Harry Harrison was a science fiction author with a long career from the 1950s through to the beginning of the twenty-first century. His novels and short stories blend science fiction and adventure, always with a focus on the characters over the technology. Harrison’s love for the genre led him to write more than a hundred short stories and fifty novels, with stints as an anthology editor and writer of sci-fi history.

Often, the themes Harrison explores are familiar ones: stories of robots bound by internal laws (“The Velvet Glove,” “Arm of the Law”), societal changes as a science (“The K-Factor”), and parallel universes (“Down to Earth”). But it’s his protagonists who, with their quick thinking and non-conformist moralities, take center stage.

Collected here are Harrison’s short stories that are currently known to have passed into the U.S. public domain, arranged in order of publication, with the exception of “The Stainless Steel Rat” and “The Misplaced Battleship” which were later combined to form the basis of the novel The Stainless Steel Rat .