Customer Reviews

Roller Ball Murder

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I first read this collection of short stories in the mid 1980's and i have had an opportunity lately to re-read them and i am doubly impressed; the title story alone is worth the purchase price but there are also several others that stand out: THE WARRIOR, THE ARSONS OF DESIRE, THE GOOD SHIP ERASMUS. William Harrison writes with the soul of a poet and a there is a melancholic sense of loss that permeates some of these stories and carries them into strange directions just when you least expect it. Imagine a cross between Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl, with a bit of Stephen King tossed in for good measure and you have a pretty close approximation for what's in store if you take my advice and buy this book. Anyone interested in short stories should own it.

This compilation of short stories isn't bad, but it isn't good either. I get the feeling that the author read a lot of other sci-fi authors and tried emulating their work, but a lot of the stories felt flat and unimaginative. There are a few gems in this, "Roller Ball Murder" and "Nirvana, Gotterdammerung, and the Shot Put" being the ones that stood out the most for me. Wouldn't buy it again if I had the chance for a do-over, but probably would check it out of the library.

Harrison is a master storyteller, & his hallmarks are bizarre premises or characters driven to do bizarre things & a terse & spartan writing style. "Roller Ball Murder" had the bizarre premise & was Harrison's most commercial success. The original story is a first-person narrative of a panic-stricken sports hero, watching his sport become increasingly cruel & barbaric.

"The Warrior" is an interior monologue (told as if the reader were sitting next to the narrator) of a restless soldier of fortune, who, without a war to fight, decides to take on that conspicuous example of cosmopolitan excess, an international film festival ("Christ, some show."). The narrator of "The Good Ship Erasmus" smuggles cigarettes on a quit-smoking cruise; like Kafka's Hunter Gracchus, he is destined to cruise forever.

Harrison's characters are sometimes on the verge of breakdowns: a fireman thinks he's causing fires so he can rescue lost loves; a weather forecaster thinks he causes the weather. This is an early collection of Harrison's stories, published while he was still teaching writing, something, as he wrote in the Preface, he could never again do with "a straight face."

Rollerball is a collection of short stories by the author William Harrison. After reading this book, the only story that really stood out for me was "Roller Ball Murder" which the movie Rollerball was based on. The movie is fairly true to the short story but is only 15 pages long and really only touches on part of what the movie was about. I found all of the other stories fairly dry and uninteresting and reading this will add nothing to what the original movie had.

Rollerball (1975) is a collection of a dozen short stories by William Harrison. Although headlined by the now-infamous Roller Ball Murder, most of the stories are not even science fiction - which must have come as a surprise to innocent buyers. The stories show a progression into the 'dark woods' (as the author puts it in his introduction), culminating in the apocalyptic title story.

The works range from 1968 to 1973. The earliest is "The Pinball Machines", Harrison's charmingly nostalgic recounting of his father's old barbershop, his father's old pinball machines, and, most importantly, his father's old-fashioned sense of honor. The other early inclusion is "The Hermit", a tale of redemption in the snow-bound wilds of Montana.

After these two, things start to get a little bleak.


"The Blurb King" recounts how a savvy businessman has profited by reducing human interaction into a few computer-generated catch-phrases. "The Good Ship Erasmus" is an existential thriller, told from the point of view of the only cigarette smuggler on a cruise ship intended to stamp out the nasty habit of smoking.

Several other stories are written in a similar vein - people bleakly looking for meaning in activities either mundane ("Eating it", "Weatherman", "A Cook's Tale"), esoteric ("Down The Blue Hole") or lethal ("The Arsons of Desire"). Futile or successful, the search is invariably destructive.

The best story - hilarious cover-art and movie-tie-in aside/forgiven - is definitely "Roller Ball Murder". Despite the brilliance of his dystopian detail, Harrison doesn't make the flaw of getting bogged down in detailed world-building, and keeps the story about the character and the message. Evil corporations may rule a post-Armageddon world, but, essentially, this is still about a man, locked into the prison of his life, searching for a meaning that constantly eludes him. That said, like Ender's Game, the ends may have inadvertently outshone the means, as Jonathan E's ennui is less glamorous than his day job of dodging 300 mph cannonballs and killing people in a modified form of lethal lacrosse.

Although "Roller Ball Murder" is the highlight of the collection, the other stories came as pleasant surprises. Rollerball is an excellent book that freely crosses between (and rises above) genres.