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50 in 50 is Harry Harrison's 2001 career-retrospective collection, structured as exactly fifty stories from fifty years of his short fiction, one per year from 1951 to 2000. The selection runs across his trademark modes: comic-SF Stainless Steel Rat shorts, deadly-serious Make Room! Make Room!-adjacent overpopulation pieces, satirical pieces, and the occasional historical thriller.
Harrison is the kind of writer career-collections do well by, because the bigger novels (Make Room! Make Room!, the Stainless Steel Rat books, Bill the Galactic Hero) tend to crowd out attention to the shorter work. 50 in 50 fixes that. The very early 1950s pieces are mostly competent rather than great. The 1960s and 1970s middle stretch is the peak. The late stories are a more interior, melancholy Harrison than his comic-SF reputation usually allows for.
Recommended for SF readers who want a single-volume overview of Harrison's short-form career and for completists. Books like 50 in 50 are a vanishing form in publishing now (the career-retrospective collection requires both a publisher's commitment and a long career to draw from), and this one is among the best of its kind. Four stars.
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