A STAINLESS STEEL RAT IS BORN. This item is unavailable.A STAINLESS STEEL RAT IS BORN

In this prequel to the Stainless Steel Rat, Slippery Jim is a brash 17-year-old who has left his parents' porcuswine farm, planning to embark on a life of crime. The book opens with Jim bungling a bank job so that he can be arrested and sent to prison, where he plans to learn the art of being a master criminal. Deciding that the Bishop should be his mentor, Jim sets about proving himself worthy of the master's attention. He eventually has to flee his home planet of Bit O' Heaven with the Bishop, but Garth, the Captain of the ship who promised them safe passage, sells them into slavery. The latter part of the book details Jim's adventures on the planet Spiovente, a semi-industrial world fighting feudal wars with weapons smuggled in (against League regulations) by Captain Garth.

In the auspicious annals of crime, chicanery, and counterespionage, one name towers above all the rest - Slippery Jim diGriz, the famous outlaw known and feared as the Stainles Steel Rat! Now the uncanny, untold origins of the 25th century's most canny criminal are at last revealed.

This thrilling volume in the saga of James diGriz explores his humble beginnings as a petty criminal on the backward planet of Bit O'Heaven, and his rapid rise to the most wanted man on a dozen worlds. And it contains the never-before-told story of the fabled archcriminal known as The Bishop, who tutored young Jim in the higher arts of crime and gave him his legendary nickname. A rousing, rolicking, often touching tale, A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born is a stirring portrait of a man who learned to laugh at the laws that bind ordinary men.