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Rollerball Murder
In the near future, there will only be corporations, comfort, conformity and Rollerball. In the very near future, they will produce a war every week during prime time and televise it to the rest of the world. They will call it Rollerball. Within the eye of Jonathan E., the world's most gifted athlete performer, you can see the murderous game which has replaced war. Eighty thousand people are watching from the stands, two billion more are following the game on multivision. It's violence for all, by proxy. The winners survive and receive all the best that the world can offer. Lucky losers are only maimed. Unlucky losers die!
174 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
8 people are currently reading
330 people want to read
About the author
William Neal Harrison
17 books10 followersWilliam Neal Harrison was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter perhaps best known for writing the short story "Roller Ball Murder" which was made into the movie Rollerball in 1975.
Harrison was the adopted son of Samuel Scott and Mary Harrison and grew up in Dallas, Texas, attending public schools. His mother read widely, kept elaborate scrapbooks featuring both family members and celebrities, and wrote devotional poetry.
Harrison attended Texas Christian University, where he became editor of the campus newspaper, The Skiff, and began to write. He later attended Vanderbilt University where he studied to teach comparative religion at the divinity school, but once again he began to write and made lifelong friends in the Department of English. After a year teaching in North Carolina at Atlantic Christian College, he moved his young family to Iowa where he studied in the creative writing program for ten months. At Iowa he sold his first short story to Esquire and published reviews in The Saturday Review.
In 1964, Harrison moved with his family to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he published his first novels and in 1966 became the founder and co-director of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Arkansas with his colleague James Whitehead. Many American and European writers and poets came as visitors to their program and their students went on to publish hundreds of books of poetry and fiction in major New York and university publishing houses.
Harrison also served on the original board of directors (1970–75) for the Associated Writing Programs during the great growth period of creative writing in American literary education. He was also on the board of advisors for the Natural and Cultural Heritage Commission for the State of Arkansas (1976–81).
Harrison received a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fiction (1974), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Fiction (1977), the Christopher Award for Television (1970) and a Columbia School of Journalism Prize with Esquire Magazine (1971). He has been represented in Who’s Who in America since 1975. His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories (1968), Southern Writing in the Sixties (1967), All Our Secrets Are the Same: New Fiction from Esquire (1977), The Literature of Sport (1980), The Best American Mystery Stories (2006), New Stories from the South (2006), Fifty Years of Descant (2008) and numerous textbooks.
Merlee was Harrison's wife of more than fifty years and his children are Laurie, Sean and Quentin. He lived in Fayetteville until his death, although he traveled widely in Africa, China, the Middle East and Europe. He was a longtime baseball fan and Chicago Cubs supporter. He was an active fly fisherman and played tennis and golf.
His heroes were Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever, but he taught hundreds of fine authors in his classes and offered seminars on James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Federico Fellini and others.
Harrison was the adopted son of Samuel Scott and Mary Harrison and grew up in Dallas, Texas, attending public schools. His mother read widely, kept elaborate scrapbooks featuring both family members and celebrities, and wrote devotional poetry.
Harrison attended Texas Christian University, where he became editor of the campus newspaper, The Skiff, and began to write. He later attended Vanderbilt University where he studied to teach comparative religion at the divinity school, but once again he began to write and made lifelong friends in the Department of English. After a year teaching in North Carolina at Atlantic Christian College, he moved his young family to Iowa where he studied in the creative writing program for ten months. At Iowa he sold his first short story to Esquire and published reviews in The Saturday Review.
In 1964, Harrison moved with his family to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he published his first novels and in 1966 became the founder and co-director of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Arkansas with his colleague James Whitehead. Many American and European writers and poets came as visitors to their program and their students went on to publish hundreds of books of poetry and fiction in major New York and university publishing houses.
Harrison also served on the original board of directors (1970–75) for the Associated Writing Programs during the great growth period of creative writing in American literary education. He was also on the board of advisors for the Natural and Cultural Heritage Commission for the State of Arkansas (1976–81).
Harrison received a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fiction (1974), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Fiction (1977), the Christopher Award for Television (1970) and a Columbia School of Journalism Prize with Esquire Magazine (1971). He has been represented in Who’s Who in America since 1975. His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories (1968), Southern Writing in the Sixties (1967), All Our Secrets Are the Same: New Fiction from Esquire (1977), The Literature of Sport (1980), The Best American Mystery Stories (2006), New Stories from the South (2006), Fifty Years of Descant (2008) and numerous textbooks.
Merlee was Harrison's wife of more than fifty years and his children are Laurie, Sean and Quentin. He lived in Fayetteville until his death, although he traveled widely in Africa, China, the Middle East and Europe. He was a longtime baseball fan and Chicago Cubs supporter. He was an active fly fisherman and played tennis and golf.
His heroes were Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever, but he taught hundreds of fine authors in his classes and offered seminars on James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Federico Fellini and others.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
August 19, 2012
It's quite a terrible thing, to write one science fiction short story in your career yet be known as a science fiction writer.
I look at this book, its reviews, its selving/tags and I wonder if most people even read the other stories. Perhaps they, like me, thought they were opening a book of science fiction stories and (unlike me) didn't respond to reading literature instead.
I wonder if Harrison identified with all the lonely men in this collection? Every story features a man in isolation in one way or another. And perhaps the success of his movie at the expense of his literary career drove him to day time telelvision?
That is how it seems to me, Rollerball was the reason I picked this book up but the titular story is no better or worse than the overall collection. It works as a good piece of literature about the follies of mankind like only a story from the early 70s can, but then to a certain extent they all do.
Of all of the stories I particularly enjoyed The Blurb King which features a request to James A. Michener to keep his blurbs to under 2500 words and people advertising their feelings on blurb buttons - the whole thing bringing to mind the effect that the growth of social media outlets has had on us in the past decade. That alone made this worth the time to read.
I look at this book, its reviews, its selving/tags and I wonder if most people even read the other stories. Perhaps they, like me, thought they were opening a book of science fiction stories and (unlike me) didn't respond to reading literature instead.
I wonder if Harrison identified with all the lonely men in this collection? Every story features a man in isolation in one way or another. And perhaps the success of his movie at the expense of his literary career drove him to day time telelvision?
That is how it seems to me, Rollerball was the reason I picked this book up but the titular story is no better or worse than the overall collection. It works as a good piece of literature about the follies of mankind like only a story from the early 70s can, but then to a certain extent they all do.
Of all of the stories I particularly enjoyed The Blurb King which features a request to James A. Michener to keep his blurbs to under 2500 words and people advertising their feelings on blurb buttons - the whole thing bringing to mind the effect that the growth of social media outlets has had on us in the past decade. That alone made this worth the time to read.
March 18, 2014
This book will blow your mind. I was only ten when I read this, and I remember exactly where I was and what was happening in my life at the time. It had that big an impact on my deviant little imagination. It's a set of extraordinarily bleak (if you think about them) and quite brutal short stories, in which he gets right inside some heads to discover and describe some horrific inner logic and motivation. The kind of thoughts that 'good' people aren't supposed to admit to thinking, but that they almost certainly do.
And yet you read Harrison's biography and butter wouldn't melt in his mouth - he studied to teach comparative religion, founded an MFA and won numerous prestigious prizes. He travelled very widely in an era when travel wasn't as safe and easy as it is now, and he lectured on a diverse range of writers. This was a man who didn't just travel widely in the real world, and the world of literature - he was a man who went deep into the human psyche and imagined places where very few people go. I wish I'd met him - he only died last year. I must read more of his work.
And yet you read Harrison's biography and butter wouldn't melt in his mouth - he studied to teach comparative religion, founded an MFA and won numerous prestigious prizes. He travelled very widely in an era when travel wasn't as safe and easy as it is now, and he lectured on a diverse range of writers. This was a man who didn't just travel widely in the real world, and the world of literature - he was a man who went deep into the human psyche and imagined places where very few people go. I wish I'd met him - he only died last year. I must read more of his work.
September 2, 2020
I recently watched the trippy 1974 sci-fi movie Rollerball for the first time (see my review over at Letterboxd), and I loved it so much that I thought I'd track down the original story by William Harrison it was adapted from, which was first published in book form the same year as the movie, and was very nicely still available on a dusty back shelf of the Chicago Public Library. So what a surprise, then, to learn that Harrison wasn't actually a sci-fi author at all, but rather a veteran of literary fiction, a big admirer of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene whose own stories are mostly similar examinations of masculinity among world-weary globetrotters, but who dabbled in experimental science-fiction in the '70s (mostly through commissions from Esquire magazine) because it was the Countercultural Era and this is what literary fiction authors did during the Countercultural Era. So in this particular collection, the pieces are sometimes straightforward Modernist-style tales, set in a variety of interesting locations (Montana, the south coast of Spain, a small town in Missouri); but sometimes they reflect the magical realism that was so trendy at the time because of authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (see for example the story of the magician who can literally make himself disappear), with only one or two pieces in this book that stretch all the way out into actual genre writing.
And as far as the title piece, it is way, way darker and more violent than the movie, which fans of the film will find hard to believe. In his original story, the balls are as heavy as bowling balls and are shot out of cannons at 300 mph, spinning around the top edge of the stadium track like a roulette ball and tempting players into possible suicide in order to get an edge over their opponents; and the whole point of the sport even existing is that somewhere between one and fifteen people are killed at every single match, thus better explaining the original story's title, "Roller Ball Murder" (as in, it's a combination of a roller derby, basketball, and murder for sport). He also makes the world that created this game a lot clearer than the movie does, picturing a time in the future in which a debilitating war between Europe and Asia has resulted in private corporations now being the new city-states (displaying shades of premonition that cyberpunk writers like William Gibson would grab and run with a mere decade later), and those corporations having had their own war of attrition that has resulted in a total of six global enterprises now running the entire world, which all now have Orwellian names like ENERGY, FOOD and LUXURY. Like all these stories, it's really not much more than a character sketch drawn out into a little longer of a piece; but Harrison was quite good at these elongated character sketches, and I found this entire book to be fascinating and really readable. It comes recommended to those who want to go to the trouble of tracking down this long out-of-print title.
And as far as the title piece, it is way, way darker and more violent than the movie, which fans of the film will find hard to believe. In his original story, the balls are as heavy as bowling balls and are shot out of cannons at 300 mph, spinning around the top edge of the stadium track like a roulette ball and tempting players into possible suicide in order to get an edge over their opponents; and the whole point of the sport even existing is that somewhere between one and fifteen people are killed at every single match, thus better explaining the original story's title, "Roller Ball Murder" (as in, it's a combination of a roller derby, basketball, and murder for sport). He also makes the world that created this game a lot clearer than the movie does, picturing a time in the future in which a debilitating war between Europe and Asia has resulted in private corporations now being the new city-states (displaying shades of premonition that cyberpunk writers like William Gibson would grab and run with a mere decade later), and those corporations having had their own war of attrition that has resulted in a total of six global enterprises now running the entire world, which all now have Orwellian names like ENERGY, FOOD and LUXURY. Like all these stories, it's really not much more than a character sketch drawn out into a little longer of a piece; but Harrison was quite good at these elongated character sketches, and I found this entire book to be fascinating and really readable. It comes recommended to those who want to go to the trouble of tracking down this long out-of-print title.
June 6, 2025
3.25/5
The was a good, solid basis for the great 1975 film.
The was a good, solid basis for the great 1975 film.
June 24, 2019
A very important book for me.
When I was young (about 10 or 11 years old) I read many novels that were "tie-ins", in other words they were based on films and film-scripts, such as Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc. For some reason I only read tie-ins. So when I obtained this book I assumed it would be the same kind of thing.
But it wasn't.
It was a collection of 13 stories for adults.
This book was therefore my very first introduction to grown up literary fiction.
The stories baffled me, but I was also intrigued.
I didn't read all of them. I didn't understand most of what I was reading. I thoroughly enjoyed the title story 'Roller Ball Murder' and also 'The Warrior' and 'Down the Blue Hole' and perhaps a few others, I don't quite remember. I know that I steered clear of the longer stories such as 'The Hermit' and 'The Pinball Machines'.
And now many years later, I find myself reading the book again, but this time from start to finish.
All in all, a superb collection, without a single dud story!
'The Blurb King', which is supposedly written by a malfunctioning computer and is very self-referential, reads like a John Sladek story. 'The Arsons of Desire' is about possible pyrokinesis. 'The Good ship Erasmus' (perhaps my favourite tale in the collection) is about smuggling and a curious damnation. 'Weatherman: a Theological Narrative' is about a man who suddenly realises that he is God but that God is not all-powerful. 'Eating It' is a bizarre fantasy about the sense of taste.
Harrison's style is excellent. I recommend this collection and regard it as a shame that Harrison is less well known than he should be, despite the fame of the 'Rollerball' concept.
When I was young (about 10 or 11 years old) I read many novels that were "tie-ins", in other words they were based on films and film-scripts, such as Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc. For some reason I only read tie-ins. So when I obtained this book I assumed it would be the same kind of thing.
But it wasn't.
It was a collection of 13 stories for adults.
This book was therefore my very first introduction to grown up literary fiction.
The stories baffled me, but I was also intrigued.
I didn't read all of them. I didn't understand most of what I was reading. I thoroughly enjoyed the title story 'Roller Ball Murder' and also 'The Warrior' and 'Down the Blue Hole' and perhaps a few others, I don't quite remember. I know that I steered clear of the longer stories such as 'The Hermit' and 'The Pinball Machines'.
And now many years later, I find myself reading the book again, but this time from start to finish.
All in all, a superb collection, without a single dud story!
'The Blurb King', which is supposedly written by a malfunctioning computer and is very self-referential, reads like a John Sladek story. 'The Arsons of Desire' is about possible pyrokinesis. 'The Good ship Erasmus' (perhaps my favourite tale in the collection) is about smuggling and a curious damnation. 'Weatherman: a Theological Narrative' is about a man who suddenly realises that he is God but that God is not all-powerful. 'Eating It' is a bizarre fantasy about the sense of taste.
Harrison's style is excellent. I recommend this collection and regard it as a shame that Harrison is less well known than he should be, despite the fame of the 'Rollerball' concept.
March 25, 2023
Reading this felt a bit like reading someone's rambling, but I enjoyed it's dark dystopian vision.
March 24, 2023
The Roller Ball movie from the 70s really kick started my Dystopian novel/movie obsession. There are a lot of common themes between rollerball, Soylent Green, Logan's run. Specifically, what to do with an overpopulated world, a destroyed environment, gate keeping information, corporate greed, and so on. It's fascinating to see so many scifi movies and books tackle these themes and how close or far they are from where we are today.
Overall, this short story has a little less to stay than some of the other listed works. I felt the ending was very 1984, with Johnny losing his will to be an individual and singing the anthem, and accepting his fate.
My favorite quote: "knowledge" he tells me, "either converts to power or it converts to melancholy.
It's an interesting spin on "knowledge is power and power corrupts" in the sense that oftentimes our or knowledge only leads us to be aware of our position and we are often powerless to change those circumstances. As much as we would like to believe our knowledge would empower us, it's more likely to cause us anguish. ignorance is bliss I guess.
Overall, this short story has a little less to stay than some of the other listed works. I felt the ending was very 1984, with Johnny losing his will to be an individual and singing the anthem, and accepting his fate.
My favorite quote: "knowledge" he tells me, "either converts to power or it converts to melancholy.
It's an interesting spin on "knowledge is power and power corrupts" in the sense that oftentimes our or knowledge only leads us to be aware of our position and we are often powerless to change those circumstances. As much as we would like to believe our knowledge would empower us, it's more likely to cause us anguish. ignorance is bliss I guess.
July 19, 2012
William Harrison’s Rollerball Murder Stories is a collection of somber unrelated vignettes about men who occupy - for better or worse - lonely existences. The book’s thirteen stories touch on themes of rejection, awakening, growth, restraint, ambition, potential, and duty, but the plots serving these values are often less memorable than the privileged and sometimes pious authorial tone. This is especially true for the book’s title chapter, Roller Ball Murder, which features a mega-celebrity athlete who finds himself frustrated in an intellectually restrictive futuristic corporate society. Fortunately, while Harrison’s tone may seem oppressively didactic, his writing style is pleasingly poetic and his choices for practical and abstract settings for his cast of sad misfit characters demonstrates a wide creative range.
July 23, 2012
Rollerball Murder is a collection of short stories. All of the short stories have a running theme of a man whose fate is to lead a lonely, despaired life. My favorite was The Hermit as it shows the vulnerability of the character and his character struggling to evolve. Harrison is descriptive in his prose, albeit a bit chauvinistic and offensive to women, in my opinion.
June 29, 2024
A random selection of fairly mediocre dramas that tend to begin with a good idea then veer off into surreal stream of consciousness fantasy. The Warrior, for instance, is about a black ops soldier talking his trade, then he suddenly goes berserk and starts mowing down everything in sight. Eating It is about an orphaned child who is taught the pleasures of taste by his weird aunt, then they literally start eating their house - the furniture, the fixtures, the walls. Another story is about a track star who specializes in the shot put, and by story's end, he is shot putting himself across Europe, one throw at a time. Just about every story is like that; rather than develop the characters and complete a story arc - you know, that whole beginning, middle and end thing - Harrison time and time again abandons what he's set up and acid trips the last few pages.
February 16, 2019
3.5 stars is perhaps more accurate. But half-stars are obnoxious. Some good, weird stuff in here. A little challenging categorizing some of these as they are neither entirely literary realism nor full-blown fantastical. But satire is laced throughout these frequently delusional tales of life gone a little odd.
“Rollerball Murder” is the sole SF offering (and the most popular tale), but it doesn’t feel out of place here. It’s a good story, but I don’t think it’s the best one (but I also don’t know which is the best either).
Others I thoroughly enjoyed: “The Blurb King,” “The Warrior,” “The Hermit,” “The Arsons of Desire,” and “The Good Ship Erasmus.” The rest are good to okay. No total duds in the lot; there’s always something to think about, which I appreciate.
“Rollerball Murder” is the sole SF offering (and the most popular tale), but it doesn’t feel out of place here. It’s a good story, but I don’t think it’s the best one (but I also don’t know which is the best either).
Others I thoroughly enjoyed: “The Blurb King,” “The Warrior,” “The Hermit,” “The Arsons of Desire,” and “The Good Ship Erasmus.” The rest are good to okay. No total duds in the lot; there’s always something to think about, which I appreciate.
October 20, 2018
I had hunted for a copy of this book for years. When I finally found one I was shocked that it was actually a collection of short stories - and none of them connected to the titular story “Roller Ball Murder”.
But I dig right in anyway, and was blown away by how good many of the stories are. Some great lines sprinkled into the stores such as: “Memory is the art of old men.”
“The Pinball Machines”, “The Hermit”, and “The Good Ship Erasmus” were all excellent. And if course, “Roller Ball Murder” was as good as I’d hoped!
But I dig right in anyway, and was blown away by how good many of the stories are. Some great lines sprinkled into the stores such as: “Memory is the art of old men.”
“The Pinball Machines”, “The Hermit”, and “The Good Ship Erasmus” were all excellent. And if course, “Roller Ball Murder” was as good as I’d hoped!
October 2, 2025
The book is a collection of short stories.
Roller Ball Murder is one of the most interesting and we made into a film in '73. I still have one of the silver balls or "Rollerball” on my bookshelf from when we were filming back then.
In the short story and the film, Corporations control everything. No nations. No countries.
I see this happening in our society right now as many science fiction stories are becoming our life experiences on the streets of this country. Enjoy .
Roller Ball Murder is one of the most interesting and we made into a film in '73. I still have one of the silver balls or "Rollerball” on my bookshelf from when we were filming back then.
In the short story and the film, Corporations control everything. No nations. No countries.
I see this happening in our society right now as many science fiction stories are becoming our life experiences on the streets of this country. Enjoy .
December 27, 2020
Only read the short "Rollerball Murder" , did not read the 8 or so other short stories in the novel. Absolutely love the original Rollerball movie and, while short (maybe 15 pages) the short story is great. Its cool how the movie took little details and expanded upon them.
Ultra violent and graphic. Shows how truly insane some sports fanatics can be.
Ultra violent and graphic. Shows how truly insane some sports fanatics can be.
March 7, 2021
The rollerball story is great. imaginative, and well written. It is short, but it sets perfectly the ambient and the gaps left to the reader are nice pockets of speculation. I gave this book a low score because it comes with many other short stories that to me are half-backed, boring, and most of the times without a point or clear argument. They seem more like exercises in writing descriptions.
February 27, 2023
This is basically a collection of short stories usually about men - and a boy - who are kind of loners even though several have families. Of course I was familiar with Roller Ball Murder from the movie and I was somewhat amazed they got a whole movie out of a short story. The stories overall are OK but I wouldn't break my neck trying to read them.
April 6, 2023
A collection of stories of mixed quality, the best of which is "Rollerball Murder" in my opinion. Others that are good are: "Nirvana, Gotterdammerung, and the Shot Put", and "The Blurb King". None are terrible, just some are more memorable than others. Some you have to dig deep to see what the point is. An enjoyable read.
December 1, 2023
Published in 1975, 'Rollerball' is a movie tie-in from the time of the original movie starring James Caan. The book contains 13 short stories, one of which 'Roller Ball Murder' inspired the movie, and is the only SF story in the bunch. The remainder are extremely well written and atmospheric, and tend to be a little surreal. An enjoyable and quick read.
September 3, 2018
Good selection of short stories in this volume. The title story is the one which inspired the movie Rollerball back in the 1970s. I prefer the story as it goes into Jonathon E's psyche way more than the book does.Thoroughly enjoyable.
May 12, 2023
The actual Rollerball Murder story was really good and I wish it was a little longer. There were a few other decent stories, and some that weren't very good, nothing that blew me away. Time to go watch the James Caan film!
August 12, 2024
Can I get a full book about just the Rollerball Murder part?
That's the hook, the rollerball world enticement, I felt a bit hoodwinked by the other short stories (didn't know it was short stories until cracking it open) Most of them were decent, and all of them odd. Just no other sci-fi related, which is my jam.
That's the hook, the rollerball world enticement, I felt a bit hoodwinked by the other short stories (didn't know it was short stories until cracking it open) Most of them were decent, and all of them odd. Just no other sci-fi related, which is my jam.
October 29, 2022
Interesting reading the source material.
June 22, 2024
My uncle-in-law wrote this! Very good.
My take away? We often seem as all a little crazy.
My take away? We often seem as all a little crazy.
September 8, 2024
only read the title story but it was well worth reading
December 20, 2016
I have only read the short story, Rollerball Murder, in this collection. I was flipping through the channels tonight and saw that Rollerball with James Caan was coming on. I remembered my freshman-year English professor had studied with the author in Arkansas. He commented on how the man had written a single science fiction story that carried his entire career. As an author myself, such a lottery intrigued me. I decided to read the story while the movie played in the background. The first thing I realized was that Harrison had also written a novel called Burton and Speke, a work I loved back in the 80s. I'd never made the connection with Rollerball.
I loved the story, even more than the film. The main character's drive to fill his life with more than fame and fortune, his loss of "what might have been" when he's reunited with his first love, the hollowness and resignation of the ending, all give the written work a weight I don't feel when I watch the longer, slower paced movie. And honestly, the film has a 70s SF plastic texture that is only occasionally successful with modern viewers. The story has commentary and insight that survived a bit better.
I will seek out this title and read the rest of Harrison's shorter works. Will revise the entry in the future. Or not.
I loved the story, even more than the film. The main character's drive to fill his life with more than fame and fortune, his loss of "what might have been" when he's reunited with his first love, the hollowness and resignation of the ending, all give the written work a weight I don't feel when I watch the longer, slower paced movie. And honestly, the film has a 70s SF plastic texture that is only occasionally successful with modern viewers. The story has commentary and insight that survived a bit better.
I will seek out this title and read the rest of Harrison's shorter works. Will revise the entry in the future. Or not.
July 9, 2016
I was debating two or three stars, but looking back at my reading notes, I realized that two of the stories demanded that I give it the higher mark. I really enjoyed The Hermit (1968), probably my favorite piece in this collection of short stories. A well-developed story of two private men who hide themselves from the outside world. I also enjoyed The Good Ship Erasmus (1971), an intriguing story of a man surreptitiously selling cigarettes aboard a quit-smoking cruise. Many of the other stories felt too short to fully develop their ideas. There were nuggets and neat ideas raised, but more in an outline format rather than developed
The book is definitely dark, which is fun for me at times. But it's also very violent, including murder, assault and rape. It's also definitely sexist, with woman being one-dimensional characters composed of breasts, waists and little else.
The book is definitely dark, which is fun for me at times. But it's also very violent, including murder, assault and rape. It's also definitely sexist, with woman being one-dimensional characters composed of breasts, waists and little else.
December 19, 2024
Just reviewing the title story after watching the film. Harrison does a good job of creating the main thrust of what would become the 1975 James Caan movie regarding an increasingly unregulated spectator sport. He foresees a time when corporations would be more powerful than many countries, the narrator here is the star player for an energy monopoly in Houston, Texas.
The corporations have their own armies and have been at war with one another. They now keep the public subdued with spectacle and have removed books, leaving only edited versions on a super computer that they control.
The film clearly inspired an Amiga video game I was addicted to also, Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe. Alongside Sensible Soccer and Championship Manager it ate up many days.
The corporations have their own armies and have been at war with one another. They now keep the public subdued with spectacle and have removed books, leaving only edited versions on a super computer that they control.
The film clearly inspired an Amiga video game I was addicted to also, Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe. Alongside Sensible Soccer and Championship Manager it ate up many days.
May 2, 2012
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. (originally posted on Amazon.com)
May 6, 2016
I read "Roller Ball Murder" as part of "Best of SF 73" so this isn't about the anthology. What I find most fascinating about this story, as a dystopia of plenty, is the entire world is run by corporations. Not too different than life in 2016.
The author does an amazing job of making the reader sympathize with the main character- a talented gladiator, on a world-class level. None of the nonsense in the 1975 movie made it into this 15-page short. Ultimately it's a love story with a horrifying bend. The depth of the story, despite the length, is nothing short of staggering.
The author does an amazing job of making the reader sympathize with the main character- a talented gladiator, on a world-class level. None of the nonsense in the 1975 movie made it into this 15-page short. Ultimately it's a love story with a horrifying bend. The depth of the story, despite the length, is nothing short of staggering.
October 11, 2011
First I saw the film (1975) based on the fifteen-page short story which headlines this collection, then I read the collection with that story, then, recently, I saw the remake of the film (2002). The story which originally appeared in Esquire in 1973 is the best. The original James Caan film is the more serious adaptation. The remake is stupid but visually impressive.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews