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One of our favorite writers, Harry Harrison, author of MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM and THE STAINLESS STEEL RAT, hosted a group of us in the Borrego desert in 1987. His wife Joan prepared her usual feast, and Harry was magnificently Harry—one of the prime mentors and inspirations of the Junior Woodchucks and the Pro Fan Establishment in San Diego back in the 1960s and 70s, a number of whom helped found San Diego Comic-Con. Many of us worked hard to be able to deliver a line the way Harry did—rapid fire, with wide eyes, bristling brows, and trenchant wit. Harry and Brian Aldiss were among the speakers at Elizabeth Chater’s San Diego State College science fiction and fantasy class in the early 1970s. Harry himself pioneered with an extension course on SF at SDSC in 1970; he taught the course with William Rupp. Among their speakers, Norman Spinrad and Vernor Vinge; among the students, Joan Vinge.
