ill is just a callow farm lad from the planet Phigineradon II, with no ambitions beyond spending the rest of his life as a technical fertilizer operator. But that ambition is forever denied him the day a recruiter from the Star Troopers decides to shanghai him into the armed forces. A few empty promises of glory in combat, an impressive paper uniform designed to rip itself to pieces before Bill can settle into his first day's training, and a few highly persuasive mind-control tricks are all the unethical sergeant needs to get Bill to sign on the dotted line. The freshly zombified Bill marches toward his unpleasant and difficult future even as his sweet, gray-haired old mother begs the recruiters to give her back her son.
Once trapped in his new life, where he will be expected to join the battle against the alien Chingers, Bill discovers that the military life is nowhere near as glorious as it's been painted. It's dull, backbreaking, unpleasant, dangerous and insane: A career spent as a spare part, commanded by crazies, like the training sergeant Deathwish Drang, who collectively have nothing but contempt for anybody lower on the chain of command. Only his fellow recruit, an annoying little fellow named Eager Beager, seems to enjoy the military life: He has an unnatural, one would almost say suspicious, passion for polishing things.
Bill soon finds out that the Chingers are not the hulking monsters of the propaganda, but diminutive little lizards small enough to live inside humanoid robots they use as spies. Moreover, the Chingers have no desire for war; they're merely defending themselves against a war the human Empire began for lack of any other convenient enemies.
Losing his left arm in one early battle, Bill wakes up to discover that the surgeons have replaced it with an extra right one. The chief advantage of his new anatomy is that it permits him to salute with two hands at once.
Things get even worse once Bill gets lost on Helior, the gleaming homeworld of the Empire responsible for all this madness. Fleeing the military police, Bill finds refuge among the subterranean sanitation workers responsible for finding places to put all of this supposed paradise's garbage ...
A novel crafted for another age
"Bill, the galactic hero," is best remembered today as the protagonist of a series of sharecropped novels based on Harrison's original creation and appearing under his shared byline but for the most part written by the collaborators (Robert Sheckley and David Harris among them) who used the basic formula for a series of jokey space-opera romps.
The original is, as might be expected from the author of the classic space-opera spoof Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, that novel's equal when it comes to outrageous humor. It traps its naive, beleaguered protagonist—who is anything but a "hero"—in a series of bizarre no-win situations punctuated by lunatic supporting characters, campy villains and plot twists that persist in making his already ruined life still worse with just about every step he takes.
But it's also much more than that. Bill, the Galactic Hero is an angry book, published in the early days of America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and in large part intended as a direct rebuttal to the gung-go drumbeats of prior military-SF classics like Heinlein's Starship Troopers. It's a direct attack on the lunacy of warfare for warfare's sake, with long sections that make it seem less a work of science fiction than a thin layer of science fiction over a retelling of Catch-22.
Above all, this is a novel about a naive kid promised a great future in the armed forces who instead finds brutal conditions, corruption, abuse and a power structure that praises his courage and heroism whenever that makes good propaganda but also offers insultingly inadequate care when he's wounded. It has him assigned to an endless, pointless holding action on a planet where his forces gain no ground against locals who have no problem dying in great numbers as long as his people do the same. It has him fight in the name of a clueless, inarticulate hereditary ruler whose decisions are all made by his advisors. It has him venerate a gleaming homeworld that has covered just about every square inch of land with an urban sprawl that that looks prosperous from a distance but that is actually falling apart. It paints that world as promising great pleasures to the wealthy but for those operating on a military salary nothing but disreputable fast-food places serving greasy swill that makes him sick. That world, so wasteful it's running out of places to put its own garbage and now forced to export it, has ripped Bill, and uncounted others like him, from their lives and families to fight an endless pre-emptive war against an enemy originally attacked on the basis that it might possibly turn out to be dangerous, someday ... but that with every battle becomes more an enemy in earnest.
It is, in short, the kind of scenario you find only in science fiction.
