@cstross

Taking a cue from #TheStainlessSteelRat, one would have to have:

1. Time-travelling villain who turns out to be doomed from the start because xe actually has a closed loop worldline.

1. Snowball planet. Unexplainedly supports an advanced civilization.

And of course from a wider field of pulp there are many others:

1. Jungle planet, where absolutely everything will eat you, including even some of the rocks. Harrison and Foster did variations on this.

1. Marooned impossibly far from home, at the centre of a supervoid or something. Magically, just like every episode of the A-Team, there are resources from which one can improvise a getting-home machine. Smith did this one several times.

@robparsons
#SciFi

@cstross

I think that @merc had it right. This isn't the Galactic FBI. It's the Galactic CIA.

That said, remaining an unturned crook would have made Slippery Jim into a #SciFi version of Simon Templar. And Simon never really got into major jeopardy, either. At least not in the actual novels as I recall.

There was an awful lot of beating people up, murdering them, and pocketing part of their loot in the novels.

@djfiander

#TheSaint #LeslieCharteris #HarryHarrison #TheStainlessSteelRat

@caoilte @cstross

Actually, Inskipp had also been a crook.

#HarryHarrison #TheStainlessSteelRat #SlipperyJimDiGriz

@HopePhil That's because it's comedy, overall. Slippery Jim is still narcissistic and not averse to taking a few things for himself along the way.

#TheStainlessSteelRat #SciFi

@HopePhil Alfred Bester from #Babylon5 was close; but then Michael Garibaldi was smart too.

But that's telly sci-fi. The obvious answer, albeit that there are plenty of such anti-heroes, for the vastly larger world of _all_ sci-fi is Slippery Jim DiGriz.

#TheStainlessSteelRat #SciFi