He is also a master of disguise and martial arts, an accomplished bank robber, a criminal mastermind, an expert on breaking and entering, and (perhaps most usefully) a skilled liar.
Master of self-rationalization, the Rat frequently justifies his crimes by arguing that he is providing society with entertainment; and besides which, he only steals from institutions that he believes have insurance coverage and so will be able to recoup their losses.
Harrison used the story, with minor modifications, as the introduction to the series's first full-length novel, also called The Stainless Steel Rat.
The 2000 AD comic versions were collected into a paperback (ISBN 9781781088999) and hardcover edition in August 2021 which includes the colour centre spreads as they originally appeared.
Harrison also produced a gamebook in the style of the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy series, called You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat (ISBN 0-441-94978-9), the reader being told that their decisions would "determine whether he or she can find Prof. Geisteskrank on the planet Skraldespand[note 1] and bring him back before he activates a lethal new weapon".
[8] In 1984 a Stainless Steel Rat video game was developed by Mosaic Publishing for the ZX Spectrum, co-written by Harrison with programmer Sean O'Connell.
He recruits the Rat, but is frequently infuriated by his insubordinate attitude and tendency to go rogue – committing independent crimes for sheer enjoyment.
He was a lot less physical in his capers than Jim but undertook robberies, always leaving as his calling card a picture of the bishop chess piece.
Jim has experienced one of their techniques, in which the subject is convinced, via an implanted memory and faked surgical scars, that their hands were severed by an axe and then reattached while they were unconscious from the shock; he later becomes aware of their involvement in the alien invasion when he sees the same marks on the wrists of another prisoner.
During Jim's interactions with Hanasu - a disgraced Kekkonshiki council leader - he persuades them to reinterpret their teachings, and they embark on a more peaceful co-existence with the rest of humanity.
The Chinese activist Liu Di, writing under the screen name "Stainless Steel Rat" (不锈钢老鼠), became a high-profile symbol for democracy and free speech in China since her detention in November 2002.
In The Librarians episode "And the Happily Ever Afters", Flynn Carsen refers to Ezekiel Jones, a thief, "master of technologies" as the "Stainless Steel Rat".
Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale rated the first novel four stars out of five, saying "though pure entertainment, [it] underlines SF's role in providing speculative thought about potential problems.
"[10] The Stainless Steel Rat has been cited as Julian Assange's favourite novel, and having influenced the real-life outlaw Jim Clay "Ether" Harper VI.