Let's read some rare early Harlan Ellison stories, stories from 1958 that I do not believe have ever been printed in book form. Seeing how they have not been widely disseminated, Ellison and his publishers perhaps fear they do not represent Ellison's best work and will not bring further glory to the illustrious Ellison name, but these tales might still be fun or interesting, and at the very least provide us denizens of the 21st century a little insight into the SF world of 1958, the year of the design of the now ubiquitous "peace symbol" representing opposition to nuclear weapons, Nikita Khrushchev's rise to premiership of the Soviet Union, the founding of France's Fifth Republic, and the invention of the integrated circuit.
"The Vengeance of Galaxy 5"
"The Vengeance of Galaxy 5" is about 30 pages long, and has the basic structure of an Edgar Rice Burroughs or Edmond Hamilton story, with a guy arriving in a new world in which a beautiful princess is at war with an evil tyrant and our hero joins the princess and participates in the war and when the war is over she wants him to be her husband and king. Ellison, at least here, is not as good at the action adventure jazz as ERB or Hamilton, though he tries, coming up with various types of energy weapons and psychic powers and war machines. The interesting thing Ellison does is subvert, or at least cast a different light upon, the ERB adventure template. Our hero is not a fighting man but a small businessman who travels from planet to planet conducting trade. There are deadly fights in the story, but our protagonist does not do any of the shooting and killing--the princess does all the dirty work. And when the princess wants to marry him and make him king, the merchant refuses--he rejects ascension to the aristocrat and resists the lure of government power because he is content to be a member of the bourgeoisie, to live a life not of war and rule but of freedom and trade. Ellison doesn't use the terminology they might use, but "The Vengeance of Galaxy 5" pushes the sort of libertarian line you'd expect to hear from the people at Reason magazine or The Cato Institute, suggesting that a good society is not a closely integrated kingdom of lords and princesses and knights who intimately guide their people and demonstrate their prowess by engaging in all kinds of wars but rather a nation of shopkeepers each of whom charts his own course!
OK, analysis first, now plot summary:
Interstellar merchant Loper Martin approaches planet Sygor and finds it surrounded by a force field; he is refused permission to land, even though he has done business here multiple times, the last time like two years ago. Then he spots an aircraft approaching the limits of the planet's atmosphere, towing behind it a voluptuous woman in lingerie--it seems in this part of the galaxy they execute people by dragging them to the edge of space and then launching them into the vacuum. When the forcefield is deactivated so this doomed beauty can be ejected into space, Loper slips beyond it and rescues the woman, sucking her through his ship's "scooper" and into the padded cargo hold.
Loper introduces himself to the scantily clad Sygorian and finds her to be of queenly affect and rugged determination. When fighter planes close in on Loper's ship she, apparently, uses psychic powers to cause them to explode. On the surface, she explains to Loper what is going on.
Two years ago an evil emperor guy named Aslik started conquering this region of space, taking over one poorly defended planet after another. Loper is astonished, as interstellar war is almost unknown, as everybody has done the math and realized there is no way interstellar imperialism can be made to pay. Aslik must be insane, driven by a lust for blood and power, not any rational cost benefit analysis. Sygor put up more resistance than most because it had "the Machine," a huge robot with psychic powers left behind by a prehistoric superior race. The King of Sygor directed the robot to destroy half of Aslik's space fleet by driving the invaders to suicide. Aslik called for a ceasefire and the King was stupid enough to agree--Aslik then just murdered the King. (The universe is full of idiotic softies who fetishize ceasefires, even with the most deranged, duplicitous and despicable tyrants and terrorists.) Now the king's teenage son is technically on the throne but in practice under Aslik's control, Alsik's brutes trying to learn from him the password to the Machine; the password is "hypnoburied" in the young monarch's mind. Alsik's thugs hoped seeing his sister, princess Vedria, thrown into space to die might cause the mental anguish that would allow the password to surface. This woman Loper just rescued is of course that very Princess Vedria.
(Vedria is sporadically in psychic contact with her little brother--little bro got the Machine to make the fighter pilots chasing Loper's ship blow up their own craft. One of the story's flaws is that it is unclear to what extent the prince is in control of this robot--if he can control it why doesn't he kill all the invaders like his father did?)
The war is over, and Vedria invites Loper to marry her and become king. But Loper isn't so keen on the princess anymore, having seen her animated by a lust for blood and actually slake that thirst, and he senses planet Sygor, having tasted violence and war, is now forever tainted, a restless world of danger, not a comfortable world of peaceful commerce, and he is a trader, not a soldier or a politician. So he returns to the stars to continue his life as a gypsy wandering salesman.
As I was hoping, a somewhat entertaining and certainly interesting specimen of the large body of work produced by Ellison. Worth the time of anybody interested in Fifties SF and Ellison in particular.
"The Vengeance of Galaxy 5" would be reprinted in 1975 is a magazine of reprints, Thrilling Science Fiction.
"Cosmic Striptease"
There is a long tradition in SF of contrasting our (allegedly) belligerent and puritanical society with goody goody aliens, of advocating nudism, and of criticizing TV, and in "Cosmic Striptease" Ellison encompasses all three traditions and even throws in some science speculation about electromagnetic fields.
The space program is in trouble. Every time a rocket approaches the limits of Earth's electromagnetic field it explodes or malfunctions or just disappears. The EMF, as Ellison calls it, is a recurring theme of the story, and Ellison talks about it at some length, though I don't know that I take seriously anything he says (I think he claims that the atmosphere, gravity, and magnetism are all due to the EMF.) Physically exploring the universe seems impossible with current technology, so the space program focuses its efforts on looking out beyond the atmosphere with radar, radio waves, etc. And they make contact with Mars!
The Martians have had a civilization for 35,000 years and look upon us as primitives. (Though they haven't been able to get beyond the EMF either.) The Martians have been spying on us forever, but now that we are aware of their existence they propose to take us under their wing and improve us. They know how much we are all addicted to TV, so they will teach us how to live via TV broadcasts. These broadcasts will project 3D images on the sky that everyone in the world can see--this phenomenon is possible because the EMF makes the atmosphere a perfect lens.
In brief, the meat of the plot of "Cosmic Striptease" is about how Martians wear no clothes and their TV broadcast, a documentary about daily life of an ordinary family on Mars, demonstrates this and Earth people, at first shocked, soon take up nudism and abandon clothes. This is the first step in making violent unhappy Earth as peaceful and happy as utopian Mars. The story feels long and tedious because Ellison introduces weak satirical material and feeble character-based drama and comedy. A guy is working for an ad agency or something and gets the contract to make or sell or whatever the ads that will run in the sky during the Martian broadcast and he gets fired because the advertisers didn't know about Martian nudism but then he starts his own ad agency and blah blah blah...in addition, this guy has a secretary who is very good-looking and with whom he flirts without positive result until the end of the story when she embraces nudism and embraces him.
None of "Cosmic Striptease"'s 's four individual planks--the EMF stuff, the nudism stuff, the TV satire nor the love story--is good enough to make the story compelling, Gotta give this one a thumbs down.
"A Furnace for Your Foe"
The second Ellison story in January 1958's Fantastic appears under the pseudonym Ellis Hart and starts with a quote from Shakespeare: “Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.” Like "Cosmic Striptease," it seems to have never seen print a second time,
In an opening scene that feels sort of long a fat corrupt businessman, Weaver, hires a crook, Geordie, to ensure the participant of a race he is betting on is the winner; there is a lot of verbiage that initially feels superfluous describing how fat Weaver is, the negotiations over Georfie's fee, the fat slob’s high tech safe, the animosity between Geordie and the fatso’s right hand man Irvin, but a lot of it is actually groundwork for things that happen later so is forgivable. The next scene is a month later, and Geordie, we see, is no ordinary thug but a professional racer, a contestant in the Indianapolis 1000, a jet plane race. The course of the Indy 1000 is a circle described by towering pylons, and Geordie intentionally clips the favorite pilot's craft so that it crashes into a pylon and the expected winner of the race is killed. The third scene has Geordie in court--the robot jury deems him "not guilty" but the human judge furiously reminds him that everybody in the world knows he is a murderer and his racing career is over. Sure enough, our protagonist finds himself one of the most hated men in the world!
A nervous wreck, in fear for his life from "the mob," Geordie tries to blackmail Weaver into somehow helping him, and when he is rebuffed and humiliated, Geordie draws a gun and shoots the obese magnate dead. But before he can get out of Weaver's office with some money, Irvin the right-hand man appears and contemptuously sees Geordie on his way empty-handed. For months Geordie lives a life of misery, beaten up by strangers who recognize him as the unconvicted murderer of the popular racer, shunned even by other members of the underworld, subjected to murder attempts by people trying to get in good with Irvin, who now is in charge of the Weaver enterprises. A year later Geordie contrives to get a menial job on a space liner. This ship is taking rich clients on a cruise of the brothels of the asteroid belt, as well as hauling a cargo of 500 female sex slaves! One of Weaver Enterprises' off-the-books endeavors is sex trafficking, and Irvin is on this cruise to make sure the merchandise arrives at its destination safely, and Geordie has got himself aboard in hopes of murdering Irvin.
When the police stop the liner just outside the asteroid belt the 500 women are ejected into space to hide the evidence! After the police leave, Geordie makes his move, pulling his gun on Irvin and the ship's captain, forcing the captain and crew to leave the ship in their space suits so he and Irvin can have a final showdown alone. A stray energy blast from Geordie's gun causes heavy machinery to land on the two criminals, trapping them. The ship goes out of control and plunges into the sun. In the time it takes to reach Sol, Geordie comes to terms with his own cowardice and criminality and realizes he has been the author of his own fate and thus achieves some kind of equanimity.
"A Furnace for Your Foe" is a sort of conventional crime story, and some of the explicitly science fiction parts of it don't make sense (the liner has almost reached the asteroid belt, stops, and then falls into the sun in a matter of hours?) but in the latter parts of the story Ellison does a decent job with Geordie's psychology and I like the story's "you make your own luck and control your own life" philosophy. We can moderately recommend this one.
"No Planet is Safe"
.jpg)
Along with our heroes on their current wide-ranging survey trip is a famous writer who is doing research for a history of space colonization. He is an eccentric character who spends most of his time drinking. This scribbler wants to join the teams on the surface of the various planets under survey but he is kept aboard the ship because these frontier worlds are terribly dangerous and the officers have been given orders to preserve him.
The survey ship comes to a planet that appears safe. But after a few days people start getting killed in mysterious ways. And they can't leave because the ship's systems have mysteriously been damaged! Is it invisible natives? Tiny natives? Natives who are energy creature? Natives with psychic powers?
The writer solves the mystery and we get our twist ending--lame pop psychology. The survey crews have been conditioned to expect danger, and when they didn't find any they got more anxious instead of less, leading to accidents, and even began subconsciously sabotaging their own expedition--one of the officers himself, in a sleep-walking trance, wrecked the ship's "drive controls" to fulfill his psychological need to face a deadly crisis.
I don't like the ending, but everything up to that is OK, so we'll grade this one merely acceptable.
"No Planet is Safe" appeared in an issue of Super-Science Fiction with another eye-popping hubba hubba cover by Kelly Freas--Freas deserves all those Hugos and Chesleys--and as far as I can tell has not been reprinted since.
**********
I'm not as enamored of Ellison as some people are, and I have savaged plenty of Ellison stories at this here blog, but Ellison is ambitious and takes risks and tries to do things that are new and different and so reading his work is an adventure. Today's stories aren't ones promoted by Ellison and his cronies, but for the most part I found reading them worthwhile. For our next episode I'll pull an Ellison collection off the shelves of the MPorcius Library and read some Ellison stories that the man himself made sure escaped the pages of the pulps to be immortalized in book form.
No comments:
Post a Comment