Damon Knight: "The Indigestible Invaders," "Backward, O Time" and "An Eye for What?"

We recently read a story from the October 1956 issue of Infinity by Harlan Ellison, and I noticed that advertised on the cover of the issue is a story by Damon Knight I have not read.  So let's read it!  And two other stories Knight published in the same period.  We've already read a bunch of stories by Knight printed in 1956; "The Country of the Kind," "Stranger Station," "The Beach Where Time Began," and "A Likely Story" have all been subjects of MPorcius Fiction Log posts.  I think we've only tackled two 1957 Knight productions, "Man in the Jar," and "The Dying Man" AKA "Dio."  So, in addition to "The Indigestible Invaders," we'll read another '56 piece and an early '57 story, both of them from Galaxy, a magazine with a somewhat more serious and literary tone than many SF mags.   As with Ellison, I think Knight is overrated and have doubts I would like him personally but still enjoy a significant proportion of his fiction and nonfiction, so, as we look into today's three stories, anything can happen!

I'll be reading these stories in their original magazine versions, and the title of each section of this post will be a link to a scan of the magazine in which the story first presented itself to the eyes of Eisenhower-era SF fans.

"The Indigestible Invaders" (1956)

Here we have a joke story.  I guess we might dignify it with the label "satire," its target religious people whose opposition to contraception leaves the world vulnerable to the scourge of overpopulation.  Founded on a convoluted plot that is tedious, lacking in any kind of human feeling or suspense, and sporting jokes that are not funny, "The Indigestible Invaders" is a failure--thumbs down!

It is the 29th century.  Following a cataclysmic war some centuries back, the world is split into two Cold War camps, the Whites of the Western Hemisphere and the Reds of the Eastern Hemisphere.  These two societies have command economies and forever teeter on the brink of starvation, the governments carefully controlling food production and population levels.  For generations, population has been stable thanks to ruthless measures that are now taken for granted as normal; the political situation has also remained stable, as each side has refrained from using weapons of mass destruction or launching potentially decisive military campaigns.

One means of keeping population from growing is raiding--each side regularly sends rocket planes full of commandos and freezers to attack and kill people from the other side.  Slain enemies are brought back home to be added to limited food stores--this static future world in which there has not been technological change for centuries relies on cannibalism to (barely) function.
   

I just told you all this background at the beginning of my plot summary, but Knight doesn't do that, instead springing this stuff on you gradually, as the plot proceeds, you know, to surprise you.

The White civilization is some kind of theocracy--our narrator is the leader or one of a number of leaders, and his title is "patriarch" and council meetings are called "synods."  He is out for a walk one day and a thing he initially thinks is a Red missile lands nearby.  Aliens, apparently from Venus, emerge from the "missile," now revealed to be a space ship; the patriarch believes this is man's first contact with aliens, as he has been taught that Earth has never launched a manned space ship.  The aliens are all killed, and their bodies added to the food supply.  Eating the aliens' flesh causes a chemical change in the humans who eat it.  (Knight gives us a little science lecture on peptides.)  Those who have eaten alien food can no longer digest Earth food.  Somehow, the peptides spread to infect everybody in the Western hemisphere as well as the Western hemisphere's crops--I was too bored to follow this development carefully, maybe it is clear but it wasn't clear to me--so the Whites won't starve, at least not immediately.  But Reds can no longer safely eat Whites nor Whites eat Reds.  The raids must cease, so population begins to grow, putting pressure on food supplies and threatening starvation in the long term.

A year after the arrival of the aliens another space ship arrives, this one manned by human beings.  It turns out that humans colonized Venus before the cataclysm, something everybody on Earth has forgotten.  The aliens encountered earlier are Venerian natives, now a race of subalterns under the domination of the humans who now rule Venus.  The Venus humans somehow learned that Earthers were resorting to cannibalism, and sent the natives as a means of (again, somehow) getting the human race on Terra to stop practicing cannibalism.  The Venus humans suggest introducing contraception, but the White Earthers refuse, and instead abandon their taboo against eating fellow Whites and begin eating unmarried women, seeing as in their religion a woman has no soul until she has married.  I guess "The Indigestible Invaders" is also a feminist satire of marriage.

Attacks on religion, fear of overpopulation, and feminist sentiments are pretty common in SF, but it seems "The Indigestible Invaders" is so boring that it has never been reprinted, even though SF editors the world over must have been cheering its values between yawns.  

"Backward, O Time" AKA "This Way to the Regress" (1956)

When I was a kid, one of the stories I would hear on the theme of "ordinary people are idiots who deserve the contempt of the educated," a sort of companion piece to the allegations that rural hicks went insane with fear upon hearing Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio adaptation, was the story of P. T. Barnum's "this way to the egress" signs.  I bring this up because the story that was reprinted many times in Knight collections as "Backward, O Time," including in The Best of Damon Knight, first appeared in Galaxy under the title "This Way to the Regress" and that is the version I am reading today.

Good grief, this is one of those stories in which a guy experiences life backwards.  He's born in a deadly car crash as a middle-aged man.  He works at an "unprinting plant" where the machines take words off of paper, filling cans with the displaced ink.  When it rains he watches water leap from the surface up to the sky.  When he smokes he blows smoke out to create a cigar.  And on and on with the obvious and stupid visuals.  JFC.  Haven't I endured this stupid gimmick enough times already?  There was that four-hour-long movie with Val Kilmer or Brad Pitt (I always mix those guys up) and that Dan Simmons novel I think is overrated, and I'm sure I suffered through this sort of thing elsewhere, maybe in Weird Tales, with a guy who devolves from a man into a monkey and then a rat or whatever and finally down to an amoeba.  

Anyway, the protagonist, as I said, begins life in a car crash and gets steadily younger.  His life is pretty ordinary, and Knight fills this story's eight pages with the sorts of lame jokes I've already described, like his razor adding whiskers to his face, money flowing into his bank account from doctors and dentists, another kid curing his black eye with his fist.  These shit jokes a child could make are the entire story!  Anyway, we see a marriage in reverse, a college career in reverse (even--gag!--a bull session in which a guy wonders what life would be like if cause preceded effect, wow, wouldn't that be crazy!), service in the First World War in reverse, blah blah blah.  Horrible.

I repeat, elbirroH!  Thumbs down!

"An Eye for What?" (1957)

Do I even have the energy to read another Damon Knight story after choking down the last two abortions?  This one is over 20 pages long!  Yikes!  

Well, thankfully, "An Eye for What?" isn't bad.  The style, characters, relationships, and images are all good, and the plot feels pretty original, and it is intriguing and entertaining.  The ending left me disappointed, but I am still willing to give "An Eye for What?" a moderate recommendation. 

It is the semi-authoritarian space-faring future!  Most of our cast of characters consists of astronauts who were subjected to "Pavlov-Morganstern treatments" as children to prevent them committing crimes and who seek solace from a "Church of Marx padre" when under stress.  And they are under stress.  The men and women in the story have been living in a wheel-like starship orbiting an alien planet for years, and most of them have cabin fever because they haven't been allowed to visit the planet, only admire its beauty through the view ports.  

Rounding out the main cast is one alien, a little blob guy they call George, a native of the planet below.  The Terran space federation is trying to open up trading relations with the blob people, to get them to join the federation the way Terra has inducted countless other less-advanced civilizations into the federation, a process that can take months or years, and studying George is part of that process.

The plot of "An Eye for What?" concerns the Terran scientists on the station trying to understand the culture of the blob people.  You see, George and the humans were getting along just fine for quite a while--in fact, George has been quite submissive and obedient--but then at a banquet the blob stole a human woman's dessert.  When asked why, Georgie boy, again tractable and innocuous, says something incomprehensible about its relationship with the woman.  When the humans consult the blobs on the planet surface, they say their fellow must be punished, but won't make clear how punishment works among their people.  They do darkly hint that if George is not punished, that every human on the ship will deserve to be punished for their negligence in doing their duty of punishing George.  Uh oh.

Many punishments are tried, but neither psychological punishments (like isolating the gregarious little guy) or physical punishments (like trying to temporarily deprive it of oxygen or stretching it on an improvised rack) work--George's body and psyche are very resilient and it responds to these punishments as if they are fun games.  One of the doctors on the station who s particularly stressed out by life in orbit takes the radical step of using drugs to counteract his Pavlov-Morganstern conditioning so he can break the rules and inflict a risky punishment on George, and in an indirect way this unravels the mystery.

You see, the blobs are single-celled creatures.  If they eat too much, they will explode.  George seized the human woman's dessert because she is fat and George was worried she would explode if she ate more.  There's also a whole bit about how among the blobs the small blobs are revered and have leadership positions because they show self control.  Anyway, the means of punishing George is to give it license to eat whatever it wants so it risks exploding.  Don't worry--they stop George before everyone's favorite blob actually explodes, but George's weight gain does lead to a loss of status among the natives.  

Once the mystery is solved the commander of the base decides to not open trade relations with the blobs after all, even though they have been working to that end for over two years--it would be wrong to expose these people to the vast quantity of mass produced goods the federation could supply them, because it would destroy them-unable to resist over eating, they would all explode.  "An Eye for What?" turns out to be a long fat joke and a somewhat oblique attack on our market society, a suggestion that its ability to produce a wide range and high volume of desirable goods has dangerous drawbacks.

Obviously I am not in tune with the message of this story, the kind of argument a commie would make--I think we should have a productive society, and I don't think naked people living in huts in Amazonian rain forests who survive by hunting monkeys with blowpipes or whatever are living better lives than people in North America or Western Europe.  But I have more substantive and less ideological criticisms, primarily that the theme or message of "An Eye for What?" comes as a surprise at the end.  The clues that indicate that the woman at the banquet is fat are pretty easy to miss, though I suppose if you look at "An Eye for What?" as a mystery story, maybe that is a virtue of the story.  The theme that consumption is a terrible danger I didn't pick up on until almost the very end of the story, and I don't think there are really any hints of it through the beginning or middle of the piece.  I might also quibble that the way the mystery is solved is almost by happenstance, as a byproduct of something else, rather than through a feat of logic or cogitation or something admirable and attributable to the actions of a detective, but I guess that is true of many mystery stories.  The strength of this story is not the theme or even the plot, but the humans and the alien and the relationships among them and the little episodes that illustrate those people's personalities and relationships. 

"A Eye for What?" has been reprinted in a multitude of anthologies, but not in The Best of Damon Knight, though it is certainly more commendable and entertaining than "This Way to the Regress."  The world is perplexing.

**********

It is a relief that things took a good turn there at the end, but, oof, those first two stories.  Did writers whom Knight, as a pioneering critic of SF, had slagged ever throw such stories as "The Indigestible Invaders" and "This Way to the Regress" back in Knight's face, or at least take solace in the knowledge that the same pen that was denigrating them also gave birth to such monstrosities?  I hope so!

What you might call a change of pace next time at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Stay tuned!

Harlan Ellison: "Try a Dull Knife," "In Lonely Lands," and "Eyes of Dust"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from my paperback copy (signed by the author!) of Alone Against Tomorrow by Harlan Ellison.  Three stories today from the "man of passion," as Cecil Smith of Los Angeles Times likes to call him, "Try a Dull Knife," "In Lonely Lands," and "Eyes of Dust."  Sounds life-affirming, eh?  To read the exact same versions I am reading of these stories, try these links, but no guarantees--you never know when the pirates of the interwebs are going to be hauled before the authorities!

LINK 1 

LINK 2

"Try a Dull Knife" (1968)

Here we have a story that has been widely anthologized in American and British vampire-themed books and in European anthologies.  "Try a Dull Knife" debuted in F&SF alongside a Larry Niven story that sounds fun, and you can see a photo of Niven on the back cover of the magazine.

We know this will be an "edgy" story from the first paragraph, in which Ellison talks about marijuana use and employs an ethnic slur for Latin Americans.  A man, Eddie Burma, has been stabbed, and staggers into a "slum nightclub" in an Hispanic neighborhood where three different bands are playing, Ellison portraying the musicians and their audiences as grotesque.  Eddie wants the restroom to rest and hide in, and Ellison unleashes one of his lists on us, a list of slang and foreign words for "toilet."

As he tries to rest in the nightclub restroom, and then staggers out into the night, we learn all about Burma.  Burma is a great guy-- clever, charismatic, generous, a good comedian and talented raconteur.  The SF angle is that he is an "empath": "on a level most people never even know exists he felt for the world."  Burma, throughout his life, has attracted to himself losers and sad people, people who feed off his energy as he tells jokes and stories, as he acts as an impromptu counsellor or therapist or priest for them, salving their psychic wounds.  (We get a list of a bunch of these defeated people.)  "Try a Dull Knife," apparently, is Ellison working through his own feelings about being a celebrity, how fans (he thinks) live vicariously through him, build mental and social lives around him and other famous people because they themselves are unable to build satisfactory lives of their own.  Ellison, perhaps, feels exploited by his fans, feels a pressure to please them when he sees them at conventions or reads their fan mail or whatever.  (This kind of pressure is perhaps at the root of such famous Ellison capers as his failure to deliver the third Dangerous Visions volume.)    

Tonight, at a party he held, Burma started running out of the energy he always provided his friends and acquaintances, and these losers bitterly attacked him for, to their minds, refusing them the bounty he had always in the past been ready to supply.  One woman even stabbed him, leading him to flee.

At the end of the story the losers find him, suck him dry.  In his final moments, Burma recognizes that he is as sick as they, that he loved and sought the attention his fans provided, needed to be worshipped and admired as much as they needed someone to fill their empty lives.  Ellison is self-aware.

This story won't change your mind if you think Ellison is a self-important jerk, but it is pretty well-written and more or less makes internal sense and describes a somewhat interesting phenomena.  People nowadays may consider Ellison's descriptions of an Hispanic-American community offensive, but all the references to "fat momma"s and a "Pancho Villa mustache" and "a reject from a Cuban Superman film" paint a vivid picture and add interest to the story, even if Ellison has no specific reason to connect his plot to Latin American culture (unless we are supposed to be reminded of pre-Columbian human sacrifice or something...hmmm.)  I can mildly recommend "Try a Dull Knife"--it succeeds in its goals and is entertaining, and seems to be Ellison expressing his own feelings and reflecting on his own experiences without going overboard into irritating solipsism.

"In Lonely Lands" (1959)

Ellison uses the first half of Tennyson's "The Eagle" as an epigraph to "In Lonely Lands," which gets me on his side from the get go.  And Ellison has me on his side the whole six pages of the story, a story about human feelings and relationships.  If more of Ellison's stories were this good, I wouldn't find his outsized reputation so silly and annoying.

It is the space faring, star-hopping, future!  Pederson scoffed at his father's religion and advice as a young man, and set out on a career of adventure as an interstellar pilot.  Now a blind old man, he lives on Mars, awaiting death--it was on Mars, the first planet he trod upon after leaving Earth, that he was happiest.  A native Martian, a religious man of wisdom, becomes his friend, comforts him in his last few years, as Pederson comes to realize how right his father was about so many things.

"In Lonely Lands" actually has some of the emotional power we are often told Ellison wields, and it isn't the product of hyperbole or lists or yelling, but some subtlety and a natural tone--this is Ellison with a human face.  Thumbs up for "In Lonely Lands."

"In Lonely Lands" is one of the stories included in the massive volume The Essential Ellison and was also reprinted in The Fantastic Universe Omnibus, a themed anthology on Mars, and the men's magazine Adam.  The touching tale of Pederson and his last days on Mars debuted in an issue of  Fantastic Universe that also printed a story by Evelyn Goldstein that we read like eight years ago and which has a cover by Virgil Finlay.  I love Virgil Finlay's black and white work, which is so distinctive and so often strange and/or beautiful, but work by him in color, like this, tends to be just average--not bad, but merely in the normal range of SF art of its period, unlike his excellent and unique black and white drawings.  Don't get me wrong, this cover is better than 95 to 99% of what you'll see on the covers of new fiction and periodicals in a Barnes and Noble today, but place it among its 1950s and 1960s peers and it is just kind of regular.            

"Eyes of Dust" (1959)

"Eyes of Dust" first saw print in an issue of Rogue that bears a charming and sophisticated cover.  Everything is so ugly nowadays, and then you look back 60 years and even the porn mags are beautiful.  What a world.

Some time ago we read the Richard Matheson story from this holiday issue of Rogue and I told you that the story's holiday-time theme was dumb--see, I don't pick out Ellison, I can be mean to anybody.  Also in the issue is an article attributed to comedian Lenny Bruce that, according to isfdb, was co-written by Ellison.  Bruce and Ellison were closely associated with Rogue, and as I write this, if you click this link to an auction site, you can read a letter written by Bruce to Ellison, and another three letters from Bruce to Frank R. Robinson, another science fiction author who, like Ellison, spent time on the Rogue editorial staff.

Speaking of beauty, the city Light on the planet Topaz is the city of beauty!  Every building, every citizen, every smell, is carefully designed, meticulously curated, to be beautiful in itself and to fit into the whole scheme of the city beautifully.  But Ordak has a mole on her face, and Broomall is blind!  These two imperfects, the last imperfects on the planet, are essentially pariahs, and marry each other and set up house out in the countryside in a well-appointed suburban domicile; Ordak even commutes into the city to work a job in the scent factory (she wears her hair so it covers her mole.)

Ordak and Broomall secretly give birth to a son who is deformed; in particular, his eyes are strange and hideous--Ellison tells us they are like dust and like the grey of storm clouds and decaying bodies.  Son has psychic powers that allow him to see visions and I guess see beyond the walls of his little secret room in the basement.  He is twenty when in a freak accident an aircraft crashes into their home, killing  his parents and destroying the ground floor and much of the basement but sparing the psychic son's secret room.  The rescue squad is horrified when they discover the ugly secret room, still intact under the rubble, and the ugly young man who occupies it.  

The psyker can detect how disgusting the three handsome rescue workers find him, so he kills them.  Ellison describes this encounter in oblique poetical terms, so it is not quite clear if the handsome rescue squaddies hate the psyker and so he kills them or if he hates them and so he kills them or both.  And it is not clear if the son of Ordak and Broomall beats these guys up with his fists or uses psychic powers on them.  

Even though he could outfight three healthy adult men, the psyker is captured by the authorities without much ado.  They burn him at the stake and then all on Topaz is beautiful, but the sound of the burning psyker's screams and the grey of his eyes will continue to haunt the people of Topaz and the city of Light, or so Ellison tells us.

This story is OK; it is certainly in the "acceptable" range.  "Eyes of Dust" was included in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

Left: German       Right: Croatian (I think)

**********

My last blog post may have given the impression that I am on a jihad against Ellison, but I just try to judge each individual story on its merits, and all three of today's stories are successful, and I am happy to report this fact.  I think there are like a half dozen more stories in this collection I have not read yet, and I am hoping they will all be as palatable as today's selection. 

Harlan Ellison: "The Silver Corridor," "Bright Eyes," and "Are You Listening?"

In my last blog post I mentioned that I own a signed paperback copy of Harlan Ellison's Alone Against Tomorrow.  Over ten years ago, at a Half Price Books location in Iowa or Ohio, I paid just two dollars for the volume, a 1979 Fifth Printing.  Let's look at the contents page and figure out which stories I haven't read yet and then read three of them.  And don't fret, I will wash the Ovaltine off my hands before I handle this holy relic.  Read along in your own copy (you got one, right?) or at the internet archive if your copy is on a high shelf or under your sleeping cat or supporting a short table leg or something.

"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and the evil clock man story I read before I started this blog.  "The Discarded," "Deeper Than the Darkness" and "All the Sounds of Fear" I read in October 2024, "Life Hutch" in September 2024.  "The Time of the Eye" I read in 2022.  "Blind Lightning" I read in 2019.  I think maybe that is it, leaving a lot of stories in this book I haven't read yet.  Today we'll explore "The Silver Corridor," gaze into "Bright Eyes," and give a hearing to "Are You Listening?" 

"The Silver Corridor" (1956)

"The Silver Corridor" debuted in an issue of Infinity with a gorgeous Emsh chess and sex (your two favorite pastimes!) cover.  This issue also has a long Algis Budrys production I read in 2019 and stories by Robert Silverberg and Damon Knight I will probably read some day, and a good analysis by Knight of Judith Merril's very first Year's Greatest anthology. 

The Silver Corridor is the arena in which two politicians of the future choose to fight a duel.  These two guys each have devised a perfect (to their minds) system of government, and they had a huge argument over their differing constitutions in the Council.  The only solution, the only way to decide which system would rule the world, was to have this Silver Corridor duel.  In the Silver Corridor a computer that can read minds will create illusions that both men can see, and even touch and even be killed by.  Don't ask how any of this (or anything in any Harlan Ellison story) works--Harlan don't care.  The illusions will be drawn from their brains, and the illusions will more closely align with the psyche of the man with the more powerful imagination and the more determined will, and we are led to believe this will  proffer him an advantage in the conflict.  All this gobbledygook comes to absolutely nothing, however, so abandon all expectations and don't strain your noggin trying to understand anything that happens in the Silver Corridor. 

Most of Ellison's long tedious story (22 pages in my paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow) consists of descriptions of the scenarios in which the two politicians contest each other.  No matter how interesting or exciting the scenarios might be (and they are not very interesting or exciting, I fear) these scenarios would be boring because we know they are merely illusions.  And we have no reason to root for the protagonist, Marmorth, or the antagonist, Krane, because we don't know which of them has the better system of government, and we don't know a thing about their world, so we don't care if that world gets a good or bad system of government.  Ellison seems to try to make Marmorth a character who evolves, starting out scared and growing more confident as the story proceeds, but that is a pretty thin reed.

The scenarios:  M and K argue in a royal court over what to do with alien prisoners, kill them or do a prisoner exchange.  Ellison, I think, tries to make us like M more than K because K's arguments are emotional and racist while M's are complex and rational.

M and K are in an abstract world of color, each trying to spread his color.

A giant spider approaches; each man argues the merits of his theory of government, and the spider's course shifts towards the man who has less conviction in his theory.

Space warships of which each man is captain exchange broadsides.

A chess game (yes, Ellison's story is the basis of the cover of the magazine, even though his name does not appear on the cover) in which the pieces are made of sharp material that can easily inflict a cut and must be moved gingerly because some are covered in poison.  This is the best idea in the story.

What happens in these scenarios is inconclusive; as far as I could tell, neither man wins any of them decisively, and neither seems to gain any advantages or disadvantages from the outcome of any scenario which might affect the outcome of the next.  These scenarios are filler with no effect on the plot; their traditional components, things we have seen a hundred times before--chess, giant spider, space battle--are supposed to entertain us even though they float in lifeless isolation, totally bereft of context or human feeling.  People like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Edmond Hamilton fill their stories with these sorts of traditional elements, but in their stories those elements are entertaining because we know at least some little something about the people who confront those elements and the world in which these confrontations occur, but Ellison here seems to think we'll enjoy seeing a big spider or a space warship just because he uses the words "huge, ichor-dripping spider-thing" and "Magnificent-class destroyer" as if we are Pavlov's dogs who salivate whether there is food or not.  Ellison thinks you are a sap and a sucker. 

In the final scenario, which is set in a volcano, a "woman-thing" appears.  We are told Ellison is some genius wordsmith, but in the book version of "The Silver Corridor" I am reading he writes "She grazed into being between them."  "Grazed" seems so inappropriate I thought it might be a typo, so I looked at a scan of the ish of Infinity in which "The Silver Corridor" debuted.  There we see "She plopped into being between them," which at least makes sense, but makes you think she is fat or fluid something.

Anyway, she is not fat; she has "high breasts, trim stomach, exciting legs."  (Ellison couldn't come up with a physically descriptive adjective for the legs like he did for the breasts and stomach?  "Shapely," Harlan, did you consider "shapely?")  She also has a reptilian monster head and bat wings.  For some reason Ellison doesn't just say she has a crocodile head or a lizard head or whatever, but goes into detail about her eyes and nostrils and teeth, even though all she then does is call the men egomaniacs who are too "ensnared in themselves" and then disappear.  The men decide to collaborate, and then lava kills both of them.  That is our twist ending--two characters we know nothing about both die instead of just one of them dying.  "The Silver Corridor" is a shaggy dog story in which not only the story as a whole but each individual section is at best meaningless, and often irritating or boring.

Thumbs down!

Besides Alone Against Tomorrow, "The Silver Corridor" has been reprinted in the Ellison collection Ellison Wonderland, a collection which has appeared under the title Earthman, Go Home in the English- speaking world and Der Silberne Korridor over in Jerryland--yes, "The Silver Corridor" is the title story of the German version of the collection.  You can also find "The Silver Corridor" in the British collection All the Sounds of Fear, which is the first volume of a two-volume version of Alone Against Tomorrow.

"Bright Eyes" (1965)

One of Ellison's narrative strategies is the list.  We get one of his lists on the first page of this 14-page story.

He knew about almost everything.

The worms. The moles. The trunks of dead trees. The whites of eggs. Music. And random sounds. The sound fish make in the deep. The flares of the sun. The scratch of unbleached cloth against flesh. The hounds that roamed the tundra. The way those who have hair see it go pale and stiff with age. Clocks and what they do. Ice cream. Wax seals on parchment dedications. Grass and leaves. Metal and wood. Up and down. Here and most of there. Bright Eyes knew it all. 

Zzzzzzz....

The title creature of "Bright Eyes" is an immortal of some vaguely defined species (he has fur and feet that lack toes) who has lived a long long time in some vaguely defined building, maybe like a castle (we got "spider-thing" and "woman-thing" in "The Silver Corridor;" well, we get "castle-place" here in "Bright Eyes.")  The last of his race, Bright Eyes sees portents and must go on his vaguely comprehended final mission, so he climbs atop his steed--a giant rat--and off he goes, carrying with him his collection of skulls.   

Bright Eyes eventually realizes he has been living underground for centuries, and his compulsion to complete his final mission is leading him outside.  Outside he and his rat are attacked by feral dogs.  Ellison's description of the dogs is kind of funny:

Noses with large nostrils, as though they had had to learn to forage the land all at once, rather than from birth.

Sentences don't need to mean anything if they sound good, and if you don't think they sound good, it's on you, not on the "man of passion" who writes with "feverish intensity" as he "leads a crusade to make science fiction more pertinent to today" who penned these sentences.

Luckily Bright Eyes has powers, powers his people attained before the solar system was formed, and one is the power to cause fear in other living things, and he uses this power to drive off the dogs.  He later uses a different super power to remove the thousands of corpses that are damming up a river.  

A flock of birds flies overhead, a flock numerous enough to obscure the sun.  These birds are ill and bleed down on Bright Eyes.  This triggers a vision of one of Bright Eyes' people, a vision implanted in his mind many centuries ago, just before all his fellow furry people departed the Earth, leaving Bright Eyes the last of his kind on this planet.  I guess we are supposed to think these furries all committed suicide to give us humans room on Earth, not that they flew off to the Undying Lands or to a retirement community on Mars or something.  This guy tells Bright Eyes to take a bag of skulls and go to a certain place...which is already what Bright Eyes is doing, rendering this vision superfluous to B.E. and to us readers.  Why didn't Ellison start the story with this vision?  Ellison just makes these stories up as he goes along and just sends his first draft to the editor, doesn't he?  Ellison thinks his editors are saps and suckers.

It is implied that the human race has destroyed the world with a nuclear war, mankind's weapons not only killing everybody but causing earthquakes:

At one point he passed through a sector of trembling mountains, that heaved up great slabs of rock and hurled them away like epileptics ridding themselves of clothes. The ground trembled and burst and screamed and the very Earth went insane to tunes of destruction it had never written.

Anyway, after passing the insane mountains that are like nudist epileptics, B. E. comes to a ruined city full of dead humans and cries for the first time in his long life.  He buries the skulls and the story ends.  Just like the suicide of his race, the burying of the skulls is a futile gesture--Bright Eyes' adventure, like the adventure of Marmorth and Krane, has accomplished nothing.

"Bright Eyes" is not good, but it is better than "The Silver Corridor" because it is shorter, somewhat better structured, and its surreal visions are somewhat more interesting and original than the banal images we find in "The Silver Corridor."  (I mean the bleeding birds and the river choked with corpses, not the stripping mountains.)  We're condemning "Bright Eyes" as marginally bad, not very bad.         

"Bright Eyes" debuted in Cele Goldsmith's Fantastic, and its main berth since that day has been the collection Paingod and Other Delusions, though in 1969 it was included in the reprint magazine Strange Fantasy. 

"Are You Listening?" (1958)

"Are You Listening?" here in Alone Against Tomorrow is preceded by a one-page intro in which Ellison simultaneously channels his inner 75-year-old and his inner 13-year-old, bitching that large organizations use computers and assign people ID numbers ("they steal your name, then they go after your individuality") and bragging that he makes intentional errors on his check when he pays his phone bill because he thinks it will cost the phone company fifty bucks to trace the error (Ellison characterizes this childish behavior as "fighting back.")

"Are You Listening?" debuted in Cele Goldsmith's Amazing and, according to isfdb, has, in some editions of Ellison Wonderland and Earthman, Go Home, appeared under the title "The Forces That Crush."  "Are You Listening?" also shows up in an issue of the men's magazine Adam and in Terry Carr's anthology Into the Unknown as well as the Ellison collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

Of today's three stories, this is the best-written and has the best premise and theme, though perhaps that is small praise, seeing as "The Silver Corridor" has no real theme and the theme of "Bright Eyes" is so utterly banal.  "Are You Listening?" really fulfills the promise made by the subtitle of this book ("Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction"), it being about a middle-aged professional with a fat inattentive wife and work colleagues who barely notice him.  This guy's name is Winsocki, and Ellison makes much of the fact that this name is featured in a popular song that I, born in 1971, never heard of until today.

Anyway, Winsocki's status as a forgettable wallflower reaches its ultimate expression when his wife, his boss, people on the street, etc., can no longer see or hear him.  They can't even feel him when he touches them!  In desperation he smacks a high school girl's ass and punches people in the face, and he receives no response--his victims just keep going about their business as if nothing has happened, even if they are bleeding!  Sure, this makes no sense, but this is Harlan Ellison we are reading, and you know it's fine because you've been told so many times that Harlan Ellison is a good writer that you believe it.

For two weeks Winsockiu wanders around, stealing food, watching as his wife takes up with his boss, and knocking people over out of frustration--no matter how much he hurts people, they act like he isn't there.  Then he meets other men suffering his condition, including a college professor!  Prof and the others have accepted this new life, seeing as it is easy, there being no responsibilities.  Prof also explains what has happened to them, in the vaguest and lamest possible terms.  You see, 

"There are forces in the world today, Mr. Winsocki, that are invisibly working to make us all carbon copies of one another.  Forces that crush us into molds of each other....when these forces that crush us into one mold work enough to get us where they want us, we just--poof!--disappear to all those around us."

This doesn't make any sense, of course, but there it is.  Winsocki rejects the prof's acquiescence in his own erasure, and begins a campaign, of which this story is part, to get people's attention again.

I like the theme of the unappreciated middle-class man (as I've told you before, I love those Kinks productions like "Mr. Pleasant" and Soap Opera) and how the path-of-least-resistance prof embraces a life of ease and irresponsibility, but Ellison drops the ball in depicting and explaining the story's central phenomenon and I think the ending could have been more cathartic and/or more bleak, and certainly more exciting--I was expecting Winsocki to kill the prof, for example, an act which Ellison could have portrayed as a righteous act of justice and resistance or a sign Winsocki had been driven totally insane.

Acceptable.

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Can we handle three more stories by the universe's greatest scribbler?  Tune in next time to find out.

Merril-approved 1959 stories by G C Edmondson and George P Elliott

We're still doing this, looking at the list of Honorable Mentions at the back of Judith Merril's 1960 Year's Best SF anthology and reading selected stories from it.  Last time was "D"s, today is "E"s.  Only two stories today, because Merril only has three "E" recommendations, and one is Harlan Ellison's "The Abnormals," which we read in 2024 under its later title "The Discarded" in my signed paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow.

We're reading G. C. Edmondson's "'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" in the November 1959 ish of F&SF, which also includes part of the serialized edition of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Damon Knight's criticism of Algis Budrys' The Falling Torch and Merril's 1959 Year's Best SF anthology--Knight considers the question of how many stories that are published under the banner of science fiction actually are science fiction, arguing that Merril's anthology and Budrys' novel contain little or no new ideas or actual science.  Is science fiction in 1959 just mainstream lit superfluously set in the future, or just fantasy?  "Invasion of the Planet of Love" by George P. Elliott we are reading in a scan of the January '59 issue of F&SF, even though Merril cites as her source the ninth Best From F&SF anthology, because a scan of the magazine is easier to find than a scan of the book.

Feel free to read along by clicking the links in the preceding paragraph.

"'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" by G. C. Edmondson

It looks like I haven't read anything by Edmondson since 2014 when I read his "Technological Retreat," a joke story to which I gave a passing grade because I was a softy back then.  The years have made me hard, my droogs!  The title of this one, and those extra quote marks which I always find so annoying, make us expect that this too will be a joke story.  And then there is the fact that isfdb is telling me this is the second of eight or nine stories in the "Mad Friend" series.  Red flags all around!

"'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" is a pile of supposedly clever nonsense, two smart ass characters, our narrator and his "mad friend," talking about reincarnation and transmigration as they hang around a zoo, the zoo affording Edmondson the opportunity to make lame scatological jokes--we hear all about animals spitting, farting, shitting, chewing, etc.  The final joke is that the narrator's grandfather was reincarnated or transmigrated as a carrot and/or as the narrator's son so said son doesn't want to eat carrots because that would render him a cannibal.  Or something like that.  

As I was reading "'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" I found it irritating and thought it a total waste of time, but after finishing it (and it is a mere merciful four pages) I found the way Edmondson has sort of constructed and wrapped up the thing sort of intriguing, and wondered what the other seven or eight Mad Friend stories might be like, so I have to grade this thing "acceptable."   

I'm still a softy.

"'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" was reprinted in a 1964 issue of Britain's Venture, a magazine which reprinted lots of F&SF material, and in the 1965 Edmondson collection (half of an Edmondson Ace Double) Stranger Than You Think, which collects most of the Mad Friend stories.

This Ace Double has cover illos and nine little interior illos by Jack Gaughan, so
fans of Gaughan's should try to find a copy or scan of it  

"Invasion of the Planet of Love" by George P. Elliott

This is a broad satire that tells you that the space program is a waste of time and resources, and besides would only lead to the spread of white racism, exploitive capitalism, hypocritical Christianity, and murderous imperialism.  Was this story specifically written to appeal to Judith Merril?  Thumbs down!

"Invasion of the Planet of Love" is a report produced for public consumption by one of four men on a pioneering mission to Venus.  Only one of the men (not the narrator) has a distinctive personality; that guy is an Anglican minister who carries a cross in one hand and a submachine gun in the other.  The United States is devoted to spreading war and Anglicanism to other planets, but all expeditions to Mars have failed, vanishing without a trace, so this expedition to Venus has been mounted.  (Elliott obviously chose Venus for his story because Venus is the goddess of love.)  The four men make it to the surface of Venus, but all they find is barren waste, acre after acre, plain and mountain, consisting solely of granite--no natural resources, no life.  The men detonate an atomic bomb and in the crater discover what they are looking for, valuable minerals and the entrance to a subterranean settlement inhabited by bipedal people.  The Venereans are like hippies or figures from a Ted Sturgeon story, dancing and expressing their love for each other nonstop.  They try to express their love for the Americans, but our boys gun them down  by the score, capture and torture some of them, and are disappointed that these natives don't put up a good fight, don't offer the prospect of an exciting and challenging war.

Eventually the natives combine their psychic love powers and the Americans are so overwhelmed with love that they have to leave.

"Invasion of the Planet of Love" is so "out there" (picking out that most milquetoast and moribund of sects, Anglicanism?) it seems possible it is not an attack on the United States and Christianity but a spoof of such attacks, but I think we have to assume it is sincere.  Elliott's satire of marriage, "Sandra," which I read in 2015, was a lot better, while his treatment of an African-American academic dealing with primitives, "Among the Dangs," which I read in 2024, was significantly better.  Of course, I was a softy back then.

"Invasion of the Planet of Love" was reprinted behind an ooh la la cover in the French edition of F&SF and in the aforementioned Best From F&SF anthology, plus in a 1968 Elliott collection.   

**********

You might say our guide Merril has led us down the garden path this time, presenting us with a trifle and serving of heavy-handed leftist slop.  (In Merril's defense, her Ellison pick is not bad.)  Hopefully we won't be similarly effed by Merril's 1959 "F"s.  Stay tuned to find out.

Tarzan at the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The lake of the Horibs lies at a considerable distance from the eastern end of the mountains of the Thipdars, perhaps five hundred miles, and where there is no time and distances are measured by food and sleep it makes little difference whether places are separated by five miles or five hundred.

The time has come to read the thirteenth Tarzan book and the fourth Pellucidar book, Tarzan at the Earth's Core.  Today's subject first appeared as a seven-part serial in Blue Book, spanning September 1929 to March 1930.  I'm reading a 1970s Ballantine edition with a Neal Adams cover.  (I actually saw a print of Adams' cover illustration, signed by Adams himself, at an antique store a few years ago.)  You can see that Adams tried to reproduce the unique sky of Pellucidar in the background of painting--as every schoolboy knows, Pellucidar is the world on the inner surface of the Earth's crust, so there is no conventional horizon, you just see the surface geography of your inner world curving upwards, like if you were a tiny bug in a huge bowl (with another bowl placed upside down on top.)  The people of Pellucidar live in a perpetual noon, as the weird sun that hovers in the center of the hollow Earth never moves, and as such Pellucidarians have little or no sense of time, something Burroughs dwells on in these Pellucidar books, I guess part of the wish-fulfillment element of the Pellucidar series, an effort to appeal to the dread of 20th-century people of the schedules and deadlines and tick-tock clocks that allow our modern society to operate.  (Remember that loud stupid Harlan Ellison story everyone loves about how Harlan Ellison shouldn't have to follow deadlines and schedules?  I bet you do.)  

Anyway, Tarzan at the Earth's Core has been printed many times and has had many dramatic covers, and Adams' contribution can stand proudly among them next to those of Frank Frazetta and J. Allen St. John, each of which shows Tarzan fighting for his life against some monster.

You'll probably remember that, in Tanar of Pellucidar, James Gridley discovered a new radio wave and was able to tune in to messages sent by scientist Abner Perry from Pellucidar, messages that detailed how David Innes, founder of an empire in Pellucidar, had been captured by the piratical Korsars.  The premise of Tarzan at the Earth's Core is that Gridley recruits a bunch of Germans to build a superior dirigible with which to enter Pellucidar via an opening in the Earth's crust at the North Pole that Innes had discovered, and then recruits Lord Greystoke, your hero and mine, to lead the expedition.  A squad of Waziri, brave African fighting men who recognize Tarzan as their chief, accompany Tarzan.  For comic relief, accompanying the Germans as cook is an African-American soldier who settled in Deutschland after being captured during the Great War.  Burroughs renders this guy's dialogue phonetically ("'S funny...dey ain't no one stirrin'--mus' all of overslep' demsef") and we spend enough time with him early on that I thought he might play a role in the plot, but he does not; mainly Burroughs uses the cook's perplexity at how there is no time in Pellucidar to remind us readers of this salient fact about Pellucidar, something he persists in reminding us of again and again in a multitude of ways. 

Burroughs' style is smooth and comfortable, so after we get past Burroughs' explanation of what Pellucidar is in the two-page forward it is fun to read about how Tarzan and Gridley meet and about the construction of the dirigible and all that.  Once in Pellucidar, we get a long series of interesting and compelling scenes that mostly entail fighting prehistoric beasts or barbaric men, getting captured and escaping, or climbing mountains.  Tarzan at Earth's Core doesn't build up to a climax really, instead we have these various adventure episodes and cliff hangers in which people face death or captivity but retain life, limb and liberty, and then the plot is all wrapped up neatly thanks to coincidences.  You might say the novel is poorly structured, but the individual action and horror scenes are all fun so I enjoyed it regardless.

Immediately upon arrival, Tarzan goes off on his own and gets lost (with no stars and shadows that never change, it is hard to tell what direction you are facing) and immobilized in a trap and contemplates death as a saber-toothed tiger approaches him--Tarzan, we learn, is what an insufferable hipster might call "not religious but spiritual" and cherishes a hope that there is life after death.

Tarzan of the Apes was not a church man; yet like the majority of those who have always lived close to nature he was, in a sense, intensely religious.  His intimate knowledge of the stupendous forces of nature, of her wonders and her miracles had impressed him with the fact that their ultimate origin lay far beyond the conception of the finite mind of man, and thus incalculably remote from the farthest bounds of science.

When they realize Tarzan is lost, Gridley, a few Germans, and the Waziri, go out looking for him.  The search party blunders into an astounding danger--a big pack of saber-toothed cats are herding a huge crowd of deer, mastodons, giant sloths, "dinotheriums," etc., into a clearing to slaughter and devour them, and Gridley's party gets trapped among the doomed herbivores.  This massacre gives Burroughs a chance to share his own theory of why the dinosaurs and other prehistoric megafauna went extinct, and even a theory on the grim future of mankind; in its earlier chapters Tarzan at the Earth's Core feels like "real" science fiction, what with these sorts of speculations (however wacky) and with all the talk of how to build a superior airship.  But not the science fiction that romanticizes mankind's ability to solve problems and master the universe with science and technology; at the same time that Tarzan at the Earth's Core shows men advancing technologically and demonstrating selflessness and bravery, the novel still is full of that misanthropy we often see in these Tarzan stories, a lot of extravagant silliness about how man is less virtuous than animals:

...man, who is unquestionably the Creator's greatest blunder, combining as he does all the vices of preceding types from invertebrates to mammals, while possessing few of their virtues.

This is fun rhetoric to read, but come on, what "virtue" could we possibly say is possessed by a trilobite or an ammonite, by a skittering skink or slinking snake?  Like the idea that people in Pellucidar have no sense of time because there are no heavenly bodies and no night and day, the idea that animals--even bugs!--are better than people is an idea that makes the novel better by adding a layer of thought and feeling and alienness, but is utter balderdash.   

Tarzan is rescued from the cat who menaces him by a tribe of Sagoths, a savage people with approximately the intelligence of a human but the bodies of gorillas.  They speak the same ape language that Tarzan learned as a boy, so he is able to make friends with one of the biggest and strongest of them.  This prominent Sagoth is exiled from his tribe, and he and Tarzan set off together.  Soon they are joined by a normal Pellucidar human, a man of the mountain country of Zoram.  Like John Carter on Mars, Tarzan in Pellucidar plays the role of the civilizing imperialist who makes the natives less savage, more diplomatic and friendly, and gets the Zoramian and Sagoth, traditional enemies, to become comrades.  

Burroughs' novels generally include a princess and a man--an outsider--who ends up marrying her.  Zoram is famed as a land whose women are the greatest beauties in Pellucidar, and a third of the way into Tarzan at the Earth's Core we meet the expected princess, Jana, known as the Red Flower of Zoram.  We get a long description of her beautiful hair and and barbaric clothes, including her jewelry, made from the bones of a dimorphodon and other small creatures, and then a good chase scene as a chief of a lowland tribe, people whom the mountain tribes hold in severe contempt, and his lackeys try to capture her for the obvious purpose.  In the middle of the chase Jason Gridley appears.

Gridley survived the saber-tooth tiger feast, but was separated from his fellows, and when he got back to the zeppelin he took off in the airship's scout plane to look for his friends.  A pteranodon brings down his monoplane and he bails out, his parachute carrying him providentially right by the beleaguered Jana, who is not only about to be attacked from one side by lowlanders but from the other by hyenadons (when it rains in Pellucidar, it pours.)  Gridley with his Colt .45 revolver and Jana with her spear fight these creatures side by side, driving them off and falling in love, though Gridey doesn't quite grok his own feelings and Jana is reluctant to admit her own.

Adding a note of bitter realism to our male wish-fulfillment fantasy in which guys outfight saber-toothed tigers, pteranodons and cave bears, Gridley says the wrong thing and Jana starts saying she hates him and threatening to murder him and to commit suicide.  Jana performatively runs off and the quarelling couple are legitimately separated by a flood after one of Pellucidar's rare rain storms and Gridley must proceed alone, without a guide; in the process he loses his clothes and his rifle and must face the world as naked as its natives and armed with a spear and a bow he fashions himself.  One of the last things Jana said to him before she left him was that "Only a man may go where goes the Red Flower of Zoram," and by learning how to navigate the obstacles of a world of voracious monsters and treacherous cliffsides without clothes and without firearms, Gridley becomes that sort of man.

Tarzan and his two new buddies head for Zoram after finding the crashed plane and Gridley and Jana's footprints headed that way.  Tarzan is carried away by a pteranodon, and we get additional superior action sequences as he escapes the flying reptile's nest and then has to fight a giant cave bear on a narrow ledge.  The cave bear was attacking a prince of the Clovi people, people who, like the Zoram tribe they habitually raid to steal women, live in the mountains of the Thipdars, and saving the prince allows Tarzan to make friends among the Clovi.  While Lord Greystoke is there, a Clovi raiding party returns with a beautiful captive--none other than Jana, the Red Flower of Zoram, herself! 

Not everybody among the insular Clovi is crazy about Tarzan, and it looks like Lord Greystoke will be executed and Jana will commit suicide as she is forced to marry some local guy.  So the prince of the Clovi helps our heroes escape to a plain inhabited by triceratops and snake people known as the Horibs who ride pareiasaurs, reptiles which Burroughs depicts as being faster than a horse.  Tarzan watches as a squadron of snake people lancers hunt down a triceratops, and then he and Jana are captured by the mounted ophidians.

Meanwhile, Gridley makes friends among the Zoramians by killing a stegosaurus that was attacking Jana's brother.  (At least four times in Tarzan at the Earth's Core, Gridley or Lord Greystoke make friends with people by showing up at the very moment some monster is about to kill them.)  One of the crazier scenes of Tarzan at the Earth's Core is this one, in which the stegosaur glides by jumping off a ridge and lowering its characteristic plates to the horizontal so they serve as wings.  Jana's brother thinks Jana must have been captured by lowlanders, so, while we readers know she is has in fact been in the clutches of the Clovi mountain folk and then the snake people, we observe as Gridley and his new friend seek the Red Flower of Zoram in a village in a swamp.  This swamp is full of giant reptiles of all types, and Gridley is amazed to see a huge snake swallow a trachodon whole.  Further amazement follows as Gridley and friend are captured by Korsars and carried down a river towards the sea.  The pirates' boat is attacked again and again by giant reptiles, and then, finally, by Horibs, whose steeds are just as agile in the water as on the land.  Burroughs gives us a long and mind-blowing horror/battle scene with a surfeit of gruesome wounds and gallons of blood; once the pirate boat is taken by the snake people, Gridley has to watch as the reptile men eat the dead pirates.  Gridley and Jana's brother are carried off by the Horibs to be fattened up for a feast!

In the closing chapters of the novel, Burroughs wraps things up a little too quickly and a little too anticlimactically.  The snake men unwittingly bring Tarzan and Gridley back together, while chance reunites them with the Waziri and then the German airship.  With their modern rifles the Waziri make quick work of the Horibs, then the airship and its bombs awe the Korsars into handing over David Innes.  Somewhat oddly, we don't get a scene of Tarzan and/or Gridley meeting Innes and/or Abner Perry, shaking hands and thanking each other or something.  Despite the uncountable fights and chases they have all been in, the crew that entered Pellucidar on the airship has suffered only one casualty--one of the Germans is MIA.  Gridley decides to stay in Pellucidar to look for mein herr, and when she sees that Gridley is sticking around, Jana finally stops giving him the cold shoulder and the two openly express their love for each other.

(One of my gripes is that Burroughs didn't give the German for whom Gridley is going to search any personality that I can remember, or develop any kind of relationship between Gridley and this German.  Instead of expending time on the black cook, Burroughs probably should have given this German a personality.  Or, had the American cook, maybe through some goofy misstep, get lost in Pellucidar and have him be the man whom Gridley vows to find.)

Tarzan at the Earth's Core is made up of the same basic building blocks of so many of Burroughs' works, but the action scenes and horror scenes are better than average, or at least I enjoyed them more than usual.  The minor characters are not as good as some we have seen, but they aren't bad, and I have already said I enjoyed the stuff about the German dirigible and Burroughs' various evolutionary theories.  It is a little hard to judge, seeing as it has been a while since I read them, but I think I like this one better than the last three or four Burroughs novels I've read. So, thumbs up, I certainly recommend Tarzan at the Earth's Core.

It looks like the fifth Pellucidar novel appeared in 1937, preceded by the fourteenth through nineteenth Tarzan books, so it will be a while before we return to the Earth's Core.  I wonder if Gridley ever finds that German.