Harlan Ellison: "Life Hutch," "Battle Without Banners," "A Friend to Man," "The Voice in the Garden," and "Soldier"

Way back in 2016 I read four stories from the 1973 printing of From the Land of Fear, a 1967 collection of Harlan Ellison stories which, bizarrely, has no table of contents and no page listing where the included stories first were published.  My copy has a dark cover illustration by an O'Brien and is emblazoned with the claim that Ellison is "the best-selling science fiction writer in the world."  The '67 printing has a cover illo by the Dillons and promotes the Roger Zelazny foreword, and the '74 printing has a wild prop and model photograph.  My favorite may be the French translation, the cover of which features a somewhat fanciful pterosaur (I love pterosaurs.)  Recent editions have that portrait of Ellison smoking a pipe that always makes my eyes roll. 

I read four stories from From the Land of Fear back in 2016, "The Sky is Burning," "My Brother Paulie," "Back to the Drawing Boards" and "'We Mourn for Anyone....'"  In 2022, when I read the collection Gentleman Junkie, I read "Time of the Eye."  I'm skipping the Zelazny foreword and the screenplay version of "Soldier," so that leaves five stories for me to wrestle with in this blog post.  Let's do it!

"Life Hutch" (1956)

The stories in From the Land of Fear have italicized intros from Ellison, sometimes long, but the one for "Life Hutch" is just seven lines, Harlan name dropping about a time he hung out with Robert Silverberg, Randall Garrett, and John W. Campbell, Jr., Silverberg and Garrett engaging in horseplay and Campbell playing the wise old man giving long-winded advice, like Nestor in the Iliad.

"Life Hutch" is a classic-style science fiction story about space men and space war, robots and computers, a man using his wits and knowledge of technology to save himself from a dreadful death.  All the science and tech stuff works, as does the psychological suspense stuff.  Thumbs up!

Our hero is the pilot of a one-man space warship serving in a fleet engaged in a major space naval battle.  His ship is hit and he crash lands on a little planetoid.  The planetoid has a "life-hutch," a little sealed room with food and a radio and medical equipment and so forth to succor people just like our hero who get into trouble out in space.  In the little building is also a robot that maintains the place and helps do heavy labor when necessary, unloading a supply ship or whatever.  When the pilot gets inside the little building the robot strikes him down, breaking his bones--the robot is malfunctioning!  It attacks anything that moves!  Can the pilot figure out a way to fix or destroy the robot...without letting it see him move?  If he can't, he'll die of thirst or from his internal wounds!

A good suspense story.  In the middle of the ten-page tale is a dream sequence in which Ellison pushes the idea that wars are based on race prejudice and this is ridiculous because people are all essentially the same.  At least I think that is the point of the dream sequence.  There is also a subtheme that the robot is malfunctioning because some greedy businessman cut corners or some politician was corrupt; this story flatters readers who might think of themselves as anti-establishment types.        

"Life Hutch" first saw print in an issue of If we've already looked at, the one with Frank Riley's "The Executioner," which both Judith Merril and I liked.  Besides Ellison collections, the story has reappeared in some anthologies, including Silverberg's oft reprinted Deep Space. 

"Battle Without Banners" (1964)

In the intro to this one Ellison pokes fun at manly men writers like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway and says he thinks sports are boring and stupid.  He also clues us in to the fact that this story is about racism.

"Battle Without Banners" is a fantasy in which blacks and Jews work together to rise up against the gentile whites who oppress them full of loving descriptions of white gentiles being gunned down.  Set in a prison, the black and Jewish criminals collaborate in organizing an elaborate jail break, capturing automatic weapons, making improvised bombs and shooting it out with the guards, whom we are told again and again wear white uniforms.  In lulls in the fighting one of the African-Americans massages the back of one of the Jews (is this a clue they are gay lovers?) and some of the jailbirds talk about what landed them in prison.  One of the Jews threw a bomb into an Iowa church because one of the minsters was an anti-Semite.  One of the blacks shot down some KKK members who were on their way to punish a black man who had sexually harassed a white woman ("grabbed a feel off a druggist's wife.")  Another of the Jews "did something" to his gentile wife after she called him a "dirty kike" during sex; killed her, I guess?

Readers who keep score carefully may notice that the Jews show more remorse for their crimes, are less mentally stable, and more likely to surrender to the white gentile establishment, than the blacks. 

While on the one hand a wish fulfillment fantasy for bloodthirsty "anti-racists," "Battle Without Banners" is also a tragedy.  The inmates are compared to the crucified Jesus (their jailbreak attempt is called "their passion") and in the end some of them surrender and the rest are overwhelmed by a charge of the white uniformed guards; the last lines of the story are a lament that there are always too many white gentiles for the oppressed to overcome.  Time will tell,  I suppose.

A silly sort of exercise, I guess specifically written to "epater le bourgeois" or be "over the top" or to "push the envelope" or whatever cliche was operative in '64.  Thumbs down!  "Battles Without Banners" was first printed in Taboo, an anthology of stories "which no publisher would touch."  This book also presented stories by Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber and Charles Beaumont that I have not read yet--a Taboo blog post covering those stories might be a good idea, if I can find the stories.  (It looks like the actual book goes for over $100, so that is out.)   I don't think "Battle Without Banners" has been anthologized again; the other Ellison collection in which it has found a home is Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled.

I don't care what anybody says, Islands is a better album than 
Beat or Three of a Perfect Pair

"A Friend to Man" (1959)

This one is actually in a magazine I own, an issue of Fantastic Universe with art by Virgil Finlay and stories by Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, George H. Smith and Robert Silverberg.  (I think the Anderson story would go on to be integrated into the novel Orbit Unlimited, which we read in 2018.)  I should read more from this thing.  Well, I guess today is a start, though I'm reading the book version of Ellison's contribution.

In his intro to "A Friend to Man" in From the Land of Fear, Ellison says he is against war and thinks only insane people would aspire to be soldiers and suggests our world has become "chickenshit" because nowadays people use firearms instead of fighting hand-to-hand.    

 
Somebody (it is implied it is the Chinese) is conquering the world!  America is devastated!  A robot, once owned by a painter, has collapsed due to a lack of lubricant--he is just steps away from a big barrel of oil that will bring him back into shape!  The robot loves his master and is confident his master will save him.

Meanwhile, his master is one of a band of guerillas awaiting the advance of the enemy.  The guerillas ambush an enemy column, and are wiped out, but not before creating conditions that in turn wipe out all the humans among the invaders--the enemy column includes a detachment of robots, and these survive the engagement.  The final scene of the brief story sees these invader robots, now independent, bringing lubricant to the American robot and implying that they will work together to rebuild the world destroyed by humankind.  I guess we are supposed to think not that the Chinese conquered the world, but that all humankind was exterminated, that the mutually annihilating skirmish we witnessed represents the entire war, which saw every human being killed.  The meek (robots) have inherited the earth!

Acceptable, I guess.  This is sort of Clifford Simak territory, what with the worshipful robots who think of themselves as subordinate to mankind but which the author implies are better than mankind inheriting our world.  I find this kind of thing absurd, of course, but the way I hear people talking about their pets, I guess it is possible that when humanoid robots are common this belief will become common as well.

"A Friend to Man" does not appear to have been reprinted anywhere besides From the Land of Fear.

Those are some serious eye lashes

"The Voice in the Garden" (1967)

isfdb says this one-page story debuted in a magazine called Lighthouse and Ellison in his intro says it was written as a "one-liner at the famous Milford, Pennsylvania Science Fiction Writers Conference."

The world has been destroyed by atomic war, and one man has survived and has been wandering the world, somehow getting from Europe to Ohio.  In Ohio he meets the last woman in the world.  They agree to recreate the human race together.  She says her name Eve and he says his name is George and that is the joke.

Thumbs down!

Harlan the comedian has included this story in other collections (I guess he considers it essential) and Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander included it in Microcosmic Tales.

                

"Soldier" (1957)

In the intro to "Soldier," which is longer than the text of "The Voice in the Garden," Ellison reiterates his opposition to war and his contempt for soldiers.  From the Land of Fear also includes a screenplay for a TV version of the story which I am going to skip.  

The story begins with a vivid scene of war in the future featuring energy weapons and other high tech devices as well as psychic powers.  Then a one in a bazillion event occurs--being hit by the ray artillery in just the right way somehow sends the private we have been following back in time to the 20th century!  To a train platform!  Confused, he quickly gets into fights with civilians but is disabled by a police officer and dragged to jail.

The authorities in Washington quickly learn about the soldier's high tech equipment and have him brought before a language expert.  The soldier was on the Western side of a conflict between the West and a Russian-Chinese alliance and speaks an evolved form of English and it is not hard to teach him 20th-century English.  The government boys try to figure out what value this future guy can offer the United States, but he is essentially uneducated so he doesn't know how his weapons and equipment operate and while he knows military tactics, they are not applicable to 20th-century warfare.  

The pipe-smoking philologist who knows the future soldier best has the idea that if the time traveller can tell enough people how horrible war in the future is then maybe war can be prevented.  As the story ends, after the future soldier has publicly described his harrowing experiences on the future battlefield many times, people all over the world are signing petitions and legislatures are passing laws to abolish war.  Of course this is ridiculously naive--the measures depicted in the story have already been tried in real life and failed.  People have had access to vivid accounts of dreadful battles and horrible wounds since the Iliad and that has not stopped war; laws against murder and rape haven't stopped murder and rape, and countries like the USSR and the PRC don't even have legislatures that truly represent popular opinion or have any real power over their nation's rulers anyway.  Ellison of course realizes this and ends his story on a down note--the pipe-chomping intellectual recognizes that since the soldier exists, the future he comes from must be inevitable.

This story is well written, all the future battle and technology stuff is good and the soldier's reactions to finding himself in a different world are good.  So, thumbs up!

     

"Soldier" debuted in Fantastic Universe under the title "Soldier From Tomorrow."  Besides Ellison collections, it can be found in the Asimov and Greenberg anthology The Great SF Stories #19 and a 1996 book where it sits along side new novelizations of Outer Limits episodes. 

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Well folks, today we learned that war is bad but racism is worse, so if you call a minority a mean name he is allowed to murder you.  Morally permitted, mind you--in practice, murdering people is likely to lead to prison and martyrdom.

You don't have to take Harlan Ellison seriously as a pipe-smoking philosopher to recognize that "Life Hutch" and "Soldier" are well-written SF stories with intriguing speculative technology, effective portraits of men under psychological stress and exciting action scenes.  "The Voice in the Garden" is stupid, but "A Friend to Man" is OK and "Battle Without Banners," while bad, is useful for the insight it might provide into the time it was published and the mind of one Harlan Ellison.

Alliances between blacks and Jews and between the Russian and Chinese governments may or may not shake the world of the future, but I can confidently predict that the future will see me shaking my head at more Harlan Ellison stories, and probably enjoying a few of them, too.  So stay tuned.