Harlan Ellison: "The Discarded," "Deeper than the Darkness," and "All the Sounds of Fear"

As I have bragged before, some years ago in America's Middle West I purchased for $2.00 at Half Price Books a copy of the Collier paperback edition of Alone Against Tomorrow that is signed by author Harlan Ellison himself, a Fifth Printing produced in 1979.  After reading some uncollected stories by Saint Harlan, and then stories collected in From the Land of Fear, let's today read three stories from this holy relic touched by the man's own hand.  The first story in Alone Against Tomorrow is "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," which I am not reading again, and the fourth is "Blind Lightning," which I read back in 2019 when we took a look at an anthology on the theme of people being hunted.  So let's read the second, third and fifth stories from this collection of "stories of alienation in speculative fiction" by a "vigorous" man whose "writing deserves nothing but praise," "a first-rate novelist" and "major voice" whose "stories are written with a feverish intensity."  Get a room!

"The Discarded" (1959)

This piece debuted in an All-Star Issue of Fantastic, where it bore the title "The Abnormals."  Bizarrely to my mind, "The Abnormals" is the cover story but Ellison's name doesn't appear on the cover.  Inside we find a Virgil Finlay illustration of a bikini babe, but it is for Rog Phillips' story, not Harlan's.  (Rog Phillips is a star?)  In the letters column, readers praise Fantastic's policy of printing fantasy stories and reminisce about the good old days of Weird Tales and H. P. Lovecraft and express appreciation of the appearance of WT alum Robert Bloch in Fantastic's pages.  The Associate Editor of The American Rationalist writes in to attack religious people (a "dense pall of ignorance and superstition...still shrouds too large an area of our culture") and complain that too many fantasy stories get merchandised as science fiction.  Editor Cele Goldsmith has put together a lively issue!

In "Battles Without Banners" (see our last blog post) Ellison made a distinction between members of marginalized populations who violently lash out of the mainstream population and would rather die than surrender, and those who try to assimilate and/or cut deals for their personal benefit, and here in "The Discarded" he does a similar thing.  Does Ellison's romanticization of vengeful hard liners jive with his anti-war stance?  If you don't want war, don't you have to cut deals with others or knuckle under to the culture of others?  If blacks and Jews shouldn't assimilate to white gentile culture or cut a deal with the white gentile establishment because the white gentile establishment can't be trusted, why should the West cut deals with or put trust in Moscow or Peking or Hamas or Hezbollah?  We've got two choices--fight or submit--and Ellison thinks both are wrong?  You have to wonder if Ellison's ideas are thought out logically or are just emotional outbursts or romantic poses.  (It is perhaps significant that stories like "Battles Without Banners" and "The Discarded" don't offer solutions, just depict lost causes, that they appeal to emotion and not reason.)

Mankind has colonized the Solar System, with human settlements on moons like Io and Callisto and planets like Mars and Venus.  Our protagonists are on a space ship, hoping to be permitted to land on one of these settlements, but nobody wants them because they are hideous freaks!  Use of weapons of mass destruction over the years has polluted the Earth, and as a result a susceptible minority of people suffers horrible mutations, and these mutants have been exiled from Earth.  The ship which is the setting of "The Discarded" is home to hundreds of the mutants--fish men who have no choice but to wear helmets full of water; a guy with two heads, one an imbecile; people with spines growing out of their backs; people with feathers instead of hair, etc.  These people tend to be violent and suicidal, and many dead mutants have been tossed out the air lock after their successful suicide attempts.

One day a ship approaches this ship of the exiled.  It bears news--more and more people on Earth are getting sick and exhibiting horrendous symptoms as a second wave of the plague washes over the world; this new strain, apparently triggered by attempts to kill the germs causing the plague, is more virulent and more people are vulnerable.  There is a theory abroad that the blood of victims of the first wave can be used to inoculate those as yet unaffected, and Earth wants to make a deal with the abnormals on the ship.  Are the Earthers sincere in offers to let the Discarded live on reservations on Earth in return for their blood?  Should the abnormals dismiss the Terran offer out of hand or give it a try?  There is a fight among the leaders of the ship of exiles, and the accommodationists win.  Blood is donated to Earth, and the Terran population is inoculated.  But the Earth doesn't hold to its side of the deal--in fact, it sends all the people who have been deformed by the second wave of the plague and adds them to the population of the ship of exiles!  The leader of the accommodationists commits suicide.

Whatever you think of the story's misanthropic ideology, which maybe appeals to angsty kids who like to play act feeling rejected by society, "The Discarded" is well-written and some will enjoy hearing about the many different mutations Ellison comes up with, so while similar in theme it is far better than the somewhat ridiculous "Battle Without Banners."  I can mildly recommend this one.

"The Discarded" is included in Paingod and Other Delusions as well as Alone Against Tomorrow, and is one of the stories in The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, a book our man tarbandu wrote about back in 2012.  The cover illustration of one edition of The Illustrated Harlan Ellison is by Michael Whelan, who effectively renders the inmates of the ship of abnormals.  The interior illustrations for "The Discarded" were done by Tom Sutton, and if you look around online you can find a bunch of Sutton's illustrations, and they are pretty elaborate--Sutton took this job really seriously and gave it his all.

"Deeper than the Darkness" (1957)

"Deeper than the Darkness" first saw print in an issue of Infinity Science Fiction that looks awesome, with stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Fritz Leiber, E. C. Tubb and John Christopher, and art by Emsh and Jack Gaughan.  I will have to look into this one further.  But today we focus on "Deeper than the Darkness," another story that would appear in Paingod and Other Delusions and The Illustrated Harlan Ellison.

Even in the era of intergalactic colonization, commerce and war, there are still in North America rural backwaters, little hick towns, and it is in just such a place that the Feds catch up to Alf Gunnderson, a psyker--a very special psyker who can start fires with his mind, though he can't control them.  Alf has been bumming around the galaxy, "a tortured and unhappy man," and in Chapter I he is taken to a federal facility by government mind readers for study; the climax of Chapter I is Alf's declaration that he wants to die.

In Chapter II, Alf is on one of the latest government space ships, on a dreadful mission--to use his powers to turn the sun of the home system of one of Earth's enemies into a supernova!

In Chapter III, Alf realizes he has additional psychic powers, and can shield his mind from intrusion by the mind reader and his body from destruction by the brain blaster who have been assigned to make sure he completes the apocalyptic mission assigned to him.  Alf is the greatest most powerful psyker in the universe!  Alf looks out the port into hyperspace--"That darkness deeper than the darkness"--and considers whether he should embrace his role as a super weapon and thereby enjoy a life of purpose and meaning instead of that of a shunned loser, even if it means exterminating a bunch of people--billions of them--he knows nothing about.  He decides to steal a lifeboat and abandon the Earth vessel.

In the final chapter, IV, we find Alf has become "the Minstrel," a guy who travels the galaxies, bumming rides from system to system, playing music on a theremin so profound that it makes people cry in one scene and in another lifts the spirits and eases their anxieties of passengers and crew on a star ship so they all independently think, "this is going to be a good trip."  

All the psychic space empire stuff in this story is good, and very reminiscent of Warhammer 40,000, what with the renegade psykers, sanctioned psykers, scary hyperspace that special psykers have to navigate the ships through, the vast number and diversity of planets and the endless wars with a multiplicity of enemies.  The sentimental and sappy resolution isn't bad, and is perhaps more interesting than Alf joining the enemy or even blowing up Earth the way Elric blew up Melnibone, which I suspected might happen, or Alf becoming benevolent dictator of the universe, like might happen in a van Vogt story.  Maybe a small personal ending is a nice change of pace, a contrast to the paradigm-shifting sense-of-wonder endings we expect from old SF stories.  I can recommend "Deeper than Darkness."

It seems our mates over in Blighty split Alone Against Tomorrow into two volumes
for paperback publication; I guess all those extra "u"s in "colour" and "armour"
take up a lot of extra space.  All three of today's stories appeared in the half
entitled All the Sounds of Fear; the other half bears the moniker The Time of the Eye

"All the Sounds of Fear" (1962)

This one seems to have made its debut in the collection Ellison Wonderland, which has also been printed under the title Earthman, Go Home!, or in a British edition of The Saint Mystery Magazine; the US book and the UK magazine seem to have been printed within a month of each other.  Judith Merril reprinted "All the Sounds of Fear" in the eighth of her famous anthology series, and it would also show up in one of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies.  

"All the Sounds of Fear" is gimmicky and feels long and slow.  In the past I have complained of writers' efforts to convey through print the experience of listening to powerful music, and of course it is a cliche to make fun of written descriptions of sexual ecstasy.  It is difficult to replicate some experiences through text, and efforts to do so will end up being boring or irritating or ludicrous, and one of the problems of "All the Sounds of Fear" is that in the first half of the story Ellison tries gamely to convey through print the effect of witnessing an excellent dramatic performance and I found it eye-glazingly tedious.

A young stage actor gets into his parts by living them before hand, and we get a long description of a handsome 22-year-old buying worn clothes to transform himself into a homeless derelict and then living on the streets for six weeks.  He does similar things again and again (e. g., working in a foundry for almost two months so he can convincingly portray a guy who works in a foundry) and over two decades builds up the greatest career in the history of the legitimate theatre.  Ellison fills the story with direct and slightly oblique references to important plays and playwrights and of course "the Method" and Stanislavski that maybe drama aficionados will appreciate.

Halfway through the story, while preparing for a part as a murderous religious fanatic, the world's greatest thespian murders a young woman and ends up in an insane asylum.  In the loony bin he inhabits one character after another, living for some weeks as one of his roles, then as the one previous, then the one previous to that, and we get some psychobabble ("induced hallucinatory regression") and snooze-inducing scenes in which the actor talks to a shrink in the voice and with the mannerisms of fictional characters, imparting his fictional biography.  

Finally we get our Twilight-Zone-style ending, when, having already relived all his roles, the actor becomes nobody, his face a smooth blankness. 

One of the things I kind of thought Ellison was trying to do, and maybe he was but too subtly for my taste, was to suggest that the Platonic ideal of THE ACTOR would have no actual character of his own, but merely reflect the world around him, and this actor in the story became a religious fanatic killer because our society is too religious and too violent--in the view of Harlan Ellison, like that of the guy from the American Rationalist, the religious murderer is the figure characteristic of our society.  That is silly, but at least it would be an argument, at least the story would have a point--as it is, this story is pointless, just 12 pages of flavorless goop.  

I like Moby Dick, and when people say, "Isn't a lot of it just about the tools and techniques of killing and processing a whale in the 19th century?" I say, "Kind of, but I am really curious as to how guys in the 19th century killed and processed whales."  And maybe people who are really interested in early 1960s drama and pop psychology will like "All the Sounds of Fear" more than I do.  But to me the story is a drag, a long series of pointless details and sterile references culminating in a lame visual sting that has no sting because I couldn't begin to care about the lead character because he has no personality, no identity, no motivation, no goals.  Thumbs down.

**********

Two good science fiction stories plus one mundane story that deals entirely with topics I don't care about and climaxes in absurd fantasy.  Two out of three is not bad, so this was time well spent.  Rest assured we'll get back to Alone Against Tomorrow, though we've got plenty of other projects under way here at MPorcius Fiction Log that we'll be attending to for a little while.