"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 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)
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.
"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.
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