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)

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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.