As chronicled in my most recent overly long blogpost, I downloaded a scan of the 600th issue of Amazing Stories, published in the year 2000. Today let's read the Harlan Ellison story included in the issue, and two other stories from the Y2K period by SF's bad boy. As I write this, the below links will get you to scans of publications including today's stories, but no guarantees--the high seas of internet piracy are treacherous.
"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" (2000)
I'm reading this in a scan of the magazine in which it debuted, the cover of which has a good illustration by Christopher Moeller. The painting feels like a sincere invocation of the idea that the future is going to be a beautiful adventure, not like a goof or a parody of classic adventure SF. I can't say the same for Don Ivan Punchatz's interior illustration for "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes," which looks cartoony, like a lampoon of something. But we can't really blame Punchatz, as, reflecting our decadent times in which everything is derivative and usually an effort to denigrate or "update" the past rather than an homage, Ellison's story is a self-conscious spoof not to be taken seriously and certainly not meant to express hopes for the future.
"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" begins with an italicized intro in which a princess in some medieval milieu kisses a toad, Ellison using flowery sentences and archaic words I guess in an effort to be funny or emulate our stereotypical image of a fairy tale. As it turns out, this intro is not a frame or anything, in fact it has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the main story and is absolutely superfluous. The five chapters of the legit story forgo the baroque romantic stylings of the fairy-tale intro and most of the text is reminiscent of a hard-boiled detective story, though Ellison includes more graphic violence, over the top gore, really.
Mars has been conquered by the human race, the natives, whom Terrans call "gooks" or "marties," raped en masse, the land strip mined and then covered with businesses and industry. Among the businesses-- brothels. Our main character is Sarna, a human whore at one of the brothels where the rest of the whores are mixed race people with yellowish skin. These hybrids look down on full-blooded natives, but Sarna is liberal and sympathizes with the natives. When a full-blooded native comes to the brothel it is Sarna who takes him to her room, but the Martian doesn't want to have sex--he is trying to hide from criminals out to murder him. He has something they want, and when he shows it to Sarna she screams--her screams get the attention of the native's human pursuers and they climb in the window, cut the native to pieces and leave, having not seen the treasure.
In Chapter Two the half breeds overthrow the Terrans, exterminating the people who forced their native ancestors and themselves into factories and mines. In describing the murder of the native in Chapter One, Ellison included a lot of very detailed, cartoonishly detailed, gore, and he does the same here in Chapter Two as Sarna, the only human left alive on Mars, fights off many half-breeds, shooting off their heads and limbs with a "burp gun," a kind of energy rifle. She even uses the burper to clear away some corpses that are blocking the door of an elevator she wants to use.
Sarna escapes to the top of a skyscraper, where she plays possum among some middle-class Terrans who have been murdered at their desks. She is an expert at playing dead because she has had so many clients at the whorehouse who savored the idea of raping a sleeping woman.
We sometimes hear that Ellison just bangs some draft out and doesn't revise it before sending it off to the publisher, and "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" certainly shows signs of this practice. Here are three passages that give you an idea.
She ran through the whorehouse, the burp rifle before her
like some deadly appendage, and once, when a door swung
toward her, blown by the wind, she blasted it from its frame.
As a last resort she blasted at the bodies with the burper, and
the arms that blocked the elevator separated. She kicked the
stumps away, thrust home the door, and shot the elevator up, to
the very top of the twenty-story building.
She ran to one of the desks, painfully and with strain lifted
the white-collar corpse from the chair, and dumped it through
the broken window beside the desk.
Personally, I object to "like some deadly appendage," to "separated" and to "thrust home" as applied to an elevator door, as well as to "painfully and with strain" and "white-collar corpse." These clunky phrases are fine for a draft when you are trying to get ideas down in a hurry, but why didn't Ellison or Amazing editor Kim Mohan take a few seconds to smooth these sentences out? As they are, these sentences take me out of the story because they sound so silly. (Please spare me the lazy explanation that Ellison and Mohan are intentionally including bad sentences as part of the spoof of the science fiction of the thirties or forties.)
In Chapter Three, after the rebels fail to see through Sarna's dead act and leave the office, we learn what the treasure from Chapter One is--a being the size of your fist that looks half-toad, half-human and has seven eyes. The creature has been dormant, and Sarna has kept in a little box in a pocket or purse since acquiring it, but now it is awake. Via telepathy it explains that it is one of six such creatures, which, when united into a single entity, wield great power. It seduces Sarna with the promise of helping Terra take over Mars again, and with the promise of curing a wound she has. Previously when we heard about this wound Ellison told us that "She saw one of the martie burp blasts had ricocheted a bit of
masonry off her arm, and it was bleeding" and "Her head ached, and her arm was a sliver of red-hot pain
where the masonry had grazed her." Well, now we learn that the wound is radioactive and the radiation will spread through Sarna's body and kill her soon. "Sama bit her lip and watched the raw
wound ooze blood down her arm. It was
quite painful, throbbing and glowing as only
a burper wound could." This feels a little sloppy, to me; Ellison only mentioned the bloody wound when Sarna needed it to lend verisimilitude to her playing dead act, not when it happened, and now that Ellison needs a way to get Sarna, of whom we have been told "she had never been loyal to Earth, or patriotic," to cooperate with the monster, Ellison decides the wound is radioactive to the point of glowing visibly in daylight, even though he has never before suggested the burp weapons' discharges cause radiation poisoning or make things like masonry radioactive. Ellison is totally making this stuff up as he goes along and not bothering to revise his first draft so such improvisations are properly integrated into the narrative and foreshadowed.
Anyway, the toad monster enters Sarna's mind and operates her like a puppet, directing her through the abandoned dome city to the space port/air port. Even though a revolution that killed all full-blood humans took place earlier in the day, it is business as usual at the space port. Didn't the halfbreeds kill all the humans so they wouldn't have to do these jobs anymore? Sarna knocks out a guard with the butt of her energy rifle and hides among cargo, and when the cargo is loaded she is able to get aboard a flight across Mars to where one of the monster's five brothers has been buried. Some half-breed comes to inspect the cargo and she guns him down. Won't that fill the ship with radiation? Well, I guess the burp gun radiation only has effect when it furthers the plot.
In Chapter Four the monster continues to puppeteer Sarna in the task of finding its brothers. The first is a glowing entity, again fist-sized, that allows Sarna and the first monster to teleport across the galaxy to the environs of a white dwarf star where they find another brother, a globule of water floating in space. In Chapter Five they retrieve two other brothers from a jungle planet's swamp, one that looks like a human man and one that looks like a cloud of goop. The five join to become a sort of hovering grey ball that now can travel through time.
Then comes the big twist ending, one that which I think marks this story as an homage to A. E. van Vogt. (I'll note here that Ellison championed van Vogt when other SF big wigs, led by Damon Knight, were always trying to diminish our favorite Canadian.) Sarna the prostitute is the sixth of the six entities that make up the god-like monster and her integration into it will make it invincible. For a million years she has inhabited thousands of mundane bodies, forgetting her divine nature, trapped thuswise by powers who fear the uniting of the six, for together the six could rule the universe, and would rule it cruelly. Sarna joins the ball. But her mundane lives have taught her to be against racism and imperialism, so she guides the grey ball to commit suicide in the heart of the sun so Terra will not regain power over Mars and the super-entity will not gain power over the universe. Ellison ends the story with a line in italics: "And they died happily ever after."
Then comes Ellison's afterword, which is mostly lame jokes but suggests he had the idea of this story in the 1980s and wrote it in the early 1990s but for like 15 or 20 years had trouble convincing editors to publish it. He points out that Allen Steele got a story with a similar gag published a few years ago and hints he is worried people will think he is copying Steele.
"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" is at best a mediocrity. The basic plot is fine, but it is self-consciously unoriginal and the writing is shoddy and sloppy. The justification for doing a pastiche of a type of story that has been done before with sincerity is that you are making it funny or undermining its supposed outdated values. But Ellison includes relatively few jokes, and none is funny. And he doesn't undermine old SF with his boilerplate anti-racism and anti-imperialism and by having as a protagonist a woman because such politics have always been represented in the science fiction magazines--my go-to examples are Edmond Hamilton's 1932 "A Conquest of Two Worlds" which appeared in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories and Nelson S. Bond's 1941 "Magic City" which appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, but there are others.
"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" is a barely acceptable filler story much like many that came before it that Ellison and Mohan hoped would be elevated in the public mind by having the Harlan Ellison® brand stamped on it, the brand of the emperor with no clothes.
Harlan Ellison scholars trying to wring some value out of this unremarkable production might consider the question of whether Ellison gave to Sarna characteristics he associates with himself, if she might represent him in the story. I've already pointed out how Sarna sympathizes with minorities and has no loyalty to her own race or country, which of course sounds like our old pal Harlan. Early in "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" we are told Sarna is characterized by self-respect, is more popular with the clients than the other girls, but earns the other prostitutes' respect despite their envy and jealousy because she respects herself. At the end we are told "The life she had led had been a shadowy thing, at core unpleasant and degrading, yet she had respected herself, and that had kept her from regretting too much." Is this Ellison's view of himself, a writer who writes for money and is a better writer than the other writers but has won their respect through the tremendous power of his self-regard, a self-regard that has made it possible to endure a humiliating life of catering to audiences and clients and employers to whom he feels he is superior?
"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" resurfaced in 2009 in the Lansdales' Son of Retro Pulp Tales and in 2015 in the Ellison collection Can and Can'takerous, two good examples of how sad cover illustration has been in this 21st century.
"A Lot of Saucers" (2000)
Armed with my history degree from Rutgers University, both before and after I worked in a government office doing nothing (or at least nothing good), I worked actual jobs entailing real work in retail stores, warehouses, department stores, as a delivery driver, and in book stores, so I recognized the name of children's book author Bruce Coville when I saw that a story by Ellison debuted in the 2000 volume
Bruce Coville's UFOs. Let's see what your old pal Harlan and whoever ghost-edited this thing for Skylark Award winner (!) Bruce thought suitable for the kiddies of the year 2000. I'm reading "A Lot of Saucers" in the collection
Troublemakers, which prints a blurb from the
Los Angeles Times dubbing Ellison "the 20th century Lewis Carroll" and which includes an intro by Ellison that suggests this story is going to be about how you shouldn't be prejudiced. Harlan, always coming up with new ideas.
"A Lot of Saucers" is largely about the relationship between a General and the Captain, Alberts, who is his adjutant. Ellison tells us that "adjutant" is the "politically correct word for assistant...the guy who actually got the job done" and that it "sounded better than slave." When the two men first met, Alberts was a Lieutenant, and "solved ten thorny problems in two days." Still Alberts considers his position on the General's staff "cushy," that there has never been any real work to do until today.
What is so different about today? Well, a week ago five thousand alien space ships, each "almost four miles around," appeared in Earth's skies. So far they have done little; periodically a saucer will teleport away and then a different one will teleport into the empty spot some time later. Still, each day since the ships appeared people have gotten more scared of them. The General, a wealthy man who rose to his current rank "almost faster
than the eye could see....through his father’s connections" gives Captain Alberts the job of coming up with what to do about this mysterious interstellar armada.
Three weeks after the aliens' arrival, Alberts boards a helicopter and approaches the most peculiar of the alien saucers, one that seems old, covered in pock marks and dust, and which has never teleported away. An alien appears out of a hatch, a thirty-foot tall hairy biped, and the adjutant and his pilot flee in fear.
Week ten arrives. Earth society is collapsing due to fear, though the saucers have done nothing hostile as of yet. The General himself decides to take a helicopter up to see the dirty saucer. He sees the hairy alien and decides to launch a nuclear missile at the dirty ship. The saucer teleports away after being hit, but then returns, bearing a makeshift patch, and the hairy giant appears, and shoots down at the military men, killing the General. As he shoots, the alien shouts in English, and his speech indicates that the aliens are using Earth as a parking lot and consider the Earth people to be vermin; this alien in the dirty ship is the parking attendant, responsible for keeping the vermin under control. The alien begins a campaign that will kill all life on Earth.
A silly joke story with a tired "message," that the trigger-happy US military is going to destroy the world, that is sloppily written (there is a sentence in which the pronoun "he" could apply to either the General or to Alberts; sometimes the people on the ground can see what is happening on top of the half-wide wide saucer that is a mile above them and it is not clear how; Ellison writes about the year 2000 military in a way that is bizarre, like it is still 1945, saying stuff like "They attached the parasite missile beneath a night-fighter," and "They were out on the desert, the ack-ack guns sniffing at
the sky, pelting the saucers from six separate batteries"), and is way too long. Thumbs down! I can understand Ellison chasing a paycheck from Coville and Coville wanting a big name in his kid's book, but I don't understand putting this junk in an anthology which includes some of Ellison's greatest hits like "Jefty is Five" and the clock man story. Embarrassing.
"Incognita, Inc." (2001)
I'm reading this one from a scan of the magazine
Realms of Fantasy, an issue which promotes a TV adaptation of Marion Zimmer Bradley's feminist (and I guess anti-Christian?) version of King Arthur. isfdb is telling me that "Incognita, Inc." debuted in
Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, which is kind of amusing. This story also appeared in
Can and Can'takerous, as well as a yearly best of fantasy and horror anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and Stephen Jones' 2007
Summer Chills: Strangers in Stranger Lands, which has a joke cover. I hope this is going to be a sincere horror story and not today's third don't-be-a-racist slash white-people-deserve-to-die joke story.
Well, it is not a horror story, but "Incognita, Inc." is sincere, thank heavens.
"Incognita, Inc." comes to us as a report from a widower, a Chicago-born man who calls himself a "loyal corporate tool." He has worked for WorldSpan for decades but this report is also his notice of resignation because WorldSpan has made him do something that has broken his heart, fire an employee whose work is not producing revenue for the company--it is this firing that is the topic of the report. Ellison, that original thinker, is contributing to the volume of media about global corporations doing corporate take overs and defending the bottom line through the practice of corporate layoffs as well as the widespread laments about "mom and pop" local shops getting closed.
WorldSpan, during one of its corporate takeovers, somehow acquired a tiny little map store in Chicago that has one owner and no employees. The store makes no money so is to be shut down, but it has no phone number or e-mail address, so to sack the map store guy the narrator has to fly to Chicago. Does any of this makes sense? Ellison keeps calling the guy in the store the owner but WorldSpan is the real owner? Well, whatever.
The store, it turns out, is like Dr. Who's TARDIS, tiny outside but huge inside, and it sells esoteric maps, including maps of places that are not real, and maps of phenomena that the map maker couldn't possibly know about via mundane methods. For example, if you lose your good luck charm, the guy in the store can draw you a map of where you dropped it.
Ellison loves to present lists to his readers, and we get lots of lists in "Incognita, Inc." For example, a list of large places when Ellison's narrator wants to tell his bosses that the mysterious map store is not just large, but vast.
I don’t mean to tell you it was large. Large is the rotunda of Grand Central Station. Large is the basilica of St. Peter's Cathedral. Large is Hanging Rock in New South Wales. This was vast.
We also get our share of lists of imaginary places like Narnia and Barsoom, and the authors who create imaginary places, like L. Frank Baum and Samuel Butler.
After the long description of the store where there are thousands of cubby holes holding many thousands of maps, and the long description of the map store guy, an immortal in Victorian clothes who has been making maps of places real and imagined since the start of civilization, we get the plot. Our narrator tells map store guy he has to shut down, feels guilty, map store guy comforts the narrator, assuring him that nothing matters (“Most of us think we’re more important than we really are, Charlie. The universe isn’t watching. It mostly, for the most part, doesn’t care.”) and then the map store just vanishes. Due to high technology and the capitalist drive for efficiency, some of the magic of the old world has been extinguished. Outside, a woman asks for directions to a grocery store and the map store guy whips out his fountain pen and draws her a map. It seems he'll still be able to do the thing that he loves, that some of the magic of the old world lingers on. The End.
An acceptable filler story that expresses nostalgia for the good old days (the good old days that "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" told you were endless racism and sexism and imperialism.) Less sloppy, more economical, and more evocative than our other two stories today--even the jokes in the story (the store offers maps to where O. J. Simpson hid the murder weapon and to the location of the place the singers of "Louie, Louie" gotta go to) are better. Maybe Ellison revised or copy edited this one?
It is always nice when the last story in a blog post is the best one, so we can end the post on a happy note and not wonder why we spend so much time reading and thinking about fiction instead of devoting all of our free time to
playing Telengard and listening to
"Sailor's Tale" or looking out the window at the birds.
Stay tuned for more rants and raves here at MPorcius Fiction Log. Really, there are raves, sometimes.
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