If you don't want to risk soiling your own copy of Alone Against Tomorrow by taking it out of the locked and climate-controlled glass case in which you keep your Harlan Ellison collection, you should be able to find these stories somewhere or other online. Here are some links to give you a head start:
"Nothing for My Noon Meal" is a decent traditional science fiction story with space suits and space ships and all that, with the kind of high emotion and tragedy and alienation we expect from Ellison, but Ellison doesn't overdo it as he sometimes does--this story doesn't feel like Ellison is yelling and it doesn't feel like he's belaboring his points. I can mildly recommend "Nothing for My Noon Meal."
Our narrator is a "poor space bum" who, I suppose, lives by exploring and mining new planets and that sort of thing. He gets married and he and his wife approach a small planet with a strange day and night cycle, the result of the planet orbiting far from its star and having two moons that often eclipse the star, so that this planet experiences months and months of darkness at a time.
Approaching the planet there is a disaster and the ship falls apart. The narrator is in the forward portion of the ship, which can serve as an escape pod or lifeboat (Ellison uses the word "hutch") but his wife is back in the galley getting coffee and so when the ship is wrecked she dies but he survives to land on the planet. On the planet he discovers, accidentally, that the only living thing on the planet, a sort of flower, subsists on nitrogen and expels oxygen. So there will be enough oxygen for him to survive, at least as long as the flowers are in bloom. One of the story's plot elements is that the flowers seem to die off, but we eventually learn that they are just retracting into the surface and will be back. Ellison's botany is a little all over the place; early in the story the flowers are described as "strange plants that sucked nitrogen from the thin atmosphere, circulated it and cast it back out as oxygen," but then at the end we are told that the flowers, feared dead, "had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself...." Well, whatever; Ellison doesn't have some kind of science or engineering training like Asimov or Anderson or Heinlein or one of those guys, and we don't expect the focus of his work to be actual science.
Exposure to the planet has a strange effect on the narrator--he grows a thing like a goiter on his face, a sac, that can store oxygen and which distorts his face so he looks like some kind of monster. This is the first instance in real life of a mutation taking immediate effect instead of having to be passed on via heredity to an organism's offspring.
Our guy survives on this little planet for some months, and then an Earth ship arrives. While the narrator is an old space bum with an old ship who has endured a tragedy that has often made him question whether or not he should continue living, the three people arriving on the ship, a brand new fancy shiny one, are young scientists full of energy and hope--Ellison really pushes the alienation theme here. The three scientists want to bring the narrator back to Earth to study--Earth is in trouble because of overpopulation, thanks to antiaging drugs and a Christian lobby that is preventing the adoption of "really effective birth control laws," and maybe learning how to mutate people in their own lifetimes will help somehow. But our guy, with his hideous face, doesn't want to live among normal people, and, besides, he can hear his dead wife's voice--she is floating in space, orbiting this planet, and doesn't want him to leave. So he convinces the three scientists that they should send people to study him while he is here on this little world. Maybe we should compare this story to the H. G. Wells story we just read, "A Dream of Armageddon," in which a guy has a one-of-a-kind contribution to the troubled world that only he can make and he refuses to make it because he would rather spend time with a woman he loves.
I don't think "Nothing for My Noon Meal" has ever been anthologized, but of course it has been reprinted in the multiple editions of multiple Ellison collections, including Ellison Wonderland, which in 2015 appeared behind an embarrassingly lame and instantly dated try-hard I'm-a-phony-rebel cover with sickening colors that I can barely believe was actually sold to people instead of thrown in the garbage. Disgusting. In comparison, Bob Pepper's 1974 cover looks like a towering achievement from an era of awe-inspiring creativity, beauty, sophistication and elegance.
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| "Harl"? More like "hurl," amirite? |
"O Ye of Little Faith" (1968)
"O Ye of Little Faith" starts off with a dream-like action sequence that makes me wonder how Ellison got a reputation as a good writer. Here's a sample sentence that seems to have all kinds of grammar issues (I'm not going to put all those "[sic]"s in there):
The tips of his fingers skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating, for a long moment, but was lost in an instant as the shriek tore from his throat and he plunged, hitting painfully with his shoulders and the back of his neck that threatened to snap his spine, down into a depth of water black and viscuous and bottomless that closed over him, filled his mouth with foulness, blind, dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.Maybe this sentence is full of printer's errors and typos? Anyway, the action sequence stinks; not only is it poorly written but it feels like a dream sequence so you don't care if our protagonist, Niven, outfights or escapes the centaur or gets out of the arena or out of the tunnel or wherever the hell he is because you expect every painful and confusing paragraph to be followed by "Niven woke up in a cold sweat."
After two pages of this aggravation we learn that Niven was in Mexico on vacation and his centaur-fighting, into-a-pit-falling hallucination began in a soothsayer's shop. We get one of the lists we so often find in Ellison's work, this one meant to convey to us how crazy Tijuana is, a list of the stuff money can buy in that town, like a ten-year-old boy virgin or the chance to see a sex show involving a dog. The word "pudenum," in italics, makes an appearance, which I don't run into often in my reading. Anyway, Niven and his 35-year-old girlfriend were in Tijuana to get her an abortion, and after the procedure she asked him where their relationship was going. She didn't like his goofy evasive answer so stormed off and he chased her into the soothsayer's shop, where the Mexican oracle told Niven that he was a man without faith and so was damned and so Niven punched out this stooped old man and suddenly found himself in a "bowl" fighting a centaur.
After this flashback we are back to the hallucination. Niven escapes the foul water and encounters Jesus, Bast, Apollo, and other deities, and realizes that like a god who has lost his worshippers, he failed to give his girlfriend a reason to have faith in him, to believe in him, and so he is lost like those forgotten gods. Or maybe his girlfriend is like a god and he is like a worshipper who failed to have faith in her and so is lost. It is a mess.
This story is a pretentious but weak bit of self-indulgence, Ellison apparently trying to come to grips with his own issues with women and with the psychological pressures of being an atheist, or maybe just trying to mine his relationship problems and hostility to religion for material. Poorly written and offering no entertainment value and only sham profundity, MPorcius Fiction Log has to give "O Ye of Little Faith" a bitter thumbs down.
"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (1958)
But let's look at Ellison's own commentary on the story in SF: Author's Choice 3, a five-page intro that precedes the nine-page story. Oh, first I'll note that the text of "O Ye of Little Faith" in SF: Author's Choice 3 seems to have been cleaned up--the sentence I quoted above has somewhat better punctuation and grammar, and the italicized "pudenum" was changed to unitalicized "pudenda."
Ellison tells us that "O Ye of Little Faith" isn't really his favorite of his own stories--that would be either "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" or "At the Mouse Circus." Then he relates the story of how, when he was a little boy, a little girl who was a Seventh Day Adventist tried to convert him because she thought Jews committed such crimes as grinding up gentiles to make matzoh and were doomed to hell. Harlan then tells us he has become very interested in religion, bragging that he is reading Chesterton and Aquinas, and that in his writing he has been trying to come up with a modern pantheon of gods and figure out what happens to gods who are no longer worshipped--"O Ye of Little Faith" is one of those efforts. Harlan also makes a sex joke that comes off as a dated and kind of creepy non-sequitur:
She may have been correct; I may be doomed, but not because I didn't read The Watchtower. And frankly, I can think of infinitely groovier things to do with little Gentile girls than grinding them up for matzohs.*
*[UPDATE 8/27/2026: See the comments for an interesting observation on this passage from one of my eagle-eyed readers.]
Then we get the real reason the version of "O Ye of Little Faith" that I read is such a piece of junk--as a stunt, Ellison wrote it in one hour at the 1966 West Coast Science Fantasy Conference after Larry Niven won an hour of his time in a charity auction; one condition of the auction was that Ellison would include the name of the winner of the auction in the story as well as three words chosen by the winner (Niven chose "minotaur," "polyp" and "prognosticator," but in the heat of writing Ellison mixed up "minotaur" and "centaur.")
Finally, Ellison babbles on about how important writers are in our violent world; "writing is a holy chore....a heavy responsibility....none of us who write take it lightly..." Good grief, Harlan, you just told us you published--in a porn mag--as a completed story a rough draft you made up as you went along that is full of mistakes.
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I felt like I was recognizing this story as I read it, and after I had drafted the below blog post I realized I had in fact read it in 2024 and blogged about it. Oops. I think the version I read today in Alone Against Tomorrow is different, however, and that justifies my just posting about "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" again, doesn't it?
Arthur Fulbright is a "partial clairvoyant," which, in this story at least, means he can see some future events but not others. He is also a 39-year-old virgin--you know what that means. Art lived with his mother for like 33 years, and now, six years after her death, he has one of his visions of the future--that the world will end in two weeks. He decides he'd better lose his virginity while he has the chance.
The story follows his clumsy attempts to date women and then his abortive plan to rape a woman. Finally, guided by his ability to see the future, he meets a whore in a bar and seals the deal. She asks for 15 bucks, and after he finishes having sex with her in his house he pays her four thousand dollars. You might say that his last act on this Earth is to become the world's best tipper. A moment later Arthur, the prostitute, and the entire world are incinerated.
This is today's most competent story; there are not any goofy blunders and all the characters act in ways that makes sense. I'm not sure if "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is today's best story, though, as "Nothing for My Noon Meal" is more creative and has a lot more stuff going on--"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is kind of obvious. Is it better to be ambitious, take risks, and make mistakes, or set modest goals and achieve them? I can't decide, so I'll just say I can mildly recommend "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" and leave it at that.
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Two of our stories today are alright, but one of them is so bad it is kind of insulting that Ellison and his editors and publishers saw fit to shovel it at us, like we'd eat anything and enjoy it if it bore the Ellison label. It shakes your faith in the whole enterprise of publishing, the whole culture of fiction.
If my memory is to be trusted, and today we have seen it isn't, there are three stories remaining in Alone Against Tomorrow that I have yet to read. I think I'll wrap up this project in our next post by blogging about "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes."
The Watchtower is published by Jehovah's Witnesses and I believe they are not the same as Seventh Day Adventists though I have no idea what the doctrinal differences might be. Nor, probably, did Ellison.
ReplyDeleteGood catch! Ellison's writing often feels like a draft that neither he nor an editor--in this case Harry Harrison--took the trouble to edit, proofread or revise. And you have to wonder how much of his anecdotes are just made up, besides.
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