Dream World, Feb '57: M Lesser, P G Wodehouse, & H Ellison

Advertising works!  We just took a look at the May 1957 issue of Amazing, and saw within it an ad for Dream World, another magazine edited by Paul W. Fairman.  Dream World endured for three issues, all appearing in 1957, and the value proposition of the magazine, though promoted as "A New Kind of Fiction...Stories of Incredible Powers," seems to have been that it carries stories about sex.  I guess this was in the wheelhouse of Fairman, author of several volumes of The Man from S.T.U.D. series, including 1968's The Orgy at Madame Dracula's and 1969's Rape is a No-No. These S.T.U.D. books appeared under a pen name, and it seems lots of Fairman's work appeared under false names or other people's names; we read his novel Whom the Gods Would Slay, credited to Ivar Jorgensen, way back in 2018, and according to isfdb, Fairman ghostwrote juveniles for Lester del Rey (del Rey provided extensive plot outlines), among them The Runaway Robot, a book I see all the time in antique stores and used book stores.

Let's look at the first issue of Dream World, and read some of the included stories, one by Milton Lesser (under his pen name Adam Chase), one by P. G. Wodehouse (wow!), and one by Harlan Ellison.  Thorne Smith, a famous guy I have never read, Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett also make contributions (Smith's an excerpt from a 1930s novel) to this new venture, but we'll be skipping those today.  I'm also skipping the Milton Lesser story that appears under the Darius John Granger pseudonym because it is twelve pages long and is apparently about football and ain't nobody got time for dat. 

"Legs on Olympus" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

Like 66% of today's stories, "Legs on Olympus" has apparently never appeared in any form in any other venue.  This is a jocular retelling of the famous Judgement of Paris which you no doubt know all about from your readings in classical literature and study of art history.  Hollywood columnist Abner Paris is in Atlantic City in the greatest state in the union to judge a beauty contest.  A naked girl appears in his room at the Troy Hotel and asks him to judge a "celestial" beauty contest.  Lesser engages in lame puns and jokes of that nature; this woman doesn't know about air conditioning, for example, and doesn't know that "gag" is a synonym for "joke" or "gimmick," even though she uses other corny colloquial English like "The heck you say!" and "drat the luck."  Anyway, Abner thinks it's all a gag and agrees to judge the contest as a way of calling the girl's bluff and getting rid of her, but after he agrees she jumps on his lap and they (it is strongly implied) have sex.

When Abner wakes up he and the girl, who reveals herself to be Eris, the Goddess of Discord, are on a sheep-infested hillside and he is wearing a wool cloak.  Eris takes him to where he is to judge which is the fairest, Hera, Athena or Aphrodite.  The three goddesses, all haughty and self-important, show off their looks to Abner and offer him extravagant bribes, but in the end he gives the golden apple marked "FOR THE FAIREST" to Eris, with whom he has fallen in love.  This story has a pretty wholesome ending, a guy bangs one chick and then immediately gets engaged to her.

"Legs on Olympus" is a bland and mediocre filler piece, but never actually boring or irritating, so we're judging it barely acceptable.  I was actually curious what Lesser was going to do with the material as I read it, so reading it was no chore.

"Ways to Get a Gal" by P. G. Wodehouse

The cover of Dream World Vol. 1 No. 1 advertises "Ways to Get a Gal" as a "Brand New Story" by the world famous and universally beloved Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, but an elaborate and extensive website about Wodehouse's early work suggests "Ways to Get a Gal" is a version of "Ahead of Schedule," a story that appeared in 1910 in the British magazine Grand and was revised for publication in this republic of ours in 1911 in Colliers.  I decided to read the Dream World story and then read a version of the story found in a 1980 printing of the oft-reprinted 1914 Wodehouse collection The Man Upstairs and Other Stories and see what differences there might be.

As the world knows, Wodehouse writes in a charming and fun style, filling his texts with amusing phrases and little jokes based on the shortcomings of his characters, jokes which are lighthearted and affectionate rather than cruel or superior, and he goes in for fun silly little plots with happy endings; somehow, Woodhouse writes stories in which everything works out for everybody but at the same time acknowledges the reality that life is characterized by failure and the world is awash in evil, so that his stories don't bring you down but also don't come across as squeaky clean or saccharine lies.  The man is some kind of hero and genius.  He does all this characteristic stuff here in "Ways to Get a Gal," so of course I enjoyed it and am giving it a thumbs up.

The plot:  An Englishman with a title but little sense is in love with a blue-eyed blonde woman who works in a department store and has set out to marry her, following a scientific plan of campaign devised by himself.  Being totally incompetent, this guy's income consists of an allowance from a fat uncle who owns a very lucrative chain of restaurants over in the land of plenty, the U S of A.  Said allowance is sufficient to keep his Jaguar running and his valet on staff.  Trouble appears when fat uncle comes to visit Blighty and fat uncle falls in love with the very same blue-eyed blonde woman at the glove counter at the department store and embarks on his own campaign to make her his wife.  If our hero marries this chick, uncle may well stop sending the allowance.  If old fat uncle marries the chick, our hero will probably no longer be in line to get his full inheritance when old fat uncle dies, this woman being young and healthy.

The resolution of the plot comes when the blonde falls in love with our hero's valet--she seems to think the flowers the valet has been personally delivering for some days are from the valet himself, not some goofy lord.  Also, she is apparently more susceptible to the naive wooing methods the valet learned in his rural village than to the latest scientific methods current in London.  Our hero's finances are safe, and Wodehouse makes it clear that both he and his obese uncle (215 pounds!) are shallow twits who are falling in and out of love all the time and will forget the blonde woman in days if not hours, so no hard feelings.

OK, now the version of the story from The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, entitled "Ahead of Schedule."  (The hero's scientific method of pursuing women operates on a careful schedule.)  This version feels longer, and has longer sentences, with more details and more jokes, but the jokes are good so we don't mind.  The protagonist has a different name, and the obese uncle (sixteen stone five!) does not own restaurants, but a company that makes braces (I call them "suspenders") and is an American himself, a native of "Pittsburg," as the town was apparently commonly styled in 1910.  (Pittsburgh comes in for some ribbing in "Ahead of Schedule.")  The characters in this version of the tale all have more personality, more complex back stories.  The woman in question is a chorus girl, not a department store employee, for example, and she actually has some dialogue.  This version of the story also has more learned references, like a military history joke ("He hated to abandon the schedule. To do so meant changing a well-ordered advance into a forlorn hope") and more big or rare words ("The advent of an unbidden guest rarely fails to produce a certain gêne.") 

The plot is also a little more complex, with the hero accelerating the schedule of his scientific method in hopes of beating out his uncle in winning the hand of the fair maiden, and the chorus girl and the valet hooking up because they knew each other back in their village, were engaged but broke up and upon meeting again realized they had made a mistake.  

The '57 version of the story is more streamlined, but the additional, perhaps superfluous, material, in the 1910 version is actually entertaining, so I prefer the earlier version.

A fun little experiment, reading both versions of this story, both of which again and again brought a smile to my face.  The Dream World story "Ways to Get a Gal" would be reprinted in the 1990s in First Impressions, Mature Reflections, the fifth volume of Plum Stones, a small press series that reprinted rare Wodehouse stories that had previously been uncollected.

Left: 1958     Right: 1980

"A Bucketful of Diamonds" by Harlan Ellison 

Here we have a Harlan Ellison story that has never been reprinted.  Harlan completists, perk up!  

Davey the second-story man is in jail.  A djinni (Ellison insists on calling it an "Estrian" after telling us it looks just like a djinni) appears and offers Davey a deal.  The djinni can't touch anything in our universe, being from a "another time-line" and thus "immaterial," so he wants Davey to steal something for him at some unspecified future time.  In exchange, he will give Davey the ability to walk up vertical walls and use his djinni powers to make any possible witness look the other way while Davey is committing crimes.  Davey agrees--my twitter feed is full of stories of people getting arrested dozens of times and still being set free to massacre people, but this is the 1950s and fiction besides, and Davey has been arrested more than four times and it looks like this time they will really throw the book at him, so he has no reason not to agree to the deal with the djinni.

Davey's trial is in two days, so he hustles to use his new powers to escape confinement.  Then he commits one brazen robbery after another--the powers the djinni promised him are real!  Davey buys a nice house and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, slows down his pace of robberies, only committing really lucrative ones once or twice a month.  For example, he climbs a skyscraper and infiltrates a party attended by movie and TV stars and a famous lady novelist and, Ellison going for some kind of obvious tried-and-true comedy, a "British-colonel type, complete to flowing white mustache" who says stuff like "By Jove!" and "I say!"  Nobody can see Davey, so he gropes women's asses or kisses them if they are trim and kicks them in the ass if they are fat, and his victims blame innocent men and a brawl erupts.  The sexiest and most famous woman at the party, I guess a Marilyn Monroe caricature, Davey robs of her necklace and strips of her clothes so everybody can see her naked.  This scene has no effect on the plot and I guess is just here to appeal to the desire of readers to sexually abuse women and to humiliate those they envy for their wealth and status.

The djinni finally calls upon Davey to steal that item for him.  Davey launches the operation, but comes to a bad end.  The item the djinni wants is the magical key that will set him (the djinni) free from the prison that is used by his race to confine criminals--this Earth.  The guardian of the magical key is another djinni, an agent of the djinni establishment that imprisoned Davey's benefactor, and thus can see Davey just fine--this djinni is also on this time-line and thus material and can kill Davey with ease, and does so.  This story is less wholesome than Lesser's, but in the end the people who misbehave are punished.

The start of the story, Davey and the djinn's relationship and Davey's escape from prison and his amassing great wealth, are entertaining.  But the Marilyn-Monroe scene is just OK, and the ending is sort of perfunctory and disappointing.  It feels like Ellison was making an effort in the first half of the story, then included the exploitation material he felt was called for by the venue in which the story would appear, and then just quickly wrapped things up with little thought.  I'm calling "A Bucketful of Diamonds" acceptable--the first half or so is better than Lesser's "Legs on Olympus."  

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The Wodehouse of course is quite good, and the Lesser and Ellison get passing grades--they are exploitation filler, but I didn't find them repulsive or snooze-inducing.  I can't truly recommend the first issue of Dream World unless you are a student or collector of Wodehouse or Ellison, but I'm not denouncing it, either.  I find these odd little corners of the SF world intriguing and so we will probably be reading from the second and the third and final issues of Dream World. 

      

    

  

                 

     

           

Harlan Ellison: "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," & "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes"

Let's finish up my signed copy of the fifth (1979) Collier paperback printing of Harlan Ellison's 1971 collection Alone Against Tomorrow, about which I have already written at some length here, here and here.  After today I will have read every story in the book, in one form or another, and blogged about most of them.  (A few--the most famous ones, probably--I read before this blog quivered to glistening and sinister life, and I haven't felt like rereading them yet, and anyway, I feel like this blog offers the most value when I write about stories which haven't already been written about a million times.)  You shouldn't take anything I say, or anybody says, at face value, life and the world being what they are, so I encourage you to read Alone Against Tomorrow yourself--try these links--before seeing what I have to say about "Night Vigil," "Lonelyache," and "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes," or after.

"Night Vigil" (1955)

"Night Vigil" appears to have debuted in an issue of the fanzine Peon with a cover by Ed Emshwiller, which is pretty cool.  This side-stapled periodical also includes essays by Robert Bloch and Terry Carr.  Fun.  "Night Vigil" enjoyed a wider audience in 1957 when it was printed in an issue of Amazing with a cover suggesting our fine-feathered friends and the mechanical minds that owe their existence to our ingenuity are teaming up to exploit one of our most valuable resources--swimsuit models!  Don't count out the trim brunette who is representing our civilization, though--she's packing heat!  After seeing print in Amazing under the title "Yellow Streak Hero," "Night Vigil" has reappeared in many Ellison collections.

"Night Vigil" is a normal science fiction story about being in space and dealing with aliens and one man sacrificing to help his civilization, and a decent one.  Mild recommendation.

The human race, in its travels around the universe, has come upon evidence that other advanced civilizations have been wiped out by some mysterious enemy.  The government needs to deploy some kind of sentinel or tripwire on an asteroid at a specific strategic point way way out there, far from Earth, to watch for this enemy.  Using computers, they determine from among all the young men on Earth the man most likely to remain sane while living in a tiny one-room Quonset hut, bereft of human contact, year after year, decade after decade.  This nineteen-year-old is seized by the government as he is sitting on his front porch canoodling with his girlfriend, hypno-trained how to operate the communications system that he will need to use on the asteroid should the alien monsters appear, and then shipped to the watching post.

Our guy has been in the Quonset hut for 24 years.  Ellison does a good job of describing all the psychological phenomena he has endured over those years.  Then the scanners finally detect the approaching enemy and he sends the critical message to Earth.  He has sacrificed his life for his people.

A decent story.  Star Trek fans may find Ellison's use of the phrase "on the edge of Forever" amusing.  Maybe we should see this story as one that subverts our expectations, as the critics like to say.  Some stories might have this single guy outwit the aliens all by himself.  Other stories might have a twist ending in which there are no aliens and the government is using the alien scare to manipulate the populace.  Ellison here does neither, instead producing a story that depicts the sad truth that polities have enemies and those polities require people who will take risk and make sacrifices to oppose those enemies if they are to endure.

"Lonelyache" (1964)

"Lonelyache" debuted in Knight, "The Magazine for the Adult Male," in an issue that promises to introduce us to "the Aqua-Nudes," reveal to us "the truth about the Irish Sweepstakes," and share with us "pix" of Christine Keeler, the woman embroiled in the Profumo affair.  isfdb lists one anthology, a Belgian one, that reprints "Lonelyache;" otherwise, it has only reappeared in Ellison collections, many of them.    

This is essentially a mainstream story about people whose marriages have failed and how they have empty sexual relationships, adultery and one-night stands and so on, in a vain effort to fill their time or feel love, etc.  Also, perhaps, about how people with difficult childhoods have trouble making adult relationships work.  There are lots of uncomfortable angry conversations, and some literary-type metaphors.  The genre fiction elements consist of the protagonist's dreams, in which he has to fight for his life against a series of assassins, all of them former friends, and defeats them one by one, Ellison describing the gore of their horrible wounds, and a monster forming in the protagonist's small apartment, I guess a metaphor for the man's unhappiness, dissatisfaction, psychological collapse over his loneliness and his shame at using women for sex.  Finally, he pays a prostitute, and this degrading act brings the monster to completion, and the protagonist digs his old service pistol out of the closet and commits suicide.

"Lonelyache" is competent--no major blunders--and at times it is sort of clever or arresting, but it is also long and meandering, episodic, the scenes don't flow logically from one to the other, you almost feel that the scenes could be in different order and the story would work the same.  The gory dreams--which seem to be about comradely relationships with other men and a child's relationship with his parents--and the monster, which receives short shrift, seem tacked on, divorced from the main drama, which is all about sexual relationships with women.  We'll call "Lonelyache" acceptable and move on with our lives.

"Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes"  (1969)

Here we have a story about African-American life that uses the "n-word," so there is your trigger warning.  "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" is actually a good story, better paced and structured than so many of Ellison's stories, so, thumbs up.

A white man who is some kind of hobo or tramp rides the rails illegally to the n-word section of a town to attend a funeral, using his special powers to avoid the railway police.  This guy, our narrator, is some kind of space alien, we eventually realize--he steals Hydrox cookies but mostly eats grass and weeds, and can "go dark," which I guess means "become invisible."

He spies on the funeral of a well-liked 82-year old black guy, Jed, planning to pay his final respects when all the other funeral attendees have left the room in which lies the body.  But then another (apparent) white person, an astoundingly beautiful woman, comes into the room she thinks is empty to (apparently) pay her respects.  She steals the silver dollars off Jed's eyes--according to the narrator, this means Jed won't have passage for the trip to Heaven and will end up in Hell.   

The narrator chases the woman all the way to a different city, using up a considerable portion of his small store of money to do so.  This striking beauty is a whore, and he confronts her at the brothel, and has to use his special powers to kill whatever you call the bouncer at a whorehouse.  Eventually, he gets her full story out of the beauty and we get his full story out of the narrator.  The narrator is a space alien and the kind, generous, giving, etc., Jed, who was always helping people down on their luck, helped the alien and taught him how to pass as a Earth human.  The prostitute is Jed's daughter, and they had an antagonistic relationship because she insisted on passing as a white woman and Jed, the narrator tells Jed's daughter,

"...took in all kinds, and didn’t care where they came from, or what they were. Just as long as they didn’t lie about it.  He had a lot of love."

There is quite a bit of stuff to think about in this story, if we choose to do so.  All three main figures in the story, alien, prostitute, and Jed, are unable to "go home"--the alien can't get back to his home planet, the prostitute isn't able to comfortably spend time with her own father or any black people (or even respectable white people, for that matter), and Jed also seems to have had trouble getting along with his own flesh and blood and is kept from Heaven.  The narrator and the prostitute are both passing, and are both in a sense Jed's children, and both lower class thieves--how great a parent was Jed if his real child and his de facto child both ended up on the wrong side of the law, making their way by doing things that conventional morality holds to be degrading and humiliating?  Ellison writes in the voice of the space alien,

Jed, Jed, you poor old nigger bastard. You knew I couldn’t get home again, back to whatever world it was I'd come from, and you taught me how to pass so they wouldn’t kill me, but you couldn’t handle it when it happened to you.

What does "when it happened to you" mean?  When Jed's own daughter tried to pass, and succeeded?  Or in some way was Jed also trying to pass, trying to hide white blood of his own or a sexual relationship with a white woman or both?

A successful story--even the action scenes work.  Worth your time, especially if you are interested in depictions of African-Americans by white authors, in particular efforts by white people to depict rounded and realistic black people who aren't just dangerous monsters or innocent victims or beleaguered saints.  

 

"Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" debuted in Galaxy.  The text there is obviously different than that in my paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow, but I just glanced at the magazine version, didn't actually closely compare, and the differences may just be in mechanical stuff like punctuation.  Norman Spinrad, whom I have heard Ellison helped get work at places like Knight, included "Pennies, Off a Dead Man's Eyes" in his 1971 anthology The New Tomorrows, and it also turned up in the first Best From Galaxy volume. 

The moon and the woman's profile on The New Tomorrows seem to be copied
from the Dillons' cover for Over the Edge.  Weird.

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I'm glad I could finish up my look at Alone Against Tomorrow with stories I can say something nice about, including one I can recommend without reservation (I don't count the trigger warning as a reservation.)  It might seem like it, but I don't open up Ellison's books and hunt down his magazine appearances hoping to point out problems and otherwise cut the man down to size--I am genuinely curious about Ellison's work and career and am glad when I can legitimately enjoy anything he has written.

Harlan Ellison produced a lot of work and no doubt we will be seeing more of him in the future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Harlan Ellison: "Nothing for My Noon Meal," "O Ye of Little Faith" & "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (redux!)

Let's take a break from Weird Tales and read three stories from my autographed paperback copy of Harlan Ellison's 1971 collection Alone Against Tomorrow.  (According to the copyright page, mine is a Fifth Printing from 1979.)  I won't wear gloves, but I will hit the soap and water before handling this holy relic touched by the very hands of science fiction's bad boy.  We've already read a bunch of stories that appear in this book--see these links:

LINK THE FIRST
LINK THE SECOND 

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:

Hardcover 

Paperback

"Nothing for My Noon Meal" (1958)

Nebula Science Fiction was a British (the wikipedia article stresses that it was specifically Scottish) magazine that was published between 1952 and 1959.  There was a US edition offered in '58 and '59.  The wikipedia article includes quotes from Ken Bulmer, E. C. Tubb, and Brian Aldiss praising the magazine, and editor Peter Hamilton, to the skies.  "Nothing For My Noon Meal" debuted in Nebula, and appeared in both the British and American editions.

"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.

"Harl"?  More like "hurl," amirite?

"O Ye of Little Faith" (1968)

I have in the past noted how closely intertwined are the worlds of SF and that of men's adult magazines, and today we note that "O Ye of Little Faith" saw print in the magazine Knight the same year it appeared in the Ellison collection Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled.  Our pal Harlan is proud of this one--it appears in Harry Harrison's 1971 SF: Author's Choice 3, in which "Thirteen Science Fiction Masters" like Sonya Dorman and David I. Masson "Present, With Commentary, Their Own Favorite Stories."  Let's read the version of the story in my copy of Alone Against Tomorrow and then Ellison's commentary in the Harrison anthology, which will be easy for you cybersleuths to find online.

"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.      

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.

"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (1958)

Another porn mag story, "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" appeared in Rogue ten years before "O Ye of Little Faith" was printed in Knight.  This one also appeared in Ellison Wonderland, but I'll illustrate this part of the blog post with covers of The Essential Ellison, in which "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" was also offered to the public.

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."

Harlan Ellison: "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes," "A Lot of Saucers," and "Incognita, Inc."

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"  
"A Lot of Saucers"
"Incognita, Inc."

"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?

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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.

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.