Harlan Ellison, thoughts?

[Extollager]

JD rightly said, "the story continues to be highly regarded by many readers, writers, and critics to this day."

Yes, I realize that. And I intend to read at least four more of Ellison's major stories. I'll report back here before long, I trust.

Where's the best place to read his original "City on the Edge of Forever" script?

[Extollager]

"'Repent, Harlequin!'" -- this reminded me very much of one of Ray Bradbury's styles. I would think it could be made the basis of a good ballet.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Extollager

JD rightly said, "the story continues to be highly regarded by many readers, writers, and critics to this day."

Yes, I realize that. And I intend to read at least four more of Ellison's major stories. I'll report back here before long, I trust.

Where's the best place to read his original "City on the Edge of Forever" script?

To the last question: There is an older book, a collection titled Six Science Fiction Plays, edited by Roger Elwood (1976). But the most accessible is the White Wolf edition of the script, with a lengthy essay by Ellison (which you are likely going to want to skip -- it has a tendency to really annoy people with a fondness for Star Trek) and a series of essays by people from the original series on the subject. This also includes earlier "treatments" as well, which may prove of interest. It has not only seen a hardback edition (again, if memory serves), but also a tpb and a book club edition, so should be fairly easy to track down. The title is: The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay that Became the Classic Star Trek Episode....

By the way, on the subject of "mainstream" sf of the time, for those who are interested, here's a brief list of what was nominated (and won) for the Hugos for the same year:

Novels:
The Butterfly Kid, by Chester Anderson
Chthon, by Piers Anthony
The Einstein intersection, by Samuel R. Delaney
Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny
Thorns, by Robert Silverberg

Novellas:
Damnation Alley, Roger Zelazny
Hawksbill Station, by Robert Silverberg
Riders of the Purple Wage, by Philip Jose Farmer
The Star Pit, by Samuel R. Delaney
Weyr Search, by Anne McCaffrey

Novelettes:
Faith of Our Fathers, by Philip K. Dick
Gonna Roll the Bones, by Fritz Leiber
Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, by Harlan Ellison
Wizard's World, by Andre Norton

Short Stories:
Aye, and Gomorrah, by Samuel R. Delaney
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison
The Jigsaw Man, by Larry Niven

Best Dramatic Presentation:
Amok Time, by Theodore Sturgeon
Mirror, Mirror, by Jerome Bixby
The City on the Edge of Forever, by Harlan Ellison
The Doomsday Machine, by Norman Spinrad
The Trouble with Tribbles, by David Gerrold

and special awards were given to Harlan for Dangerous Visions, and Gene Roddenberry for ST.

It is interesting to note that, in the categories other than novel, the literary awards were all (except for "Weyr Search" and "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream") given to pieces originally published in DV, and several of the nominees also first saw print there, such as Niven's "The Jigsaw Man" and Delaney's "Aye, and Gomorrah"....

[j. d. worthington]

If you don't mind a suggestion or two, how about "In Lonely Lands" (from Ellison Wonderland), "Jeffty Is Five" (from Shatterday), and "Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time", "Working with the Little People", "The Wine has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory has Gone Flat", and "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (from Strange Wine)? Or you could look up one of the two editions of The Essential Ellison (a rather hefty tome which is a good retrospective, though by no means holding all his best work; simply a cross-section of his career)....

[Fried Egg]

Reading on in "Deathbird Stories", I've just finished "Basilisk". What a harsh, brutal but brilliant story that was. That one will stay with me for a long time...

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

If you don't mind a suggestion or two, how about "In Lonely Lands" (from Ellison Wonderland), "Jeffty Is Five" (from Shatterday), and "Lonely Women are the Vessels of Time", "Working with the Little People", "The Wine has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory has Gone Flat", and "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (from Strange Wine)? Or you could look up one of the two editions of The Essential Ellison (a rather hefty tome which is a good retrospective, though by no means holding all his best work; simply a cross-section of his career)....

I may well look up some or all of these eventually, but right now what I'm doing is reading Ellison stories that were in award winner/best of year books in my university's little library. I saw "Jeffty" in one of them, but not the others.

A little more about the "gratuitous" horrible details that I complained about in connection with "I Have No Mouth." My comment was a bit too casual to be clear. The characters in that story are in a kind of hell presided over by a diabolical mechanical "god," and the narrator, at least, hates the others at the beginning of the story (right?) -- so obviously things must be horrible. What I was objecting to was what seemed to be Ellison's relishing of these details. I've not read more than a small fraction of Stephen King's writing, but he too seemed to enjoy loading on the revolting details. When an author does this, it's as if the reader is being invited to collude with him in a bit of self-deception. Officially we are both horrified (but also we kind of dig this stuff, eh don't we?).

I understand that this type of thing speaks to something in the sorry state of human nature. But that doesn't mean it should be indulged.

(Incidentally, I think there is a shrewd, rueful, and funny acknowledgment of this sorry state of human nature in Doyle's Lost World. There is a sequence in which the explorers are watching ape-men who are struggling with something--other ape-men or dinosaurs or something; anyway, ape-men are falling from a cliff onto stakes or something like that. And, as I recall, some character says something like: "It's horrible -- but deuced interesting too.")

By contrast, I don't feel sullied when I read Dante's descriptions of the horrible things the pilgrim and Virgil see in the Inferno.

[Fried Egg]

Perhaps it could be said that Harlan should leave more to the imagination. I've noticed now in several stories I've read that he likes to ram the point home to make sure the reader gets it. Where other authors might prefer a subtler approach, to not make their point so explicitly, Harlan prefers not to risk it going over the reader's head.

I can't agree however that Harlan is relishing the gruesome details, nor is he inviting the reader to do so. As I said before, I think that he just wanted to emphasise how horrific life was for these unfortunate survivors in order to underline the heroic act at the end.

[j. d. worthington]

I must agree that I've never felt he was relishing such things. He does have an intensely visual imagination (which is very evident when one reads his screenplays, which are extremely strong on this element), and his background also includes writing for comics a fair amount over the years; he also, as noted, tends toward melodrama (though this became more restrained over the years); and he is often angry when writing about such things as he deals with in such stories, and that may be said to betray him into overdoing it... though I'm not sure that applies here.

Odd that you say that about Dante's Inferno, for I did come away from several passages in that feeling exactly this way....

An interesting personal note on that subject. I first read this story in the collection The Hugo Winners, vol. II, when I was just on the point of entering high school... and I was appalled. I had thoroughly enjoyed "'Repent, Harlequin!', Said the Ticktockman", but this story repulsed me in the extreme. It was so completely unlike what I was used to in sf, for one thing, and it was so violent and nightmarish and (as I perceived it at the time) unrelentingly "down", that it turned me off; so much so that his third entry there, "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World", had me very wary at first... but that one I felt quite differently about. When I went back a little later and reread "I Have No Mouth", I found my reaction to be quite different and, while I won't say it is among my favorites of Ellison's stories, I do think it is among his best in some ways... but it is also the one I tend to use as the "acid test" on whether someone is going to like Ellison as a whole, rather than only select stories, for it shows in perhaps the most concentrated form the elements that most often tend to elicit the reaction I describe above.

So it isn't that I can't understand your reaction... I actually had something similar myself, but a reassessment of the story had me changing my views later on....

"Basilisk" is a powerful story -- certainly some of the imagery and the emotion is very well done -- but it has always struck me also as something almost made for a very dark bit of comic book art....

[Extollager]

Thanks, JD. I'll put it this way: "I Have No Mouth" is loaded with descriptions of horrific tortures.

These didn't actually occur, in contrast to the horrors that Ivan Karamazov recounts in the "Rebellion" chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. Even if we readers didn't know that Dostoevsky derived them from factual accounts, we would recognize that those crimes against children are indeed the kind of thing that does happen.

But Ellison is the inventor of the atrocious stuff occurring in his story. These atrocities are not only horrible, they are darn clever too. Very ingenious. As a reader, then, I am implicitly being led to admire the author's artistry... as a designer of tortures.

Feh!

I accept that to tell this story, Ellison did have to imagine horrific stuff. If he had been an artistic genius, he would have done that while not making readers feel that he's showing off his ability to imagine ghastly atrocities. But he doesn't come across to me as a genius here. He reminds me of the ever-inventive Stephen King churning out scenes of graphic violence. (I'm thinking of Pet Samatary, for example. I was much more favorably impressed by King's latest, 11/22/63. It seemed to me that he let me down and indulged in graphic stuff for its own sake only twice in a novel of nearly a thousand pages, and in those two instances he didn't go on and on.) I'm quite serious about this charge as being a defect, both of morality and artistry.

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

Odd that you say that about Dante's Inferno, for I did come away from several passages in that feeling exactly this way....

You tell of rereading "I Have No Mouth" and changing an initially negative assessment of it, and perhaps I will too. But let me address this Dantean point.

Dante and Ellison describe horrific scenes. However, an important difference is that, in the case of Dante, most, at least, of the torments of the damned are images of what a specific sin is. For example, Paolo and Francesca are endlessly whirled through space. But that is what their sin (lust) is like, namely a culpable yielding of oneself to swirling, whirling passion when one ought to have retained self-mastery and not submitted to the temptation. Ellison's humans are whirled along too, but there it's just something the sadistic computer does to them. It's almost like something you'd see in a movie with CGI effects and say "Cool!"

Another important difference is that in Ellison's stories we readers are being treated to several pages of inventive descriptions of victims being tortured.

But in Dante the sufferers are not victims. They are the shades of people who had exercised their free will, their moral responsibility, to choose evil. Having chosen evil, they have rejected the good. Now, in hell, they have, and basically are, what they chose. In our earthly lives we choose wrong things but often much of the world goes on working pretty well for us, mercifully. The sun still rises for Hitler, the rain still falls and makes the crops grow in Nazi Germany, here and there ordinary decencies survive, bread is still baked and tastes good when the Nazis are hungry, and so on. In hell the good things have fallen away and all that's left is what the sinner chose -- and this or that is what he chose.

And they are shades, not people. For them no further choices will ever be possible. Now here is where Ellison does make use of his characters, or one of them, as a moral agent at the end of the story.

At any rate, since I mentioned Dante in the first place, I thought it would be appropriate to refine the comment a little.

[j. d. worthington]

This may be a fundamental difference in orientation, as I have no belief in an afterlife, the concept of sin (wrongdoing, yes; sin, with its implications, no), etc.... but, while I can appreciate what Dante was doing, and that he did it with great skill and artistry... to me it still showed an imagination which delighted in visions of horrific tortures and inhumanity toward one's fellow man. The fact that these torments were symbolically fitting for the particular transgression simply, to me, indicates how twisted and hateful the religious views behind them are. On top of which, there are a number of things which are punished eternally in such a view, which are, at most, actions with extremely limited amounts of harm attached to them; the only excuse for such torture is a particularly unconvincing one: that a particular deity has claimed them to be worthy of eternal punishment. Sorry, but that, to me, is a darned sight more evil than anything any of the sinners in Dante's vision could possibly have done.

On the other hand, in Ellison's story, what we have are both victims and perpetrators; as representatives of their societies, which created this monstrosity by their callousness and rejection of their humanity, they, too, bear responsibility for its existence and actions. Both Ted and AM say as much in different parts of the story, in different ways. In a very real sense, they constructed their own hell by rejecting their better natures (as did the rest of humanity, when it "spent [its] time badly", as the story has it, playing its genocidal games rather than cherishing and nurturing each other and attempting to make our noblest dreams come true.

So yes, while they are still alive, rather than spirits, they are not simply victims suffering needlessly. They are, in a very substantive sense, representative of us all, as a whole, and individually, when we too succumb to the easy out and practice our little (or sometimes big) inhumanities and injustices. The difference is that AM has been given the power to do things we have not yet gained the power to do, but is nonetheless the child of our own tendency to cruelty of invention. The sadism is no more than one sees with the biblical god; it is simply more modern in tone... and is the child of our own sadistic nature. Note that this does not mean our nature is entirely one way or the other, but that this is within us, just as the self-sacrifice Ted practices at the end is, as well.

It is a horrifying vision, it is intended to repulse, to be a thing we reject, because in moving back from that, we come a little closer to realize how easily we can construct such a hell, how damnably easy it is for us to do so, and how often we dance on that brink (as we are doing now with the increasingly inhumane approach we are seeing from the extreme right and left... which are, on the right, becoming, frighteningly, more and more centrist, it seems); by rejecting this option, we recover a little of our humanity, a smidgeon of our sanity, and make the possibility of this sort of hell just the tiniest bit more remote.

I'm afraid that I see this as a very moral story, in the end; the sensationalism, to me, by no means comes across as the sort of shallow thing which it seems to you; it has as much weight, in a secularist mode if you will, as Dante's vision does in a religious one. But whereas Dante, for all the dogma concerning "free will", ultimately gives none of his characters that benefit, Ellison uses a future vision to urge the use of a will to change for the better before we do make such a hell of this little plot of ground which is our home.

Originally Posted by Extollager

You tell of rereading "I Have No Mouth" and changing an initially negative assessment of it, and perhaps I will too. But let me address this Dantean point.

Dante and Ellison describe horrific scenes. However, an important difference is that, in the case of Dante, most, at least, of the torments of the damned are images of what a specific sin is. For example, Paolo and Francesca are endlessly whirled through space. But that is what their sin (lust) is like, namely a culpable yielding of oneself to swirling, whirling passion when one ought to have retained self-mastery and not submitted to the temptation. Ellison's humans are whirled along too, but there it's just something the sadistic computer does to them. It's almost like something you'd see in a movie with CGI effects and say "Cool!"

Another important difference is that in Ellison's stories we readers are being treated to several pages of inventive descriptions of victims being tortured.

But in Dante the sufferers are not victims. They are the shades of people who had exercised their free will, their moral responsibility, to choose evil. Having chosen evil, they have rejected the good. Now, in hell, they have, and basically are, what they chose. In our earthly lives we choose wrong things but often much of the world goes on working pretty well for us, mercifully. The sun still rises for Hitler, the rain still falls and makes the crops grow in Nazi Germany, here and there ordinary decencies survive, bread is still baked and tastes good when the Nazis are hungry, and so on. In hell the good things have fallen away and all that's left is what the sinner chose -- and this or that is what he chose.

And they are shades, not people. For them no further choices will ever be possible. Now here is where Ellison does make use of his characters, or one of them, as a moral agent at the end of the story.

At any rate, since I mentioned Dante in the first place, I thought it would be appropriate to refine the comment a little.

[Extollager]

JD, it's been my privilege to teach some of the greatest literary works of all time. But I've never taught the Divine Comedy. I thank you for helping me to see how it would likely strike some of my students, if I ever did. I understand the poem differently, as do writers I have read who wrote about it (Singleton, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, Auerbach, &c), so it would be easy for me to underestimate the moral repugnance some student readers might feel based on their reading and what they brought to it.

I'm reading "Jeffty Is Five" this evening, by the way.

[Extollager]

I wrote "it would be easy for me to underestimate the moral repugnance some student readers might feel based on their reading and what they brought to it."

JD, if that sounded condescending, I apologize; I just meant my remark at face value, that I could have students (if I ever taught Inferno) -- who could be good readers -- whom the book would strike as morally repugnant.

Incidentally I don't like the very common practice of college teachers who teach Inferno and not the rest. I think offhand that the whole Comedy should be taught or else an abridgement, perhaps, of the whole work. Inferno can be read as a stand-alone work, but that is not what Dante intended and I think one must misinterpret it somewhat without the other two.

[Extollager]

The ending of "Jeffty" wasn't clear to me. Did the radio fall into the bathtub?

[j. d. worthington]

Short answer: I would say yes. The question is: How, and why? That, I think, is the crux of the matter.

And no, it wasn't condescending; at least, I don't take it as such. I think, however, I should clarify a few things. My objections to the horrors of The Inferno are on an ethical basis, not an artistis one. I would argue that it (and the Divine Comedy as a whole) is among the greatest poems ever written. It expresses, with consummate artistry, a very real aspect of the human condition. That this aspect is repulsive and horrendous to many with a secular approach is another matter altogether. As art, it is a magnificent work. As a moral or ethical statement, it is barbaric and vile, and can only be excused if one views it through a specific set of religious glasses -- not religious in the general sense, but a very narrow and definite set of axioms which themselves are distinctly open to question. In any other context, what the Inferno (and, to a lesser extent, Purgatorio) presents as morality or justice would simply be inexcusable, just as the idea of infinite punishment for a finite crime (or a crime with finite repercussions) would, taken out of the context of religious apologetics, be seen as an obscene abuse of authority.

So, yes, you likely would have trouble selling it to many of your students. This is not to say that I think it shouldn't be taught, and taught as one of the supreme achievements of human art... simply that there are going to be some serious questions raised which will need careful discussion. (And yes, I agree with you -- it should be taught in context as part of the whole. Though I find the Paradiso a bit numbing after a while -- not enough contrast for my taste -- it is nonetheless an exceptional work, and much of it is simply exquisite. I highly recommend Dante's great work to anyone who cares about literature. I suppose the problem is that, in order to do something like this justice, one would need to teach an entire course on it alone....)