Harlan
Ellison is a writer, a writer of short stories and novels, of movie scripts and
comics and he was the author of one of the most famous episodes of the original
Star Trek series, an episode featuring Time Travel,
Nazis and Joan Collins titled "City on the Edge of
Forever". Typically, he produced a
script that he must have known was going to be significantly altered, (drug
dealing on the enterprise?) and then complained
bitterly when it was.I've never met Ellison and I'm not sure I'd like him very much if I did. In interviews he comes across as being arrogant, opinionated and angry at the world. He is litigious and fiercly defensive where he regards his rights as having been infringed. Sometimes it appears, that he seeks out slights or sets himself up for persecution. But those who know him, seem to forgive him on the basis that this behaviour is just 'Harlan being Harlan'*.
Despite that less than glowing introduction, I almost hold Ellison in awe because of three short stories that that I read when I was 13 or 14 years old and I have never forgotten. They all appeared in two huge paperbacks, The Hugo Award Winners edited and introduced by Isaac Asimov. (The Hugo is the Booker prize of Science Fiction).
I loved almost all of the stories in that book, from the military sci-fi of Gordon R Dickson's "Soldier Ask Not" to the hard science based Larry Niven story "Neutron Star" which was more of an astrophysics lesson than a piece of fiction. But there were four stories that hit me like a brick to the head, that changed what I thought about writing, and what it was for. Three of them were by Ellison and they were among the shortest stories in the whole 1,000 page collection.
Before I even got to read them the they looked different. The titles were so strange. "Repent Harlequin, said the Ticktockman", "I Have no Mouth but I must Scream" and "The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World"*. I'd never seen anything quite like them.
There was something strange and exotic about these titles. They sounded like warped versions of the bad science fiction movies of the fifties that I hadn't seen but had read about in dreadful movie magazines. I was used to titles that helped you predict what you were about to read, these didn’t help at all.
"Repent Harlequin" was the first of the stories and remains the one I like most. Originally published in Galaxy magazine in 1965, it won the Hugo for best Short Story in 1966. I could go into details about the plot, but to be honest that is the least interesting thing about the story. It was, in the words of one particularly unsympathetic critic a "primitive statement . . . about [the] solidly acceptable idea [that] regimentation is bad". And while that may well be a fairly accurate assessment of the plot, it misses everything important about the story.
At its simplist, the story is about a darkly regimented world, where the clock and the schedule rules everything. The Harlequin, a benign version of the Joker from the Batman comics, is disrupting this well-ordered, impecibly organised society with outrageously bombastic and colourful stunts, revealing the fragility of the order in this strange society. He is anarchy personified.
The Ticktockman is the man charged with enforcing the schedule with punishments that far outweigh the crimes. The story tells of the disruption caused by the Harlequin, his pursuit by the Ticktockman and his ultimate betrayal by a loved one who 'just wants to belong'
.
That alone would be enough to have an impact on slightly disfunctional 14 year old but there was more. Everything I ever read before this had the feeling of a storybook, however fanciful the plot or the characters, I was supposed to believe that what I was reading was real. 'Repent' was different. There was no sense in which I thought this was a 'real' story, involving real characters. There was some strange and fundimental separation between the readers and the characters in the story.
I reread the story again just before writing this, and that separation still exists, it was as if I was watching a troop of marionnettes under the control of a single master. I was aware that there was an author and that he was manipulating his characters, his readers and the english language for his own purposes. And while I may not have been able to put that into words as a 14 year old I think I understood.
The names Ellison chose for his characters re-enforces this feeling of alienation, the Harlequin, the Ticktockman and Pretty Alice, these are not the names of real people but of puppets or archetypes, of creatures of myth or pantomime fools.
His use of language was different to any fiction I'd read before, almost poetic but harsher than any poetry I was aware of. Ellison was ignoring as many rules as he possibly could. Sentences could run on, and on, and on, ignoring the conventions of prose writing. One paragraph, about jelly beans, is a single run on sentence of more than 100 words. But it never seems wrong or difficult to understand.
Short phrases or even single words were repeated, giving the writing a rhythm that demanded to be read out loud. It was confusing, exciting, frustrating and alien all at the same time. It stunned me, I didn't know you were allowed to write like that. Its probably the first time that I was more interested in the writing than the story being told.
I've now discovered that Ellison wrote this story overnight, at a writers workshop. It was almost certainly written to be read out loud and I can't help but wonder if it was a reaction to someone spouting about the 'rules' of fiction and telling him what he couldn't do
In the years to come I'd come across similar books, or books that had the same feeling. Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, the poetry of Charles Bukowski or the bizarre fantasy of House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. I'd understand what I was seeing much better when I got to those books, but nothing ever had quite the eyeopening effect of Harlan's story.
I may not be remembering this accurately, it was nearly forty years ago, but I think I skipped the next set of stories and went straight to the next of Harlan's award winning short stories.
"I Have No Mouth but I must Scream" is a horror story. It has all the trappings of science fiction and operates perfectly well for scifi fans but at its heart is a single powerful idea that is truly horrific.
Like Harlequin, "I Have no Mouth…" was written very quickly. In this case Ellison wrote it overnight, taking both the title and his inspiration from a drawing by his friend William Rotstler. It saw publication, apparently little changed from the original draft, in Worlds of IF magazine in 1967 and won the Hugo for short fiction in 1968.
It is a very different from 'Repent'. Written in a more traditional first person narrative. it tells the story of the last humans left alive on an earth ravaged by war. They are being kept alive and tortured by the supercomputer that took control of that war and all but eradicated the human race. The story is unrelentlingly grim, a modern vision of hell with the computer designing tortures specifically tailored to defile and destroy the people it has kept alive as its playthings. Taking from them the things they held most dear. In one case looks, another intelligence, another dignity. The ending is bleek and horrific and hopeless and I've never forgotten it.
And in that ending lies the reason why Ellison both qualifies as one of my reasons to be cheerful and yet is an author who I have only read sparingly. You can't read too much Ellison at one sitting, or at least I can't. So much of his fiction has the same bleakness and lack of hope that it is exhausting to read. There is often too little light to go with the shade.
In the foreword to the collection named after "I Have no Mouth...", Ellison reacts to a comment from fellow author Joanna Russ that she wishes he would write more 'preciesly' so that she could go back to stories to re-read and admire them like statues. Ellison responds by saying that "my stories were by no means 'statue' stories, immobile, fixed permanent. They were assaults." and that is very true. With "Harlequin" I suspect the assult to be personal, an attack on someone in that workshop who said "a story should be……" and gave a list of requirements that Ellison objected to. The assault in "I Have no Mouth" is on the senses. That story, quite simply, gave me nighmares.
The third Ellison story in the collection. "The Beast who Shouted Love at the Heart of the World", is at the same time fascinating and the story I like least of the three. It was published in Galaxy Magazine in 1968 and won the Hugo in 69.
The story is told in five parts. dealing in turn with a psychopathic killer on earth, the discovery of a statue of the killer on a distant planet, the capture of an insane seven-headed dragon and a discussion of ethics between the creator of the technique and a friend. Finally there is the investigation of a field that pulses with madness by a scientist with a name that translates as The Hour and his discovery that an alien race are draining madness from their own world and dumping it onto random humans. Ellison has described the story as an experiment. It is not sequential and he imagined it as the rim of a wheel with the pieces coming together at the centre.
In theory the story would work no matter where you started on the wheel.but in practice I suspect nobody read it in any order other than the one it was published in. At the time I didnlt understand what was going on. I liked reading it, Ellison's prose always surprises and entertains, but I didn’t engage with it. Now, I've read other things that played the same game and enjoyed them more so it has lost its impact for me.
Ellison is a great writer. I've read his stories in fits and starts over the years and have always admired them, even if sometimes I have not quite enjoyed them. But he wrote two stories that I have not forgotten almost 40 years later. Two stories with real impact and real style. He editied the best selling anthology of "Speculative Fiction" of all time (Dangerous Visions) that led me to search out other authors who gave me hours of pleasure and much to think about. Overall I'd say Ellison certainly qualifies as one of the finer things in life, one of my reasons to be cheerful.
I have no Mouth and I must Scream
The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
Dangerous Visions Ellison as editor.
* Isaac Asimov says
Harlan is not the kind of person he seems to be. He takes a perverse pleasure in showing the worst side of himself, but if you ignore that and work your way past his porcupine spines (even though it leaves you bleeding) you will find underneath a warm, loving guy who would give you the blood out of his veins if the thought that would help.
*(For the record the fourth story was Samual R Delany's "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and I understood not as single word of it, and then read it again).
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