One of the most complex and conflicted writers of SF, a moving and insightful portrait Definitely one of the best SF author biographies I've read, alonOne of the most complex and conflicted writers of SF, a moving and insightful portrait Definitely one of the best SF author biographies I've read, along with "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick". There's no question that Alice B. Sheldon had a unique upbringing, a searingly bright but restless and troubled artistic passion and intellect, and an incredibly varied and fascinating life. It holds the weight of tragedy, but much artistic integrity and struggle as well. If you have read her stories and then read this, you will both gain great insight and immediately want to revisit them for a more enriching second reading. ...more
The Lathe of Heaven: An early 1970s classic of reality-altering dreams with Taoist undercurrents Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I love Ursula KThe Lathe of Heaven: An early 1970s classic of reality-altering dreams with Taoist undercurrents Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I love Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels from the late 1960s and early 70s. She just couldn’t go wrong during this period. Although The Lathe of Heaven may not be the first book that comes to mind as one of her masterpieces (that honor would likely go to The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or the EARTHSEA TRILOGY), it was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and won the Locus Award in 1972. It’s what I consider one of her smaller books, but still one of her best.
What makes The Lathe of Heaven great is that it can tackle some of the biggest issues of the time — overpopulation, environmental destruction, war, racism, the lost soul of the modern world, exploration of the dreaming mind, alternate realities, and the urge to shape society for the better — all in under 200 pages. I really feel that is a lost art in this day of massive doorstoppers, multi-book mega-series, and self-indulgent info-dumps.
The story is also simple in concept, with a very small cast of characters, so it could easily be a stage play and has been made into a film twice, once as a PBS production in 1980 and later as an A&E Network film in 2002. It centers on George Orr, an unremarkable man who happens to have “effective” dreams which alter reality. Horrified by this, he tries to suppress his dreams with drugs, but runs afoul of the law and is given the choice between therapy or a mental asylum. He chooses therapy, and is assigned Dr. William Haber.
The early parts of the story detail the therapy sessions of George and Dr. Haber. George is a very passive, almost timid man. He doesn’t want to be in this situation, and certainly doesn’t want to be altering reality with his unconscious dreams. Dr. Haber is the polar opposite, a confident, brash, and aggressive man who quickly recognizes the potential to harness George’s dreams to shape reality in the ways he wants.
Although he makes repeated and valid arguments as to why he should utilize this unique ability to do good and improve society and the world, each time he inserts suggestions to George such as “let’s imagine a world without overpopulation, war, pollution, racism, etc.,” the outcomes invariably are not what he expected and include some serious unforeseen side-effects. Notably, with each new iteration, Dr. Haber’s status and career seem to also improve.
The middle portion of The Lathe of Heaven then explores a serious of alternate realities dreamed up by George’s unconscious with prompting from Dr. Haber. The ways in which things go wrong are quite ingenious, and it’s clear that Le Guin does not subscribe to the power fantasy that someone with the means has the right to shape society and reality to their liking without consultation, even with the best of intentions. As the worlds get stranger and more distorted, Dr. Haber hatches an idea that if he can replicate the process on himself, he can cut the reluctant George out of the equation and dream the world himself exactly to his specifications. This forms the climactic final events of the story.
What adds interest to The Lathe of Heaven and places it firmly in the late 60s & early 70s is not just the political issues of the time, but also the underlying elements of Eastern philosophy, specifically the Taoist quotes at the beginnings of chapters from Chuang Tzu, as well as Tao Te Ching, The Book of the Way and Its Virtue by Lao Tzu, along with western philosophers such as H.G. Wells, Victor Hugo, and even Lafcadio Hearn. You can see how well-read Le Guin is and how much Eastern philosophy was gaining prominence and popularity in the West as an alternative to traditional Western philosophy, especially on college campuses and in intellectual circles. This is similar to the profound influence of the I Ching, The Book of Changes, in Philip K. Dick’s dystopian masterpiece of alternate reality, The Man in the High Castle.
Taoist thinking can be found in the character of George. From many perspectives, this protagonist is very frustrating due to his passivity, reluctance to take any action to change the world around him, and instinctual distrust of authoritarian behavior. Whereas some people might seek to harness their powers to shape reality through dreams, George is repelled by this. Taoism is one of those slippery, non-dogmatic philosophies that espouses the pursuit of The Way though natural, uncontrived living. Disciples seek to discard the ills of civilization and material desires and pursue the simple, unadorned joys of a basic agrarian existence. One key concept is called Wu Wei, which is defined as “effortless action,” “non-action,” much as the planets orbit the sun without any effort, just following the natural rhythms of the universe.
So while from a Western perspective George is a spineless man, afraid and reluctant to do anything with his powers of dreaming, from a Taoist perspective he might be a very dedicated individual trying to avoid doing harm to the natural order of the world around him. Of course this becomes an interesting point of debate in the story — if Taoists look to the ancient past of a simple existence as the ideal, does this principle still apply in the dystopian future society of George and Dr. Haber, living in massive towers packed with millions of people living on minimal rations due to overpopulation, a deteriorating environment, wars throughout Europe and the Middle East, and a general spiritual malaise? Faced with such conditions, is it wrong for Dr. Haber to want to change that? And is it right for George to resist any such manipulations? As always, it is the questions that Le Guin raises that are more important than the answers. The Lathe of Heaven is a concise, though-provoking journey into multiple realities and the dreaming unconscious, but is in no way an escape from reality....more
The Voice From the Edge Vol. 5: Shatterday & Other Stories: Dark, powerful, and ironic stories that stay with you Originally posted at Fantasy LiteratuThe Voice From the Edge Vol. 5: Shatterday & Other Stories: Dark, powerful, and ironic stories that stay with you Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the final installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. It’s been quite a ride, and it’s hard to dispute that Ellison is a superb storyteller who can take an idea and run with it in the most original and twisted way, frequently delving into the dark and cruel side of human nature, but also celebrating moments of nobility and pathos along the way. His voice is powerful, unique, and very charismatic, so hearing him narrate his own work is a treat.
Like Vol. 4, not all the stories in Vol. 5 are narrated by Ellison himself. Fortunately the supporting cast are very skilled, and the stories really lend themselves to narration, so I didn’t have a problem with that. And again he throws in anecdotes about his life and writing that illuminate his creative process. This entire series can be listened to multiple times; it’s that good.
This collection has a large number of award winners and nominees (he has a lot to choose from). The tone of most of them is quite dark, and they demand careful listening for full effect. The good thing about short stories is that it’s not a big time investment to re-listen to the ones you really like. In this case most of the stories are from his most experimental period in the 1960s and 1970s. While not as difficult as stories like “The Deathbird” in Vol. 4, I did have to give two careful listens to “Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans,” but it was well worth the time. Below are my favorites from this collection:
“Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” (1966; Hugo nominee): What if you could live as you always imagined yourself in dreams? Let’s say a 6-foot 3-inch chiseled Nordic warrior steering a ship on rough seas on route to fighting a fearsome dragon to save a beautiful damsel in distress. Ellison explores this male wish fulfillment fantasy by a meek 41-year old accountant who takes a detour on his way to work one morning. The descriptive passages are vivid and dramatic, and the story’s conclusion is anything but wish fulfillment. Very well done.
“Shatterday” (1975; Nebula nominee): Ellison once again tackles the old chestnut of what you would do if you met yourself, and turns it on its head. Here a successful ad executive with a wealthy but shallow existence calls home one night only to discover… himself answering the phone. The two selves insist they are the real one, and as they examine their lives they discover they have not been a very nice for a long time. As always, Ellison leaves the denouement in suspense until the end, and it is a satisfying one that pulls no punches.
“Basilisk” (1972; Hugo & Locus winner; Nebula nominee): I was waiting for an Ellison story about the Vietnam War, which dominated social debate during his most creative writing period. Well, “Basilisk” doesn’t disappoint. A soldier on patrol in Vietnam steps on a punji stick booby trap and wakes up in captivity, having lost his eyesight. He is repeatedly tortured until he spills all the information he knows. But one day when pushed to the edge he discovers that he has the power to destroy his enemies in terrifying ways. He is rescued and brought back to the US, but when he returns home he is viewed as a traitor to his country. His family has been driven out of town and his fiancée has married the town jock. When he confronts them, things quickly spiral out of control. It’s a very powerful allegory of what US soldiers experienced both in Vietnam and after returning home.
“Shattered Like a Glass Goblin” (1968; Nebula nominee): This is a trippy story about a man who comes back from Army basic training to reconnect with his fiancée. He discovers she has shacked up in a large drug-house on a hill. The inhabitants of the house, including his fiancée, spend all their time high on various substances. He is the only normal one among them and serves as their connection to the outside world. However, when his fiancée convinces him to partake of their drug cornucopia, things get very weird and phantasmagoric. This is clearly a horror story about the dangers of the drug culture prevalent at the time.
“Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W” (1974; Hugo & Locus winner): This is probably one of the most original stories in the collection, and certainly scores points for most creative and unwieldy short story title of all time. It’s a gonzo version of Fantastic Voyage, in which a man pleas for the opportunity to be shrunk to the microscopic level so he can enter his own body in order to find the geographical location of his own soul. Not content with that, his intent is to discover his soul so he can die in peace. After going through the process he begins to explore his body in an Odysseus-type voyage of rough seas until he finds the island where his soul is stored. I needed to listen to this twice to grasp the details, but it’s a very interesting and affecting story.
“All the Lies That Are My Life” (1980; Hugo nominee): This is the longest piece in the collection, a highly autobiographical novella about a highly successful writer (sometimes of science fiction) who is brash, arrogant, brilliant, popular with the ladies, and frequently a jerk. Then there is his less successful writer friend with whom he has a love-hate friendship. When the writer dies in a spectacular high-speed highway accident involving road-rage and Latino thugs, it’s revealed at the funeral that he has left his final will and testament on video. Everyone is then subjected to a long invective-filled rant about his worthless sister, followed by props to the friends he approved of.
This is about as self-indulgent a story as every was penned, even by the king of self-absorption, Harlan Ellison. And yet he is such a larger-than-life personality that I think it’s fair to conduct an analysis of his life in fictional form like this, a retrospective of his life and legacy while still living. Who wouldn’t want to control the image people hold of your life? It’s certainly quintessential Ellison, full of self-deprecation, oversharing, self-aggrandizing, and heaps of chutzpah. But because he is a natural storyteller, it’s definitely worth a listen....more
The Deathbird & Other Stories: The Voice from the Edge Vol. 4: Some of his most experimental stories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is theThe Deathbird & Other Stories: The Voice from the Edge Vol. 4: Some of his most experimental stories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the fourth installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. He’s a born storyteller, without question the most passionate, intense and brilliant audiobook narrator I’ve ever experienced. He captures the characters’ quirks and attitudes, and narrates with masterful pacing and tone. This is the ideal showcase for him to read his favorite stories from a career spanning over 60 years.
Vol. 1 featured some of his best stories and narration, Vol. 2 was also excellent but not quite as brilliant as Vol. 1, and Vol. 3 had some top-notch stories and finished with two horror tales, the first narrated by Robert Bloch. Vol. 4 is the first collection in which not all the stories are narrated by Ellison himself. Fortunately the other narrators are very good, including Theodore Bikel, Stefan Rudnicki, and Arte Johnson. You can imagine that someone as picky and demanding as Ellison would tolerate nothing less.
What distinguishes Vol. 4 of this collection is not just the large number of award winners and nominees, but the challenging nature of the stories. They are complex, elusive, erudite, and experimental. So much is implied; very little is spelled out. But they are also very rewarding if you listen carefully. I actually listened twice to the ones I liked best. In particular, Ellison’s endings often contain a twist that redefines what came before, so you need to make sure you don’t miss them. Stories from the 1970s and later have gone completely away from the early more pulpy stories of the 1950s. That’s why it’s strange that the longest story in the collection, “Run for the Stars” (1957), reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s earlier stories. Frankly, it feels quite dated and pales versus his later, more mature stories, so I’m not sure why it was included and narrated by Ellison himself. Having said that, it’s an impressive collection and these were my favorites:
“The Deathbird” (1973; Hugo & Locus winner, Nebula nominee): This is the most challenging story in the collection. It tells a very unconventional story of the creation and destruction of the world. A shadow figure drifts through the layers of a desolate far-future earth to find a crypt in the center preserving Nathan Stack, a man who has been sleeping there for 250,000 years. The shadow figure is named Dira, and is also known as the Snake, who harks back to the Garden of Eden. Dira was left on the Earth by an earlier race to make sure that humanity knows the true story of creation. That is because the God we know has twisted the story of Genesis to his own ends, and the Snake has been on the side of humanity. And only Nathan Stack, essentially the avatar of mankind, has the power to confront God and end the pain of the world with the help of the Deathbird, whom Dira commands.
This story is told in non-linear form, with several vignettes that seem like conventional stories, with the unifying theme of people letting go of loved ones. There are also odd snippets of academic-sounding comments, such as the opening lines of the story: “This is a test. Take notes. This will count as 3/4 of your final grade.” The central story is told in mythical, biblical style. It reminded me somewhat of the middle story in Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1973). Ellison lets the reader put the pieces of the story together gradually, leaving tantalizing clues throughout. I had to listen to this one three times to grasp its meaning, and I’m still not sure I understood everything. But the writing, imagery, and narration (which is done by someone other than Ellison, perhaps Stefan Rudnicki) are so hypnotic and intriguing that it’s worth it. On further reflection, the story’s concept of God as a sinister and not omnipotent creator mirrors the complex Gnostic concepts explored in Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion (1981).
“Croatoan" (1975; Hugo nominee): Here’s another story where it’s not immediately clear what is going on. A man named Gabe is sent by his panicked girlfriend to go into New York’s sewers to retrieve something very precious that they flushed down. The story also moves between flashbacks to put together the full picture of what led him to this point. He discovers that discarded crocodiles, and something far more sinister, infest the sewers. The story is more character than event-driven, and touches on a very sensitive subject in the US today.
“The Beast Who Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (1968; Hugo winner):Here is another complex and demanding story with a brilliant title. It takes a similarly elliptical approach, dropping incongruous details and not identifying the connections between story elements. The story begins with very newscast-like comments describing three terrorist-like mass-murders perpetrated by a man named William Sterog, who is clearly insane. The narrative then jumps to the far future in which an Earth expedition finds a giant statue with a beatific expression on its face, and a vague description of the crosscurrents of time, space, and existence.
The story then shifts to a strange underground “level” containing an insane seven-headed dragon (which may be the same as “the maniac.” Two individuals, Semph and Linah, are arguing whether it is appropriate to “drain” the dragon or not. Although not immediately apparent, the “draining” process seems to involve removing the insanity of the subject and dispersing these bad essences elsewhere. The debate centers on what becomes of these essences. Semph is sentenced to death for opposing the draining, and a statue is built in his honor.
Once again the narrative abruptly changes to the description of the meeting of Pope Leo the first and Atilla the Hun. Apparently Pope Leo managed to convince Atilla not to sack Rome, though at other times Rome did not escape this fate. The connection of this to the rest of the story is completely unclear to me.
Finally, during the trial of Semph, it’s made clear that the draining of insanity keeps the future society of the Concord safe from madness, but that these essences have been beamed throughout the universe, and have arrived on the Earth. This may be an explanation for the insane actions described in the beginning, and for all other acts of madness by implication.
“The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” (1991; Nebula nominee): This story defies easy description. It is strange, sympathetic, cruel, ironic, and filled with humor. Essentially it is a series of tiny vignettes featuring Levendis, a powerful but mysterious figure that goes about the world dealing out justice (with extreme prejudice) in some cases, standing by observing in others, and playing bizarre pranks in others. As it turns out, it appears that Lavendis may be how Harlan Ellison views the role of the divine in our lives — random, capricious, both good and evil, sometimes indifferent, but always unpredictable. God, if he exists, is not either the vindictive Jehovah of the Old Testament nor the merciful and sacrificial Christ of the New Testament. If anything, Lavendis may be Ellison’s way of saying “shit happens” in life and that we shouldn’t expect any rhyme or reason in the world. Life is what you see before you, and it’s up to you what to make of it.
“Count the Clock That Tells the Time” (1978; Locus winner; Hugo nominee): This is a sweet little love story based on very original premise: what happens to all the time that we “waste” in our lives? Does it just disappear, or go someone else and accumulate? Ellison explores this question, and then expands on it by speculating on what happens when two people who have wasted their entire lives in solitude find each other outside of time and space. It’s pretty affecting and has a bittersweet ending as well. Excellent stuff.
“How Interesting: A Tiny Man” (2010; Hugo winner): This is a short but effective story that could only be done full justice being narrated by Ellison himself. What if you were to create a tiny man who could fit in your shirt pocket? How would other people react? Would they simply remark “How Interesting! A tiny man,” or would their reactions be more extreme? The answers this story arrives at are a powerful indictment against the intolerance and close-mindedness of people, and the ending is very sad indeed....more
Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes: The Voice from the Edge Vol. 3: Worth it for the title story alone Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the third inPretty Maggie Moneyeyes: The Voice from the Edge Vol. 3: Worth it for the title story alone Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the third installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. He’s a born storyteller, without question the most passionate, intense and brilliant audiobook narrator I’ve ever experienced. This is the ideal showcase for him to read his favorite stories from a career spanning over 60 years.
Vol. 3 has some top-notch stories like “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” and finishes with two horror tales, the first narrated by Robert Bloch to chilling effect. It’s also unusual in that it has six very short stories that accompany the artwork of Jacek Yerka especially for the book Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka, the Fiction of Harlan Ellison. While these may be very effective when seen with the artwork, they lack context alone and are too short to really have a major impact. I would have preferred that he include some of his huge back catalog of longer shorter stories instead. Ellison does sprinkle in a lot of biographical anecdotes that makes this audiobook a real treat to listen to. He may be cocky and abrasive, but he’s also charming and honest as hell.
This collection is interesting for the number of stories that are nearly devoid of fantastic elements. Ellison is a masterful storyteller, so basically any ideas he chooses have the potential to be great. In this collection, you won’t find too many spaceships, robots, or futuristic societies except for “Kiss of Fire,” “The Discarded,” and “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World.” Some of the best work perfectly well without any real fantasy elements at all, like “Status Quo at Troyden’s” and “Valerie: A True Memoir.” These were the standouts for me:
“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” (1967): This story alone is worth the money. Ellison absolutely tears into every word like a pack of Dobermans attacking a bloody-raw Porterhouse steak. I guarantee you have NEVER heard narration this intense, sinister, down and dirty and absolutely joyful. Ellison’s description of Maggie goes on for a long time, and in the afterword you understand this character had a real-life inspiration. It’s an incredible tale of a down on his luck loser in Vegas who finds a Silver Cartwheel Chief slot machine that gets him jackpot after jackpot after jackpot… but at a terrible price. The real show-stopper here is Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, a high priced escort who shows in Vegas with her Sicilian hood boyfriend Nuncio and ends up staying in Vegas much longer than expected. I listened to this one several times and every character in it, including the sleazy pit boss, are done to perfection. Here’s a sample of Ellison’s writing:
Outthrust chin, perhaps a tot too much belligerence, but if you’d walloped as many gropers, you too, sweetheart; narrow mouth, petulant lower lip, nice to chew on, a lower lip as though filled with honey, bursting, ready for things to happen; a nose that threw the right sort of shadow, flaring nostrils, the acceptable words: aquiline, patrician, classic, cheekbones as stark and promontory as a spit of land after ten years of open ocean; cheekbones holding darkness like narrow shadows, sooty beneath the taut-fleshed bone structure; amazing cheekbones, the whole face, really; simple up-tilted eyes, the touch of the Cherokee, eyes that looked out at you, as you looked in at them, like someone peering out of the keyhole as you peered in; actually, dirty eyes, they said you can get it.
“Kiss of Fire”(1973): This is a fairly tricky story to grasp on the first time around. I listened several times to get the drift, but I came to appreciate it as a very daring story about creativity and at what cost, set far in the future. It’s also about a fatigued artist, and how far one can go when your work victimizes others. Strangely enough, the jaded and cynical far-future denizens strongly reminded me of the decadent members of Iain M. Banks’ CULTURE series.
“Status Quo at Troyden’s” (1958): This is another perfectly narrated story by Ellison that has no fantastic elements. It’s the simple story of a down-on-his luck old man living in a flop-house on the minimal payments sent by his son. When his payment is cut, he is at a loss and asks the slimy building owner for a few bucks off the already-low rent. When he gets rejected, things take an ugly turn, and our previously-meek protagonist shows a surprisingly mean streak when the tables are turned.
“Tired Old Man”(1975): This is a story based on a real life meeting in NY at a writers’ party between Ellison and one of his crime fiction idols, Cornell Woolrich. It is one of Ellison’s favorites, and features some pretty harsh ridiculing of the jealous little world of competing authors, and Ellison’s dislike for such literary circles. But when he encounters and has a deep and inspiring conversation with a very old man in a soft chair, he is shocked to find that nobody else at the party saw this guy, and that the person he claims to be has been dead for many years.
“Valerie: A True Memoir” (1972): Here’s another excellent story that has no fantastic elements whatsoever. It’s simply a tale Ellison tells about himself as a writer, when he encounters a seductive woman named Valerie who takes him for a ride, and his efforts to get back at her. Ellison isn’t afraid to ridicule his own gullibility, while also suggesting he is quite the lady’s man. It’s a funny story, something you could easily imagine him telling over a beer.
“A Toy for Juliette” (1967): This is actually a story by Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame) written for Ellison’s famous Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967. It may be the creepy soundtrack of any horror story I’ve heard. It’s about a young lady named Juliette in the far future who basically sits around waiting for her kindly uncle to bring her live ‘toys’ for her to play with (and dispatch painfully). Everything goes as usual until one of her ‘toys’ turns out to be much more than she bargained for. The story reads like an evil nursery story, with this inane toy store background music that wildly contrasts with the dark storyline. I loved it.
“The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” (1967): This story is a direct follow-up by Ellison to “A Toy for Juliette,” and takes place immediately after that story ends. As Ellison says in his afterword, this is the most violent and explicit piece he’s ever written, and I can understand why Kat would be sickened by it. When you realize who has been set loose in a decadent far-future dome society, you can imagine the mayhem that will ensue. It’s a pretty nasty story, and I actually liked the prior story better because of its sick sense of humor. But I give Ellison full credit for such a creative idea and not pulling any punches....more
Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 2: More incendiary audio performances Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is theMidnight in the Sunken Cathedral: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 2: More incendiary audio performances Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the second installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. He’s a born storyteller, without question the most passionate, intense and brilliant audiobook narrator I’ve ever experienced. He captures the characters’ quirks and attitudes, and narrates with masterful pacing and tone. This is the ideal showcase for him to read his favorite stories from a career spanning over 60 years.
Vol. 1 featured some of his most famous stories and incredible voice narration, so it’s a tough act to follow. While his narration is just as exemplary in Vol. 2, I didn’t think the stories were quite as brilliant as those in Vol. 1. In part I think that’s because the stories in Vol. 1 are longer, while Vol. 2 has a number of shorter stories that didn’t grab me as much. Having said that, it’s still a great collection and these were my favorites:
“Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral” (1995): This story is all about the oppressive weight and darkness of the depths of the Bermuda Triangle, and how that parallels the feelings of loss of a man whose father was killed in an industrial accident. As he dives deep below the sea, he encounters his father again in unexpected fashion. This is impressively described, with dramatic and hallucinatory imagery. An excellent story.
“The End of the Time of Leinard”(1958): Here’s a story that is not SF or F at all, but rather a Western theme. It’s about tough-as-nails Sheriff Leinard, who had to do plenty of killing to civilize a rough border town, but once things have become more civilized, the town leaders decide they don’t need such a fierce peace-keeper anymore. Just when you think it’ll end in an epic shootout, it ends on a note of melancholy. The story may be a metaphor for the loss of that hard pioneer spirit as society gets more civilized.
“Go Toward the Light”(1996): Since I’ve recently read Robert Silverberg’s time-travel book Up the Line, this was an interesting spin on the idea of travelling back in time to witness important historical or Biblical events. This one focuses on scientists involved in a time-travel project. They have an argument over who is the better Jew, and one of them goes back in time to witness a miracle at the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Despite all his training, he is torn about meddling in history, the cardinal sin of time travel.
“Jeffty is Five”(1977): As Kat said, this is the highlight of the collection, and won the Hugo, Nebula, British Fantasy, and Locus Poll Awards. It’s about a boy named Jeffty who is stuck at 5-years of age, while his friend grows older normally. His parents are at a loss what to do, and seem emotionally paralyzed. Jeffty cannot go to school, so his only friend is the narrator, who keeps visiting him as he grows older but Jeffty remains the same. The story is filled with heaps of nostalgic trivia about all the old TV shows, cartoons, and books that Jeffty can miraculously continue to acquire long after they have disappeared from the modern world. The story has a tragic ending, a clear metaphor for the loss of that sweet innocence that we imbue the past with.
“The Function of Dream Sleep”(1988): This story is more psychological horror, about a man who has a terrifying dream that a mouth has opened on his side and exhales a chill breath of death. He visits a group studying R.E.M. sleep and explores the idea that dreams are not a means of expresses subconscious thoughts, but rather a way to expel bad thoughts from the mind. After a very strange experience with a group of mental patients, the man is directed to find a reclusive man who may have the answer to his dreams. It ends with a strange encounter that I didn’t fully understand, but it was certainly a memorable story.
There were also several humorous stories that featured great New Yorker accents, such as “S.R.O.” and “Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish.” These are great to listen to, and really show off Ellison’s sharp wit and skill with accents. There’s another story called “Rat Hater”, a fairly mean-spirited vignette about a gangster getting revenge many years later for the murder of his loved one. Then again, I like Mafia movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc. The first story “In Lonely Lands” is a short piece about an old man dying and his Martian companion. It strongly reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and just like that book I didn’t really connect with it.
Overall, this was a very good collection that illustrates just what a skillful storyteller Ellison is, and also that his unique brand of story writing doesn’t easily fit the SF or Fantasy categories, but frequently contains fantastic elements in stories that are otherwise firmly grounded in our reality. This is yet again different from magic realism. It shows that Ellison is fully capable of telling an emotionally powerful tale with conventional settings, but borrows fantastic elements whenever they serve to enhance the story....more
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 1: Ellison narrates his best stories brilliantly Originally posted at Fantasy LiteraturI Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 1: Ellison narrates his best stories brilliantly Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Harlan Ellison is probably one of SF’s biggest personalities. By all accounts, he’s brash, cocky, arrogant, abrasive, and obnoxious. He is also one of the most brilliant practitioners ever to hammer away at a typewriter, producing over 1,700 screenplays, novellas, short stories, essays, and pieces of criticism, etc. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the SF field was his watershed anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), which championed the New Wave movement and challenged the genre to redefine itself.
I’ve never been to a SF convention or met many SF authors or fans (Hawaii and Japan are not the biggest hotspots for that, believe it or not), so I have never met or heard Ellison speak. Therefore, I will not comment on all the notorious stories about his belligerence. I will simply weigh in on his work, which is what I have to judge him by. And within minutes of listening to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 1, I was completely hooked.
This guy is a born storyteller, without question the most passionate, intense and brilliant audiobook narrator I’ve ever experienced. He’s just that good and he knows it. He captures the characters quirks, personalities, attitudes, and delivers the stories at exactly the right pace and tone, which is obvious because he’s reading his own stories. And the 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series is the ideal showcase for him to strut his stuff and read his favorite stories from a career spanning over 60 years. He has a huge pile of awards (Hugos, Nebulas, Bram Stokers, Edgars, World Fantasy) and Lifetime Achievement Awards, so there are plenty of excellent stories to choose from.
Vol. 1 features some of his most famous and impressive work, and are narrated to perfection. I’m not sure there’s anything more that can be said about the man or his stories, but it was my first time to encounter his work, so I assume there are other SF fans out there, especially younger ones, who may not have heard anything. If so, this is a great way to hear his stories read exactly the way he’d want. Absolutely brilliant. My favorites in this collection:
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967, Hugo Winner): The collection leads off with one of Ellison’s most famous stories, about an insane and sadistic AI named “AM” who has killed off the rest of the human race but has saved five unlucky individuals for eternal torture. It’s narrative with such enthusiasm and energy that you can picture Ellison with a maniacal grin in the recording studio. The vitriol that AM bears toward humanity is fearsome to behold, and it’s a very different take from the cold, detached approach of HAL. Overall, it’s a chilling story and brilliant performance.
"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman (1965, Hugo & Nebula Winner): This is another classic favorite set in a dystopian future society controlled by the Ticktockman, who regulates the lives and daily routines of all its citizens. Everything runs smoothly until a man dressed as a clown starts to disrupt things, involving jelly beans of all things. In addition to the great title and narration, the audio production has added a number of amusing sound effects.
Laugh Track (1984): This is a later story that ruthlessly skewers the cynical entertainment business that Ellison worked in for decades, in particular the insipid and mind-numbing TV programs that Hollywood has cranked out for generations. Ellison reads this story with incredible energy in a New York wiseguy style, about a young guy in the business who hears the voice of his dead Aunt Babe on one of the laugh tracks, and starts to pick out her voice on other sitcoms. He decides to track down the source of the recording by talking with an ultra-secretive “sweetener” who produces the laugh tracks. His description of the “unmentionable” sweeteners, the unspoken dirty secret of the industry, is hilarious, and when he finally tracks downs dear old Babe, the story takes a very unexpected turn. This was one of my favorites just for the biting humor and ridiculing of sitcoms.
Paladin of the Lost Hour (1985): This story took me completely by surprise. After the dystopians horrors of “I Have No Mouth..” and “Repent Harlequin…”, I was unprepared for a story as poignant, emotional, and sublime as this. Is this really the same writer? Ellison, showing his versatility as a storyteller, switches from wiseguy mode to sensitively tell the story of a young man in a dead-end job as a midnight convenience story manager who encounters an old man being beaten by hoods in a graveyard one night. Although he isn’t looking for friendship, the old man is so clearly lonely (he visits his wife at the cemetery all the time), that the young man lets him stay at his place out of pity. Eventually they develop a very close friendship, and both reveal very unexpected backgrounds that moves the story into a completely different direction than I was expecting. This story moved me to a surprising degree, and again proved that Ellison is too versatile a writer to be pigeon-holed.
A Boy And His Dog (1969, Nebula Winner): Here’s a story listeners are likely to either love or hate. It’s the story of Vic and Blood, the eponymous Boy and his Dog. The are a team that roves a post-apocalyptic United States where civilization has collapsed into savagery and roving gangs. The only bastions of civilization are underground shelters where pre-war society has been recreated in caricatured terms. Vic is not a sympathetic figure – he is a shallow and vicious hoodlum who seeks simply to survive, kill rival scavengers, and track down women to rape. So are we supposed to sympathize with him? I certainly don't.
The story gets going when Vic and Blood are at a movie theatre showing vintage stag films, and among the many solo scavengers watching the film Blood informs Vic that he smells a woman. They follow her trail to a building where he corners and rapes her. Despite himself, he starts to develop feelings for her. She encourages his feelings, despite the misgivings of Blood. They then find themselves under attack from other solos who’ve tracked her as well. Eventually the girl Quilla lures him underground to Topeka, a cartoonish version of the lost middle-America. However, it turns out he’s been lured on purpose to serve as a ‘stud’ to impregnate the women there as the men there have lost the ability to do so. The sound-effects here are really great – incongruously cheerful and hokey music plays as Vic and Quilla spread death and mayhem in Topeka in their bid to escape to aboveground. When they get there, they discover that Blood is injured and starving, and Vic has to choose between his loyal dog and his newfound love.
This story was filmed in 1975 by L.Q. Jones, and features a young Don Johnson as Vic. I saw it many years ago and I think it’s meant as dystopian satire, at least I hope so because otherwise it’s a pretty unpleasant choice between the vicious hood Vic and the creepy artificial world underground. In the end neither is particularly appealing, but Ellison’s sympathies are clearly with the anarchic freedom outside and the bond between Vic and Blood. What’s more questionable is how he treats Quilla in the story, as she quickly gets over her initial rape and quickly latches onto Vic as a ticket out. It’s not a very pleasant story, but undeniably gripping. And Ellison of course invests the storytelling with such gusto that you can’t help being carried along.
Grail (1981): This is the last story in the collection, and according to Ellison’s opening intro, this is one of his favorites. In fact, he is confounded by the fact that his other more famous stories were written very rapidly, while he spent a great amount of time and research on ‘Grail’ but it never really gained a major readership.
The story itself is certainly interesting. After losing his love in a mortar attack during the Vietnam War, a man hunts across the world for ‘true love’, which she told him about in her dying words. After much travail, he discovers a means to find it – forming a pentagram and contacting a demon from the nether realms. Things get pretty strange afterward, and the demons are not what you’d expect. Finally, he finds his long sought-after grail. But once again, Ellison delivers a twist that boils down to “beware what you wish for.” Definitely an original story, though not perhaps as superior as he believes. But then it all comes down to preference....more
Roadside Picnic: Russian SF classic with parallels to Vandermeer’s Area X Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Roadside Picnic (1972) is a Russian SFRoadside Picnic: Russian SF classic with parallels to Vandermeer’s Area X Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Roadside Picnic (1972) is a Russian SF novel written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. This was back when authors and publishers were subject to government review and censorship. Since it didn’t follow the Communist Party line, it didn’t get published in uncensored book form in Russia until the 1990s despite first appearing in a Russian literary magazine in 1972. So its first book publication was in the US in 1977. Since then Roadside Picnic has been published in dozens of editions and languages over the years, and inspired the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, which the Strugatsky brothers wrote the screenplay for.
The story is set after the Visitation, when aliens briefly stopped on the Earth and left six Zones where strange alien technology and physical phenomenon exist. Residents of these areas never saw the aliens, but the alien artifacts have mysterious powers that can sometimes be harnessed by humans without understanding the underlying technology. The title refers to the simple analogy of a group of people going for a picnic in the countryside, having a good time, dumping various trash, and heading on. For the forest animals, the actions of these mysterious beings are incomprehensible, as are they objects they leave behind. So we are those helpless forest creatures.
Since the visitation, the Zones have been closed off by the UN and various governments to civilians, but the lure of the alien artifacts creates a robust illegal trade in them by “stalkers” who know how to avoid the numerous strange and frequently deadly traps that would kill the unwary. The protagonist of the story is Redrick “Red” Schuhart, a veteran stalker who has made dozens of successful trips to the Zone and emerged with enough artifacts to support himself and his girlfriend. This existence is quite precarious, so he also takes a job as an assistant in a lab that studies the Zone. However, he frequently finds himself in the local bar, especially when he makes another illegal score.
When Red ventures into the Zone with another stalker named Burbridge, they encounter “witch’s jelly,” a substance that dissolves Burbridge’s legs. Red saves him, but has to evade the authorities upon his return. Meanwhile, his girlfriend Guta gives birth to a girl with a full body of hair (who gains the moniker “Monkey”), since many children born near the Zone or exposed to people like stalkers end up with strange mutations.
After various scrapes with shady artifact buyers, underground organizations, and a stint in prison, Red finds himself at home once again. Sadly, his daughter has lost the ability to speak. Finally, he is lured into “one last job” to retrieve a legendary object called the “Golden Sphere”, which is rumored to grant the wishes of its owner. He enters the Zone with Burbridge’s son, but they must first get past the “Meatgrinder.” The ending of the story is fairly abrupt and ambiguous, so I will leave it to the reader to decipher.
So was Roadside Picnic good? I thought the central concept was excellent, but I’d be hard-pressed to say I enjoyed the book. It spent a lot of time with Red drunk in the bar, commiserating with various others in the strange subculture that develops around the Zones, which are generally desolate and sparsely populated. The various shady buyers and their schemes to get artifacts weren’t as interesting as I hoped, and the actual time within the Zones was frequently anticlimactic. His family life with his wife and mutant daughter was more promising, but didn’t really develop enough dramatic depth. And the ending… I had to go back and re-listen twice just to make sure I hadn’t skipped a final chapter by mistake.
The most interesting thing about Roadside Picnic is the parallels it has with Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (2011), which it predates by about 40 years. That book is about a strange area known as Area X, where bizarre physical phenomena occur and many expeditions have gone in but have never returned. Of course it is not revealed whether Area X was due to aliens or other more occult sources, and the novel is stylistically much closer to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and the New Weird school of fiction. Vandermeer loves to mix genres, injecting lots of horror and mystery elements, and has some fantastic descriptive writing. But Annihilation and Roadside Picnic do share the same DNA: a refusal to disclose their mysteries to the reader. They show the limitations of human knowledge, and our powerlessness when faced with a superior and mysterious force. The characters of Annihilation are more unreliable narrators than Red, and less easy to relate to. In the end, it wasn’t my favorite book, but it is still worth reading if you are interested in classic Russian SF.
Film Version: Stalker (1979) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Roadside Picnic did inspire a very loosely-based adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky, who also directed the film version of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris in 1972. He was intrigued by the book and went to a lot of troubles (including having to completely reshoot the entire film after the first film stock was unusable) to achieve “classical Aristotelian unity” and create a very artistic, intellectual, and STUNNINGLY BORING film version. I had already seen Solaris and knew I was facing long, uninterrupted and static shots, minimal dialogue, inscrutable snippets of philosophical debate, and above all ambiguity and a lack of action. Sound like a promising way to spend 2 hours and 40 minutes?
I was shocked to find the film available at my local Japanese video store. What were they thinking? This film is exactly the type of pretentious art-house film that is highly praised, being picked #29 by the British Film Institute of the “50 Greatest Films of All Time” and getting a 100% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while being completely unwatchable. I started the film determined to give it my undivided attention, but it punished me unrelentingly. I dare anyone to watch this film to the end without wanting to stick a fork in their eye.
The story has been changed quite dramatically from the book. The entire backstory about the visitation, black market for alien artifacts, and various organizations’ schemes are mainly left out, leaving us with… I’m not sure what. Instead, we have the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor (much like the 4 main characters of Vandermeer’s Annihilation), the latter two seeking either inspiration or fame by discovering a Room in the Zone that will grant the entrant’s deepest wish.
We are then subjected to over two hours where almost nothing happens at all. My wife and daughter started to ridicule the film and we decided to wait to see if anything happened at all, and burst into laughter at Tarkovsky’s insistence on lovingly filming desolate, abandoned industrial scenes with no events of any kind. There were quite a few completely incomprehensible discussions among the three characters about the meaning of life, ambition, and their true motivations for seeking the room. The ending is almost comically obtuse, as every time there is any possibility of action, the characters elect instead to sit or lie on the dirt floor and mumble about drivel. I have a feeling that Tarkovsky and I would not get along at a cocktail party.
I guess Tarkovsky saw the film as a means of exploring the inner psychology of his characters, and the Zone as merely a framing device for this. I don’t think that was the original intention of the Strugatsky brothers (though they wrote the screenplay), since Roadside Picnic was, for me at least, more about how humans react to a superior and unknowable alien presence. So frankly the intent of Stalker was completely lost on me. There is one telling anecdote I read about. When a government official complained that the film was slow-moving, Tarkovsky supposedly retorted “the film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.” Pretty contemptuous of the viewer, if you ask me. Why bother making the film at all? I would grant this film zero stars — steer clear of it....more
Radio Free Albemuth: Divine messages via a pink laser from space Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 but onlRadio Free Albemuth: Divine messages via a pink laser from space Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 but only published posthumously in 1985. Even for Philip K Dick, this is a bizarre and partly deranged book. It’s a deeply personal autobiographical attempt for him to make sense of a series of bizarre religious experiences he collectively referred to as “2-3-74”. So if you are only a casual fan of PKD’s books or movies, this is probably not for you. However, if you love his novels and know something of his troubled life, it will provide an absolutely fascinating picture of a man struggling to extract meaning from it all, using every resource his powerful, wide-ranging and increasingly unstable mind can muster. It may be a confounding mess for many, but what a gloriously courageous attempt he makes. For me this book and his later complete rewrite VALIS (1981) provide a window into PKD’s mind that no other books can (other than the massive and unreadable Exegesis of Philip K Dick), and is a moving and profound experience if you go along with it.
The story starts out quite simply. Part one is narrated by none other than Philip K Dick, a struggling science fiction writer and friend of Nicholas Brady, a Berkeley dropout who works at local record store. It is the late 1960s, and the book humorously depicts the growing counter-culture in Berkeley, with its legions of anti-establishment intellectuals roaming the streets and coffee houses on Telegraph Ave. It turns out that this is an alternate history United States where despotic right-winger Ferris F. Freemont has become President after Lyndon B. Johnson (think a sinister amalgam of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy). He is determined to crush liberals, free speech, and communist conspiracies. There is also a citizens militia of sorts called “Friends of the American People”, which serve to investigate anti-government groups including a (perhaps fictitious) organization called Aramchek dedicated to overthrowing Fremont’s government.
Nick’s career at the record store is going nowhere, though he has an encyclopedic knowledge of music. He begins to receive strange visions that he believes are signals from VALIS, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. These signals come to him at 3am at night, delivered by a near-earth satellite firing a focused pink laser beam (I’m not joking here) straight to his brain. At first he is not sure what is happening, but gradually he understands that VALIS is a super rational alien collective mind that has chosen him (and a select few others) for a mission to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of President Freemont. This revelation is of course quite disturbing to his wife Rachel, but when VALIS warns him that his infant son Christopher has an inguinal hernia, something that did not show up in any medical exams, they rush him to the hospital and the doctors are shocked to discover his diagnosis was right, and do an emergency surgery to save his son (this actually happened to PKD in real life apparently). This causes their belief in VALIS to grow.
Eventually VALIS grants visions to Nick that he should move to LA and become a record producer for folk musicians. He moves his family to LA and very quickly finds success in his new job. VALIS then reveals that this is all part of his mission to embed secret anti-Fremont subliminal messages in the songs he produces, in order to overthrow the totalitarian regime and bring freedom to the masses, who do not realize they are trapped in the Black Iron Prison that is representative of the evil Roman Empire that persecuted early Christians and has never ended. We also learn that VALIS has made previous attempts to heal the world of its madness, including various early Christian Gnostics, Elijah from the Old Testament, Jesus, etc. However, the Empire has continued to prevail, but VALIS has not given up the struggle. PDK provides dozens of pages explaining the philosophy of VALIS and all the obscure historical clues as to why the world is ailing. He dives way down the rabbit hole into cosmogony and cosmology, explaining how the creator of the universe is irrational and separate from the Logos, or rational mind, that is the ultimate source of wisdom. VALIS has sent homoplasmates to bond with certain chosen humans and impart this secret wisdom. HAVE I LOST YOU YET? ONLY PKD COULD COME UP WITH THIS STUFF, AND HE ACTUALLLY BELIEVES IT TOO.
One day Nick has a vision of a folk singer named Sylvia, and soon after this she shows up at his office, asking for a clerical job. He hires her but convinces her she should be a songwriter instead, and they reveal to each other that they have been having similar dreams from VALIS. Having finally discovered a kindred spirit (which turns out to be part of the Aramchek movement), they seek to put VALIS’s plan into action, recording a hit song with the message “Join the party”, a subliminal appeal to revolution. His relationship with his wife is strained by his friendship with Sylvia (whose real last name turns out to be Aramchek). However, his good buddy Philip K Dick stays true to him despite being skeptical of this craziness. For some reason a lot of this weird 1960s conspiracy stuff and obscure underground societies reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
Nick and Sylvia think they have successfully produced the song that will launch their revolution, but the FAPers (Friends of the American People) have actually been spying on them the entire time, and seize both of them along with PKD and throw them into a secret confinement facility outside the justice system. The FAPers reveal that they know about the plot, and that it has been foiled. There are some final events I won’t spoil, but suffice to say that the real PKD was clearly VERY PARANOID about the Republican Party, the FBI and CIA, and right-wingers in general. As everyone knows, they really are out to get us all.
Whether or not you buy into any of PKDs paranoid fantasies or strange religious experiences, it’s undeniable that he wrote this book with searing honesty, pathos for the struggles of his characters (himself, really), and out of a genuine desire to understand what exactly was happening to him with all these visions and hallucinations. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book and its successor VALIS is that PKD separates himself into two characters, Nicholas Brady and PKD in Radio Free Albemuth, and Horselover Fat and PKD in VALIS. This essentially allows him to have an extended dialog with himself, as the Nick and Horselover characters undergo the strange visions and hallucinations, while the PKD characters are separate from this and serve as devil’s advocate. I’ve never seen a clearer fictional depiction of schizophrenia, but the fact that PKD could control the process and explore his own mental breakdown in a fictional narrative is simply incredible and to me was quite moving, particularly in VALIS. You can feel his struggles with sanity, even if you don’t believe in his gonzo religious philosophy. It’s a unique literary experience for any hardcore PKD fan, though it may make no sense whatsoever to most readers.
Film Version (2010): I was surprised to discover a film version of Radio Free Albemuth had been made as a low budget indie production back in 2010 starring Jonanath Scarfe as Nicholas Brady, Katheryn Winnick as his wife Rachel, Shea Whigham as Philip K Dick, and Alanis Morisette as Slyvia Aramchek. With great trepidation but irresistible curiosity I watched it on Netflix. Basically all the dream sequences are laughably bad, and the actors struggle to deliver all of PKD’s bizarre dialog with straight faces, but that is really due to the source material itself. Frankly, I don’t think this book was ever meant to be filmed, and is almost impossible to make convincing. So I don’t blame the filmmakers, but I think this would be impossible to watch except for die-hard PKD fans like myself who’ve read the book already. It seems the producers also have the rights to VALIS as well, but I sincerely hope they don’t try that one. It makes Radio Free Albemuth seem downright conventional. I do give kudos to Shea Whigham for portraying PKD as a smart and somewhat cynical SF writer, but the real PKD was actually a combination of both Nick Brady and SF writer PKD, which makes for a much more complicated and unstable personality....more
Memories of the Space Age: Autopsy of a lost dream Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Memories of the Space Age (1988) is a limited edition hardcovMemories of the Space Age: Autopsy of a lost dream Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Memories of the Space Age (1988) is a limited edition hardcover published by small press Arkham House, with a gorgeous cover of Max Ernst’s ‘Europe After the Rain’ that captures the hallucinatory, decayed imagery of J.G. Ballard’s collection. It contains eight stories written between 1962 and 1985, thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age. The stories have so much overlap that some readers will find them very repetitive, and that is undeniable. Yet they do lure the reader into Ballard’s hypnotic world in a way few other writers do. These are the stories:
"The Cage of Sand" (1962), "A Question of Re-entry" (1962), "The Dead Astronaut" (1968), "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island" (1974), "News from the Sun" (1981), "Memories of the Space Age" (1982), "Myths of the Near Future" (1982), and "The Man Who Walked on the Moon" (1985).
All of the stories have a similar feel, and perhaps the earliest one, “The Cage of Sand,” captures Ballard’s ideas the best. It’s the story of Bridgeman, an architect who was not chosen to design a new colony on Mars, a failed astronaut named Travis, and Louise, the wife of a dead astronaut. They occupy some abandoned hotels near Cape Canaveral among the abandoned launch gantries, with the latter two obsessively watching the revolving satellites that revolve around the Earth, carrying dead astronauts — including Louise’s husband. Bridgeman is there for a different reason, since the site has been covered with Martian sand brought back from Mars to compensate for the lost mass from earlier Earth expeditions. That may make no sense at all, but it’s an irresistible image for Ballard: Earthlings basking in Martian sands on a Florida beach. However, the sands also contain an undetectable virus that attacks Earth’s flora and fauna, wrecking civilization. So Florida is now deserted except for a few eccentrics, and the security forces who decide to erect a fence to contain the site after failing to convince them to leave (hence the title). The atmosphere is drenched in languid images that reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles:
At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped onto his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the half-submerged hotels. Behind the silent facades, in the tilting sand-filled streets which had once glittered with cocktail bars and restaurants, it was already night. Halos of moonlight beaded the lamp standards with silver dew, and draped the shuttered windows and slipping cornices like a frost of frozen gas.
I think it’s very telling that “The Cage of Sand” was published in 1962, a year after the first manned space flight by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961. Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose in Burbank, CA in 1962, and John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, TX in 1963. The conflict in Vietnam rapidly escalated in the early 1960s, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident happening in 1964, drawing the US into a drawn out conflict. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated within 2 months of each other in 1968. Finally, in 1969 the Apollo 11 mission allowed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take those historic steps on the Moon. The US and Soviet space programs were engaged in the Cold War and Space Race for supremacy. All of these events were extremely influential on Ballard’s writing, and it’s interesting to observe how his writing may have evolved as events unfolded. Notably, the space shuttle Challenger disaster did not happen until 1986, but Ballard seems to have already predicted the decline and failure of US space ambitions well before that. It makes sense that a thematic collection like Memories of the Space Age would be published in 1988.
It’s fascinating how consistently Ballard returned to these ideas over three decades, and his obsession with mankind’s attempts to penetrate space and leave the planet. Unlike the vast majority of Golden Age SF by writers like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, Ballard takes a very negative view of ‘outer space’, and instead seeks to explore ‘inner space.’ His stories explore the psyche of spaceflight, and inevitably his characters encounter failure, insanity, and despair in their attempts to come to grips with it. It’s not clear exactly why Ballard found the idea of spaceflight so repellent, but if I may take a stab at it, I think he viewed it as humanity surrendering to its increasing adulation of technology and conquering of the natural environment. This can certainly be seen in extreme form in his tales of urban existential disaster: Crash, Concrete Island, and High-Rise.
It’s safe to say that Ballard has always taken a jaundiced view of modernity — our love of urban lifestyles, technology, and media imagery. I think his main intent in exploring these themes has been to expose the dangerous pathologies that have arisen as a result of our focus on surface comforts at the expense of our ‘inner space’ and emotional lives. And yet I don’t think he has ever explicitly shown us an example of the opposite, his idea of a utopian society. Returning to nature in his stories generally represents a return to barbarism, not the idyllic world of Eden. Yet between barbarism and an emotionally void modern life, what is there to uphold as a model for healthy living?
Based on reading four of his novels and over 50 of his short stories, Ballard’s most hopeful stories feature characters that have escaped the grips of time, but this takes the form of crystallization or plunging into the dreams of the distant past. Perhaps Ballard himself sought in vain to discover hope through his writing. And yet he wrote so eloquently of failed ambitions, a desire to escape the constraints of time and entropy, and our persistent modern myths, that his writing occupies a unique place that straddles literary ambitions and speculative fiction, both adopting and subverting the spaceflight and technology tropes of our beloved SF genre. It’s no surprise that J.G. Ballard is not always considered a welcome presence in the SF field, but for me his works represent a refreshing counterpoint to the usual SF themes....more
The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard: A broad spectrum of Ballard’s capabilities Originally published at Fantasy Literature The Best Short Stories of The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard: A broad spectrum of Ballard’s capabilities Originally published at Fantasy Literature The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (1979) was published in 1977 in the UK and 1978 in the US. It contains a few stories from J.G. Ballard’s earlier, more conventional SF phase in the late 1950s, his most productive and lyrical phase in the early and mid 1960s, and a small sampling of his experimental ‘condensed novel’ phase of the late 1960s/early 1970s. The stories are taken from these collections: The Voices of Time (1962), Billennium (1962), Passport to Eternity (1963), The Terminal Beach (1964), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), and Vermilion Sands (1971).
The stories themselves are: “Concentration City” (1956), “Manhole 69” (1957), “Chronopolis” (1960), “The Voices of Time” (1960), “Deep End” (1960), “The Overloaded Man” (1961), “Billennium” (1961), “The Garden of Time” (1961), “Thirteen for Centaurus” (1961), “The Subliminal Man” (1961), “The Cage of Sand” (1962), “End-Game” (1963), “The Drowned Giant” (1964), “The Terminal Beach” (1963), “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” (1966), “The Assassination of JFK Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” (1965), “The Atrocity Exhibition” (1966), “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy” (1967), and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968).
In The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, I found his earlier stories to be more conventional than in his later collections, and while still interesting, lacking that distinctive Ballardian lyrical and thematic style: namely, “Concentration City” (1956), “Manhole 69” (1957), “The Overloaded Man” (1961), “Billennium” (1961), “Thirteen for Centaurus” (1961), and “The Subliminal Man” (1961). Interestingly, both “Concentration City” and “Billennium” are about impossibly overpopulated future cities, a direct contrast to Ballard’s later obsession with solitary characters lost in desolate, deserted cities, space launch sites, jungles, etc. The other stories from that period didn’t really leave much of an impression on me.
“Chronopolis” (1960), “The Voices of Time” (1960), “The Garden of Time” (1961), and “The Cage of Sand” (1962) were the standout stories that do not overlap with his collection The Terminal Beach and contain the most classic Ballardian themes of entropy, melancholy, time coming to a halt as the past merges with the present and future, lonely couples, obsessed eccentrics, deserted hotels, abandoned launch sites, empty swimming pools, strange and pointless scientific experiments, dead astronauts orbiting space forever, and the moribund US space program.
Finally, The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard includes four bizarre ‘condensed novels’ from Ballard’s controversial collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970): “The Assassination of JFK Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” (1965), “The Atrocity Exhibition” (1966), “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy” (1967), and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968). From the titles alone, you know they are not your normal subject matter. In fact, the first US edition was destroyed by publisher Nelson Doubleday due to concerns about lawsuits from celebrities mentioned as well as general concerns over obscenity. That, of course, made the few remaining copies extremely valuable, and with most such cases, makes readers even more interested. Eventually, US publisher Grove Press took the plunge and published it in 1972 as Love and Napalm: Export USA.
Inspired by William S. Burroughs, these stories are fragmented, bizarre, experimental, and explore the unstable main character’s twisted attempts to come to grips with major public events of that era such as Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, the Cold War and space race between the US and USSR, and most of all the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Honestly, it’s hard to really grasp what Ballard intended with these stories, as they defy any conventional storytelling standards. They certainly explore his patented ‘inner space’, which often shapes the external environment, but there isn’t much pleasure to be derived from reading them now. Basically they’re of historical interest now as experimental writing from that period, but not much more (some fans may disagree, of course).
Overall, I think The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard is a good sampling of three distinct phases of Ballard’s writing: his earlier, more conventional SF period, his most lyrical and distinctive middle period, and his later, more experimental period. In that sense, it is a convenient way to trace his development as a writer. However, as I think his best and most enduring short work comes from his middle period, I would recommend The Terminal Beach and Vermilion Sands, which contain the bulk of his best, most memorable stories. Of course, if you are a dedicated completist, then the only way to go is with the massive The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, which itself has some notable omissions.
Finally, it’s worth noting that after the 1984 publication of Ballard’s autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun and the 1987 film version by Steven Spielberg, he suddenly found himself in the limelight and enjoying much more mainstream attention, and went on to a very prolific writing phase which produced a number of notable mainstream novels (none of which I’ve read), such as Running Wild (1988), The Kindness of Women (1991), Rushing to Paradise (1994), Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006)....more
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