“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967)

I guess we can give Harlan Ellison some points for paranoia prescience with this very early vision of an AI dystopia. As such, it reminded me a lot of 19th-century horror, which often seems to believe that simply mentioning something uncanny, such as a ghost, is enough to set the mood. The idea of an AI takeover is barely developed here. It just happened somehow. Computers around the world have become sentient and they really hate people. They have allied into one thing—called “AM”—and wiped out all humanity except for the five featured in this story, who are being tortured and kept alive indefinitely. It’s been going on for 109 years at the time of the story—apparently the machines can somehow confer immortality or at least long life too. Lucky day. They seem to be able to do practically anything they want. The bad news is that the machines hate with molten rage (an Ellison specialty) even if specific reasons are not given here. They just do. The story is basically scenes of torture and terror alternating with world-building explanations and exposition. Ellison brings a lot of energy to his work, which has always been one of the main appeals about it. He may often feel like he’s making shit up, but at least it’s usually interesting shit. At this point I am beginning to think, however, that he might be more of a young person’s writer. He’s not impressive to me now the way he was when I read him in my 20s. I always intended to read more of him then but unfortunately never got around to it. Now his stuff too often feels made up, though certainly he goes deep into his themes and ideas. The thing about this one is that it never goes much further than its striking title and premise. It doesn’t have to, or didn’t. Now it has a lot of stiff competition in the realm of AI dystopia. Start with The Matrix and no doubt whole shelves of SF I don’t know at all. In fact, we might be living in that dystopia any day now. Still, I was glad to get to this story finally.

Harlan Ellison, Greatest Hits
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“Jeffty Is Five” (1977)

Wikipedia calls this story by Harlan Ellison a fantasy, which seems about right. It makes no sense what’s going on, has no rational basis. Jeffty—Jeff Kinzer—seems to be permanently 5 years old, that’s all. The first-person narrator was his age when they met in the neighborhood and became friends. Now he is a 22-year-old college graduate starting his own business, an electronics repair shop. He grows on, but Jeffty does not. For some reason this is not entirely clear to people around him until Jeffty is 14, which seems a little slow on the draw, but that’s how the story goes. Could be psychological denial on the part of his parents, who are notably depressed. Ellison throws in another nice wrinkle when it turns out Jeffty is apparently living in an alternate timeline. The radio in his bedroom plays old-time radio shows, not the rock ‘n’ roll and pop music of the story’s present day. But the shows Jeffty listens to are also contemporary, aware of and making references to current events. Jeffty can even enter contests on the radio and send away for prizes, which are old-fashioned but also brand-new. The narrator stays friends with Jeffty, but inevitably the dynamic starts to have aspects of babysitting, or maybe the old Big Brothers program. There are good, inexplicable things going on here, but I’m not sure Ellison understands the situation any better than we do and he’s the author for crying out loud. He has a responsibility. But it feels more like he’s just playing with it, riffing on it. It has less of Ellison’s typical rage to propel it, but there is a detectable bitterness about time and aging. Over at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), I have only rarely seen so many rankings for any other story I can recall, 12 votes with a composite 9.08 (of 10), which certainly speaks to Ellison’s lasting popularity and regard. As usual, I am feeling a little contrarian. I like the wistful tone of this story but there’s something rancid in it too—it’s on the fence about what it means to be 5 years old maybe even forever. Ellison also didn’t seem to know how to finish it except by kind of blowing it up, which doesn’t really work. In fairness, I wouldn’t know how to end it myself. Despite any misgivings, the story does have many nice passages.

The Essential Ellison, ed. Terry Dowling
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"The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" (1967)

It turns out that Harlan Ellison's longish story is not just riffing on poor Robert Bloch's previous story, "A Toy for Juliette," but is self-consciously the next chapter. I say "poor" Robert Bloch because he has also been roped into writing the introduction to this story and really doesn't have a lot to say. Of course it sounds like Bloch has high regard for Ellison (he would have to, either way) and I get the sense it's sincere, though he appears somewhat bewildered by the requests. In many ways, Bloch and Ellison are opposites. Both are fascinated by cruelty, but Bloch is more circumspect, laying little traps in his writing that are designed to bloom cunningly into clarity. Whereas Ellison is verbose and explicit. Bloch is a folk song murder ballad. Ellison is an opera. Ellison's story is three times the size of Bloch's, and doesn't come with much of a surprise the way Bloch's does—indeed, was engineered to. I think of Ellison as sort of the Lester Bangs of science fiction, which means in part that I'm OK with his excesses. What interests me most about these two stories is the suggestion of an old guard / new blood distinction. Bloch started publishing in the 1930s. Also, for what it's worth, he's probably known more as a horror or maybe crime fiction writer. In his afterword, Ellison discusses how hard his story was to write. It took more than a year in fits and starts. And it feels a little labored, not to say overdone. It might be the story he was hoping for from Bloch, with the Victorian savagery of the killer juxtaposed by the gleaming technology of The Future. It's going to be heavy for the future when it tangles with Jack the Ripper, man. And so it is, at some length. Bloch's story might be better—if it's more gimmicky, it's also more crafted, and unpleasant, which has to be part of the point. Ellison's is more like a report from his brain which has stalled with vapor lock on the creative problem. It can be highly effective, and in general is one of the most tightly written stories here, but it never has much of anywhere to go. Ultimately it's Jack the Ripper who does most of the work in all of these stories, including Bloch's original from the 1940s, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper." In other words, they tend to be ever more grotesque exercises in "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Dangerous Visions (1967)

Well, I enjoyed doing the long short story project completed last month—not least because I got to add some of my own horror and mystery genre choices along the way. Even the three main anthologies indulged themselves a little in that regard. But too late, I thought of science fiction, which was also a staple of early reading and ended up mostly shut out of the story project. One Kurt Vonnegut story was not enough (and Vonnegut's story isn't even such a good representation of science fiction). To rectify that, I turned to Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison's landmark science fiction anthology. That was about a year ago, and just as I was preparing to start posting about it came news of Harlan Ellison's death this past June 27, 84 years old. Sad news—he was a formidable, unique, and always interesting writer, editor, and character.

Dangerous Visions is over 50 years old now, and science fiction has gone through multiple eras since. But arguably the collection still has claims on our attention—for one thing, it's the first science fiction anthology ever that was made up only of commissioned work (rather than plundering back issues of SF magazines such as Astounding Stories or Galaxy Science Fiction, which had been the norm and often still is). I remember when I came across Dangerous Visions in the early '70s the stories still had a jazzy charismatic glow of transgressive zing—"dangerous" is probably fair enough.

Invisible Man (1952)

This great American novel, the only one Ralph Ellison published while he was alive, is conceived in such scope and detail it's clear he must have argued a lot with himself about the details. Obviously, for example, he decided not to use the definite article ("The") for the title, presumably to universalize the central tenet (or perhaps thinking he could avoid confusion with H.G. Wells's 19th-century horror tale). And he did not insert a comma between the two words, which would have emphasized his motivating idea with a pivot to hipster dialect. As much as anything, the struggle Ellison lays out in the totality of his amazing episodic saga, full of fancies and bold conceits and simply one of the best American novels that exists, is the matter of looking to win the simple respect of being seen. The presidency of Barack Obama and what came after are urgent reminders that the racial problems we refuse to face today we have always refused to face. And until the majority can look at the minority (however you slice and dice, by race, gender, ethnicity, religiosity, sexual orientation) and see them—a prospect that could still be unlikely today, more than 60 years after the publication of this book, which was nearly a hundred years after the Civil War—then the problems we have always had will continue. Some aspects of Invisible Man may seem out of date now, such as the lengthy episodes with the Communist Party, but if they are dated they are nonetheless good history, and certainly illustrative of dynamics still at play. Ellison's panorama is sweeping. It starts in the South, where Negroes are omnipresent but institutionally shackled, and travels to the North, where official policy is to keep blacks out of sight. In either case, the vertiginous sense of invisibility is produced for its objects, who are people. If it feels dated in some places, it still makes its way to moments that feel ripped from today's headlines, such as many of the encounters with police. And it's never less than dazzling, with its clarion language, headlong narrative momentum, and many cunning tricks. It is always operating poetically at multiple levels, with surging power. It's never mired by literary baggage but the baggage is there to be unpacked, on practically every page. The first-person narrator and our epic hero is unnamed, of course. One of his early experiences in the North is a job in a factory that specializes in a paint so bright it seems to glow, called "Optic White." By the general reaction to him of his all white coworkers it's evident he's a token hire. His first task is the final step in the process of making "Optic White" paint: 10 drops, no more and no fewer, of a mysterious liquid black substance. Oh there's black and white all over Invisible Man—it's what it's self-consciously made of. At the same time, in the factory, Ellison is also drawing a portrait of a nearly totalitarian war industry—which indeed prevailed openly in World War II and after, was characterized in 1961 by President Eisenhower as the "military-industrial complex," and is more virulent now than ever. So it's not just race that Ellison is on about, but also American power and corruption, the Communist movement, crony capitalism, and much more. Essential.

In case it's not at the library.