The Inescapable Presence of Harlan Ellison
The cantankerous legend hovers over modern science fiction; plus, utopian predictions for life in 2010 that wildly missed the mark
The reason I wanted to include Amazing Science Fiction Stories in “Flashback” is a little counter-intuitive for a project where I’m re-visiting my favorite science fiction from my youth: I want to re-read it because I didn’t particularly like Amazing and I want to see if I was wrong.
I was more of an Asimov’s kid — there’s a reason this project started with two issues of that magazine. I suspect that getting positive feedback from the editor for my first submission played a lot into that. Kindness goes a long way. But Asimov’s was a little more “gee whiz, bang bang” science fiction compared to Amazing, which I considered to be — to borrow a word of the moment — weird.
That’s obvious from the cover of this issue, a prime example of ‘70s surrealism by fantasy artist and illustrator Ian Miller. There’s nothing wrong with it, as a piece of art. It just has nothing to do with any of the contents of the magazine. Granted, sci-fi mags and books are famous for having nonsensical, ridiculous, and/or butt-ugly cover art. But even by those standards, this desaturated medieval nightmare doesn’t exactly scream “Buy me!” from the magazine rack.
An interesting choice for a magazine that desperately needed people to buy it. I can only assume that the choice was made for them because they didn’t have money to spend on a full-color, original illustration. For as famed as Amazing was — it was the first true “science fiction magazine” and launched plenty of careers — it had foundered in financial doldrums and crises for decades by 1981. During the ‘60s it had devolved into a reprint factory, mining its past glories for cheap copy in the present. That led to some major changes in the industry when those writers being reprinted rightly objected because they weren’t getting paid.
I didn’t realize at the time but this is why every typewritten manuscript I submitted began with my name, address, word count, and the all-important “First North American Serial Rights.” It’s like I tell my real estate clients about all the forms they endure when buying a house — each of those words and phrases stems from a story of someone getting screwed over.
Anyway, at this point in Amazing’s history it was digging its way out of all that but old habits died hard. In a 130-page issue, you don’t get an original, previously unpublished story until page 56. Instead, the magazine leads off with an excerpt from the then-upcoming Roger Zelazny novel, Madwand. Financially, this makes sense. The magazine gets free copy and the book gets free advertising. But the former editor in me looks at this whole mess and just sees twenty — twenty! — pages turned over to free advertising. Between that and the lack of paid advertising (they couldn’t even sell the inside front or back cover, which is print advertising bread-and-butter), no wonder they were still struggling.
Skipping past the excerpt you get a reprint masquerading as “The Amazing Hall of Fame.” I’ll admit, a creative way to draw on your historic status while cutting costs. In this case, they chose “The Discarded,” an early and classic story by Harlan Ellison. And I know he got paid.
You can fuck with a lot of people and a lot of things, but one thing you never wanted to fuck with is Harlan Ellison and his intellectual property rights.
Funny enough, one of the letters to the editor in this issue complains specifically about the Amazing Hall of Fame, calling it “a transparent device to run reprints, and reduce production costs.” The editor responds, noting that they are “re-buying” the stories. Yes, but it’s cheaper to re-buy a previously published story than it is to buy a new one (especially a new one by an author at the level of Ellison).
On the plus side, “The Discarded” is a classic for a reason. Humans suffering horrific and spectacular mutations as the result of multiple nuclear wars have been hounded from the surface of the Earth and refused landing at any human colonies throughout the solar system. Confinement in a ship orbiting above a home planet that shuns them leads many to suicide. Then, the leaders of Earth make an offer that sounds too good to be true but irresistible to the desperate. This is a story about hope versus deep despair. And despair wins.
Damn humans, they can never be trusted.
Although it already felt a little dated by 1981 — it was originally published in 1959 — the ending packs a punch then and now with the rather depressing cynicism Ellison honed over the years in this and other stories, such as “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” That last one was one of the most horrifying things I read as a kid. I highly recommend it.
For someone of my age, growing up with Star Wars on movie screens, Star Trek in reruns, and dystopian science fiction films from the 60s and 70s running in “Late Night Movie” perpetuity meant having an incredibly broad range of works to choose from. Space opera, techno utopias, population bombs, post-nuclear societies — it was all there. And Harlan Ellison wrote for, or influenced, a hell of a lot of it.
I mentioned in an earlier column Ellison’s famed anthology, Dangerous Visions, and its follow-up, Again, Dangerous Visions.1 Through those, he helped launch and craft the whole “New Wave” of sci-fi and fantasy and promoted the work of numerous — and somewhat diverse, for the time — writers. He also played an active role in the industry, a litigious quasi-crank who actively sought fights over writer’s pay and publishing rights. It paid off for him and helped set better standards for the industry.
I don’t want to give too much credit here. Ellison was one of many who worked for better pay and treatment of writers. He just happens to be one of the most prolific (and profane) of them and played an outsized role in science fiction.
Just how outsized is partly illustrated in this very issue of Amazing, which features a story, “Harmless Illusions,” by Felix Gotschalk, that’s an exceptionally un-subtle “comedy” about Ellison and the entire cadre of New Wave writers.
How un-subtle? It starts off interviewing one cranky old intellectual named “Ellen Harlison.” It goes downhill from there into a weird fever dream of borderline anti-semitism, straight out Orientalism, “no homo” homophobia, and inside jokes that I’m pretty sure weren’t funny even at the time. I couldn’t find much on Gotschalk outside of a reference to him in a fanzine as a “divisive” writer with an “anal-focused” style, and that sounds about right.
Fourteen years after its publication, Dangerous Visions was still driving the conversation, for better or worse, and would continue to do so until cyberpunk took over. Ellison’s influence is still with us (he only died in 2018, it hasn’t been that long), particularly his penchant for probing the more cynical parts of human nature. If you haven’t read him you really should.
So, what else did Amazing have on tap in August 1981?
Well, the rest of the issue is pretty solid, at least with the fiction.
Short Stories
“The Foxworth Legatees,” by Ron Goulart
Imagine Knives Out as a science-fiction story featuring an AI-programmed satellite mansion, a slew of clones, and Benoit Blanc transformed into a green-skinned heterosexual polygamist, and you’ll be about halfway to “The Foxworth Legatees.” When the rich and reclusive Foxworth, who lives in the sentient home orbiting a strange world, is murdered suspicion falls on his fifty-three clones and robotic copies who’ve gathered for a reading of the will.
Taking established genres like the murder mystery and adding sci-fi twists is as old as science fiction itself. Making it comedic generally adds a degree of difficulty that most writers don’t seem to pull off (though I admit that humor is super subjective). Goulart mostly pulls it off here, with a lighthearted romp through mystery cliches that lands the jokes more often than it misses.
Two things stand out reading from the future. First, as always, technology prediction is hilarious in retrospect. Predictions of super-powered computers have certainly come true, as per the smart phone in your pocket. What they mostly did not get — and wouldn’t, I think, until writers like William Gibson, Neil Stephenson, and other cyberpunkers broke through — was the sheer level of surveillance that would come with those tech advances.
Case in point: a major plot point revolves around there not being cameras in areas of a satellite home run by a paranoid zillionaire and a sentient computer. It’s funny from 2024, because in these times writers have to work themselves into knots to write around the intrusion of technology in our lives. Except for the most extreme situations, no one is ever out of touch, we all carry homing beacons around with us, and you literally cannot walk down a street without appearing on a doorbell or security camera.
The second is the sexuality on display, which sounds progressive on its face but really isn’t. The polygamous protagonist has two wives but this is no throuple — it’s two wives competing for attention and affection from the dominant husband. It’s icky when you think about it for even a second. Then there’s the use of homosexuality in another species yet again being used to signify how alien they are.
Finally, the estate lawyer at one point says of the deceased, “How the blinking bejeezus the old boy could live up here in this pansy of a house is beyond me.” Um, he called the house a fag. I’m not offended, it’s just stupid and probably one of the more ‘80s moments I’ve run across here.
“The Sea Above,” by Gene Kilczer
Continuing my theme of “it’s like this other story but,” this tale of infiltrating an underwater alien society is a lot like the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where a surgically altered Riker is trapped on a first-contact candidate planet and has to escape by having sex with a horny alien played by Bebe Neuwirth.
ST:TNG was just weird sometimes.
Anyway, where Riker was trying to establish, um, relations under the benevolence of the Federation, “The Sea Above” is about corporate imperialism and the plunder of resources. It’s the genre of humans as rapacious scavengers of the stars who visit upon other worlds all the ills they’ve already visited upon themselves.
Being a Star Trek fan, I generally try to maintain an optimistic outlook on human progress but the past few years have really put a dent in my consideration of basic humanity. Overall, this story is a pretty good exploration of that with one major flaw: the whole thing ends on a joke that is wildly out of tone and sync with the rest of the story. Feels like the editor should have stepped in and asked, “Are you sure about that ending?” And if the author said yes, to ask again, “Are you really sure?” It’s that bad.
“On the Nature of Time,” by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini
“When I was six I dreamed that my father was murdered.”
That first line of this time-travel thought experiment hints at what’s to come in this short-short story that covers a lot ground in little space. Working through the logistics of traveling backwards in time to change the present is a constant trope of sci-fi. It stands out here due to some excellent writing, character building, and a denouement that feels both inevitable and surprising.
This is one that I remembered even before picking up the magazine for a re-read, so it definitely has a punch to it. Funny enough, Malzberg went on to publish an anthology, The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time, which in a humbleness not often shown by writers he declines to include his own story. It does, however, show up in a collection of his and Pronzini’s co-authored stories, On Account of Darkness, available on Kindle if you’re so inclined.
“The Firebird Suite,” by Richard P. Russo
The author’s note on this one confused me for a moment, because Russo refers to himself as more of a literary writer but when I looked up his bibliography I didn’t see the books I expected from recognizing his last name. Then I dug deeper into the Wiki well and realized, “Oh, he’s not that Richard Russo.”
Long story short, Richard Russo is the Pultizer Prize winning author of Empire Falls. Richard P. Russo is the author who, despite the aspirations of his Amazing bio, pretty firmly stayed in the science fiction field.
I don’t intend that as a dig, plenty of science fiction should count in the “literary” column, depending on how you define it. By my own definition, which generally circles around craft, style, and intent, “The Firebird Suite” shows an author who has a pretty strong command of the “literary” style.
Of course, publishing a story about a woman with pyrokinetic powers the year after Stephen King published Firestarter is going to invite some comparisons. So, this is like Firestarter if Charlie were a grown woman and said “Okey dokey” when the secret government agency asked her to work for them.
There are some interesting things going on here with the structure and the use of shifting first and third person POV — plus the sheer volume of annoying mansplaining this woman endures, and her true douche of a husband, gives it a fairly strong feminist slant (from a male persepective).
Overall, pretty good. And definitely with sexual content and illustration that you would never find in Asimov’s.
“A Desert Stone,” by Al Sarrantino
A first-person story from the perspective of a giant chicken wandering the desert, encountering a road, and being picked up by humans simply should not work. It’s too stupid on its face.
Yet, it really works. It should be ridiculous and off-putting, but it’s funny and nimble. Each time I thought I knew where it was going it swerved in a different direction, ratcheting up the premise and ultimately using the images of post-war ‘50s monster movies to make some salient points about the ephemerality of humans and the endurance of the world.
So, yeah, the best story in the issue is about a giant, intellectual, and kind of snooty chicken.
Amazing.
“Sound as a Dollar,” by L.A.P. Moore
A joke story about how scientists conceptualize problems in such a way that the logical solution is inevitably the most awful, this should feel relevant today but it just falls flat. The issue should have ended on a high note with the previous story, instead it peters out with this deflationary story about economics.
See what I did there? Yeah, I’m not proud.
Non-fiction
While I like Gene Wolfe as a writer, I’m going to skip the interview with him because there’s no real insight to be found. Also, it’s one of the most egregiously fawning interviews I’ve ever seen and I’ve watched Fox news reporters interview Trump.
Far more interesting and retroactively hilarious is the “Futures Fantastic” science column by J. Ray Dettling, “The Incredible Communications Revolution.”
When I mentioned “techno utopias” earlier this is the exact thing I meant.
To explain what he predicts as a communications revolution, Dettling posits a family in the far future of 2010 (god I’m old) living with the fruition of fibre-optic data delivery. It is charmingly close in some ways but oh so far off in most others.
Like many of his peers, he missed miniaturization and wireless — surprising, really, given the mania for mini that came out of Japan with transistor radios, etc., in the ‘70s — and instead predicted a family “videocon” terminal working via a giant, wall-sized display, Total Recall-style.
He nails the centrality of technology to future lives — our lives — with kids rushing to the videocon to chat with friends (yet still probably fighting over it with siblings the way we used to fight over the single family phone line). In fact, a lot of these kinds of predictions came true, in large part because the people inventing them were the ones reading the science fiction making the predictions, the uroboros of 20th century tech development. That’s why so much of tech design to this day flows from the primary source of Star Trek.
Trekkies just will not let flip phones die.
But he predicted that those kids would be coming home to chat on the videocon with their friends in Moscow and Peru. That the explosion of instant communications and data exchange would lead to a freer world, where cultures are able to communicate and learn from each other, and this fine nugget:
“For the first time in history we will begin to see a new hope for world peace as nationalism evolves to globalism.”
My notes on this section simply read, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
He goes on to say that, “Censorship would be impossible.”
Oh, my sweet summer child.
Other predictions are just creepy, such as his oddly fascist optimism that crime will be eliminated through the elimination of privacy. Actually, creepy and wildly wrong.
Leaving aside the direct sociological predictions, I’ll note that I’m being a little hard on his “videocon.” He actually gets close to predicting something in the realm of the iPhone — a portable computer was not that far out at the time. The nerds had been hot to invent a tricorder since 1967.
What he, and most everyone else at the time, missed was the software. Dettling goes to great length to talk about data traffic speeds and access to libraries. What he doesn’t talk about is applications. It’s all just computers qua computers. They’re computers so they do cool computer stuff. Cool computer stuff will make the world better.
What is the cool stuff? Computers!
Again, this is not to dunk on people for not predicting the world wide web, or social media, or the ongoing scam of crypto. It’s to point out that prediction is a messy, messy business. When you read some sclerotic columnist in The Washington Post or The New York Times or The Atlantic telling you how things are going to be five, ten, fifteen years from now, grab that salt and chug. Predictions can fail and get us in trouble.
This gets to the American belief that our example — our shining city on the hill, our technological utopia, our capitalist ideology — would lead the world to freedom if we simply opened ourselves and the world to more communication and interaction. People often associate utopianism with liberalism but conservatives have a strong streak of it themselves. The late P.J. O’Rourke, the only conservative who could make me laugh, was very guilty of this, believing that desire for and access to Nintendo products would bring populations to bear against their despotic governments and help create a more capitalist and equality driven world. That…did not happen.
In the end, for a genre filled with utopian visions and hopes for progress, Harlan Ellison is the one who got it right.
The Last Dangerous Visions, which Ellison had been promising for over fifty years, will actually be coming out this fall, posthumously for him but completed by his friend, the ultra-prolific J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5). It may be five decades late but I’m still eager to check it out.