Book Review: Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits Edited by J. Michael Straczynski; Part Two
I have been a traveler for much of my life, but my situation and finances don’t make it possible to do so at present. They do, however, make it possible for me to qualify for the national program known as Museums for All, through which I can gain admission to most of the museums in the city for free. I decided, therefore, for the time being at least, to travel through time and space by exploring the variegated and multifaceted museum exhibits throughout Seattle. Besides the Museum of Pop Culture, or MoPOP, which explores the history of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and popular music (and at which Harlan Ellison has a place in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame), I have visited museums that celebrate Asian, Nordic, and Native American cultures. I’ve also perused many works of art, from classic to modern. Sometimes I have come across beautiful paintings that at first seem to be abstract splashes of color but exude great emotional power or pieces that blend seemingly disparate materials into strikingly cohesive statements. And as I pondered these works I wondered how the same assemblies of mystery and wonder could be accomplished in prose. When I brought up the subject, one museum employee suggested that some poetry does this, and that’s true, but I was more concerned about how abstractions in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts might be rendered in story form.
It’s not easy to put a story, or parts of a story, together as a collage of language with a unifying theme, but Ellison is a master at it. He accomplishes this with great skill in stories such as “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” and especially “The Deathbird.” In these tales, each part is a shining prose gem, and together the disparate parts unite in theme to create a devastating message.
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” was written back in the 1960s, but it is as relevant now as ever as the tale of a world-encompassing AI that has run amuck and destroyed most of humankind, keeping only a few survivors alive so that it can endlessly torment them. As I mentioned before, this story changed my life with its brilliance and originality. It is a dark, dark tale, but oh so well told. One objection I have with the Greatest Hits version of it, though: in the original story, in the scene breaks Ellison had inserted streams of punchcode tapes; these were meant to represent AM, the AI’s, continuous presence. Ellison had even taken the further step of having the tapes coded in international telegraph alphabet with the phrases “I think, therefore I am,” and “Cogito ergo sum,” which has the same meaning but in Latin. Even if you don’t know what the tapes mean, these interludes are eerie and powerful. However, for some reason Straczynski eliminated them and simply titled the sections alternately “I Think Therefore I Am” and “Cogito Ergo Sum” over and over, which comes across as much blander, especially if, like me, you’ve been able to compare the two versions. It doesn’t detract from Ellison’s powerful prose, but it puts it in a slightly less effective frame.
The novelette “The Deathbird” is, in a sense, Ellison’s atheist manifesto. In it, the roles of god and devil are reversed. God is a mad maniac that destroys the Earth and humankind, while the alien Snake, the devil character, is a compassionate guide to the last human on his final quest. Whether or not you agree with the religious implications of the tale (the two creatures representing god and the devil are, in the story, alien entities), it is a heartbreaking tale of the irredeemable loss of the planet we call home, which is sentient and is likened to a grieving mother. But that’s not all. The story is told in twenty-six sections that roam from past to present to far future. Some take the form of an quiz with questions pertaining to the theme. One of the sections even has an interlude that tells the true tale of Ellison’s dog Ahbhu (incidentally the inspiration for the award-winning novella “A Boy and His Dog,” which is not included in this collection): how Ellison rescued him from a shelter, learned to love and trust him, and finally had to put him down when he became deathly ill. But all the disparate parts come together flawlessly as an intricate literary mosaic.
“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” which has always been one of my favorite Ellison works, has a brilliant storyline, but it goes far beyond mere story in the telling. It is a novelette-length piece of prose poetry, its descriptions intricate and ornate and deeply emotional. When a character dies, this turn of plot is not simply stated; instead, Ellison takes readers on a wild cyclonic rollercoaster ride through the process of dying, even using stylistic touches such as changes in margins and font size to provide graphic illustrations beyond words. In his introduction to the story in his collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: Stories, Ellison writes that the story came to him when he was in Las Vegas for a film event, and he dashed up to his room and his typewriter and began to write it out while naked in a cold, air-conditioned room. With the story half-finished, he developed pleurisy, went into a coma, and had to be flown back to a hospital in Los Angeles. One wonders if he was writing the surrealistic death sequence when he was slipping over the edge himself.
(To be continued)
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