Biddy and the Silver Man

by Harlan Ellison

Twelve-year-old Biddy, a spirited girl braving the Arizona heat with her trusty burro Buck, spends her days exploring the desert. Despite her polio and leg brace, Biddy and Buck embark on imaginary adventures until they stumble upon a mysterious cave. Inside, she discovers a peculiar machine and meets Joe, a man claiming to be from the "sky bloc."Joe's miraculous healing powers restore Biddy's leg, igniting wonder and fear in the small town of Sage Bend. As tensions rise, the town's suspicion and prejudice lead to a dramatic confrontation, testing Biddy's courage -- and the power of hope.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 1957

About the author

Harlan Jay Ellison (1934-2018) was a prolific American writer of short stories, novellas, teleplays, essays, and criticism.

His literary and television work has received many awards. He wrote for the original series of both The Outer Limits and Star Trek as well as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; edited the multiple-award-winning short story anthology series Dangerous Visions; and served as creative consultant/writer to the science fiction TV series The New Twilight Zone and Babylon 5.

Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog".

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Biddy and the Silver Man is a novella that was published under the house pseudonym of E.K. Jarvis in the February 1957 issue of Fantastic, which was edited by Paul W. Fairman. Ellison never included it in any of his single-author collections, and I didn't catch any signature bits that reminded me of his later work. It's not a bad story at all and it does have some very nice moments. Biddy is a young girl in the contemporary West with a disabled leg. She encounters an alien in a cave who heals her (he's subsequently lynched by the locals) who's come to Earth to warn us, essentially, that we have to clean up our act in order to join the Galactic Federation. Evidently, perhaps, Fairman had told Ellison that The Day the Earth Stood Still deserved a curtain call. It's a typical cautionary sf tale from the '50s, better than some, but not a classic by any means. That issue is notable for being emblematic of the field at that time. It has a cool cover by Ed Valigursky that shows an attractive young lady who seems to be a hundred feet tall wearing a bathing suit instead of a space suit being towed across the cosmos by a rocket ship. (Or maybe she's normal-sized and the rocket is only a foot long.) That cover is for the story World of Women, a novelette that was published with the byline Harlan Ellison. There are five stories in the issue aside from the Ellison pair and the regular columns and departments, two by Robert Silverberg (one under his name and one published as by Ralph Burke), and three by Henry Slesar (one under his name, one as by O.H. Leslie, and one as by Clyde Mitchell). That illustrates how the Ziff-Davis magazines were produced, and yet they still were usually entertaining, and they did print some great tales. Anyway, I did appreciate the opportunity to read this lost Ellison novella via the fine LibriVox performance.

[Dhimma Ayogu (altoreluwa) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this🫶🏽