Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison
Greatest Hits, Harlan Ellison (Union Square 978-1-4549-5337-1, $19.99, 466pp, tp) March 2024.
Harlan Ellison’s short fiction is undoubtedly far better known than Wyndham’s, but for readers too young to have followed his prolific and rather spectacular career, which peaked from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, he might be best known for a handful of stories which have been endlessly anthologized, mostly “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”. Beyond that, the entirely reasonable question (which I still get asked a lot, since I wrote a book on Ellison some time ago) is where to start. Ellison wasn’t his own best advocate in assembling collections, which often tended to supplement iconic stories with minor works that he was fond of, and the massive The Essential Ellison (revised edition 2001) is way more than anyone but the most ravenous fan needs (and it seems to be long out of print anyway). So, in the absence of a traditional “best of,” editor J. Michael Straczynski’s Greatest Hits is probably as good a place to start as any. As with Subterranean Press’s Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison, Straczynski’s selection of 19 stories focuses mostly on award winners and nominees, supplemented by seven stories not in the earlier Subterranean Press volume. While I suspect that the manic dystopia of “Ticktockman” (1966) and the raw nightmare vision of being trapped in the mind of a vengeful computer in “I Have No Mouth” (1967) can still startle first-time readers after more than half a century, the rather minor Nebula winner “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” (2010) now looks more like polite late-career recognition.
Still, focusing on awards gives us a solid sampling of some of Ellison’s best, or at least best-received, work. The sentimental but affecting “Jeffty is Five”, about a childhood friend who never grows older and is magically able to remain in the world of that childhood, is one of several stories that clearly draw on autobiographical elements in a way that was rare in SFF of the time. Even “The Deathbird” (1974), Ellison’s ambitious, myth-drenched recasting of Genesis from the point of view of the snake, embeds a brief memoir of Ellison’s dog’s death (which Ellison elsewhere published as non-fiction). The most deeply personal story, though, is “All the Lies That Are My Life” (1981), which somehow earned a Hugo nomination despite its manifest lack of fantastic content. It was well-known at the time that the story borrowed elements from Ellison’s lifelong friendship with Robert Silverberg, telling of two writers who began their careers in low-end genre magazines and paperbacks, but one of whose career became an improbable fever-dream of international literary and financial success. Toward the end of the story, that writer confides to the narrator his central fear: “Will they still read me? Will I be on the bookshelves…? Fifty years from now I want them to come back to my stuff, the way they did to Poe’s and Dickens’s and Conrad’s. I don’t want to wind up like Clark Ashton Smith or Cabell or the other Smith, Thorne Smith.”
I suppose the good news for Ellison – whose own voice that clearly was – is that nearly six years after his own death, and more than 50 years after arguably his most famous stories, a collection like this should appear, complete with an appreciative introduction by Neil Gaiman. There are, to be sure, some signs of dating. In an era in which issues of appropriation are being more widely discussed, Ellison’s choice of a Chinese narrator for “Chatting with Anubis” or a Black narrator in “Mefisto in Onyx” seems questionable, but the latter story, involving a telepath and a serial killer, features some of the most elaborate plot twists of any of Ellison’s fiction. And for a writer actively involved in feminist causes, his presentation of women could be a bit gazey. The title character of “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” (1967) – whose mother was Cherokee – is exoticized even as the story parodies her exoticization. Still, it’s an unnerving portrait of the ravenous culture of Las Vegas, just as “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” (1973), Ellison’s take on the Kitty Genovese murder from 1964 (which at the time was reported as widely witnessed by bystanders who did nothing), evokes the darker side of urban anonymity in 1970s New York. The horror at the heart of that story seems just as visceral and shocking today as it did then, and that visceral power may turn out to be the key to Ellison’s continuing reputation. He could indeed be pretentious or sentimental or performative at times, and a few of his stronger stories may be fading from memory simply because they were mainstream tales that didn’t show up on awards ballots or in SF anthologies, but on the evidence that Straczynski has assembled here, his fiction can still scream.
Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the April 2024 issue of Locus.
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While largely positive, I feel that Mr. Wolfe’s review misses a couple of _very_ important points: 1) “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” is very much a by-product of Ellison’s late-in-life writerly evolution toward something akin to a Borgesian or Frederic Brownian-type of short, sharp succinctness: thus it’s brevity. It is also of a piece with Ellison’s “kinder, gentler” mindset which was more often on show in his later years, and…it fits in nicely with what (at the time) was becoming an “autofiction” trend (I feel certain that events prior to its writing informed the story). Finally, though he might have denied it, I think the story is a mini-tour-de-force about the dangers of celebrities purposely “creating” a personality (many writers, from Hemingway to Twain have done it) and what can happen should that creation become the center of attention. 2) More importantly, Mr. Wolfe (like more than a few these days) says he feels Ellison’s choice of using Chinese and Black characters as narrators in two stories is “questionable”. Is it because of the first person narration, or just the fact that the writer (Ellison) is caucasian? If so, I believe the Wolfe is joining a too often wrong-headed group of voices who wrongly paint everything with a PC brush. William Styron took a lot of heat in his time for THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, but no less a light than James Baldwin defended the right of a writer to let his imagination take him where it may (as long he did so with “clean hands and composure” and responsibility). Even R.F. Kuang’s latest novel –YELLOWFACE — seems (to me) to be more concerned with the power of those who attack writers (in her book, it is “online critics”, i.e. disgruntled readers) for the wrong reasons, thereby wielding power over the publishing industry for the wrong reasons. The notion that a writer can’t — and shouldn’t — imagine him or her or their self inside the mind of someone with a different ethnic background or a wholly different gender is a slippery slope that will only take everyone — writers, readers, publishers, etc. — into a briar patch that should be avoided at all costs.
Right, the guy who fought the rest of SFWA to have Butler named to its “hall of fame” was a sexist racist because he wrote many.thousands of short stories in the first person, who was generally a male, though no description given, assumed White.
CRAP: You left out, for instance, the number of Jewish narrators, Ellison was a Jewish Atheist. “Write what you know” is one of the best rules a writer needs to follow- what else did he know? Getting beaten up for being the only Jewish kid in his elementary school on a daily basis. My memory of the elementary school class photo he included in one book or another doesn’t depict a single non-White kid. I don’t think he knew many non-Whites until either being drafted or moving to New York. Had his first dog gassed , at the request of an “old” neighbor, probably because of his culture.
He was verbally attacked at one point for his characterization of only one of the last four humans on earth, in I HAVE NO MOUTH… as female, and serving the sexual needs of the other three, apparently enjoying it as much of any of the others who have had their minds twisted by the computer AM.
That bothered a female reader.
He asked her if it bothered her that she was Black – dead silence, then denial – obviously not a close reader.
The reader missed at least two references to her extremely dark skin.
He issued a short story as an anti-rape wall poster, in which a woman enjoying a head-trip sexual fantasy on a boring bus trip finds her thoughts invaded by a sadistic male telepath on the same bus – a stronger telepath, she destroys his mind, leaving his body functioning without thought.
But, he makes the point, she was never the same, never free from the horror of the invasion again.
“Pennies off a Dead Man’s Eyes” and “Mephisto in Onyx“ are clear examinations of his understanding of being a member of a minority who can’t pass. The Discarded is an extreme example of bigotry overtaking a society.
Like many of Ellison’s 3rd person stories, the bulk are by an invisible narrator is an invisible voice – I was lucky enough to meet Harlan on several occasions, and take a small amount of pride being one of the half-million or more people he recognized as someone he had met and spoken with before. For a total of maybe 2 hours over many years, so I hear those stories as read by the author..
Can’t help it, he was a great reader.
I really get tired of authors pilloried for not making sure (excuse me if my figures are off) only 50% of the narrators or lead characters are male, 75+% (in the US) some kind of raving believer to Atheist Christian, with the correct diversity of assorted Protestants and Catholics,3-6 pct. Jews or Muslims, 1-3% of other faiths , 15% Hispanic-American, 1-5 generations removed; 13% Black, 5% Asian-Pacific Islands, with the Asians divided according to census Indian Subcontinent, Arab, a thousand other divisions, the remainder East Asian, @15% LGBTQ+ whether any of that’s central to the story or not.
The world doesn’t work that way – writers don’t work that way – would one impose the same gender guidelines on a Margaret Attwood, or is she allowed to almost always write with a female 1st person narrator or lead character ?