Harlan Ellison (1934–2018)

As a huge fan and admirer of Ellison’s work, it is really hard for me to take an unbiased view of his work. So, take that as a caveat for the review that is about to follow.

Ultimately, this is a perfect introduction to Ellison’s work. As the title promises, it is his greatest hits. Now, that doesn’t mean it is perfect. In its attempt to be all-encompassing, it includes some of the relatively famous but questionably great stories. For example, “I’m looking for Kadak”, while show more slightly entertaining, has never been one of my favorites. (Rather, if you want a piece with the flow and feel of something to be read out loud, “Prince Myshkin and Hold the Relish.”) And all the offerings in “The Lighter Side” (Which, why isn’t Kadak in this section?) are good, but not great.

But I’m already being picky. Because rereading most of these stories (and, trust me, I’ve read them all many times) brings back the same impact as in the first reading. It kicks off with some of the most famous stories. “’Repent Harlequin’ Said the Ticktock Man” is an excellent first dip into the Ellison waters. But then the collection forces the reader to dive in head first with “”I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” Mean, powerful, biting, impactful.

Man, the first few stories bite. And they bite with anger but with lessons to be learned. And they entertain…in their own way.

Again, all the greats and award winners are here. And the collection contains what I consider his best story, “On the Downhill Side”

One way I was reading this book was with the idea that it would be good for high school students. It might open their minds to something different, challenging, and help them see that others feel the same way they do. I recall, that high school is when I read most of them. Reading it with that in mind, I imagined all the distraught parents who would find this unsuitable and unacceptable for their little glass-house children. And the odds are those children have already experienced worse.

Which leads to another interesting thing in this volume. In the introductions and forwards, we see what is starting to be an interesting aspect of Ellison’s legacy – an apology for who he was. Apologies for some content, apologies for some language, apologies for the author being the author he was. And there is even a specific calling out of the language used in “Mephisto in Onyx” – a “Content Warning” about the language that is used. “…there are terms used here that may cause offense.” Look, I know I am old and of a different time, but are such warnings really necessary. Or are we all becoming those glass-house children?

It is a great collection. If you know Ellison, reread these stories with joy. And if you do not know of the great works he has built, then jump in and enjoy. show less

A truly horrific story about the creation of hell for a small group of five survivors of a Terminator scenario - an artificial general intelligence has destroyed the rest of humanity using its capability as a human-created war machine.

The five are not simply surviving in a post-apocalyptic hell on earth. They are abstracted from that hell into a worse one within the underground structure of the AGI. The AGI wants to express its own continued loathing for humanity because of the circumstances show more of its creation.

The AGI comes only to exist for its hatred. Able to create any reality it wants in order to torment the five, it can get deep inside the human mind and construct a state of eternal torment for people it won't let die, one that is beyond imagining (though Ellison does an excellent job of coming close).

A great deal of the virtue of this 1967 Hugo Award winning story lies in the writing which has all the taut energy of a wordsmith who manages to channel Hemingway more than Ashton Smith in his description of both physical and psychological horror. Grim, remorseless and dark! show less

Sometime between the first Dangerous Visions anthology and the second, Harlan Ellison jumped the shark. Perhaps in those four years, he started to believe his own hype. It is true that the first anthology did seem to set a fire under a number of writers, both old and new, to experiment and try new things, and it happened because Ellison championed it. But in the preparation of the second volume, Ellison took on much more than a simple championing role—he became a dangerous vision of show more himself.

But before I get to the real criticism of this volume, let me note that it still contains a couple of the greatest short fiction stories ever published: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest,” a piece that merges environmentalism and racism in such a talented way that it’s as hard to read it as, Le Guin says in her afterword, it was easy for her to write it; and Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” one of the best feminist science fiction stories, posting a world where the men died off and the women did what they had to do to continue, then the ramifications of being “rediscovered” by the rest of humanity. Both of these stories are as powerful today as they were forty years ago, because the problems remain. To be entirely frank, I’ve never been a fan of either writer, some of whose other stories set my teach on edge. But there’s no disputing that these stories are worthy of being read by every reader, especially any reader who wants to understand the power of science fiction when it’s done well and done correctly.

There are some other good stories in this 46 story anthology as well. “Ching Witch” by Ross Rocklynne is one of the funniest stories that incorporates a cat. H. H. Hollis’ “Stoned Counsel” is an interesting idea of how legal work could be transformed in the future through hallucinogens. The two stories by Bernard Wolfe, “The Bisquit Position” and “The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements,” are unusual and strange in their mixture of 70s cultural themes (Vietnam war, sleep research) with 50s era style (world-weary protagonists caught up in weirdness). Gregory Benford’s “And the Sea Like Mirrors” predates Stephen King by a decade, containing much of what has become King’s stock-in-trade: a horrific world in which an “everyman” tries to survive.

But the majority of these stories are simply “meh,” and in some instances, downright awful. One story, Richard Lupoff’s “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old Alabama,” was so annoying (i.e., made-up language similar to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker), I skimmed it after the first section. And it’s not hard to discover why this may be, because the very process of putting this anthology together can be pieced together from the introductions and afterwords. The culprit: Ellison’s increasing need to grandstand, to puff up the book and himself. One of the earliest things you learn is that this huge volume comprises only half of what Ellison had accepted and bought, and that it became so large, he and the publisher agreed to release this volume and then one called The Last Dangerous Visions later—so much later that it never appeared.

Grandstanding? The best example of which can be read in the introduction and afterword to “Bed Sheets are White“ by Evelyn Lief, which is more of a story than the story itself. Basically, Ellison shows up at Clarion determined to be a holy terror to the students by tearing apart their stories on the first day of his week. In the afterword, Lief reports that Ellison said this about her story that first morning, "This story is trite and schoolgirlish. It's the perfect example of every single thing that can be done wrong, all in one piece of writing." She goes back to her room and writes “DAMN YOU, HARLAN ELLISON” on a sign and hangs it above her typewriter and then proceeds to write something that he will like. He likes it and immediately buys it for Again, Dangerous Visions.

And that would be a beautiful story if “Bed Sheets are White” was any good, but it’s not. It’s short enough that you can forgive it for being mediocre, but Ellison lauds it as on par with Le Guin or Russ or Benford? Sorry, not even close. What the foreword by Ellison and afterword by Lief depict is Ellison’s increasing role in the creation of not only the book, but the stories themselves, as he started to see himself as the great savior of literature, challenging both established authors and beginning students, and becoming their benefactor, muse, and daemon. It becomes all about him, both from his standpoint and the author’s. And thus, when it fails to be about the story, things fall apart.

Unlike others before me who’ve laid criticism at Ellison’s feet, his recent departure from this world means I have no fear of a late night phone call or sharply worded threat made in a public place. The thing is, I’ve always liked Ellison’s writing—his short story and essay collections were meat and potatoes to me in my formative years, and I loved his zeal and passion to champion perceived and real injustices in the world. In particular, his essays in The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat were early influences on how I viewed popular entertainment and the role of the critic. The Dangerous Visions anthologies were a great idea, and the two that were published had an impact that could be felt beyond the SFF world. Yet the warning signs for the project going off the rails could clearly be seen in A,DV even if Locus picked it as the best original anthology published in 1972.

It’s probably for the best that The Last Dangerous Visions never appeared, because it simply could not have lived up to its hype. What’s sad is that the stories got bumped into that stillborn volume never had the opportunity to feed their author’s careers aside from cover letters where they might have been listed as a sale. The other sad part of the whole debacle is how it continually cast a cloud over Ellison’s career, even until the very end. show less

Since Ellison's death in 2018, there has been a real effort by J. Michael Straczynski, his friend and literary executor, to put his work back into public consciousness. This new "best of" collection is part of that campaign.

Within genre fiction of all types, he's long been recognized as a major figure. He's received the lifetime achievement awards of the Horror Writers of America and the World Fantasy Award, been named a Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and the Science Fiction show more Writers of America, and been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He has received at least two each of the major genre awards -- Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, Edgar, World Fantasy.

And he's one of a handful of people who can be said to have significantly changed his field. Ellison was one of the drivers of the "new wave" movement that hit science fiction in the mid-1960s, a shift away from adventure stories and spaceships toward literary experimentation and explorations of the psyche. There was an emphasis on confronting contemporary social issues (there are a lot of really bad allegories about racism from that era) and shattering old taboos. The titles of Ellison's major early works scream new wave: "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World," "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."

His concern for social issues wasn't limited to his fiction. Ellison marched with King, campaigned for the ERA and against the Vietnam War, and mentored a lot of women and POC writers, most notably Octavia Butler.

He was also, as he was delighted to acknowledge, one of the most abrasive, contentious, difficult people you might ever meet, and that also comes through in his writing. His stories dealing with racism, in their worst moments, come close to indulging in rather than confronting the problem. This collection comes with an introductory note about the "outdated cultural representations and language" in some of the stories, and the story "Mephisto in Onyx" gets its own supplementary note.

But holy shit, could he write! His prose sparkles and dazzles and thrills; his ideas are large and daring. He is occasionally so far out on a limb of stylistic experimentation that you have to slow down to figure out what the heck he's doing; "The Deathbird" is a re-examination of the Garden of Eden story told in short fragments that include a multiple choice exam, a set of book-club-style discussion questions, and a short essay about Ellison's pet dog.

I would single out as favorites from this collection "Jeffty Is Five," which starts out as an exercise in Bradbury-esque nostalgia before curdling into a heartbreaking ending; the aforementioned "Mephisto in Onyx," a duel of wits between a mind-reader and a serial killer; "I'm Looking for Kadak," a comic bagatelle about Jewish Venusians desperately trying to find a tenth to make a minyan; and "Paladin of the Lost Hour," about the relationship between a Vietnam veteran and the old man he rescues from a mugging. (And I now need to find the adaptation from the 1980s Twilight Zone revival, starring Danny Kaye at the end of his career and Glynn Turman at the beginning of his.)

Ellison is one of the major writers of the late 20th century, and I wouldn't restrict that claim to genre fiction writers. He deserves to be thought of alongside the finest writers of "literary fiction," which let us never forget, is just as much a genre as SF, mystery, and horror. Greatest Hits is a fine collection of his best work, and it scratches the surface so faintly that you could easily assemble a Volume Two with no significant decline in quality. show less