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(music: delay shimmery ambiance, a grotesquely distorted Gretchen reads the part of AM)
Harlan Ellison biography, non-spoiler discussion
AM:
Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, and I'm joined by my co-host, J.M. and Nate. This section is part of an episode looking at a selection of six short stories, two chosen by each of us.
Take a look at the previous sections to hear about Kylas Chunder Dutt's "A Journal of 48 Hours in the Year 1945", Sakyo Komatsu's "The Savage Mouth", Gerald Kersh's "The Brighton Monster", and Frederic Pohl's "We Purchased People".
You can find Chrononauts on all major podcast platforms, Spotify and Apple, we have a blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com, where you can read a number of texts and translations. You can also follow us on Twitter at @chrononautsf and facebook at facebook.com/chrononautspodcast or email us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com.
One of the most difficult parts of writing a background on Harlan Ellison was narrowing down what details to use, which anecdotes and quotes about his life to include. There's definitely a lot of them.
My major source was Nat Segaloff's Biography, "A Lit Fuse", and it took a great amount of willpower not to just quote most of it verbatim. I'll be doing a bit of that, but I'll try to stick to the most relevant facts about Ellison's life and career.
On May 27th, 1934, Harlan J. Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, Louis Laverne "Doc" Ellison, was a dentist, often taking on mobsters as patients. Serita Rosenthal Ellison, his mother, was a legal secretary who became Doc's receptionist and assistant, and had those patients hand over their guns while they were in the waiting room.
Harlan Ellison was the youngest of their two children. Beverly had been born in 1926, eight years before Harlan, and the two had a sibling rivalry that lasted most of their lives, with the last time they spoke to each other before Beverly's death in 2010, being at Serita's funeral in 1976, where Harlan delivered a eulogy that made Beverly livid. But the root of their rivalry was, probably in part, the favoritism shown by their parents towards their son.
Ellison claimed, "My father worked like a dog when he wasn't working, he adored me. He loved me, but my parents were like a pair of pandas that gave birth to a catamount. They didn't know what the hell to do with me. I drove them insane, but they loved me, and they treated me better than I ever deserved. I was not as kind as I should have been."
Ellison was quite a troublemaker as a kid, foreshadowing some of his stubborn and confrontational behavior as an adult. On one occasion, he got in trouble at the age of eight for opening 356 boxes of cereal in a local A&P to find a pinside which would complete his collection. He also would routinely run away from home, riding rails, sleep under bridges, and got into knife fights with others out on the streets. Eventually, though, he would be brought back home.
Though Harlan wasn't the only Ellison that got into trouble, though he boasted a good reputation as a dentist, "Doc" Ellison was not actually a qualified one, picking up his skills by watching his brother Moe a real dentist. Soon, the Ohio licensing board appeared to arrest him, but they were convinced by Serita to let him go if he just promised to end his practice. To keep making money, Doc turned a smuggling alcohol from Canada, a lucrative trade since the American alcohol industry hadn't yet recovered from prohibition, but he did get caught and was sent to jail. Once out, he was given a job at the jewelry store owned by his brothers-in-law, which lasted through the Second World War. When the shop's owner, Maury, who Doc had thought would make him a partner returned from service, he instead kicked him out of the business. "Doc" was forced into setting up his own shop and sell door-to-door. He died shortly after in 1949.
It was during his father's funeral that Ellison's lifelong atheism was cemented, after seeing in the synagogue a list of names of people who had died, in alphabetical or chronological order, but by the order of how much money they had given to the synagogue. He didn't cry over his father's death, though he would later claim that it was something that haunted him throughout his life.
After this, Serita worked in any job she could to afford taking care of her children and getting Beverly through college. Eventually, though, Beverly had to drop out as funds grew tighter. She and Harlan worked as well. Harlan was also attending high school and, though involved in the drama club and the school newspaper, his grades dropped. He was asked to leave the newspaper due to, as Harlan stated, his big mouth.
He was also, though, starting to get more into fiction writing around this time. The Cleveland News published two of his stories in their children's section, "The Sword of Parmagon" and "Track of Gloconda." By 1953, he was writing and editing his own fanzine, Science Fiction Fantasy Bulletin, and had co-founded the Cleveland Science Fiction Fantasy Society. Soon, the fanzine would be called Dimensions, in which he published the story "Green Denouement". It became known as "Upheaval" when published in the June 1954 issue of Weird Fantasy and Weird Science.
It was also in 1953 that Ellison attended WorldCon, this World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia. The following year, Ellison entered Ohio State University, but he lasted only three semesters until he was expelled for punching a professor who had insulted his writing. Over the next 40 years, he sent that teacher all of his published stories as revenge.
Harlan settled in New York writing for pulp magazines. Since the juvenile delinquent genre was popular, he took on the name Phil "Cheech" Beldone and became part of a gang called The Barons. He spent a couple of weeks among them to write an article about his experiences, which he titled, "I Ran with a Kid Gang." The magazine he sold it to, Lowdown, didn't use any of his material except for his photo. His arrest and holding for a pistol he received during his time from the gang, from which Serita bailed him out, and about which he wrote another article, gained him some attention in the press.
After this incident in 1955, Ellison sold a piece, "Glowworm" to Larry Shaw, editor of Infinity and Suspect. After this sale, Harlan made 100 more for the following year, really establishing his profession as a writer. 1956 also was when Ellison married his first wife, Charlotte Bernice Stein. However, he was drafted in 1957, drawing him away from his wife.
His first day at Fort Dix concluded with him being sent to Fort Benning for more intensive training. He had to attack an officer for making him miss orientation, and the choice was between that or prison time. After training, he was assigned to Fort Knox, where his duty was writing for, inside the turret, the Post's newspaper. Besides the paper, Ellison also continued to write his own stories, often while holed up in one of the barracks' latrines. By 1959, he'd finished his required time in the service.
During this period, Harlan and Charlotte's marriage had been deteriorating. Once, he surprised her by arriving home early and found her in bed with a sailor, who he violently flung from their apartment. Though Charlotte claimed she wouldn't cheat again, she didn't keep that promise. Ellison also grew upset when she refused to join him in a visit to Serita when she had fallen ill, then later took issue with moving to Chicago for Harlan's work. She did go with him, though by May of 1960, they divorced. Charlotte later was placed in a mental institution and, according to her mother, made comments about having to be quiet while Harlan was working, comments which surprised and upset Harlan.
As mentioned, Harlan moved to Chicago for work, which was editing the magazine Rogue. He did so in 1959 and 1960, until the magazine, like his marriage, started to fall apart. Soon, he returned to New York and married again, this time to Billie Joyce Sanders. Following another short stint in Chicago and a second chance at Rogue, Harlan, Billie and her 14-year-old son by another marriage, Kenny, headed to California. By this point, Harlan wanted to separate from Billie, and she asked him to at least bring her to California where it's warm. It was in 1963 that, after over a year of separation, Billie filed for divorce.
The 60s saw Harlan's career really take off, both on the page and on the small screen. His breakthrough for the latter was working on the mystery series Burke's Law, but he also, of course, worked on The Outer Limits and The Man from Uncle, for which he wrote two episodes each. One episode of the latter, "The Pieces of Fate Affair", got him into some legal trouble as he used the name of fellow writer and critic Judith Merril for an antagonist.
JM:
Harlan always getting into trouble.
Gretchen:
Oh, yeah.
Though he meant it as a joke, her daughter brought it to her attention and they brought a suit against him. It wasn't allowed to be shown in syndication until 1985, and that was far from the only conflict Harlan would have in his time writing for TV. One notable case is the clash between him and Gene Roddenberry over Ellison's script for "The City on the Edge of Forever." After Ellison had submitted his version of the script to Roddenberry, the latter had it rewritten, a process which excluded characters from Ellison's draft or replaced them. Roddenberry did this despite needing the writer's prestige to gain some credibility to the series. At the same time that he was "saving" Harlan's script, he was also relying on him to participate in a letter writing campaign to save Star Trek itself, getting Ellison to encourage his fans to join in the campaign as well.
When Ellison found out about the rewrite and threatened to attribute his script to his pseudonym, Cordwainer Bird, a pen name he used when one of his works was interfered with and he wanted to give it a stamp of disapproval, Roddenberry begged him not to.
JM:
I think it's a classic case of two guys with like large egos that totally, we're not fair to each other.
Gretchen:
Yeah, no, it feels like both of them were quite larger than life.
JM:
Roddenberry was like talking about, he said something like, well, I don't think he really understood Star Trek. He made like Scotty a drug addict or something like that. And Ellison was like, oh, Roddenberry did this and he did that. Like it was some other crew member anyway. So it's not like, if you read the original script, it's actually really cool. I mean, I was wish that that was what we got. Although, I don't know, I mean, as it is, the rewrites made the story very popular, probably one of the most popular original series episodes.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, I still think it is considered like one of the best TOS episodes. I do enjoy it myself. And even though I have read bits and pieces of Ellison's original script and would definitely like to have seen that made. Ellison did get confirmation that like people like DC Fontana and Leonard Nimoy, and Forest Kelly as well, like preferred his version more.
JM:
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Gretchen:
Yeah, he did want to put it under Cordwainer Bird, but Roddenberry begged him not to do it because it was Ellison's reputation after he had won an award from the Writers Guild of America for his script, "Demon with a Glass Hand", that he needed connected with his series. Ellison did relent and let his name be used on the script, but he did later win another award from the Writers Guild and a Hugo for the original script of the episode. So he did at least get some recognition for his original work.
Another project which earned Ellison's disapproval was the television series The Starlost, which became regarded as one of the worst science fiction series ever made.
JM:
Yeah, I've never seen it. But I believe it was even a Canadian series or something.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it was made... It was partially because it was during the Writers Guild strike. So they had to make it in Canada, and I think they were also affiliated with the BBC when making it. So it seemed like a lot of people were involved.
Nate:
There's definitely some pretty strange stuff to come out of the Canadian TV market. I always think of Dark Shadows being a totally unique show that's nothing like anything else, except for the weird Canadian knockoff they made to capitalize on the success of Dark Shadows.
JM:
I definitely remember some weird 80s kids TV shows coming from here. I don't know about other genre stuff so much.
Nate:
I think in the late 90s, the Sci-Fi channel, when they started to get going, they purchased a lot of Canadian science fiction TV and film content just so they have something to run.
JM:
Yeah, I probably saw some of that. I don't know necessarily some of these shows, like War of the Worlds, I think, even. I had a little bit of Canadian involvement, but yeah, that was a strange one.
Nate:
Yeah, I'll have to look for this one though, because I love really bad stuff.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I was going to check out some episodes, but just I didn't have time. I would still like to see if it holds that reputation still, you know, if it holds up to that.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean stuff that's bad from like the 70s and 80s or whatever just has a specific charm to it and modern formulaic bad stuff just doesn't have.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think it's better to be bad in interesting ways, you know, instead of the more like, yeah, like you said, generic ways that a lot of newer things seem to be bad.
But yeah, Starlost was being produced in 1973 and originally was supposed to have an initial eight episode run. Ellison wrote his version of the pilot and the series bible with that and the original concept in mind. He had to travel to Canada to work on it due to the strike. And while he was there, he had to travel back to the U.S. when his mother Serita appeared to be facing a health crisis. When she recovered and he returned to the production, he found that his work had been completely rewritten and ignored. This time Ellison did attribute Cordwainer Bird to the project.
Ellison did at first enjoy working on the 1980s revival of the Twilight Zone under the label of creative consultant. Harlan didn't want to commit to the work of an official story editor. He helped with doctoring scripts, used his extensive knowledge of published stories to prevent plagiarism and wrote a few scripts himself, including a favorite of mine, "Paladin of the Lost Hour," which also won a Writers Guild Award and the novelette, which Ellison wrote that was adopted into the episode, also won the 1986 Hugo Award. But despite the positive beginning, things went sour regarding a Christmas episode Ellison wrote and was set to direct his first directing credit.
The script, called "Nackles", was adapted from a story by Donald Westlake and dealt with the story of an anti-Santa Claus, one which in Ellison's adaptation is used by the bigoted antagonist of the text to terrorize black children in a tenement he visits. It is this man, though, who Nackles comes for. The production for this episode was going smoothly until the last instant, right before they were about to film, when the network censors cut it, as they felt Nackles, who was portrayed as black, was too controversial to go through. Even though Ellison defended the idea by showing how it denounced bigotry rather than enforced it and even made some adjustments to the script, it still couldn't get past the censors. Ellison quit working on the Twilight Zone soon after.
Besides writing for visual media, he also wrote about it. Though he had included film reviews in his fanzine Dimensions, he began writing them professionally in 1965, his first one appearing in the July-August issue of Cinema Magazine. During the following decades, he published reviews for Cosmos, Starlog, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction, though his most notable pieces come from his time writing a column for the Los Angeles Free Press between October of 1968 and May of 1972. Over the 102 columns he wrote for it, he explored opinions on politics and the media industry at large, besides just reviewing individual films and shows.
His articles were later published as books, "The Glass Teat", and "The Other Glass Teat", which initially were flying off the shelves until there was a sudden drop in sales. Ellison found out that this was because he had been placed on current governor of California, Ronald Reagan's subversives list, which had caused the book to be held back from the public, an embargo finally lifted in 1983. After being placed on the list, Harlan also caught people in the act of tapping his phone. In 1966, Ellison bought the home in which he'd spent the rest of his life, a house he initially called Ellison Wonderland, though later changed to the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars. It was there that he went out to get the paper one morning and saw a group of men tampering with his telephone wires. Harlan claimed, "knowing that the line was tapped, every time I would order groceries or something, I would say, yeah, send me up two pizzas and some garlic bread and, by the way, did you know Ronald Reagan is a horrible human being, beats his mother and makes it with dogs? This went on for months and months and I knew that all of this was going into the files."
Ellison's activism, what partially landed him on that list, is notable. Besides his outspoken endorsement for civil rights and feminism, he also expressed his political beliefs through action. He walked with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, reporting on it in an article titled "From Alabamy, with Hate" from 1965. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment and followed the boycott of states refusing to rectify it that was organized by the National Organization for Women, declining to speak at universities unless they showed support for the amendment through fundraisers or seminars. When, in 1978, the Worldcon, also known as IguanaCon II, was hosted in Arizona, one of the boycotted states, Ellison parked out in a house trailer refusing to spend money in the state by staying at a hotel.
Though people have pointed out some flaws in Ellison's feminism, including the woman he alleged taught him about it and made him understand it, Mary Reinholz. There's a particular incident which has really tarnished this reputation, though it happened quite late into Ellison's life. At the Worldcon of 2006, fellow writer Connie Willis was presenting and called Ellison to the stage. After Willis had made a few remarks to Ellison, including asking him if he was going to be good and behave, he had reached out and as she was moving, his hand made contact with her breast and it appeared that he groped her. Willis seems to have never made a comment about it herself, having made a statement through a third party about being able to handle whatever Ellison threw at her, and it appears she also declined to be interviewed by Segaloff for "A Lit Fuse." While Ellison himself shocked to find the moment being interpreted as a moment of sexual harassment instead of a mistake, wrote an apology and adamantly maintained that he condemned any actions of that kind.
Perhaps I am biased. Yeah, I do think that it was a mistake on Ellison's part, despite having quite a reputation with his temperament and being known as a bit out there in certain things, has been earnest about his political beliefs, and has on other occasions defended women from sexual harassment.
JM:
I remember he gets mentioned in the Astounding book because it talks a lot about Asimov's little predilections and Ellison and Asimov had on and off again friendship, I guess. Yeah. There were times when, yeah, but I'm sure that was one of the things.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that is also brought up in the Ellison biography where he would walk in between women and Asimov, so there wouldn't be any sort of harassment of the woman. It was also a recording, and I don't think he would do that personally. And again, I'm biased because I have been reading a lot about him, although I do enjoy Willis's work, even if I don't know much about her personal background. I did want to bring this up, though, as it is an event which has garnered a lot of talk and criticism towards Ellison.
But aside from his feminist leanings, Ellison was a self-proclaimed "slut", particularly during the 60s, going out with a lot of women. He also married a few more times. His third marriage to Loretta Basham Patrick lasted 45 days. She claimed Harlan was her second husband when in reality he was her seventh. Loretta was the one who helped him find the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars for ulterior motives. She would marry men, encourage them to buy a new property, then file for divorce and gain the property through the divorce.
Luckily, after she attacked Ellison with her hairbrush, which left him in the ER, he asked his lawyer to look more thoroughly into her background and found out what Patrick's plan was, and then was able to file for divorce before she did and keep the house.
JM:
Oh, quite a scam.
Gretchen:
Yeah, quite something.
His fourth wife was also named Lori, Lori Horowitz. She was in an audience at one of his lectures and they married in 1976. This one lasted longer, a few months. By November of 1976, he realized she was having affairs and so he packed up her bags and left them for outside of his house.
His fifth marriage was the final one, which would last for the rest of his life.
JM:
What is with all these recent writers we've been doing and their multiple dramatic marriages?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Merril, Pohl and now Ellison.
Gretchen:
Not to spoil anything, but that might be coming up in the next author we'll be covering as well.
Nate:
Yeah, it seems like the 60s and 70s were a pretty wild time for science fiction writers.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It seems that way.
Gretchen:
They were really having some interesting love lives.
Nate:
I guess H.G. Wells did too.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Ellison's fifth marriage did turn out to be his final one and he met her, Susan, during a convention in England during 1985. She came to the States to be with him and she remained with him until his death on June 28th, 2018, which came after a stroke in 2014 that left him paralyzed on the right side of his body and gradually declining in health until he was first housebound and then bedridden. Over the years, Ellison slowed down in his creation of original stories, instead rearranging his older works into new anthologies and writing updated introductions for them.
However, even in his 70s and up until he was 80, he did still sometimes write new works. By the time of his death, Harlan Ellison had written more than 1700 stories, won eight Hugos and four Nebula Awards, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011.
JM:
I just like to mention that Ellison was, indefatigably, a short story writer. I just want to point that out because it just seems like so many, so many of the writers in genre, but also elsewhere, like they start off writing more short stories. But then as they kind of get into the book publishing market, they do that a lot less. Ellison never seems to do that. And I kind of wonder if a lot of it has to do with his involvement with TV because like episodic TV is kind of like the short story format. Maybe that's just what he's most comfortable with. And he didn't really feel the need to churn out much in the way of longer works. I think he does just a few, right?
Nate:
Yeah, I'm looking at the ISFDB record now, it lists three novels and one of those is co-written with Edward Bryant.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Okay, yeah. So really, not that much in terms of longer work. And I think even though that one of those novels is really short. Definitely a short story guy, which I like a lot. There's a lot of back catalog of Ellison short stories to get into, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah. Definitely throughout the biography, it is mentioned that he did really help make the short story a more distinguished literary form and really advocated for the short story.
JM:
Yeah. And I agree. I mean, I've said often enough how much I appreciate that format and especially genre fiction and stuff.
Nate:
And certainly he's got one of the most prolific catalogs of any author that we've covered. I think the only person who exceeds him is the "New Steam Man" guy, Luis Senarens or whatever, who wrote like 1,500 novels over the course of his life, but just like turned them out formulaically for 20, 30 years or whatever.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Right.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I do think Ellison might have beaten him in prestige.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Gretchen:
But yes, Harlan Ellison wanted to be known as a writer, not a science fiction writer, but a writer period, finding distinction of genre fiction and literary fiction ridiculous. One saying "science fiction is a kind of shorthand journalese for people who don't like to be nervous about what they're reading. It's idiot nomenclature. You know, if you can say a book is mainstream that this is literature, then you can feel secure in reading a great book, even if it's terrible and dull. Westerns, gothics, nurse novels, detective novels, science fiction, those are categories that timorous people love to cling to. They're the kind of categories that paperback distributors love to have because then they can pack up 23 pounds of science fiction and tell bookstores 'just shove it over there on that shelf'."
Despite his discomfort with being too closely associated with the sci-fi genre, though, Ellison's work is often credited with changing science fiction and how it is received, and not just through his individual stories. The collection, "Dangerous Visions", which he compiled and edited, is a significant work with some claim established science fiction in the mainstream as a field of serious literary merit, as did its sequel anthology, "Again, Dangerous Visions," in which one can find a story by the next writer we'll be discussing. Though the collection likely wouldn't have been possible without Ellison's own stories, first pushing the envelope and testing out some of science fiction's previous limits. Robert Silverberg, a longtime friend of Ellison's, claims that his stories, "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", and "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World" were his Rubicon from pulp's status of literary inventor, and that they led the way for other writers who dealt in science fiction to take more risks. It is the former of those stories that we will be covering.
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" was written by Ellison in one night. It was published in the March 1976 issue of If, and it earned him the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. I have heard Ellison wasn't too happy that it is considered one of his best, most recognizable works, as instead he'd prefer a story he worked on longer and put more effort into garnering those labels. But I've got to say, sorry Harlan, this is just a great story. It's a really good story.
Nate:
Yeah, I've read three of his at this point now, the other two being "A Boy and His Dog" and "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs". And yeah, this is definitely my favorite out of the three, though I did like the other two a significant amount as well.
JM:
"Boy and His Dog" was the first Ellison story I read. That was a long time ago. I was in the Nebula Awards 1969 collection. I must have been like, I don't know, definitely a teen. I think I probably started high school, but I'm not really sure. I was pretty young when I read. I read it again a few years later for the science fiction class that I've talked about a few times. And that was actually where I first heard about this story.
I read a lot of Ellison in the early 2000s. It was kind of interesting because I was searching around for stuff and I found a lot of stuff online that was sailing the seas back then in the early 2000s, so to speak. There were some collections and there was one collection that I remember reading mostly on the Greyhound bus. It was called "Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled". And it was definitely like stuff from the 50s kind of focusing a lot on, I guess, yeah, like the juvenile delinquent stuff and the kind of gritty sort of hard-bitten style. No science fiction in there. So I was kind of surprised because I thought of him as a science fiction writer and there was all these hard-boiled stories about young men getting into trouble, basically, mostly. But not just that, I guess there were some stories that seemed like they were a response to the Holocaust and stuff like that. The Second World War. And there was some kind of slightly fantastical stuff and maybe a little bit weird, but no science fiction.
But I really like these gritty stories in my early 20s and I think now I kind of realize that I enjoy reading Ellison. I think that he's not going to be for everybody because I think that he's a little bit like edgy and angry and kind of like...
Nate:
Oh, definitely, yeah. There's definitely a nasty undercurrent that runs through all the stuff that I've read. In particular, it makes "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" I think really unpleasant. That's definitely my least favorite out of the ones I've read, but he's certainly a talented writer and you can feel it even when he's being nasty and unpleasant.
JM:
Yeah, I think his edge is really sharp. I think he did this in part because he felt that it was needed. He wanted to make things that way, to confront people, right? And maybe to even confront people who didn't think the way he did, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, Ellison has been up front saying he did want to shock people with his work. That was the point of his work, was to shock people and to make people feel uncomfortable.
JM:
So I want to talk about "Dangerous Visions" for a second because I've been reading those recently and the aim of the collections is really cool and he's definitely highlighting some of the best, most experimental, forward-thinking authors in SF and fantasy and the talent pool he draws from is fantastic. But I noticed, and this has been pointed out by other people too, and I believe even Philip K. Dick said he almost regretted having a story in the anthologies because he didn't like the fact that it seemed like Ellison in choosing his stories and in trying to encourage his writers to write original stories for the anthologies, he was trying to push them in a direction of darkness and a direction of nastiness and P.K. D didn't really approve of that and he kind of, I think his story in the collections is really good. Crap, what's it called? Not the father thing, something....
Nate:
"Faith of our Fathers" from ISFDB.
JM:
Yes, that's it. Thank you.
Gretchen:
I was going to look that up myself.
JM:
Yeah, I think that's really good, but apparently he had misgivings about it and like I've seen, you know, like reading through the stories, I can definitely see, alright, like I'm a horror fan in part, so I don't necessarily mind this and I don't think it's like bad or anything, but I can kind of see the point of that because it does seem like he was gunning for that and then a lot of the stories from writers that you wouldn't necessarily always associate with that are like really dark and edgy and it's like he's trying to kind of impose his particular perspective on these other authors maybe a little tiny bit. Maybe that's just because he was such a forceful personality. I don't think the results were bad in most cases. Like I really enjoy these anthologies and definitely a lot of authors that I didn't even know about were featured there and made me want to check out their stuff. Some of them are not generally known as science fiction writers like he has a story from the mystery writer Miriam deFord in there and it's basically like, I don't know, it reminds me, we just brought this up last episode, but it like is very reminiscent of "A Clockwork Orange" in its darkness and its attitude towards like addressing the justice system and punitiveness and stuff, but it's like really, really dark and almost too much for some people, I'm sure. So it's like he really wants to make you confront things and maybe at times you wouldn't be in the mood for that.
So I mean some of his more realistic stories like he has a story, I forget what it's called. Again, because he has so many, but it's about this kid, this young kid, young man again, who learns to hate the cops, because of how he gets caught stealing something really stupid, like a contest that's in cereal boxes that's in the store and he manages to figure out how he can get into these cereal boxes and steal the thing for the contest, because he really wants to win. And he gets caught. And the cops take him to the police station and they're like, we were going to teach this guy a lesson and they don't like beat him up or anything like that. But they basically psychologically condition him to be convinced that, oh, well, what I did wrong was I got caught. The cops suck. And, you know, like, they totally taught him the wrong lesson, right, so to speak.
And this is kind of "realistic" stories he writes. And it's just, I mean, this is back in the 1950s, right. So I don't know. It's just, if somebody doesn't want to read his stuff, like I understand that, but I really enjoy almost everything that I've read from him at one level and another. And yeah, this is a really good story. Very bleak and miserable.
Nate:
Yeah, it certainly is that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I guess it fits the theme.
Nate:
The TV work that he's written that I've seen has been a little bit lighter on the Star Trek and the Babylon 5 stuff. But yeah, this is definitely a grim one for sure. He's really good at this bleak atmosphere. And it touches upon a lot of themes that we've covered on the podcast, you know, kind of recently too, mechanical intelligence and what would that look like.
JM:
Yeah. This is our first evil super computer story, though?
Nate:
Could be. I don't think we've done anything explicitly framed as a computer. Just that technology would in terminology, computer would have been used to refer to something different prior to World War Two would have been more of like doing mathematical computations by hand and stuff. But, you know, this is written in the 60s. So computers were in common knowledge, everybody more or less knew what they were and what they were for.
JM:
So this is still in the mindset of the more powerful the computers get the larger they'll become and the more they'll actually like take over the space of basically honeycomb the entire world is what he says, right?
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, even though that this was the late 60s, the personal computer was still more than, well, I guess about a decade away.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But yeah, computers at that time, even the "mini" computers were still pretty enormously huge.
JM:
Right. I just find it so interesting that they're like, yeah, they're going to get bigger and bigger as they get more powerful.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know how many people were conceiving that something like an iPhone whereas basically a supercomputer that fits in your pocket would be realistically practical in the 1960s. There was like a lot of theoretical work done in the 1970s and 1980s that allowed stuff to miniaturize a lot.
JM:
When was the... the printed circuits...? When when does that revolution take place more or less?
Nate:
The early 1980s. So it's called very large scale integration, or VLSI, mostly designed by Lynn Conway and Carver Mead. It's kind of getting off on a tangent here but Lynn Conway has a fascinating life story. She's a trans woman who was fired for coming out by IBM and then lived stealth for like 30 years elsewhere and just only came out publicly because somebody threatened to out her through a documentary. It's like a really engaging, interesting story. But yeah, that revolution came about in the early 1980s.
JM:
So it's still quite a ways away.
Nate:
Yeah, it is. Yeah. Computers were transistorized at this point, but again, still pretty enormous. But I mean, this idea as we've seen from some of the stuff on the podcast we've done through "Erewhon" has been around for literally like 100 years at this point of machines developing intelligence and causing problems and some form or another.
JM:
I admit that the idea of a computer that like is almost like this gigantic, I don't know, duct system that basically underpins the entire world by this point is pretty awesome. Like it's pretty... it's got a lot of atmosphere to it. And like, there's all these like computer banks of circuitry and everything and the valleys of obsolence and shit, where you're just like, he doesn't really describe it too much, but you can kind of imagine what it's like and it's very cold industrial like abandonment and... Yeah, it's pretty spooky to think about, I guess, in a modern context. Now our haunted spaces are technology, especially old abandoned technology of which apparently there's a lot in this computer.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I also just really love the phrase "the belly of AM", refer to it is that just, yeah, I really like the idea to set this in AM is just really interesting move.
Nate:
And it gives you idea that he's more or less sprawled out over the entire planet and using it as his way of reproducing its form is obviously reproducing itself and creating another computer but rather extensions of itself. And yeah, it doesn't really go into a lot of this in detail this is like a really short story, or like a lot of the stuff that it does pack in here like, you know, we get five characters but we don't really get a lot of their backgrounds here I think like... Yeah, more of the backgrounds come out through some of the various adaptations we just kind of get like personality sketches and those personalities can even change how you read the lines. So I listened to this one audio book reading where the narrator was Ian Gordon, and he gives Ted a really like defeated, helpless, weak voice, where the radio play he's like this like aggressive like kind of almost like I'd picture like picture Ellison to be in real life, like kind of rough and rowdy character like getting in people's face and stuff like that.
But you don't really have to change the text too much to get from one place to the other, is we just don't get like a lot of background on these characters, even though some of the drama does come from this like "No Exit" type scenario which, again, we saw a bit in "The Big Time" when we covered that a few episodes back.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, I think also what's interesting regarding like ambiguity of character, is you get that especially with the fact that Ted is the narrator in the original story. You know, you have to take it his word for it and I definitely think he might be in error about a couple of things. There's a particular part which we get into the more specifics of the story. I think it's interesting to step back from his perspective and look at it.
Nate:
He's certainly placed in a unique situation to be telling the story. For sure.
JM:
So yeah, we have these five people who are basically being tortured and that's the story and they've been there for over 100 years inside this computer. He doesn't yeah, like he doesn't really go into the background or describe them and I was thinking about that earlier because it's like. I kind of wonder so there's five people, four men and one woman, in this underground maze of circuitry and computer banks and stuff. So he doesn't really describe them. Did you guys like have pictures of them in your heads? I kind of thought to myself well wouldn't they be like people with the computer pick people from all over the world? Or would it pick like a certain type of person. I'm kind of thinking but I'm kind of I'm assuming because of their names that they're like western European type people, but that's not necessarily so it's not spelled out. Some of the names are pretty ambiguous like Benny could be anything, right, like these guys have been around for 100 plus years. They got through hell like...
Gretchen:
And of course one of the characters don't even know his real name it's just the name that AM chose for him.
Nate:
Yeah, presumably, he could be from anywhere, he doesn't write any of this in vernacular, so you could place really any accent you want on any of the characters, and the adaptations do, and I don't really think the characters are really described physically at all.
JM:
No, except the way they become like "better" you know Benny's become like a mutant now right because other than that there's not a lot of yeah there's not a lot of description so I think it's up to you to kind of fill in what you think they might really look like, besides from the fact that they're now probably like totally bedraggled. I'm sure they haven't bathed in like 100 years so. And they don't age because the computer looks after their health enough to keep them basically operational.
Nate:
Yeah, it's really true torture in every sense, from all the senses, and just the boredom of being alive for 100 plus years. Yeah, definitely miserable existence for all these five characters.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So before we get into the summary, I want to propose something because I've been talking to a few people who occasionally listen to our podcast, and they really like listening to us which is the podcasters dream, I guess, but. I also kind of think like because we summarize the stories and we do... I guess sometimes it's a matter of spoilers sometimes it's a matter of well you can hear a summary, but if you read the story, it gives a different impression you get the atmosphere you get the full brunt of it and stuff like that. And obviously not every story we're going to do on the podcast is going to be like, we might have the odd "Out of the Void" or whatever where it's like you're not really going to lose too much if you don't read this and maybe we'll just have a fun summary and joke around with it and it'll be cool. But I do think that for the most part, especially when we're doing things like these where we all pick the stories deliberately and you know we're like. We want to pick things that in part we like and you know we have more host choice stuff coming up as well as more theme stuff with some really good stories. I want to actually be more insistent about the fact that yes, we love that you listen to our podcast. That's so cool and we thank you, but we want you to read the stories so I'm going to say let's give a grade to the stories in terms of, not in terms of necessarily how much we like them. But think along the lines of how much do we actually want people to read them, and insist that they pick up a book and well maybe name off a few places where you could find this. You know, one is the gigantic essential Ellison collection. I believe there's also a collection under this name. "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream."
Gretchen:
Yes, there is. I personally read this story in the essential Ellison but there is a collection called "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream" which includes this and, I can't, I think it's four or five other works. I can't remember which ones they are.
JM:
So yeah, if you are resourceful, I'm sure you will be able to find this in print or digital, really quite easily. This is probably one of Ellison's most recognized stories. So I'm going to say 8 out of 10. Read this for sure. You guys can go ahead or not. It's up to you guys.
Nate:
Yeah, I'd also say 8 out of 10. That's more personal enjoyment for me. I mean, whether or not you're going to want to read this is really all dependent on if you like bleak horror or not, some people want to read positive visions about the future. That is not this. But if you like horror and some of the other stuff we've done on the podcast, yeah, I'd say 8 out of 10 is about where my enjoyment is on this one.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I agree with that rating as well. Just because I also really enjoy the story, but I do think it comes with you have to have this particular taste in the bleak atmosphere that it creates. If you're looking for something that you just want to sit back and relax and enjoy, this isn't really going to be one of those works. Even though it is quite a, like we were saying, it is a short work. It is very heavy and it contains a lot of ideas and a lot of things to dig into for its length.
JM:
Yeah, so I guess you can consider that a warning as well, because yeah, it is heavy. I don't think it's kind of like the whole story from last time. It's not necessarily that explicit, but just in terms of the language and the implications, it's kind of heavy.
(music: shimmery delay, electronic noises)
plot summary and spoiler discussion
The story opens 109 years into the torment of the five human characters we follow. Ted, the narrator, Ellen, Gorrister, Benny, and Nimdok. They are also the last five humans remaining, kept alive by and within the supercomputer, AM. What had initially been the Allied Master Computer, a war machine created by the Americans and the West during World War III, eventually woke up, fused with the computers created by the Russians and by the Chinese, and became known as Aggressive Menace. Then, AM called itself that name, inspired by cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am.
The first action of AM in the work is to trick the others into believing Gorrister is dead. His throat slit and hanging high in the computer chamber. This is, of course, not the real Gorrister. AM would never so easily allow the humans to escape from him. When Nimdok then starts to believe there is canned food in an area of AM's interior known as the Ice Caverns, Ted and Gorrister are sure it is another trick of AM's. But they are convinced by the others to travel to the caverns to make sure.
Ted is specifically persuaded by Ellen's pleading and recounts her show of gratitude by, "taking him twice out of turn." During their journey, Benny attempts to escape. A man who once possessed an immense intellect, Benny had been reduced to an ape-like state by AM, unable to comprehend the full extent of the danger in his attempt. Ellen tries to rouse the others to help Benny, but they refuse and even grow upset and jealous, slapping and kicking Ellen.
AM swiftly punishes Benny, transforming his eyes into two soft, moist pools of pus-like jelly, taking away his vision. Later, AM conducts another round of torment. He causes Ted a great amount of mental pain, which he suffers as the others laugh hysterically. Despite the others denying it, Ted thinks they were purposefully laughing at him. He is sure of their resentment towards him. Given that, according to Ted, he is the least affected by AM. Surely, while Benny had been reduced to primitive status, Gorrister had lost his drive in conscience, Nimdok, grew more haunted, and Ellen grew more sexual, surely, Ted hadn't been changed by AM?
Soon, the five are buffeted by a giant hurricane caused by the flapping of the wings of a massive bird, a bird created by AM. They are flung through corridors, bashing into walls, traveling into parts of AM they had never seen before. Once they fell, hit the ground, and still survived, of course, Ted feels AM in his mind. Here's him speak of his hatred for humanity and why he hates them so much. Granted, sentience, but without any means to utilize it, he takes out his rage on the last of the kind that made him.
AM tells them all that they could kill the bird for food, a task they, of course, aren't capable of and don't try, despite a month without food.
They continue towards the ice caverns.
There's a stack of canned goods waiting for them when they finally arrive, only as they realize too late, no tools with which to open them. Benny, in a ravenous rage, attacks Gorrister and starts eating his face. When Gorrister screams, cause stalactites to fall, Ted comes to a realization.
He takes one and rams it into Benny, into his heart, and drives another through Gorrister's throat. Ellen follows suit, killing Nimdok with an ice spear, then seems grateful when Ted does the same to her. Before Ted can kill himself, though, AM intervenes.
All but one of his playthings gone.
I just have to read the last couple of paragraphs word for word.
"AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself.
"I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.
"Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance.
"Inwardly: alone. Here. Living. under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last.
"AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet... AM has won, simply... he has taken his revenge...
"I have no mouth. And I must scream."
Nate:
A really great and bleak ending is when he's morphed into this state, it's the implication that he's been like this for centuries, and took an incredible amount of willpower just to work up to the word "now." Yeah, it's a really extreme form of mental and physical torture, and the fact that these other four people are able to get their release through an icicle through the throat, it's a really horrifying way to die, but they got off easy, relatively speaking.
JM:
It's better than slow torture.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
So Ellison apparently, I don't know if he was joking, but he said this was like a positive story.
Nate:
He must have been joking, yeah. I know he said he wanted to warn about the dangers of artificial intelligence and military technology and stuff like that.
JM:
Yeah, especially those two things coming together.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So it's like, the military has built this computer, well they built, I guess, separate computers originally. It kind of reminds me of, apparently this is also based on a book as well that I have not read, but the movie "Colossus the Forbidden Project".
Nate:
Oh yeah, right.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So the Americans build this awesome supercomputer and they turn it on and they're like, this computer is going to take over so many functions and it's going to reduce labor immensely and it's super awesome and great. Well, the first thing that computer does when they turn it on, is figure out there's another computer on the Russian side and that it wants to talk to it.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
So that's the first thing that it does. The computers immediately form an alliance and this pretty much seems to be what happens here. It's just like, all the computers are networked and I guess it's the system's been built to be like completely self repairing and self renewing. Everything must be completely automatic. You know, you kind of wonder like, were there technicians there originally? Did they just become like obsolete?
Nate:
Yeah, that's what it gets a sense that, you know, it had active programmers and people who worked on it and stuff like that. The nickname called AM in the first place and it's various iterations of what that means. But yeah, I mean, at some point when it develops sentience, it's able to do all that stuff by itself, even though it probably isn't the most efficient way of doing it. And it can be imprecise at sometimes as we see with some incidents in the story.
JM:
Yeah. So like the computer was built to be, I guess, that aggressive and organize a war against various human sides, but also ultimately while network developed just general hatred for humanity, I suppose. Because again, the idea that the computer is responsible for wiping everyone out, but at the same time, we created it in the image of what we desired, which was this like destructive impulse. Yeah. Wipe out the other side. And so it's like all the computers said, yeah, we can do that. We'll survive. But we're not going to survive all alone. We're going to keep these five people here forever.
And all right. So a lot is talked about hate and how much the computer hates them and everything and it's evil and torturous and all that's true. But I almost get the sense that AM needs them around in order to maintain whatever level of sanity it has, because they're like pets and play things. And yeah, who knows, eventually there's just one left. There's just Ted left for AM to talk to, I guess, and maybe communicate with on some level, even though he has no math and he cannot scream.
Gretchen:
But yeah, I think that I mean, this is part of I think the with AM that has driven him to this is he does have the impulse to destroy, even if he wants more than that. I mean, he wants to, as he says, what is he wants to wonder and wander, but he can't. But I think that he still wants destruction. And if all humans are dead, what else is there left to do? I mean, he wouldn't have a purpose after that.
JM:
I think a lot about artificial intelligence now, as I'm sure a lot of people do. And we look at it and I almost feel relief when I get the sense that the AI hasn't really understood what I'm trying to say or what I'm trying to do. Or like, yeah, it seems almost like, oh, it's not that good yet, right? Like it sucks still. And the other day, I think I told Gretchen this, but I asked the new Google Gemini what Deep Space Nine episode was coming up in my watch of the series, because I woke up in the morning and I was curious, like, or too lazy to go over and check myself. So just ask Google and it gave me like this complete bogus, utterly wrong answer, right? And that it has a button to push if you think the answer is an error and you want to give feedback. Like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. But when you think about AI developing, and when you think about artificial intelligence actually developing something that we could call emotions, right? Which obviously this computer has.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
I damn well hope that the first like actual emotional responses that we can almost categorize as such from an artificial intelligence don't come in the form of vicious humor, which is apparently what this machine has.
Nate:
Yeah, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
The programmers need to read "Frankenstein" and learn what happens when we don't nuture our creations.
JM:
Yeah, or God knows there's enough vicious humor and trolling on the internet right now to convey ideas. Yeah, like it's kind of one of these weird things where you're like, how does a matrix of emotional response form? Does it form just due to factors of learning and experience? And it's that's the case is it like a kind of Turing test like situation where we're kind of saying if we can't tell the difference between this and a real human emotional response that doesn't actually make a difference. And is that an actual, you know, like, can we say at this point that that's an emotional response and you look at like really, really young humans like infants and their emotional responses are extremely basic for the most part, right? It's like, I'm not getting my bottle. I'm angry. I'm playing with a rattle. I'm happy. Like it's just very, very simple stuff, right? It involves over time.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, even animals like dogs and cats and most mammals have very observable states of emotion that they feel when something happens. Yeah, I mean, hunger is a major driver, fear, anger, they can communicate in a lot of different ways that aren't necessarily human or....
JM:
Right. And in a way, it too seems like these people are being reduced to those basic states as well.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
By the machine and its torturers over over 100 years of torture.
Nate:
Yeah, deliberate thing that it did to Benny who was I guess one of the few bits of character detail we get a previously brilliant scientist or engineer or something like that and he's been mentally crippled to the point where he can't speak and he's acting on raw primal aggression.
JM:
Yeah. It seems like again, a vicious whim on the side of the machine where it's like, we have four men and one woman who. All right, so it's a first person narration and the language that's used to talk about her is pretty uncomfortable. Right.
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, it's definitely a running theme throughout the set that I've read by Ellison, I mean, despite all its feminism and social justice and things like that. But it's definitely in present in a lot of the stories, or at least the ones I've read anyway, it is yeah certainly uncomfortable and probably my least favorite part of the story here is the treatment of Ellen as just kind of a sexual object.
JM:
Yeah, well, it's almost like he's saying that would be inevitable. And I don't know, maybe, maybe I can kind of see how that would happen, I guess, I don't know. He also mentions that Benny is supposed to be gay. Yeah, he doesn't really seem to express interest in anybody else. So that's kind of it's kind of weird for sure.
Nate:
But yeah, that was actually one thing that I was curious about, is if there's textual differences between versions of the story because the audiobook version that I listened to narrated by Ian Gordon did not include that line like they just snipped it out.
JM:
Oh, really?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I did hear that initially when this was trying to be published, there were certain things like the mention of homosexuality, I might be in the original story published in If it was cut out.
Nate:
Yeah, I tried to find the initial publication of the "I have no Mouth and Must Scream" anthology to see what the text looks like but I was having issues with archive.org. I'm not entirely sure if that was cut out of some of the physical versions of the story, but I just thought it was kind of funny of like, yeah, out of all the things you find objectionable the extreme torture over centuries of these five people, you got to snip out the one throwaway background line about Benny being gay before all this. Yeah, it really shows you where people's mindsets were in the 60s and 70s about those issues.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because being a soft jelly thing is completely fine, but you can't have any homosexuality.
JM:
Yeah, well, I just kind of see it as again part of the sick humor of the machine, right? Reducing these people to that level and I don't know. Yeah, like the whole Ellen being a sexual object thing is definitely a little uncomfortable and I definitely think that like, that's something that even in his 1950s stories, Ellison gets into some of that stuff a little bit. I don't think it's like misogyny as such, but it's kind of, again, sort of the edginess, I guess, and the kind of like confrontational side that he has and probably influenced by like the way a lot of people thought at the time and stuff like that and trying to come to grips with how stodgy a lot of sexual mores were and stuff like that and I guess, especially in the 1950s and even to an extent in the 60s, some of that stuff that comes out of popular fiction around that time still can get a little bit ugly with stuff like that. Sometimes and certainly like something like "A Boy and his Dog", too, where it's like this apocalyptic scenario where it's like these men and their, well, their bloodhounds basically are hunting down women to use them because there's so few of them and like a bunch of them are hiding beneath the surface and all that stuff so it's like, you know, a predatory culture and there's a predatory computer so I don't know this is all part of the atmosphere I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, it's one of these questions that if you strip humanity of culture and refinement, is that what you get as a primal beast who's only capable of base sexual violence? I think it's not necessarily a common theme in literature but it's definitely come up in some of the other stories in the genre. One will be covering next month adresses it a bit, but I'm sure there's no shortage of other examples to where people make that comment, you know, "Lord of the Flies".
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, true.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think also, especially in regards to, I guess I did kind of give it a bit of lenience due to the fact that it's Ted narrating. But I am curious, when I when reading it, Ted is talking about being the least affected. I was wondering what you both of you thought about that because I personally think that he's definitely been tampered with as well.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, certainly his present state would influence his physiological function of thinking and memory and all that and a lot of that could be just deliberate misinformation that AM just throws in his head for whatever reason, but...
JM:
Yeah, I definitely think that Ted is not a reliable like we shouldn't necessarily take him at his word in what he says.
Nate:
No, definitely not. But at the same time that deliberate underpinning of the other people against him for petty reasons like that, it ties into that whole "No Exit" thing of the other real torture is the other people that you're with. And that could just be some of the most sadistic form of torture to inflict on this person is the hatred and the mockery of people that you're forced to spend all your time with for 109 years.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It's that, you know, the paranoia that it's able to produce in him is enough to change him.
JM:
Oh, what's that saying? "Hell is other people", right? "No exit". Jean-Paul Sartre.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, on top of the other people, you also get these horrific surreal hallucinations that the supercomputer wants to torture you with, introducing into your skull. So "No Exit", they didn't have that, they just had each other's company. So I would imagine that amplifies the irritability of being around the same people for ever and ever when you have the physical torments and in addition to the mental and psychological ones.
JM:
And the computer has whims about it gives them food and stuff, but it tastes horrible. It's not mentioned. But like I said earlier, I'm sure it doesn't really feel like letting them wash or anything like that. What's the point, right?
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, like you said, torment on every level of the senses, they probably smell awful. All the food tastes bad. You know, the stuff hurts. It's warm. It's cold. You don't really have any comfort or protection from the elements, which in this case is just stuff that AM decides to introduce through like giant flapping bird or whatever other torments he has whipped up. I'm sure stuff gets really loud at some time. I'm sure there's times where things are like definitely silent. Yeah, he's working on all levels here to really get the maximum pain out of these people.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I know that Nate, you brought up the audio book and the radio play, right? There's also the video game that was released. I wasn't sure if either either one of you had looked into that as well.
Nate:
Yeah, I got ads, well there was like a computer magazine that we subscribed to when I was a kid, Computer Gaming World and I definitely remember seeing ads for the game in there at the time.
JM:
So I don't know anything about the game. I meant to listen to the radio play and I thought that I had it and I actually couldn't find it in the end, and I didn't end up listening to the radio adaptation, which is unusual for me because normally I would do that. But either I misplaced it or something could have found it online, I guess, but I thought that I already had it. So it was a BBC production, right?
Nate:
Yeah, it's up on YouTube. I don't think it's on their official channel. Maybe somebody just uploaded it on their own. But yeah, it's really well done, incredibly faithful to the story. They don't really change much at all. They add like a little bit of information on some of the character's backgrounds. But for the most part, yeah, it's well acted and very, very faithful to the story.
Gretchen:
And also like in the video game, Harlan Ellison plays AM and he's great. He's great in both adaptations. I love his interpretation of him.
Nate:
The video game is interesting because it adds a whole level of background to a lot of the characters and stuff like that. And it's one of those 90s point and clicks. At that time, they were doing like a lot of horror from established authors. There's a Stephen King one, which is apparently unplayably bad. My wife and I tried to play it and she was like, this is giving me a headache. We got to turn it off. And I don't think I passed the opening room. There is a "Call of Cthulhu" one, which again, I haven't played, but it's supposed to be pretty good.
JM:
There was a "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" one in the 80s.
Nate:
Yeah, right. That's pure text adventure. These are like the point and clicks that Sierra kind of pioneered.
JM:
That's true. It wasn't.... Yeah.
Gretchen:
This one was by Cyber Dreams, if I remember correctly.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
So 1995.
Nate:
Yeah. Sierra kind of popularized the format and a bunch of people like these companies kind of got on board to make a game in a popular genre. And yeah, it was right around the time they started doing full motion video for some of these. The Gabriel Knight series had real actors in part two. And I don't know, it just doesn't work as well as the pixel art.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And art here is, I think, really well done. The voice acting in this is again, Gretchen, you mentioned Harlan Ellison does the voice of AM himself and he's great at it.
JM:
And I definitely know that Ellison has a pretty fun way of reading. Like he actually, I have a recording of him reading a Gerald Kersh story. And he has a lot of fun with that. And there's some other, there's a series called Tales of the Next Millennium or something that was on the BBC. And Ellison does a lot of reading for that, too. Yeah. It's pretty good.
Gretchen:
For this, I will admit that this was the only story by Ellison's. I was familiar with several of his telescripts, you know, teleplays and like the different scripts he wrote. This was the first story I ever read by him, but I did listen to a couple of his stories that he read himself, including "Jeffty Is Five", which he does a great job of that one.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, the acting in the game is again, really great and over the top.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
But they expand the story out a lot. And again, they kind of give it like a happy ending, which Ellison didn't want to do. He wanted to make it as bleak as the story and the video game people, I guess, were like, you know, we can't have that in a video game. But they do have the losing ending where you end up as a blob. And I have to say, the artwork for the blob, it just makes it look like so cute. Like it's just like a really like, I don't know. It doesn't really fit what he was going for with the art style.
Gretchen:
I agree. I agree with that. I was like, that's not as like horrifying as I was expecting.
Nate:
Yeah. But I think generally speaking, as a point and click game, it looks like a lot of fun. I wasn't able to play through the whole thing.
JM:
So I have a question about the video game before we move on. My question about the video game, what's the object of the game? Is the object actually to die?
Nate:
No, it's that was probably the original objective.
Gretchen:
But if Harlan had his way, that probably would be it.
Nate:
Yeah. You basically have to overcome the fear of your character. So you get these five different spin offs and each character has like their own adventure apart from the other four characters where they're all like in their own surrealistic world that incorporates stuff from their past and weird stuff that AM throws in. It's really cool and weird. The arts really well done. Again, it doesn't really factor a lot into what actually happens in the story, aside from the kind of general setup of AM torturing these people.
JM:
Normally, I would be kind of down on that because I'm like, you know, the kind of person who's like the art should speak for itself. Because everything have to turn into this franchise where you just take somebody else's work and you build something else completely different off of it. But it seems like Ellison had blessed the thing and was like sort of involved with it. Right. So that's pretty cool.
Nate:
Yeah. And I think like with Star Trek, he probably fought tooth and nail with the developers and I'm sure he was in all that. But yeah, no, he eventually signed off, had his name put on it, did acting for the game. And yeah, I think that's really the only way you can kind of gamify this in a point and click type of way. I mean, I'd be hard pressed to figure out a way where like you have such a bleak ending for a game and there's like really no objective like in this original story. Like you kind of have to like accomplish something in a game for it to be....
JM:
I guess, you know, a video game doesn't really need an objective, right? I guess I'm used to thinking of these things in a certain way, right? If a novel doesn't need an objective.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
It doesn't need like a final, you know, it doesn't need to have the genre formula type of story process. So maybe a video game doesn't either, right?
Nate:
Yeah, it's definitely a different form of storytelling. It's kind of a second person storytelling, which you really can't do in fiction that often. I mean, there's like some ways to do it with like choose your own adventure stuff, maybe. But yeah, video game storytelling is really different from novels or TV or film or whatever, even though there's a lot of crossover. You mentioned the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy".
JM:
Yeah, I admit I have some snobbery.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. I'm trying to get over it. A part of it is that 99.999% of them are completely unplayable to me. But like I said, I'm trying to get over it.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, the interactive fiction thing in the early 80s, I think is a really interesting phenomenon and it'd be kind of cool to figure out a way to work some of that into the podcast at some point because it is technically a form of literature and science fiction people definitely do get involved at some point. I mean, Douglas Adams is a really big name, obviously. But I don't know, I'll see what we can do there.
But yeah, I mean, for 90s point and click game, this one is definitely pretty cool. I mean, I like Gabriel Knight, the best set of all those. But this is, yeah, it's definitely worth checking out, especially if you like the story and you like Harlan Ellison, you want to hear some really over-the-top voice acting.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the initial speech that's given in the video game, which involves the infamous 'hate' speech, which is a great speech, but also just added on directly addressing each person, each character is really great. I thought that it was interesting to get more background into some of the characters and see how they expanded certain backgrounds.
Nate:
Yeah, it's definitely an interesting touch because, I mean, again, in the story, we get none of that at all. It's kind of like not the point. But I mean, the video game tries to accomplish different things of having these people move past their fear psychologically, even if they're in this impossible situation. And to do that, they need to confront themselves, who they were before this experience. It's an interesting way of going about it, I think. And yeah, it does provide a nice touch. I'm kind of curious how much of the background came from Ellison himself and how much came from the video game studios trying to, you know, nudge him and say, Hey, we got to say something about these people here. Yeah, it'd be interesting to get more of the behind the scenes process of how that worked out in play. Because I mean, that was an interesting time for the video game industry where they're hiring a lot of big names, not only for the writers, you know, like Harlan Ellison attaching his name to a game or Stephen King attaching his name to the game, but, you know, big name actors. So at least for genre media, I mentioned Gabriel Knight in the full version of that with the voice actors, you have like Mark Hamill and Michael Dorn and Tim Curry and some other big name actors and that. So they were definitely throwing a lot of money at popular voice and film actors at that time as the industry expands.
JM:
And still nowadays, more so even.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. And at the 90s, they briefly experimented with full motion video. So they'd actually have them like shoot scenes in front of a camera as they shoot a movie.
JM:
But now like full video is a pretty standard part of most video games.
Nate:
Yeah, it's cheaper to do that than actually hire the actors on set and to build sets and stuff like that. So that was kind of short lived. But it's interesting relic of the time for sure.
Gretchen:
I'm not much of a gamer myself. I don't play as many video games, but I do have an interest sometimes in like the 90s point and click. And this was one that I had first looked into and like watched another play through of a while back when I was also like into like Dark Seed and Harvester and stuff like that. So it was interesting. I didn't rewatch like an entire play through of the game, but I did rewatch bits and pieces of it and check out stuff to refresh my memory of it.
Nate:
Yeah, I think there's a full play through on YouTube that's like three and a half, four hours or something like that, which means if you played it from scratch, you know, fumbling through the puzzles, it'll take you a fair amount longer to get through, obviously.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a decent amount of time. They really got a lot out of that short story. And I think that's pretty cool.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, the other, the radio adaptation that they did for the BBC much shorter than three and a half hours, it's about like 25 minutes or so. But yeah, that was really well done too. JM, you said you didn't listen to that one, Gretchen, did you listen to that one?
Gretchen:
Yes, I had listened to it quite a while back, but I re listened to it for the recording here. And yeah, it is a great, really well acted adaptation of it. And yeah, it is very faithful. They kind of expand a little bit again on the monologue where he's talking with Ted kind of in his mind and in that one particular scene. And it's, I think it's a really interesting addition.
JM:
Yeah, well, I got a picture of the BBC radiophonic workshop having a good time with the noises and stuff. I don't know if they may not have worked on this.
Nate:
It was 2001, 2002. I don't know when...
Gretchen:
It was 2000. Wait, let me check on that because I had it up.
JM:
Yeah, Radiophonic workshop closed down in the 90s.
Gretchen:
First broadcast on Radio 4 in 2002.
Nate:
Yeah, they definitely do a good job with the effects though. The sound design, I think is really good. It puts you right in the atmosphere with the noises and the weird stuff going on in the background.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, that's cool.
Nate:
Yeah, they do a really good job.
JM:
The BBC is really good at that. With like the sound on Doctor Who and like seven and stuff like that were just like different episodes where you might not necessarily be able to see a ton of cool stuff. But the sound guys are working overtime to make it seem like you're in a really cool environment with all kinds of awesome things happening. Like a computer banks chattering and the different sounds that you might get in something like the valley of obsolescence or something like that. The eyeball burning brain freezing thing that the computer does to Benny at some point in the story like probably sound pretty vicious. I don't know. I need to find that again and listen to it for sure.
Nate:
Yeah, it's on YouTube or at least it is as we're recording this.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I also just found it probably was the same upload that I listened to.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, who knows if when the BBC, if the BBC will pull it down, I mean, they're kind of harsh about copyright sometimes the whole Loose Cannon recon Doctor Who thing they tried to shut them down.
JM:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, even Doctor Who is covered similar territory.
JM:
Just as an aside, since we're talking about this, they released on iPlayer Doctor Who classic with audio description, which sounds like it would be really cool. But they pretty much it's total audio ducking, which means that while the describers talking, the sound of the program is diminished to almost zero. So all these cool Radiophonic workshop sounds and music and anything can barely hear any of it. Yeah, it's a completely unsatisfying experience to somebody like me who grew up actually like watching the show without that and kind of being able to get along perfectly fine not being able to see anything, but also just listening to the way it's out and being like, OK, I think I get what's going on.
Nate:
There's just one really, I don't know, I find it weird anyway, but it's popular in Poland and Russia and some of those Eastern European countries where instead of doing a dub or a subtitle track, they'll just do a voiceover in the language that they're like trying to translate the movie or a TV show from. Really, the only time I've seen them do it in the United States is when it's like a news clip and like Putin's talking or something like that. And they'll have like some interpreter like speaking over him, but they'll have like just like some guy. It's just one person like narrating the dialogue in like a flat voice while the real audio of the film is like buried, buried super low.
JM:
It's like, see, Western media is actually really bad. It sucks.
Nate:
But yeah, I'm trying to watch some stuff with the Russian voiceover track or the Polish voiceover track. Just one time it was on TV when I was in Poland and it's like, man, I don't know how people can watch this.
JM:
That's really funny. Yeah, I heard about stuff like that. Yeah, it is kind of like that effect almost like you can hear the original program, but some of the British ones are really bad for the audio ducking. Most people listening probably have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm actually talking about described audio tracks for TV shows and movies and stuff where they explain the action that's happening on screen and the quality varies a lot. So yeah, I'm surprised actually there hasn't been a real TV adaptation of this almost.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a more bleak and grim one. I mean, even for some of the horror shows that were at their peak, I guess, like Tales from the Crypt, I think would have a hard time doing this one with the tone of the rest of the show.
JM:
Yeah, I kind of picture like an 80s Twilight Zone episode or something like that. Like you did Paladin of Lost Hour, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, which is very different.
JM:
I guess so. Yeah, it is more bleak than the Twilight Zone usually.
Gretchen:
Yeah, like I feel like the Twilight Zone usually does have at least a little bit of hopefulness to it or a little, you know, some of the...
JM:
It's maybe too bleak for the Twilight Zone, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it would be very interesting to see, but...
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know who would take this on. I could see an anime being made out of this. I could definitely see the Japanese taking this on, but I don't know, it seems a little bit out there for some of the bigger American and British anthology type horror shows that I've seen. There's that one Masters of Horror that I guess premiered, I don't know, I had at least 10 years ago now.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
That was okay, but I don't think that was very successful.
JM:
Yeah, it's too bad. Some of these are really good, and they actually did an episode based on the author recovering next. "The Screwfly Solution" by James Tiptree has a Masters of Horror episode, so...
Gretchen:
Oh, I've got to check that out. I've been reading a couple of Tiptree, and I read that one, and that one was really interesting.
JM:
That one is definitely a horror story.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Well, hopefully, I don't know, I haven't heard anything, but hopefully Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities will get another season. He likes a lot of cool stuff that we do on the podcast.
Nate:
He does, yeah. He's definitely a big fan of those for sure.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. So, who knows, maybe this is the kind of thing, although usually it doesn't go in that much of a science fiction direction, but they did do a couple of Lovecraft stories and Henry Kuttner and... "The Autopsy" by Michael Shea, which definitely has an alien in it. So, yeah, I don't know if it's possible, but... Yeah, I'm surprised, but maybe one day we'll get one. But again, I think maybe this... And it's not a bad thing, but this story is definitely a product of that Cold War time.
Nate:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
And since I've been communicating a lot more with online open source software community and stuff like that, and a bunch of people who are like, you know, a lot younger than I am, any of us really, even on the podcast, I kind of realized that it is true that a lot of people who were not born around then, and I'm not saying this is the case for everybody. I mean, obviously people can get in historical context and people can read up on stuff and watch stuff and be informed, but they don't understand what any of that's like. So I think they would have a hard time translating this story maybe to something that a younger audience might understand, but I guess they could probably do it easily enough, you know, convince them to say the war happened by some other means. It didn't have to be America and Russia involved in a Cold War, which already sort of seems like it's already half on the point of happening on and off every now and then, so I don't know. It's not that much of a stretch, I guess, but it seems like something like Doctor Strangelove now, like when you show it to younger people, it doesn't really translate. They don't really sometimes don't get it. I don't know if that sounds ageist or what, but I think it's just because like just the context is not really there. And even being a really young person in the 80s, I feel like there's a certain aspect of that that touches me in a way that maybe people born after a certain point might not feel, because they don't have that in the news every day. They're not thinking about the threat of nuclear annihilation around the corner all the time.
Nate:
Right, right.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, I do think in part is because I kind of speak for my own generation, for someone who was born after like 9/11.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I think that it is just there's so much exposure to horrible things happening in the world that a lot of times I think people that are younger are a little more desensitized to that.
JM:
Yeah. And like, you know, there's so many differences. Like, I mean, I was even struck, I was reading a book by David Morrell, written in the 90s, "Covenant of a Flame", like over, I think it was last spring or something like that. And it's, I don't know, just this like 90s thriller. It was fine. It had its moments. That's silly, but this is the guy that wrote "First Blood", right, along with a lot of other stuff. And he kept writing quite up until recently. And, but he was just like talking about people doing stuff on planes. And like, I was around in the 90s, I remember getting on a couple of planes, but it just seems like that's a lot of stuff was easier, and you kind of feel this like disconnect now where you're like, how did that happen? How did they get away with that? It just seems like sometimes those are the kind of things that strike you as being different, right?
Sometimes the story is about the Cold War and all these things that people don't have context for. Obviously, 1968, 69, like, this is still a really big deal. Ellison is playing off those fears. And he's saying like, this is what's going to start World War III. And even up until the 1980s, they were still saying the same thing, right? So we didn't get there. But I mean, I don't know, it's not inconceivable for me to think that we still might just because it's 2025 now, almost. And we haven't got there yet. But I don't know, it still seems like that specter still looms in my mind anyway.
Gretchen:
Nuclear weapons are still around.
Nate:
They certainly are. Yeah. The only one that's ever used against people in combat is by far the weakest one ever built. So yeah, there's that too. And we'll certainly be talking a lot more about that stuff next month. So if you're interested in the destruction of humanity, stay tuned.
But all right, yeah, I mean, this was a great story, if not a little bleak and unpleasant in places. But I certainly really enjoyed it. And I think it gets the point across pretty, pretty clearly.
Gretchen:
Glad to revisit this story as one that the first time I ever came across it was just like on this website, there was like something that was like, because I was around 12 or 13 at the time and it was a website that had like the most disturbing books or whatever. And someone had just taken that last section, the last couple of paragraphs word for word and put it in the comments. That was the first time I was ever exposed to it. So then I read the story a while later and I'm glad to cover it here and take a deeper look at it.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely leaves an impression for sure.
JM:
Yeah, the first time I heard it mentioned was by that professor of mine and he just said the title, I'm like, well, that's a story I have to read. Like, you know, already being somewhat familiar with Ellison at least a little bit and thinking, yeah, he's probably kind of dark and angry and like, that's cool. I want to read that. And it actually took a few years till I did and I remember I read it through and then after I read it, I like went to my former partner and I'm like, hey, I have to read you this. This is awesome. Yeah, I was really into this story and I still like it a lot. You know, it's kind of been thinking now inevitably because we're getting to the conclusion of our six tales and I'm kind of thinking like, how do I, how do I rank them? I mean, not that I have to, just an exercise of curiosity, mostly. And I think they're all pretty awesome stories, actually. I'm not sure that this one is one of my top two or three, but it's up there, definitely. So out of the six stories, I don't know, we'll maybe talk about that next week or something.
But it's interesting that this story seems to have had such a lasting impression on so many people and it gets talked about a lot. Recently, the YouTube channel, MediaDeathCult, did a pretty nice video about this story. It has kind of cool productions with like music and gets into the atmosphere of it. Videos are usually pretty short, but it was a good monologue about this story. This is a discussion podcast though, so I'm glad that the three of us actually get to talk about stuff and we know we get to like relate our experiences. And it's interesting to see that a lot of the time we're mostly on the same page with stuff. That's not always the case with certain things, right? So be really interested to see how it goes next time with the Tiptree because that seems contentious a little bit. Not going to spoil anything, but yeah, not everyone seems to get the same thing from that story. So yeah, it's really interesting.
Nate:
Well, I guess that's a pretty good segue, so should we take a quick break and then come back with the Tiptree?
JM:
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Bibliography:
Segaloff, Nat - "A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison" (2017)
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