The late Harlan Ellison was a prolific writer who wrote novellas, short stories, scripts, and screenplays while maintaining an unwavering dedication to the truth. As a result, he also had a reputation for being combative, condescending, and a self-professed rabble-rouser. Ellison came along at a time when Science Fiction was in danger of becoming a part of the past. Scrapping as a writer at a penny per word for magazines and journals, Science Fiction dwelled in the pulps. The short stories that resembled romances, westerns, and even mysteries in form were tying a genre that dealt mainly with the future to the relics of publishing.
Born in Ohio, Ellison had the childhood of a fighter. The only Jewish kid in Painesville, OH (thirty miles from Cleveland) Ellison was regularly beaten up and had no friends. With no future there, Ellison ran away from home where he took only jobs he could - unskilled labor. He fished for tuna off the coast of Galveston. Picked crops in New Orleans. Drove a nitro-glycerin truck in North Carolina. Upon returning home for the funeral of his father, Ellison studied writing at Ohio State University for a tenuous eighteen months. When a professor said, "You will never be a writer." Ellison hit him and was quickly expelled. (For the first twenty years he was published, Ellison sent that same professor every book he wrote.)
Ellison's career in writing got off to a most auspicious start. At 15, he configured Sir Walter Scott into his creation and scored a five-part serial in the Cleveland News. However, behind the scenes, Ellison maintained a steady diet of writing fueled by classic Science Fiction and imaginative comics. At 21, Ellison moved to New York City, where managed to get 100 short stories published over two years. While many were under other pen names and pseudonyms, it was enough to keep him living there. When he joined the Army and shipped out to Fort Benning, GA, Ellison wrote his first novel "Web of the City" in his spare time. Seen as a successful writer, the Army held on to him as their Public Information Officer at Fort Knox.
Running out of cheap magazines to buy his stories, Ellison traveled to Hollywood where he sold teleplays to everyone from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" to "The Flying Nun." In Hollywood, Ellison's nuts and bolts view of the industry would shape his constant philosophy - "Pay the writer." His most famous screenplay may be the best episode of Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek" ever. 1967's "The City at the Edge of Forever" remains in the Hall of Fame and was even novelized for publication.
Writing for other entities, no matter how rewarding, was not working out. In addition, Ellison was involved with The Civil Rights Movement, marching in Selma, AL with Dr. Martin Luther King and above all trying to find a way that Science Fiction writers of all races and genders could redefine the genre. 1965's ""Repent, Harlequin," Said The Ticktockman" was a turning point. With an eye on a less-that-ideal future, Ellison announces upfront that his story is based upon Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience." In addition to giving away the inspiration, he opens the story in a conversational tone as himself including the declaration "Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself." Composed in one six-hour session at the Milford Writer's Workshop, "Harlequin" breaks all the rules of convention. Everett C. Marm, the Harlequin, has found the best way to rebel in this mind-numbing worker-based dystopian society — violating the rules of time.
The Harlequin's revenge on this sect of society is to wait until the precise changing of the guards shift at the Timkin roller-bearing plant and fly over them on his air-boat with streams of hundreds of thousands of jellybeans. As the candy convection streams down in a panoply of colors, Ellison breaks form and gives the continuous act of rebellion its own run-on sentence.
Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapace of the Timkin workers, tinkling on the sidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity, and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!
This is far more than Roald Dahl-ian slice of revenge. This a long action-packed sentence that captures the wonder of it all. As you read, you can easily imagine exactly how the dangerously compartmentalized workday would be sliced, diced, julienned, and plated for you from here on out. Going further as the action had some hint of divine intervention, every schedule from the workers to those down below the factory have their schedules delayed by seven minutes.
We then learn about the Harlequin's life through a series of randomly-selected memories all based on never being on time. Each infraction in the collective memory spouting these incidences punctuates with "..and so it goes." As you can discern there is a price to pay for all this frivolity. Time lost can only lead to time served.
After winning awards and notoriety for "Harlequin," Ellison's next tale was far darker and more dystopian quietly leading us to what we know today as Speculative Fiction. Without all the descriptions of Hard SciFi, under Ellison (and Philip K.Dick, Robert Heinlein, and more) the stories were asking more of the readers and mirroring society today. In general, Ellison would even take proceedings one step further typically assailing that we had no real future.
The chill of 1967's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is a nightmarish tale of arriving at the end of the world after World War III. In prescient ways, reading the short story nearly 60 years later is even more frightening. Ellison postulates that the three superpowers China, Russia and the United States are all so engaged in this mammoth battle that they each build supercomputers to help in the fight. After they bury each gigantic monstrosity underground, the computers join forces and eradicate everything. Dubbed AM, for Allied Supercomputer, the beast saves five humans (Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ted, and Ellen) to toy with. 109 years after AM has removed all but their lives from the barren planet. Now that even the sentient computer is bored with this arrangement, AM discovers that it has rendered itself just as much as prisoner as these five. The computer's impositions and appearance in hologram grow more manipulative and sadistic as it seeks its vengeance on its creators via the five humans.
Like "Harlequin," Ellison damages the form to make points about the endlessness of this prison-style life. As social mores are dropping around him, Ellison even engages in documenting acts that would classify this short story as "adult literature." However, these do not occur for any enjoyment. This is a grim Promethean tale of machines being granted far too much control and even too much knowledge. With no "human element" here per se, acts are portrayed as machine-like and inhuman. And in its ultimate throwback to "Harlequin," we even come to realize that time may no longer exist as well.
Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don't know. AM has been having fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense. I will say the word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now. I don't know. I think it has been some hundreds of years.
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Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
NEW MUSIC This Week
BEYONCE - Cowboy Carter [2LP/Bead Face CD/Snake Face CD](Parkwood/Columbia) • After taking the world by storm over the last two weeks, Queen Bey has graced us with physical product that gives us all of Act II of her Renaissance trilogy. Where "Renaissance" echoed the House music of her past, "Cowboy" repaves the history of Country Music to include African-American voices (the first African-American woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, Linda Martell, makes a guest appearance.) This is R&B mixed with Hip-Hop, Rock, Pop, Blues, Soul, and even Folk music. Never has Beyonce reached this far with her music even bringing along Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Post Malone, Miley Cyrus, and Rumi Carter. If that was not enough, the backing musicians on this sprawling album include Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Gary Clark, Jr., Nile Rodgers, Jon Batiste, and Rhiannon Giddens.
MAGGIE ROGERS - Don't Forget Me [GREEN LP/CD](Capitol) • Working with producer and co-writer Ian Fitchuk, Rogers continues to follow the Pop/Rock reckoning she had on 2022's excellent "Reckoning." Leaving behind her earlier Jewel-ian years, Rogers is eager to tell stories without the trappings of storytelling. A brave move, especially given "Surrender" was a bigger hit with critics than the general audience. The title cut is a heartbreaker that falls right along the lines of Boygenius. Rogers has a gift for immediately seizing the moment with her powerful but midrange voice. "Don't Forget Me" wisely unleashes its title line with her high range guaranteeing impact. The same cannot be said for the second single "So Sick of Dreaming" where she courts sweet Americana/AAA with grace until the talking bridge that leaves you no longer caring about her date to a Knicks game. Nonetheless, this sense of experimentation is a welcome exercise in change. "Don't Forget Me" more than likely will be a bit of a step backward as Rogers tries to find that hit a la "Light On."
GIRL ON RED - I'm Doing It Again Baby! [LP/CD](Columbia) • Marie Ulven Ringheim makes her leap to major label Columbia with an album of self-described "more fun" tracks than before. No stranger to the confession of romantic desires and failures, Girl on Red has chalked up numerous Platinum singles from her streaming success. Ulven Ringheim and longtime producer Matias Tellez return to the "Serotonin" formula that finally earned her chart success in 2021. Along to help with establishing this position on US shores, co-writer Sabrina Carpenter on "You Need Me Now?"
MARK KNOPFLER - One Deep River [BLUE LP/CD](Blue Note/Capitol) • On the guitar wizard's tenth album and first in six years, the former Dire Straits leader goes back home. Featuring the same band as "Down The Road Whatever," takes us back to his childhood in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Clearly crossing the bridge and returning to the Geordie culture filled Knopfler's guitar playing with new melodic textures. The early Dire Straits catalog (especially the classic 1978 debut) springs to mind which Knopfler, as the producer, further emphasizes with the addition of pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz, Mike McGoldrick on whistle and uilleann pipes, John McCusker on fiddle and Emma and Tamsin Topolski helping with backing vocals. In the addition to the release of "One Deep River" this week, Knopfler has four extra tracks coming on a special single for Record Store Day on April 20th.
