From /tmp/sf.15692 Tue Mar 30 18:15:24 1993 Xref: lysator.liu.se alt.books.reviews:192 rec.arts.books:8070 rec.arts.sf.reviews:30 Newsgroups: alt.books.reviews,rec.arts.books,rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!uunet!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.columbia.edu!news.media.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu.!wex From: sbrock@csn.org (Steve Brock) Subject: "Harlan Ellison's Watching" by Harlan Ellison Message-ID: Followup-To: rec.arts.books Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Colorado SuperNet, Inc. Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 19:32:53 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) Lines: 61 %T HARLAN ELLISON'S WATCHING %A Harlan Ellison %I Underwood-Miller Publishing, 708 Westover Dr., Lancaster, PA 17601. %I Index, two appendices. %P 514 pp. %O $17.95 paper. %G 0-88733-147-5 REVIEW Fiona Webster has given a nice description of the cover of this book, and Stewart Tame has correctly stated that this is a trade paperback edition of the hardcover published in 1989. With all the help, this review should be a snap. I have two questions, however, for Fiona: 1. What's with the arrow that goes under the title, points toward the spine, with the one on the spine pointing toward the back cover? Is it to get the reader to turn the book over to see the abstract "chessboard on the lake?" 2. And what is little Harlan doing on the cover? He looks like his head and arm are floating in the air. What is the symbolism of this? Does "fingers down" signify a bad review a la Siskel and Ebert's "thumbs down?" Little Harlan has watched, as well as written for, many television shows and movies, and this book attempts to put his reviews into some kind of order with chapters grouped into "Installments." Beginning with a short essay on the influence of movies on his childhood (and sneaking out of his grandmother's house at night to see "Mr. Bug Goes To Town" on his birthday so he could get in free, and getting caught - jerked out of his seat where he cringed, by a flashlight-wielding usher), the responsibilities of being a critic (responsibilities? what responsibilities), and his first reviews for "Cinema" magazine, he exhibits other reviews written for the publication. Most memorable of his opinions in this section are in his reviews of "Beau Geste" ("a microcephalically written screenplay of the sheerest ineptitude"), Godard's "Le Carabiniers" ("I suggest those who find this deprecating review of M. Godard's pud-pulling unacceptable, cross check with less-Philistinic reviewers and then go or not go accordingly"), and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (he calls it "Kubrick's Folly" and tells viewers to watch it "stoned on acid"). We then enter Ellison's "Screening Room" (four reviews of lesser movies excerpted from "The Staff"), and then we get to the meat of the book: "Harlan Ellison's Watching" First Series (1977-78) and Second Series (1984-). These reviews show Ellison reaching maturity, but never growing up. Most of these reviews ran in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction." In Harlan's own words, he outlines his perspective on reviewing movies. "I try to look not only at the primary entertainment, storytelling qualities of films," he says, "but attempt to consider them as reflections of cultural phenomena." This extends to occasionally equating them with bodily functions, such as "Star Wars" (panning the movie makes him "run the risk of being disemboweled by terminal acne cases"), "Cujo" ("a gawdawful lump of indigestible grue"), or "Robocop" ("this is a template for everything rabid and drooling in our culture"). Occasionally this opens him up to slander suits, but I know of none that he has lost. Few ushers, lately, have tried to jerk him out of his seat. That (once) sweet little Ellison kid is one of the most caustically, sincerely original voices we have today, whether it's a movie review, a dangerous vision, or a pilot for a new television show. This book of reviews gets an unequivocal "fingers up." And don't let Fiona get you jealous that she has the hardback edition. From new Thu Jun 16 18:53:57 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!swrinde!sgiblab!sgigate.sgi.com!olivea!koriel!rutgers!mcimail.com!0003621563 From: 0003621563@mcimail.COM (Variety Boston) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: DANGEROUS VISIONS Message-ID: <12940325014621.0003621563NA4EM@mcimail.com> Date: 25 Mar 94 01:46:00 GMT Sender: nobody@rutgers.rutgers.edu Lines: 213 RE: Dangerous Visions It may seem odd to have finally gotten around to Harlan Ellison's landmark SF anthology 27 years after it was published, especially since I was 12 when it came out and have had ample opportunity to read it for the past quarter century. Nonetheless, I have only just read it. While it is foolish to review a collection of original stories that presented itself as being on the cutting edge in 1967, I wanted to reflect on how the stories have stood the test of time when read in 1994. My goal is not to ask whether the stories are STILL cutting edge -- a pointless exercise -- but whether they are still worth reading. What follows is, naturally, my own opinion. Your mileage may vary. On the off chance that there are people reading this who have yet to read this collection, be warned: SPOILERS ARE CONTAINED HEREIN. I would rather write as a critic than a reviewer, and not worry about giving away endings of stories that have been in general circulation for more than two decades. To leap ahead to the conclusion, my feeling is that DANGEROUS VISIONS has not held up well. There are some stories that still pack a wallop, and others that are good in spite of no longer being "dangerous," but many of the others have dated badly. ELLISON: Let's begin with Harlan Ellison's introductions, not only to the volume but to every story in the book. They are horribly self-indulgent, and as likely to produce a grimace as provide a nugget of information about the author. While it amusing to read about such "young" talent as Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delaney, it is not the 20/20 hindsight that causes Ellison's words to grate, as it is his incessant self- congratulatory tone. There are certainly stories here that fail to shock that WERE rather "dangerous" in 1967, but there are other stories in here that aren't especially shocking even by the standards of classic SF. As Brian Aldiss notes in TRILLION YEAR SPREE, the idea that the stories here were on the cutting edge of SF says more about the insularity and stodginess of SF in 1967 than anything else. Certainly compared to what was going on in the mainstream in that time, there is little here that's especially daring. I am willing to concede that for the Ellison fan his introductions may be fascinating. Although I thoroughly enjoyed a brief encounter with the author around 1977, I have never been a fan. It's not that I *dislike* his work. It simply hasn't appealed to me. On the other hand, I have always enjoyed the late Isaac Asimov's equally self-indulgent introductory essays in HIS books, so perhaps it's simply a matter of taste. BLASPHEMY: No doubt in 1967 proclaiming the death or defeat of God in an SF story was especially shocking. Today, such stories as Lester Del Ray's "Evensong," Damon Knight's "Shall the Dust Praise Thee?," and Jonathan Brand's "Encounter with a Hick" seem little more than graffiti. Hey look: we can be blasphemous, aren't we daring? SF writers and fans like to think they are especially open minded, but the condescension of SOME towards those who maintain religious faith and practice demonstrates otherwise. These stories seem to exist for the sole purpose of thumbing their nose at believers. The exception here is John Brunner's "Judas" which posits a robot who has assumed the role of deity through mimicking Christian theology. He makes an interesting point about how some believers will see everything through the lens of their particular belief system. Perhaps the lesson here is one learned by such obviously religious writers as Orson Scott Card -- critiques of religious organizations work much better when the focus is on PEOPLE rather than an attempt to attack the ineffable. SEX: Aldiss, in TRILLION YEAR SPREE, suggests that most of the taboos being challenged here are sexual in nature. For the most part that isn't true, although there ARE such stories. The biggest disappointment, IMHO, was Philip Jose Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage." For years I had heard about this story, which won Farmer a Hugo award. This may be sacrilegious to some, but the story seemed to me to be little more than a LOT of style and very little substance. While the style is impressive, it seems largely in service of some very labored puns. At the end of this LONG story (novella? novelette?) I was hardpressed to see what it had all been for. Robert Bloch's "A Toy for Juliette" is basically a gimmick story (see below) but Ellison's instant sequel, "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," is an interesting extrapolation on how people might turn to vicarious violence for their sensual pleasure. Here they go back in time in the consciousness of Jack the Ripper, and the idea of a jaded society looking for SOME sensation to make life worth living works well. Carol Emshwiller's "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" is one of these annoying writer's exercises where simply having an interesting idea is a sufficient excuse for not having much in the way of characters or plot. The two stories that retain an ability to shock are Theodore Sturgeon's "If All Men are Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" and Samuel Delaney's "Aye, and Gomorrah...." Sturgeon's story would probably still have trouble getting published -- it is a defense of incest. On the other hand, it is not an especially good story, as the final third is about as dramatic as PLATO's REPUBLIC consisting almost entirely of philosophic debate. Here, the breaking of the taboo seemed to be paramount. Delaney's story stands up well (it won a Nebula) in positing neutered spacefarers and the Earthers who are attracted to them. VIOLENCE: Ironically, it is the stories about violence that are most likely to retain the ability to shock, and also stand up the best to the ensuing years. Robert Silverberg's "Flies" sends a space traveller back to Earth with the task of transmitting human emotions to an alien race. Unfortunately the process has rendered him totally amoral, and he brutalizes everyone he comes in contact with. Stories like Miriam Allen DeFord's "The Malley System" and Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man" focus on the criminal justice system. DeFord's penalogical concept is horrifying and her conclusion is logical. Niven's story is also horrifying, but in the end it is a gimmick story (people are harvested for spare parts) and the young Niven is too easily taken with his gimmick. The last page or so lands with a thud. Keith Laumer's "Test to Destruction" may be the best story in the book -- from a 1994 perspective -- after "Flies." The premise is simple: a man is tortured by a dictator using a device that will cause him to spill the contents of his brain at the SAME time he has been chosen by alien invaders for tests of the potential dangerousness of the human species. Laumer plays one off the other to great effect, and the conclusion -- where we discover how the hero is changed by the experience -- is the perfect twist. DRUGS: For SF in 1967 to acknowledge that people were taking recreational drugs was apparently a big deal. While these stories no longer shock, they hold up well. Philip K. Dick's "Faith of Our Fathers" is dated by its presumption of a Communist Chinese conquest of the West, but is fascinating for questioning whether individual hallucinations are superior to collective hallucinations. The idea is that everyone is drugged and sees the Leader in one way, but each of those given the antidote seem to see him differently. John Sladek's "The Happy Breed" also holds up well, with its society that tries to make all citizens perfectly safe and happy, and which ends up with people permanently infantilized. Brian Aldiss's "The Night That All Time Broke Out" is a gimmick story, but as long as one doesn't question the premise too closely, it is fun. (The premise involves a natural gas that makes one subjectively experience the past.) The one other drug story with an impact of Dick's tale is Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels," where a man uses a hallucinogenic cocktail so that he may directly battle his tumors, and ends up being totally locked within himself with no way out. From Spinrad's afterword one gets the impression that the "dangerous" idea here was making the story explicitly about cancer. As with Dick's Communists, it is an element that dates an otherwise powerful story. (His comment that cancer is the "pox" of the 20th century seems almost innocent in the era of AIDS.) GIMMICKS: The gimmick stories -- tales that exist largely to shock us with a taboo-busting gimmick -- almost always fail the test of time. Frederik Pohl's "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" (retitled "The Day the Martians Came" in THE BEST OF FREDERIK POHL) is downright embarrassing. Reporters make crude racial and religious jokes about Martians, and a black porter suggests that this shifting of bigotry towards the Martians will make a difference in HIS life. Equally painful is Poul Anderson's "Eutopia," where the surprise gimmick (revealed in the last sentence) is that the protagonist is gay. Clearly feelings in 1967 were different in 1994 (Ellison's references to "faggots" are especially embarrassing) but with the shock value neutered there's not much else there. Fritz Leiber won a Hugo AND a Nebula for "Gonna Roll the Bones," a story whose gimmick is that a man is rolling craps with the devil. It seems to be that stories of this nature had been around for a long time before and while there's nothing wrong with Leiber's story, there's nothing special about it either. Roger Zelazny's "Auto-da-fe" exists largely as a bull fight retold as a battle with cars. It's not especially amusing or "dangerous." At least it was short. Brevity was the chief attraction of Joe L. Hensley's "Lord Randy, My Son" which seemed to suggest "The Twilight Episode" of "It's a Good Life" which, if memory serves, was based on a previously published story. Thus there was nothing "dangerous" -- or even original -- about this story, even back in 1967. The one gimmick story that worked (although it, too, wasn't particularly "dangerous") was R. A. Lafferty's "Land of the Great Horses" which explains why there are Gypsies all over the world and what replaces them when their stolen homeland is finally returned. It's a one joke story, but it's short and the joke is clever. *** As noted, there are some stories that have held up nicely, and I certainly wouldn't attempt to rewrite history by saying that since most of the stories (again, IMHO) have dated badly, therefore they were ineffective in 1967. Indeed, one could argue that it was the SUCCESS of this volume that make the stories so ordinary by contemporary standards. However, DANGEROUS VISIONS seems to have blurred over time. If a story exists only to shock, does it serve any purpose when the shock value fades? For me, a real classic endures even if after the forces that led to its creation have faded from memory. By those standards, DANGEROUS VISIONS is more of a historical artifact than a classic. Dan Kimmel variety@mcimail.com From rec.arts.sf.reviews Fri Sep 27 18:11:18 1996 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!solace!eru.mt.luth.se!pumpkin.pangea.ca!news.mira.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!usenet From: wex@tinbergen.media.mit.edu (Graystreak) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review: THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER: THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY, by Harlan Ellison Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 26 Sep 1996 15:08:27 -0400 Organization: Intelligent Agents Group Lines: 178 Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu Keywords: author= Kevin Lauderdale X-Newsreader: (ding) Gnus v0.94 [moderator's note: this review discusses a STAR TREK-related book; followups might better be directed to groups on trek, though RASFR's charter doesn't allow for that. Please edit your headers appropriately. --AW] THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER: THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY by Harlan Ellison Review Copyright 1996 Kevin Lauderdale "The City on the Edge of Forever" is consistently ranked by fans as the single best episode of any of STAR TREK's incarnations. It won its writer, Harlan Ellison, the 1967 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, and the Writers Guild of America award for Most Outstanding Teleplay. Of course, as is well known, those awards represent different teleplays and nearly different stories. STAR TREK's creator Gene Roddenberry didn't feel that Ellison's script was STAR TREK enough, and had him rewrite it. After those changes were deemed insufficient, Ellison's script was rewritten by various hands in the STAR TREK office. The resulting episode, as aired, is significantly different from the original material. In contrast, it was that original script which Ellison submitted to the WGA and which won him the award -- one of four, I might note. That experience started what can only be described as a "feud" between Ellison, Roddenberry, and others. During the next 30 years, a number of legends have developed around the writing, re-writing, and filming of the episode. Ellison's latest book, THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER: THE ORIGINAL TELEPLAY, tells you everything you always wanted to know about "City," and his subsequent involvement with STAR TREK over the years. Ellison's introductory 25,000-word essay covers everything from his idea pitch to the writing and the rewriting by him, and then by practically everybody else who ever set foot on the lot. There are afterwards by everyone from Peter David to D.C. Fontana to George Takai. Sandwiched in between, available for the first time since its appearance in a 1976 small press teleplay collection, is the complete, original script to "City" as well as both of the preliminary story treatments and the prologue and first act that Ellison rewrote in an attempt to bring it more into line with Roddenberry's vision. The changes were many, but these are the most important: Instead of Dr. McCoy changing the timeline, Ellison's script has a Starfleet Officer named Beckwith (who deals drugs on the side) escaping into the past. Kirk and Spock have a less precise notion of Edith Keeler's role in the destruction of America. Another minor character, who Ellison says is one of his greatest -- I disagree -- a World War I vet named Trooper, was also dropped. In the end, it is not Kirk who willing lets Edith die, but rather Spock assures her death. Kirk would have let her live, destroying the universe he knew for love. The thrusts of Ellison's essay are these: 1) that his script was brilliant and different, and that it was watered down and made banal by Roddenberry and Co. and 2) that for the next couple of decades Roddenberry insisted that he saved Ellison's script from the trash-pile by rewriting an otherwise "unfilmable" script. Ellison cites, frequently by reprinting magazine and book pages, Roddenberry's inaccuracies and refutes them by providing the facts in detail. You cannot read this book without feeling that, at least on questions of financial and technical matters, Roddenberry was not entirely forthcoming. Whether the story was artistically "filmable" is up to the reader. I feel that much of this "animosity" can be explained away by two factors. Ellison doesn't mention the first, and only glances at the second. First, this was a first season script for a new television series. At the time Ellison was writing the first draft, only the first couple episodes of TREK had been shot. In consequence, short of the notes from the show's "bible," nobody really knew how the characters were supposed to act. Roddenberry later made a big deal about how Ellison had Starfleet members acting very out of character -- "He had my Scotty dealing drugs" is the famous Roddenberry quote on the Ellison's first draft of the script. More about that later. But, at time, *nobody* really knew how the characters were supposed to act. Witness Spock's behavior in "The Cage" when he and his landing party are about to beam down to Talos IV, and the two female officers vanish, but not the men. "THE WOMEN!" Spock yells in a very emotional manner. Spock hadn't even been fully developed. Indeed, Scotty didn't even have a name yet. He is referred to in Ellison's story treatments as "The Scottish Officer." The idea that Earth in the 24th century was a magnificent paradise free from the bonds of money, religion, and television, and that all Starfleet officers were crack professionals came much later. Ellison's idea of a drug-dealing officer is a good one if your show is BABYLON 5, but it isn't consistent with STAR TREK. At the time Ellison was developing the story, he couldn't have known that. So, Ellison didn't write a very STAR TREK script, but as an outside writer, he couldn't have known what a STAR TREK script really was, nor was he around the office to be in on the rewrites and development of other scripts as the producers molded the concept of TREK and adjusted scripts. In the end, it was D.C. Fontana -- not only an "insider," but the woman who had a significant hand in molding STAR TREK -- whose rewrite made it a STAR TREK story. Ellison's second point is that Roddenberry continually made factual errors when he, Roddenberry, later recounted what happened during the writing of "City." Roddenberry later -- and this is duly noted in the book -- apologized for this, essentially saying that he produced so many episodes that he couldn't be expected to get all his facts right. But he then continued to make the same errors or as Ellison would have it, "errors". While there is no doubt that Roddenberry took some credit where none was due, I chalk many of his misstatements up to simple errors. For a long time nobody bothered to check these errors, so they were repeated and repeated until they became the "truth." The sentence that sticks in Ellison's craw the most is "He had my Scotty dealing drugs." This was said by Roddenberry in an interview several years after the end of STAR TREK. As William Shatner has pointed out so many times -- most notably in his SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE sketch -- when the cast and crew were making the series, they were working. They weren't taking notes; fans were. It is entirely logical (so to speak) that Roddenberry, looking back on a script that had a minor character that was later cut, could confuse that character with another minor character -- Scotty is not one of The Big Three -- that had yet to be named. Indeed, as Ellison shows us, even Joan Collins misremebers the facts of the show. In her memoirs, she has a paragraph about "City" in which she describes her character as being "in love with Adolph Hitler." Anyone can make an honest mistake, as well as a few dishonest ones. I cut Roddenberry much more slack than does Ellison. When one lectures over and over and over again, the speeches and numbers become ingrained in your mind. I can all too easily imagine Gene Roddenberry, after so many years of misremembering the same set of facts, giving a talk at a convention and, with no malice aforethought, simply forgetting to recall that these ingrained facts had been corrected. Ellison almost makes the same sort of error; he asserts that nowhere in his script does Scotty even exist. That is true, however he does exist in the story treatments. Ellison complains about being told "our character wouldn't act that way." To which he responds, "who knows how someone would act when pushed far enough?" I say that this is Ellison playing tennis without a net. STAR TREK, while far from perfect, is series fiction with set characters. Even if they had not been completely molded, a starship captain is a starship captain. The final story, as aired, pushes the envelope as far it ever was pushed in STAR TREK. Ultimately, we have Ellison to thank for that. But his original script *tore* the envelope. Would it have made, as D.C. Fontana suggests, a great OUTER LIMITS? You bet. Imagine: U.S. Space Navy officer in the 24th century dealing drugs? Sure. Captain risking the future for the woman he loves? Gripping. But, it wouldn't be STAR TREK. Peter David's comments are particularly worth noting. He says that the original script is more complex and unexpected. Indeed it is, but it isn't STAR TREK. To carry this to the absurd, Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE is also complex and unexpected, but it isn't STAR TREK either. Of the aired version, David says Kirk is a "one-dimensional portrait of a hero. He always does what's right." Of course he does. He's the captain of a starship. Self-sacrifice is the name of the game. Protection of the timeline and your universe are pre-eminent responsibilities. Kirk letting Edith die is much more noble and poignant exactly because he does love her. Which is more unexpected, to sacrifice what you love most in order to save the future, or to be selfish and damn everyone else for the sake of your happiness? And as for "doing the right thing," as we saw in "Mirror, Mirror," the Federation *can* take whatever it wants, but it doesn't. Part of Starfleet's image of itself is that its members do the right thing. Look at how many times its members agonized over the Prime Directive, when it would so much easier to just do whatever best suited them. In the end, like the movie QUIZ SHOW, Ellison's book is an epic tale of a minor event. Not minor to Ellison, of course, nor to many of his fans, but nonetheless nothing that will shake Western Culture or even STAR TREK fans to their roots. I supposed that Ellison is right, and over 30 years, the tale of the writing and editing of "City" has developed a life of its own. And, in the interests of truth, it is nice to have the whole matter hashed out here, examined from every side, and finally put to rest. It is also nice to be able to see Ellison's script in the original, if not for novelty, then for posterity. But, when all is read and done, I still think that the version that was finally shot and aired -- by as diverse hands as it was -- is better than his script. Ellison writes a great deal about his script's heart, emotion, and complexity. I really don't see that much more there than was in the aired story. If you want real heart and humanity, read Ellison's "Paladin of the Lost Hour," available in ANGRY CANDY; the 1986 Hugo winner for Best Novelette and the teleplay of which won Ellison a WGA award. *That* is a masterpiece of relationships and responsibility. %D 1996 %I 1-56504-964-0 Kevin Lauderdale This and other reviews may be found at the Kevindex Web Page http://camis.Stanford.EDU/people/kxl/Webazine.html Available by e-mail: kxl@smi.stanford.edu (Subject: Subscribe Kevindex) Available free by post: Kevin Lauderdale, MSOB x-215, Stanford, CA 94305-5479, USA