At one point I counted Ellison among my very favorite authors, but in recent years I find myself less enthusiastic. I am not sure whether he changed or I did or perhaps a bit of both. A few of these stories were good, most of these stories were ok, and a few didn't work for me at all. Having said that, I can admire the ambition of a story like "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore" even if the result didn't do much for me. ( )

This is probably the best Ellison anthology I've ever read. There are many other that I have not so I may not be a good judge of the "best." The contents run the gamut from sci-fi to rant to pure horror with plenty of genre bending, as you would expect. The entire "Nackles" controversy is laid out from the original Donald Westlake story to Harlan's teleplay. I had forgotten how good Ellison could write straight horror. ( )

It has been along time since I read my Harlan Ellison books and my memory of them was dark. Since his death I have been rereading his books and this one I just bought with stories I had never seen before. It brought it all back, the edge of the seat, the twist endings, the darkness and the light, the fabulous use of words and images and the fast pace at which the words and the story carry you along. I had read his reviews (Two Glass Teats and Watching) which give you a flavour of his personality and opinions. But to delve into his actual storytelling is a whole new experience. I had forgotten exactly why I loved his writing, why I collected all of his books, why I have carried them from home to home to home over the years. I am so sorry he is gone and so happy that there are stories he has written that I have not yet read. ( )

The Basics

Slippage is a short story collection, which shouldn’t surprise any Ellison fans. Many of his collections have a theme, and this one has to be the saddest of all. At the time, he’d been through the wringer, and this was his last collection of new material. The term “slippage” is one he uses to emphasize a life being pushed in a direction it never wanted to go. A bad one.

My Thoughts

I’ll start out by saying that this has to be one of my favorites of his collections. There is so much strong work here. It’s extra depressing to know that because of health problems, he had to drop his heavy work schedule, and while he has done some writing since, he’s nowhere near as prolific as he once was. There’s not a weak spot among these stories. They are all worthy of attention, and some of them are definitely worth some large praise.

"Mefisto in Onyx." What do I even say about a story that blew me away like this one did? It should be a movie, though Ellison has some understandable reservations (that’s an understatement) about Hollywood that would make that kind of impossible. A better way to put it is it deserves to be a movie. A really good movie with all the bells and whistles. If I were to list a top five of his favorite stories, this would easily be in it. I don’t want to give anything about it away. Just know it needs to be read by everyone.

"The Museum on Cyclops Avenue" is another that needs to be gushed about. It’s one of those where the idea is just so good, so exciting and apt to make you grin, that it could ride on that alone and be great. But it does even more. Ellison has to be one of the only writers I’ve ever read who writes first person narratives and actually has a different voice for each one. He’d not writing as himself every time. That really shines here.

Lastly, “The Few, The Proud.” I say “lastly” because we’d be here all day if I didn’t limit myself to three stories to vomit praise all over. Trust me, choosing three from a collection this strong is no small task. In the case of “The Few, The Proud” it brought back around the story of the war with the Kyben. This time from the perspective of a deserting soldier on our side. So not only was it a chance to revisit a universe I found really interesting, but it was also a really fantastic anti-war story.

Those are just the tip of the iceberg. I think in making it my personal mission to read every collection I can get my hands on, I’ve inadvertently made it my personal mission to urge everyone who reads these reviews to check out Ellison’s work. So go on. Stop reading this and go read that.

Final Rating

5/5 ( )

My reactions to reading this collection in 1998. Spoilers may follow.

“Introduction: The Fault in My Lines” -- Introduction in which Ellison relates how an earthquake and heart attack brought back the precariousness and chance that governs the length of our lives. Ellison’s message is Pay Attention in life. You may not have that much longer. Even a man who has done as much as Ellison feels desperate that he has much more to do and treated life too casually. Slippage is a metaphor for the unexpected fault lines that open under us and threaten our lives. Ellison also laments the growing historical and cultural illiteracy which relegates quality art to such a short lifespan.

“The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” -- Ellison has said this is his favorite short story. It is the story of Levendis (Greek for someone full of the pleasure of life thus in keeping with one of the two main themes of the anthology) who, during 35 days in October, flits here and there, back and forth in history and parallel time tracks doing all sorts of exceptional things violent, artistic, and scientific, most good (Ellison’s cliched liberal politics show in some of these episodes which involve violence to skinheads and klansmen, denunciation of Jesse Helms and Louisiana politicians (most Democrats), and making sure a woman baseball player gets in the major leagues) and some bad. The main idea is that of Shirley Jackson’s “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts”, a story explicitly alluded to. If it hadn’t been for Ed Bryant’s Locus review, I may not have noticed that this story shares the spirit of Ellison’s “’Repent Harlequin!’, Said the Ticktockman”, specifically when Levendis is told by the Master Parameter that he has been having “too rich a time”. It is with this story that I noticed that part of the power of Ellison’s prose comes from the brief, but very precise use of facts drawn from history, science, and geography.

“Anywhere But Here, with Anybody But You” -- This story, somewhat inspired by events in Ellison’s own life according to notes elsewhere in the collection, is reminiscent of Ellison’s “Shatterday” (I’ve never read the story, only seen the teleplay.) in that both feature protagonists magically separated from their old lives. (The theme of slippage again.) A man comes home to find his wife and kids gone and a mysterious stranger in his house who has packed his belongings in an Army duffle bag (evidently an ex-wife of Ellison did something similar) and tells him he has to leave. Eventually the narrator realizes that the stranger in the dark is “my life till now” who will continue on as before while the narrator will leave his prison of fatherhood, marriage and wage-slavery. An obviously attractive idea whose moral implications are blunted by the wife still having the same – practically speaking – husband, the kids the same father. (Though Ellison doesn’t deal with the emotional consequences of the narrator leaving.)

“Crazy As a Soup Sandwich” -- While it was interesting to read a teleplay (something I’ve done only once or twice before) I’ve seen in the produced form on the new Twilight Zone show, the story here is not that interesting and livened only by Ellison’s melodramatic, simile laced prose.

“Darkness Upon the Face of the Deep” -- This story starts outs promising with the infiltration into Syria of two childhood friends, one a criminal, the other an archaeologist. They are looking for a old Hittite tomb with the help of a smart Mossad agent. Questions are raised about the desertification of the Sahara and the demise of the Hittite Empire. There are bits of Lovecraftian prose. But, at story’s end, we seem (the prose is irritatingly vague) to be given just a hungry horror from space unleashed from an old tomb.

“The Pale Silver Dollar of the Moon Pays Its Way and Makes Changes” -- At first, I thought this seeming essay, a collection of years with historical notes and details from the writer’s life for each, was autobiographical. Now, I’m not so sure. The first year listed, 1934, when the writer is in grade school was when Ellison was born.

“The Lingering Scent of Woodsmoke” -- What Ed Bryant would call a biter-bitten story. Here an assistant to Dr. Mengele is turned into a tree by vengeful wood spirits angry at the woods being used to stoke Auschwitz’s crematoriums. This seems like a trivial version of the Holocaust theme.

“The Museum on Cyclops Avenue” -- Ellison’s use and expertise in mythology shows here with this tale of a museum stocked with creatures from mythology, all caught or killed by its beautiful curator (Diana the Huntress perhaps though this is never stated or hinted at?).

“Go Toward the Light” -- This semi-humorous story involving a time traveler setting up the miracle of the oil during Chanukah can probably be seen as the secular Jew (or agnostic) Ellison’s retort to Orthodox Jews.

“Mefisto in Onyx” -- This story about a telepath who “jaunts” into people’s mental landscape shows a bit of influence from Alfred Bester. It gets its narrative drive by piling one outrageous plot contrivance upon another. First one of the few people that knows narrator Rudy Pairis is a telepath who just happens to be a Chief Deputy District Attorney who just happens to prosecute the very murderous serial killer Henry Lake Spanning who just happens to really be innocent and needs Pairis to jaunt into his mind (which Pairis really hates to do since he finds something bad in everyone’s mind and little to profit him). While Pairis finds evidence that he’s guilty of all of Spanning’s crimes. Of course, and I saw this coming, Paris is innocent and Spanning turns out to be a murderer and a telepath who hops his consciousness from body to body throughout human history in a manner reminiscent of Robert Bloch’s Star Trek story “Wolf in the Fold” (the story is dedicated to Bloch). What I didn’t see coming was Pairis, at the story’s end, exchanging consciousness with the killer. The story’s politics, coming from unthinkingly liberal Ellison, are somewhat surprising. There is no criticism of the death penalty, and Pairis begins to realize he can’t blame racism for his failure to put his intelligence to use. He faults Spanning for not trying to do great and creative things with his long life rather than killing.

“Where I Shall Dwell in the Next World” -- An essay with Ellison’s answer to the perennial question asked sf writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” Ellison’s peculiar answer (but it works well for him) is that he purposely mishears things. He illustrates the process with three short short stories: “Necro Waiters”, “Mark”, “The Last Will and Testicle of Trees Rabelais”.

“Chatting With Anubis” -- A typical Ellison story in that in involves mythology, precise details (of a lost Chinese dialect and the death of Alexander the Great), and a conversational style. Here the story involves Anubis denying Heaven and Hell to Moses because Judaism and Christianity destroyed the old gods by denying them worshippers.

“The Few, the Proud” -- Part of a series involving the Kyben War. The premise here is simple. A soldier gives a final deposition before his execution. He talks about his beloved Grampa Louie, a great war hero (he even has a statue dedicated to him), and how he really got his battle wounds while trying to rape a Kyben woman. Both the narrator and his grandfather were horrified to learn the Kybens weren’t gruesome monsters but very humanlike, and both are horrified at the atrocities they committed against them.

“Sensible City” -- A couple of brutal, corrupt cops flee prosecution and encounter, and can’t escape, a creepy town, a gateway to hell called Obedience.

“The Dragon on the Bookshelf” -- Story about how a dragon falls in love with a mortal woman and, therefore, dooms “mortaltime” and our world to destruction via an open “gateway” which allows denizens of other times and worlds though the dragon maintains the illusion of a surviving world until his love dies.

“Keyboard” -- A fun horror story about a vampiric computer (and, at story’s end, a vampiric tv).

“Jane Doe #112” -- An interesting story that plays into the idea of life’s precariousness and Ellison’s plea, in the collection’s introduction, to “pay attention” and also a variation of the immortal in Ellison’s “Mefisto in Onyx”. Here a man, one of those people who just “live their lives at a fuller pace”, unknowingly leaches the life of others who were “wearing a life so loosely, so unused, that it just came off.”

“The Dreams A Nightmare Dreams” -- This story was originally narration on an audio cassette accompanying the computer screensaver program “H. R. Giger Screensaver”. Here the dreams of the “Swiss dreamer” keep a sleeping nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico from waking and killing us like it did the dinosaurs.

“Pulling Hard Time” -- A story about a new alternative to capital punishment: prisoners are forced to relive, in a “moebius memory” loop, the most frightening or sad or horrible moment of their lives. Liberal Ellison seems to not approve of this, but the anger is muted though his main character is sent to jail unjustly.

“Scartaris, June 28th” -- A story that uses a variation of the idea from Ellison’s “Chatting with Anubis”: that gods need followers. Here an unnamed god older than Poseidon (his name may be “Levendis”.) adapts a variety of guises to be lynched, shake up people’s lives, kill some (a mentally retarded girl which provides relief to her parents), save some from death. At story’s end (with what seems to be an allusion to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth) he decides to stop with the “tricks and make-work” and start to build a world which will worship him again. This is a variation on the collection’s theme of seizing life’s opportunities.

“She’s a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother” -- The story of a man and his unquestioning love for a woman who turns out to be a long lived member of the infamous (and historically real) clan of Scottish cannibal killers, the Beans. The narrator will probably follow his love to the caves of Galloway’s shore. I’m not sure if Ellison is being ironical by having his narrator say affection should never be judged.

“Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral” -- Story of how a diver is reunited, on a fantastical Mars (not our Mars) inhabited by Atlanteans, with the father who was killed when he was an infant. ( )