Sunday, July 01, 2018

Alligators in the sewers

Harlan Ellison has died. One does hope he found peace.

It has been many years since I read his stories, and they are strange/original/horrifying, to say the least (Hint: A Boy and his dog does not have a traditional happy ending).

His most famous story is the City on the edge of Tomorrow, a Startrek episode where Kirk the time travel faces a choice: The woman he loves is fated to die. She is a powerful pacifist leader: If she lives, Hitler will win because she will keep the US out of the war. If she dies, history stays the same..So should he change history?

but most of his fiction was the shout of a non believer against the world. A very dark shout. Sigh. I hope he finds peace.

His short story Croatoan is haunting, where the children and alligators discarded by the careless are found happy (in heaven? A Sigrid Undet novela Gunnar's Daughter relates a dream about abandoned Viking babies has a similar theme, where the women find redemption caring for these happy children as their purgatory).

and I see in Hitler painted Roses the idea of Purgatory. Both are in the anthology Strange Wine.

Some of his stories and books are available at internet archives.

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