Skip to main content

Harlan Ellison: where to start reading

He wrote more than 1,700 stories, film and TV scripts – so here are five of the best by a giant of speculative fiction, who has died aged 84

Related: Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison dies aged 84

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
This nightmarish short story – published in 1967 and winner of a Hugo – comes from a “special place of anguish”, Ellison said. It is set in a future where a supercomputer, AM – Allied Mastercomputer – has wiped out all of humanity apart from five people, and spends its time devising tortures for them underground. “There was virtually nothing out there; had been nothing that could be considered anything for over 100 years. Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions. Now there were only five of us, down here inside, alone with AM,” the narrator explains. “He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become.” Gruesomely, brilliantly disturbing.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2tQBpm6
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more