Summary: this is a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF but the best story here is the 1968 Cavalier reprint from Eric Norden, The Primal Solution, an intense tale about hypnotic regression and a Nazi-era Jewish survivor who lost his family in the Holocaust. Of the three Ellison stories the best is the nostalgic Jeffty is Five, a multi award winning story but one which probably delivers most of its punch on first reading. Steven Utley also provides an atmospheric piece about Jack the Ripper, The Maw.
There are also a number of non-fiction pieces about Ellison, including a typical essay from the writer himself, a short and amusing biographical memoir from Robert Silverberg, and an appreciation and bibliography. Again, the best of the non-fiction isn’t any of the Ellison material but Budrys multifaceted Books column. The Letters column is also worth a look.
A decidedly interesting issue if not a particularly good one.
[ISFDB link]

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Anne W. Burke

Fiction:
Jeffty Is Five • novelette by Harlan Ellison ∗∗∗
Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage • short story by Harlan Ellison ∗∗
Working with the Little People • short story by Harlan Ellison ∗∗
Ransom • short story by Edward Wellen ∗
Victor • short story by Bruce McAllister ∗∗
The Maw • short story by Steven Utley ∗∗∗
The Maiden Made of Fire • short story by Jane Yolen ∗∗
The Primal Solution • reprint novelette by Eric Norden ∗∗∗∗+

Non-Fiction:
You Don’t Know Me, I Don’t Know You • essay by Harlan Ellison
Harlan • essay by Robert Silverberg
Harlan Ellison: The Healing Art of Razorblade Fiction • essay by Richard Delap
Harlan Ellison: An F&SF Checklist • essay by Leslie Kay Swigart
.2001 • film review by Baird Searles
Books • by Algis Budrys
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Of Ice and Men • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Letters

_____________________

This issue is one of the “special author” editions that the magazine occasionally did from 1962 to 2015 and—as you would expect from the size of the Harlan Ellison’s ego—contains more stories (three) and more non-fiction pieces than any of the previous ones (but not more pages—that prize goes to James Blish with his long novella Midsummer Century, I think).
The first of Ellison’s three stories is Jeffty is Five, which opens with a short “things aren’t what they used to be” passage about Clark Bars (a period confectionary) before going on to give a nostalgic account of the narrator Donny Horton’s childhood years. During this, Horton talks about a young boy called Jeffty:

When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia’s home in Buffalo, New York for two years.
[. . .]
When I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.
I was seven. Jeffty was still five.
I didn’t notice any difference. I didn’t know: I was only seven.
[. . .]
When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was “a troublesome kid,” and they sent me off to military school, so I could be “taken in hand.”
I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.
[. . .]
At eighteen, I went to college.
Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers, to work at my Uncle Joe’s jewelry store. Jeffty hadn’t changed. Now I knew there was something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years old, not a day older.
At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town, the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.  p. 9-10

After Horton settles back into town he occasionally takes Jeffty out to the movies, etc., and recounts the awkward visits to his house afterwards, where the parents are obviously troubled by their strange son:

“I don’t know what to do any more,” Leona said. She began crying. “There’s no change, not one day of peace.”
Her husband managed to drag himself out of the old easy chair and went to her. He bent and tried to soothe her, but it was clear from the graceless way in which he touched her graying hair that the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him. “Shhh, Leona, it’s all right. Shhh.” But she continued crying. Her hands scraped gently at the antimacassars on the arms of the chair.
Then she said, “Sometimes I wish he had been stillborn.”
John looked up into the corners of the room. For the nameless shadows that were always watching him? Was it God he was seeking in those spaces? “You don’t mean that,” he said to her, softly, pathetically, urging her with body tension and trembling in his voice to recant before God took notice of the terrible thought. But she meant it; she meant it very much.  p. 15

The story’s major development occurs when Horton finds Jeffty in his den under the porch and sees what looks like a brand new Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Badge (not made since 1956). Jeffty tells Horton that it arrived in the mail that day and, when pressed further, says that he ordered the ring so he could decode the message on the next Captain Midnight radio show (not transmitted after 1950). When Horton asks to listen to the show, Jeffty points out that it isn’t on that night (it is the weekend), so Horton returns a few days later:

He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilocycles, and he was hearing Tennessee Jed, one of my most favorite programs from the Forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.
I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn’t a rerun of an old program, because there were occasional references in the body of the drama to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the Forties: aerosol spray cans, laseracing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word “uptight.”
I could not ignore the fact. Jeffty was listening to a new segment of Tennessee Jed. pp. 18-19

When Horton checks his car radio he can’t pick up the program, and realises that Jeffty is not only not aging, but seems to live in a world that is largely like his childhood one (with the minor contemporary changes mentioned above).
Horton spends the next part of the story experiencing life in Jeffty’s world: he hears a number of radio programs from his youth, Terry and the Pirates,¹ Superman, Tom Mix, etc.; he goes to the movies to see Humphrey Bogart in Slayground (a movie of a Donald Westlake novel that was never made); he eats and drinks the products of the time (Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies); and—perhaps the only part of this world that particularly resonated with me—he sees new issues of pulp SF magazines:

Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage and Startling Stories. Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley G. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel, ISLE OF THE BLACK ONES, in Weird Tales; and in August were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom—“Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of Argosy All-Story Weekly promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me, that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.  p. 21

(Robert E. Howard was already long dead by the 1950s, so I’m not sure how he is still alive in Jeffty’s world—one of the inconsistencies of this piece, along with the anomalous intrusions of the present day.)
Horton (spoiler) experiences the best of both worlds for a while (he still lives in the “normal” world while being able to savour Jeffty’s) but, of course, this charmed existence eventually slips through his hands on the day they go to the cinema to see The Demolished Man. The pair detour via Horton’s Sony store and find it so busy that Horton has to help out, and Jeffty is parked in front of thirty-three TVs showing modern shows. After some time Horton checks on Jeffty and sees that he looks unwell (“I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past”). Horton gets him away from the TVs by telling Jeffty to go on to the cinema while Horton attends to a final customer. However, while Jeffty is queueing for the movie, he is beaten up by two youths after he borrows a radio and leaves it stuck in his world.
Horton takes the badly injured Jeffty home, and then, in an ending that is not as clear as it could be, Jeffty dies of his injuries.²
This story won that year’s Hugo and Nebula Awards, and I think I can see why: Ellison was, at that point in time, at the top of his game (in my opinion the period from the mid-60s to the mid-70s) and very popular; the story was from a special author issue of F&SF; and, finally, the subject matter would have been hugely appealing to those of a similar generation who were nostalgic for their lost pasts.³
Personally, I liked the story well enough, but I wouldn’t say it is the strongest of his tales for a number of reasons: while the gimmick is a neat one, the ending is weak and somewhat contrived (the TV set route would have been a better way to go); it could do with another draft (it is a little too long, and some of the sentences sound odd, e.g., “the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him” from the passage above just sounds clumsy);⁴ the couple’s dislike of their own child is unconvincing (most parents seem to love their children regardless of their infirmities and shortcomings); and, finally, I am not a huge fan of nostalgia (insert your own “it ain’t what it used to be” joke here).⁵
So, overall, this classic is a good story, but not a great one (although it impressed me more on first reading).
∗∗∗ (Good). 8,200 words. Story link.

•

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) begins with a man called Moth coming out of his cabin on an exotic spaceship and into the lounge. There, he goes from table to table talking to different groups of people (“this ship of strangers”) about various traumatic episodes from his life.
The first of these sees Moth listen to a couple who tell him not to blame himself for letting his child die; then he talks to an abusive and unsympathetic young man about a younger partner who cuckolded him; in his next conversation he tells a woman about how he failed to intervene in a fire in an old folks home; and then he reveals to a fat man how he took a female employee away from her husband and child (and how she later committed suicide).
There are a couple of more confessionals before he tells a woman that:

“I’ve come to realize we’re all alone,” he said.
She did not reply. Merely stared at him.
“No matter how many people love us or care for us or want to ease our burden in this life,” Moth said, “we are all, all of us, always alone. Something Aldous Huxley once said, I’m not sure I know it exactly, I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the quote, but I remember part of it. He said: ‘We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space.’ I think that was it.  p. 36

At the end of the voyage all the passengers disembark except Moth, who asks if anyone wants to take his place for the rest of the metaphor voyage. No-one volunteers.
I’m not a fan of existential mopery, but this is probably a reasonably well done example if you like that sort of thing. (At least the navel-gazing here is mostly about traumatic events and not the more usual—for the current SF field— boyfriend, body, parental or petty political concerns.)
∗∗ (Average). 4,100 words.

•

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is an Unknown-type fantasy in which the highly successful author Noah Raymond finds he is unable to write. While Raymond worries about what he is going to do, he wakes up one night to hear his typewriter in action; when he goes through to his office he sees eleven tiny people (we later find out they are gremlins) jumping up and down on the keyboard.
Their foreman explains to Raymond that they are there to write his stories for him (after some back and forth with the other cockney-sounding little people, a short explanation of gremlin history, and the fact they have been watching him ever since he wrote a story about gremlins).
Later on in the story Raymond also learns that human belief is what keeps the gremlins alive (the “a god only exists if they have believers” theme that features in other Ellison stories), and that, over time, they have changed their form to stay in human consciousness.
At the end of the story (nineteen years later) the gremlins tell Raymond (spoiler) that they have run out of stories as they haven’t been writing fiction but recounting their history. They also explain that, not only does human belief keep gremlins in existence, their belief in humans keeps humanity in existence—and that without stories to write for humans, gremlin belief will wane. The tale ends with Raymond writing the history of the human world for the gremlins to read.
This an okay piece of light humour with a final gimmick twist that shouldn’t be examined too closely (it makes for a weak ending). The best of it is some of the publishing related snark at the beginning:

[He] did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.
He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker, and frankly he didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route, snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English literature major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon, but he had heard that Pynchon and Salinger were both mad as a thousand battlefields, and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit.  p. 40

∗∗ (Average). 4,250 words

•

The three Ellison stories are followed by a non-fiction section about the author (see comments below), and the other stories in the remainder of the magazine lead off with Ransom by Edward Wellen (F&SF, July 1977). This has a good hook:

First the finger, then the ear, then the nose.
But before them, the tape. The tape came in the mail that caught up with the traveling mansion of Peter Kifeson. The tape showed a trembling Junior Kifeson in a limbo shot—no background visible, no furnishings. A two-shot, with the light on Junior and the masked man holding him at blaserpoint, and darkness all around them. You had the sense, however, that this scene took place in a small room.
Old Peter Kifeson watched, listened, and chuckled. Twenty-five million credits, indeed. But at least and at last Junior was thinking big, showing drive. About time. After all, Junior must be all of sixty.  p. 92

When Kifeson later receives a finger in the post he publicises the fact but refuses to pay the ransom (he still thinks his son is behind the extortion attempt). When an ear and then a nose arrive, Kifeson changes his mind about his son’s involvement but continues to hold out.
The police (spoiler) eventually find the blackmailer and a dead Junior. Kifeson decides to clone his son, and the last couple of paragraphs make an unclear point about parenthood and filial love.
∗ (Mediocre). 1,500 words.

•

Victor by Bruce McAllister (F&SF, July 1977) opens with worm-like aliens landing on Earth; these initially appear to be indestructible, as when they absorb sufficient material or energy they grow and replicate. However, the professor who is the father of the narrator’s girlfriend comes up with a solution—a whistle that, when it is blown and the sound transmitted through loudspeakers, summons huge flocks of birds to eat the worms. The narrator and his girlfriend figure this out after the Professor falls into a coma, and the pair go on to save the world.
These events would, in most SF stories, be the complete arc of the piece—but in this one we are just half way through, and the rest of it telescopes through time and illustrates an anti-climactic domestic aftermath. First, the media attention on the couple fades; then the Professor gets old and dies; later, the narrator and his girlfriend have problems with their teenage kids and eventually separate, etc.
This is an interesting idea but it isn’t a particularly engrossing one.
∗∗ (Average). 2,800 words.

•

The Maw by Steven Utley (F&SF, July 1977) opens in Jack-the-Ripper territory:

He came on the midnight air, a mist-man, a wraith stretched across the centuries, a shadow two hundred years removed from the flesh that cast it, a wisp of smoky gray nothingness drifting down out of the sky, settling to earth in the darkness of an alley between two decrepit houses. Behind him in the alley, an emaciated mongrel dog sensed his almost-presence and backed away, growling. He stared at it for a moment, his eyes twin patches of oily blackness floating on a face that was only a filmy blob, then pressed his hands against sooty bricks and dug very nearly insubstantial fingers into cracks in the mortar. Time let him go at last, surrendered its hold on him, gave him over completely to the moment that was 11:58.09 p.m., Thursday, November 8, 1888.  p. 110

The mist-man drifts about the city (we get bits of local colour and Jack-the-Ripper lore) until (spoiler) he arrives at the scene of the Ripper’s last victim. There, the mist-man waits. When Jack and the victim arrive, and he is just about to kill her, the mist-man descends from the ceiling and enters him. The mist-man explains to Jack that he isn’t killing the women for the reasons he thinks he is, but to feed a maw that stretches across people and time.
After Jack finishes butchering the woman (which is described in grisly detail) he leaves, and the last section has him remonstrate with the mist-man for revealing the true reason for his bloodlust. The mist-man says to him, in a biter-bit line, “It was terribly cruel of me, wasn’t it, Jack?”
This piece is more of an atmospheric history lesson than a story, but it it’s an absorbing piece nonetheless.
∗∗∗ (Good). 2,850 words.

•

The Maiden Made of Fire by Jane Yolen (F&SF, July 1977) is a short squib (it’s less than three pages long) that tells of a coal burner called Ash who spends a lot of time staring into the flames of his fires. One evening he sees a maiden (glowing “red and gold”) in a fire and pulls her out, burning his hands in the process.
Ash learns she is a fire maiden, calls her Brenna, and builds more fires so she can move around more freely (she can only move over fire and embers).
The story resolves (spoiler) when the village elders turn up and complain that their supply of charcoal has ceased. When Ash points to Brenna the elders cannot see her, and Ash’s sudden doubts about her reality causes her to fade. Ash looks at the villagers and then at Brenna, puts the doubt from his mind, and jumps into the fire to join her.
A pleasant but slight tale, even if there is some personal belief metaphor buried here.
∗∗ (Average). 1,200 words.

•

The Primal Solution by Eric Norden (Cavalier, January 1968; reprinted F&SF, July 1977) begins with a long quote from Mein Kampf about how Hitler changed from a “weak-kneed cosmopolitan to an anti-Semite”.
The epistolary story that follows then opens with a diary entry by the story’s narrator, Dr Karl Hirsch, at a psychiatric hospital in Tel Aviv in 1959. In these entries we learn that Hirsch’s research project on psychological regression in is trouble, and that one of his colleagues is trying to get it shut down.
We also learn that Hirsch is a holocaust survivor whose family was murdered during the war:

[The psychological cases] who remained were the hopeless cases, the last souvenirs of the camps. They were the only ones with whom I identified, the last links with my own past. I cherished those human vegetables, for they froze time and linked me to Ruth and Rachel and David. They had survived, but I forgave them, for they never had the indecency to really live.  p. 136

After the “normalization” in the midfifties I retreated more than ever into pure research. The healthy faces of this new generation, born away from barbed wire and the stench of Cyklon-B, were a constant reproach to me. In the streets of Haifa or Tel Aviv I was almost physically ill. Everywhere around me surged this stagnant sea of bustling, empty faces, rushing to the market, shopping, flirting, engrossed in the multitudinous trivialities of a normal life. With what loathing must the drowned-eyed ghosts spat into Europe’s skies from a thousand chimneys view this blasphemous affirmation! What was acclaimed a “miracle” was to me a betrayal. We had, all of us, broken our covenant with death.  p. 135

A new patient called Miriam comes into Hirsch’s care, a seventeen-year-old girl from Yemen who was raped by her Uncle when she was aged nine and who has been in schizoid withdrawal ever since. Hirsch subsequently treats Miriam (who reminds him of his daughter Rachel), by sedating her and using hypno-therapy tapes to get her to mentally revisit the rape event. During a critical point in the experiment Miriam appears to die—at which point Hirsch’s angina makes him black out—but when he recovers consciousness she is alive, and awake.
When Hirsch later checks her notes he notices that the uncle committed suicide shortly after the rape incident. Hirsch remembers differently—the uncle went to jail—but when he checks what he thinks are the facts of the case with two of his contacts, they cannot remember talking to him about the matter. Hirsch realises after talking to Miriam (“I made him dead”) that she must have projected her personality back in time and into the mind of the uncle—and made him slit his own throat.
After this engaging first half, the next part of the story (spoiler) sees Hirsch plan to go back in time to save his family:

I am determined to go ahead. If I succeed, these notes will in any case blink out of existence with me and my world. They will belong to Prime Time — dusty tombstones marking what-might-have-been. And I will be — where? Sitting somewhere in Germany with my grandchildren playing at my feet, David and Rachel’s children, and Ruth in the kitchen simmering a schnitzel on the stove? Or, just as likely, dead years before, felled by disease or accident. It makes little difference. I have been dead for years, it is only the manner of death that matters. And whatever happens to Ruth or Rachel or David, they shall never have seen
Auschwitz.  p. 144

Hirsch finds out as much as he can about the Adolf Hitler of 1913 (his intended target), and prepares his laboratory to make the trip—against the ticking clock of the administrators trying to close down his project. Then, just before he goes into the laboratory to start the transfer, Hirsch has doubts:

Suddenly, I feel sad. For the first time since the project began I experience something like regret. I look across the terrace at Zvi and his friends laughing under the lantern-laced trees, and I wonder if they know that they have just met their murderer. It is my duty to liquidate their world — to snuff it out like a candle. If I succeed, how many of them will see life — and where? What women will never meet their intended husbands; what children will never be born? Will I not be committing a genocide as real as Hitler’s, and even more final? But I owe no debt to them, any of them. There is only Rachel, and David, and Ruth. To wipe the reality of Auschwitz from the blank slates of their futures is worth a thousand Zvis, and his country, his poor Israel, destined to die stillborn in the placid hearts of a generation that never looked through barbed wire, never heard the tramp of jackboots. And my personality will dissolve along with theirs — whatever path I follow after 1913, what is me today shall never exist. And yet, if I could only see Rachel and David in my mind. I remember their voices, even their touch, but their faces dissolve into mist whenever I attempt to capture them. They are all I have left of reality, and yet they are the substance of shadows. Am I extinguishing a world to remember the faces of my children?  pp. 147-148

The final section is prefaced by a letter from a colleague of Hirsch’s, and refers to a document from 1913 supposedly written by him. This fantastic account sees Hirsch tell of his arrival in Hitler’s mind and how he seizes control of, and humiliates, the future Fuhrer (Hirsch makes Hitler crawl on all fours, pull out his hair, tear at his private parts and, when they go out into the Vienna streets, drink water from the gutters when other pedestrians pass by).
When Hirsch then tries to kill Hitler by making him jump off a bridge and drown, Hitler mentally counter-attacks and repels Hirsch. Thereafter Hirsch is a passive passenger in Hitler’s mind (apart from some limited control when he is asleep). During this period Hitler realises that the invader in his head is Jewish, and rationalises that he will only be free of this malign force if he kills all Jews.
At the end of the story Hirsch realises that his actions are responsible for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the death of his family—and that he is trapped in Hitler’s mind, doomed to watch the terrible events of the future unfold.
This is a cracking read, fast-paced and intense, and a piece where the Hirsch’s sense of loss is palpable. It also has an inventive twist ending, albeit one that may prove highly problematic for some readers.
∗∗∗∗+ (Very Good to Excellent). 10,300 words.

•••

As I mentioned above the special author issues of F&SF always contain non-fiction articles about the featured writer (usually an appreciation and a bibliography),⁶ but this issue leads off with an essay by Ellison himself, You Don’t Know Me, I Don’t Know You. This is a typically forthright piece (i.e. extended rant) where he covers all the usual bases: the essay begins with a list of all the stories that he has published in F&SF and the fuss they have caused (controversy); why Ed Ferman keeps buying and publishing them—”every time I run one of your stories I have twice as many people sign on as I do cancel” (self-aggrandizement); the labelling of his books as “sci-fi” (chippyness); the fact that he knows he is always “shooting off his big mouth about some fancied crime or other” (pre-emptive defensiveness); a lengthy examination of an issue of Publishers Weekly and its relative lack of advertising or notices for SF writers (ignored and unvalued); and an encounter with an obnoxious fan at a convention (vile strangers and me).
After nine pages of this sort of thing he eventually moves on to discussing the stories:

[Let] me tell you where the three new stories in this issue of F&SF came from. In that way, at least, I’ll save myself from having to endure the boring recitations in half-witted fanzines that purport to be knowledgeable analyses of what I really meant, analyses of the twisted psychosexual references that fill the stories. I’ll free myself of having to bear that silliness, at least for these three stories. Which means all the rest are still fair game for the functional illiterates who do most of the fanzine critiques.  p. 58

We learn that Working with the Little People was written in one sitting in the front window of a store in Charing Cross (Ellison does this stunt quite often, and you can usually tell which stories have started life that way) and:

It is, I suppose, an open letter to a famous fantasy writer on whose wonderful stories I grew up. This writer is a person who has become a good friend, someone I love. And because of my respect and affection for this writer, and because of the germinal effect on my writing that the body of this writer’s work had on me during my formative years, it is impossible for me to say to this writer, you stopped writing your best work over twenty years ago. It is impossible for me to take this writer aside and say, “Just for a moment let’s forget that we’re both eminently successful, that we’re canonized by fans and critics. They don’t know. But we know. We know what each of us is writing, and we know when the time has come that we’re only indulging ourselves because our fame is such that they’ll buy whatever we write, no matter how ineffective or slapdash. For just a moment let’s forget we’re who we are, and just look at what you’ve been doing for twenty years!” No, it’s not possible for me to tell this writer of classic stature that somehow the publicity and the fame and the totemization have gotten in the way of writing the stories that made the fame in the first place.  p. 58

Later, after short discussion of fame, Ellison continues:

Perhaps the writer will recognize what I’m doing in “Working with the Little People.” And perhaps I’ll get a phone call and this writer, with whom I talk frequently, will say, “I read your story. Did you mean me?” And I’ll say, fearfully, “Yeah.” And perhaps the writer will say, “Let’s talk. I’m not sure you know what the hell you’re talking about, but at least you cared enough to say it and risk my wrath and the loss of my friendship; so at least let’s sit down alone and thrash it out.”  p. 59

Yes, that’s exactly what will happen! I’d add that Ellison’s point is not at all obvious from the story, so I hope the writer (identified by others I asked as Ray Bradbury) is a telepath.
Ellison finishes by talking about Alive and Well on a Friendless Voyage, written immediately after his third marriage ended (five months long, June to November 1976), and Jeffty is Five (spawned from a word association game and about “losing so many wonderful things that meant so much to us and which we took so much for granted”).
It was interesting to read this essay again because it reminded me of why I stopped buying Ellison’s books (and largely stopped reading his essays and letters) in the early 1980s: too shouty, too aggrieved, too hyperbolic. It became very, very wearing.
Following Ellison’s essay is an entertaining biographical sketch by Robert Silverberg, Harlan, which starts with both writers in the same apartment block in 1950s New York and goes forward in time. There are several amusing anecdotes, including the time Silverberg saved Ellison’s life:

Why he was having so much trouble with the current that day, while I was making my way fairly easily in it, I don’t understand. But he seemed to be at the end of his endurance. I looked toward shore and caught sight of Judith Merril and a few other workshoppers; I waved to them, trying to indicate we were in trouble, and they blithely waved back. (Perhaps they understood the message and were exercising the most effective form of literary criticism.) Since none of them budged toward the water, it was all up to me. So I swam toward Harlan, grabbed him somehow, and hauled him through the water until my feet were touching bottom. It was half an hour or so before he felt strong enough to leave the sand flat for the return journey. Later that day, some of the demigods soundly rebuked me for my heroism, but I have only occasionally regretted saving Harlan from drowning.  p. 68

Harlan Ellison: The Healing Art of Razorblade Fiction is an essay by Richard Delap that is as full of hyperbole as Ellison’s essay:

Even in the early 60s it was still fighting an uphill battle against a reputation for garish cover paintings of women in steel brassieres and tentacled monsters whose sole occupation seemed to be trying to get a peek at what was under those brassieres. Science fiction which seemed to sway toward any serious intention was hustled into the mainstream with due haste — witness 1984, Brave New World, Earth Abides, etc. — where it was shielded by the literary lions who insisted that it was not sf because it was good literature.
The wall was tentatively breeched as the decade marched into history, but it was not until 1967 that Harlan Ellison lined up the science fiction cannons, an anthology of all new stories by the best writers in the field, and blasted the wall all to hell. Dangerous Visions did not meet with unanimous acclaim, either in the field of sf or out of it, but it created reverberations that have echoed and re-echoed continuously ever since. Thirty-two aggressive and intelligent writers came out shooting and the tentacled beasties were blasted to bits, the steel brassieres evaporated in an instant.  p. 78

Harlan Ellison: An F&SF Checklist by Leslie Kay Swigart is a comprehensive bibliography of Ellison’s work. At the time of publication these were hugely useful (no ISFDB in those days).
The final piece of special issue material is the Cover is by Kelly Freas, which features Ellison as the writer in Working with the Little People. It’s an effective piece by Freas, and atypical work.
The rest of the non-fiction leads off with .2001 by Baird Searles, which is about the TV debut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how he refused to watch it in that format. Searles thought much more of the film than I did (dull, dull, dull, incomprehensible).
He provides this interesting snippet about the original version:

And I might also indulge myself further in this orgy of reminiscence by adding that I have seen twice, because of the screening and premiere viewings, the famous lost 19 minutes of 2001 which Kubrick, judiciously or injudiciously, cut from the film after about a week.  p. 91/p. 109

Books by Algis Budrys opens with commentary on the publishing phenomenon that was The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks:

This very review at this time instead of next month, and in different terms, is the result Ballantine’s supplying me — as well as scores of much more influential people — with an advance set of bound pageproofs whose production cost and handling charges might finance an outfit like Advent: Publishers or T-K Graphics for a year. Which is to say nothing about the additional sums involved in the special booklet for retailers, the floor display stands for the Ballantine edition, the store-window poster of the Hildebrandt illustrations, the special postcard mailing, or the national advertising budget.  p. 103

Is Sword harbinging a forthcoming flourish of fiction derived from The Lord of the Rings in the way that Campbellian SF derived from H.G. Wells’s scientific romances? Is there in fact an entire generation of Frodo fans maturing into a cadre of artists who are about to flower in prose and its ancillary creations, so that the bounds of “SF” will expand markedly? Will this suck creativity away from older forms, such as newsstand science fiction? Will there be a Frodo Magazine? Will there be (many) (successful) competitors of it? Will the university of one’s choice accept taxonomic studies of it as PhD credentials? Might one establish a teaching guide? How about a writers’ conference? A TV series? A convention at which the series actors discourse on the nature of Reality, and plastic chainmail shirts are sold to ten-year-olds?  p. 104

Budrys eventually gets around to the book itself, and notes that it was written in two parts, the first half while the writer was in college, and the remainder years later. He says that the latter part is the stronger (less time spent on getting things in order), but mentions several quibbles (the use of “decimate”, “dwarf/dwarves”, “whom”, “holocaust”, etc.). He concludes by saying that is not a great book but “simply a good one of its kind.”
There are three SF novels reviewed Budrys. He doesn’t have much to say about The Starcrossed by Ben Bova (mildly amusing), but he takes some time to put Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny and Under Pressure by Frank Herbert in perspective:

Doorways, which is only moderately cute, only average convoluted, and rather straightforwardly told, is one of the first hopeful signs from this author in some time. It has an ending which appears to have been paced into the scenario at some point earlier than the day it was typed, and it has a protagonist who is rather more than a collection of tics. It represents a return toward the power Zelazny once displayed, plus a maturation that runs deeper than witticism. It is not a reversion, though that would have been nice for us, but a progression, which is nice for Zelazny, as well as us. You cannot keep a good man down.
I have no idea what produced the slapdash, eccentric work of the past few years. I have some understanding of the external and internal pressures undergone by artists, and I assume they apply even more forcefully to someone of Zelazny’s high stature. Therefore I sympathize. But a point had been reached at which it was time to shed a tear for the reader, as well.  p. 108

This is not the Frank Herbert of the Dune series, nor, thank God, of the half-dozen or so soporifics he turned out while trying to find what would work better. Eventually he found Dune World, and OK, that’s fine, but why he wanted to depart from the basic attack he employed in Under Pressure, one would be hard put to understand.
It is a book with a jargony, dull beginning, and a last paragraph which, mixed with lard, could frost a Ladies’ Auxiliary cake. In between, it is one of the finest science fiction suspense novels ever written, not at all out-dated — in fact, enhanced in relevance — by the times and events that have followed its first publication.  p. 109

There is also a brief mention of an essay (which Budrys highly recommends to writers) in a collection by Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder.
This is a cracking review column by Budrys, and one which has everything you might want as a reader: interesting reviews of the books in hand; how the books fit into the authors’ wider careers; and several snippets of publishing news and analysis.
The Cartoon by Gahan Wilson has spectators watching what looks like a military parade populated by skeletons and corpses: “Gee, I don’t know; this is kind of depressing!” say the spectators. Darkly amusing.
Of Ice and Men is an essay about ice ages and how they are linked to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Asimov begins with the tilt of the Earth and then goes on to describe our orbit around the Sun, but he lost me when he started talking about the foci of ellipses (less maths and more explanation of why the Sun is at one of the foci would have been helpful). All of this latter leads on to a description of the seasons and why they are different lengths in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
The essay concludes with the statement that ice ages are caused by none of these factors, but by the perturbations of Earth’s orbit (orbital variations caused by non-solar masses), which is next month’s essay.
There is quite a lively Letters column this issue, which leads off with an attack on John Clute’s reviews by Barry Malzberg (he disagrees with a comment about Alfred Bester’s They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To, and accuses Clute of being snide and cruel, saying the only way to get a kind word is to “have published in New Worlds”). Clute gets the better of him in his reply, I think, but struggles later with a complaint from a Carl Glover:

Why is it, then, that I am completely unable to extract a shred of sense or understanding from John Clute’s book reviews? Do I possess a receptive aphasic blind spot of which I have been hitherto unaware? Or does Clute write in some obscure and esoteric literary idiom which only certain segments of the literati can understand? For me, trying to make sense of Clute’s writing is like listening to the speech of a shrewd but floridly psychotic schizophrenic: it almost seems as if it should be logically understandable, but the meaning keeps slipping away at the crucial moment of comprehension.  p. 157

I’m glad it isn’t just me.
There is a letter raving about John Varley’s In the Hall of the Martian Kings from Linda Foster; a complaint about immorality from J. B. Post (someone steals a library book in Fritz Leiber’s The Pale Brown Thing); and a complaint from George Zebrowski about Budry’s review of John W. Campbell’s The Space Beyond, which I didn’t entirely follow but will probably come back to when I read Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column (based on All, one of the novelettes in the Campbell collection).

•••

Even though this is a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF, and Jeffty is Five won loads of awards, the best story here for me (both times around) is Eric Norden’s The Primal Solution. Of the three Ellison stories, the best is Jeffty is Five (I can’t recall much subsequent mention of the other two). I also liked Steven Utley’s The Maw, but the stories in this issue are a mixed bag.
Budrys’ multifaceted Books column is also a highlight, as are the Letters at the end of the magazine.
A decidedly interesting issue if not a particularly good one.  ●

_____________________

 

1. You can find old Terry and the Pirates radio programs on the Internet Archive. I wouldn’t bother.

2. According to Wikipedia and other sources the mother drowns Jeffty in the bath at the end of the story—that is not clear from the text (and goes to my comment about the piece needing another draft).

3. Jeffty Is Five’s nostalgia for the past comes along with a distinct antipathy for the present:

Today, I turn on my car radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.  p. 10

Things are better in a lot of ways. People don’t die from some of the old diseases any more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used to. When I’m running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I still think we’ve lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can’t buy linoleum any more, only vinyl floor covering? There’s no such thing as oilcloth any more; you’ll never again smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother’s kitchen. Furniture isn’t made to last thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to throw their furniture out and bring in all new color-coded borax every seven years. Records don’t feel right; they’re not thick and solid like the old ones, they’re thin and you can bend them . . . that doesn’t seem right to me. Restaurants don’t serve cream in pitchers any more, just that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color. Everywhere you go, all the towns look the same with Burger Kings and MacDonald’s and 7-Elevens and motels and shopping centers.
Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past.

I don’t think the narrator is nostalgic for the past, but for an idealised version of it—cherry picking the things he likes and largely ignoring the things that were also of that time: racism, sexual discrimination, possible nuclear oblivion; the list is long.
I’d also note that this reactionary nostalgia is a not uncommon trait in some SF fans. Although they spend a good chunk of their time reading about imagined futures, some have a pronounced dislike of modern technology: I’ve lost count of the number I have come across who actively dislike ebooks, smartphones, etc.; who shun streaming services in favour of DVDs; use chequebooks rather than credit/debit cards or Paypal, and so on.

4. Further to my comments about Jeffty Is Five needing another draft, the introduction states that the story arrived “in [. . .] an impressive envelope from something called Federal Express Courier-Pak. It screams RUSH /URGENT from every corner”.
It’s also worth reading Joanna Russ’s review about the writing in this story.

5. My corrective for those suffering from too much nostalgia—read Malcolm Jameson’s Blind Alley.

6. As well as the special non-fiction articles there are also advertisements for books by Ellison, one of which includes this mention of The Prince of Sleep, a never-completed novel version of the novella The Region Between (Galaxy, March 1970):

Even more fascinating is that ISFDB lists the novella version as part of a five author, five story “Afterlife of Bailey” series.  ●