Again, Dangerous Visions
Harlan Ellison
Language: English
Pages: 754
ISBN: 1497636469
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Do it my way. Get yourself sobered up and cleaned up. Look smart! Back straight! Shoes shined! Hup!” “Oh-h-h-h-h,” groaned Chug, sagging to a seat droop-shouldered. “Be not alarmed, dear boy. Zephran society is eagerly awaiting you. My, what a treasure you will be to the worshipful elders and teeming teenagers of Zephyrus who even now are assembling to welcome you! “One hour.” The blankness following this gave ample indication that communication had been cut off. One hundred top-ranking
me.” “No such thing!” boomed Sir Harry Mandifer, clapping Archer on the back. “Besides, it’s enough to rattle anyone. Gave me quite a turn, myself, and I’m used to this sort of nonsense!” Sir Harry had developed his sturdy technique of encouragement during many a campaign in haunted house and ghost-ridden moor, and it did not fail him now. Archer’s return to self-possession was almost immediate. Satisfied at the restoration, Sir Harry looked up at the ceiling. “You say it started as a kind of
strange holy gig as a social worker during the interim, I came back and finished a B.A. because what else was there to do? During my last semester I tried my hands and feet at poetry and won the Academy of American Poets Award, my creditors making short work of the prize money. Knowing I would last about a week at Med School I said well what now. Iowa they said. So in Iowa I lived in a $4/month sackcloth-panelled cave on a cliff overlooking the Iowa River with no plumbing no running water (except
The story comes out of a riff I hit people with when they are ripe for it. It turns out that a lot of people believe the story, the same way they get caught up in tall tales—so why not try it in print? The reason you can con your audience with a tall tale, “suspend their disbelief,” is that there is quite a bit of fact via details woven in with the fantasy. I once heard Gore Vidal say that you can usually spot the successful novelist as a kid—he is such a pathological liar. If you’re a good
overhead, on his arms and neck and head protected by their thick silk-fine hair, on the earth and ferns and undergrowth nearby, on all the leaves of the forest, near and far. Selver sat as quiet as the grey owl on a branch above him, unsleeping, his eyes wide open in the rainy dark. 3. Captain Raj Lyubov had a headache. It began softly in the muscles of his right shoulder, and mounted crescendo to a smashing drumbeat over his right ear. The speech centers are in the left cerebral cortex, he