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Bezig met laden... Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation (1961)door Harlan Ellison
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Harlan Ellison may be the most arrogant, smugly obnoxious writer in science fictiondom, but he writes like his eyeballs are being sliced with papercuts. That's a good thing. These stories from 1961 are "stories of the lost, the damned, the helpless, trying to get a handle on life." The themes are the social concerns rising in the public eye at that time: racial prejudice, narcotics addiction, juvenile delinquency, anti-Semitism, alienation, violence. With talent like this, a lot of people overlook his less attractive qualities. Me, I take the package as a whole. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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Bold and uncompromising, Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-up Generation is a watershed moment in Harlan Ellison's early writing career. Rather than dealing in speculative fiction, these twenty-five short stories directly tackle issues of discrimination, injustice, bigotry, and oppression by the police. Pulling from his own experience, Ellison paints vivid portraits of the helpless and downtrodden, blazing forth with the kind of unblinking honesty that would define his career. Reviewing this collection, Dorothy Parker called Ellison "a good, honest, clean writer, putting down what he has seen and known, and no sensationalism about it." Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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These tales were written in the late fifties and early sixties, some of them while Ellison was serving time in the army. He started writing for a living in 1955 and churned out pulp fiction of all kinds to pay the rent. With the U.S. government providing room and board and less time to write, he could concentrate on what he really wanted to do, which was stories of the oppressed minorities in society or of those folks not conforming to Eisenhower era norms.
So we have the ’Gentleman Junkie’ of the title story, a psychiatrist hooked on heroin. ‘High Dice’ about a poorer junkie trapped in a toilet with a mean gambler. ‘At The Mountains Of Blindness’ about Porky, a dealer who gets his comeuppance in a very unusual way. We have ’Final Shtick’, about Marty Field, born Feldman, returning to his home town as a celebrity and pretending they really did all love him back when he was a kid. ‘Daniel White For The Greater Good’ concerns a black rapist who just might deserve lynching. There are a few good yarns about party people and ‘artists’ on the fringes of society: ‘Lady Bug, Lady Bug’, ‘Sally In Our Alley’ and ‘Have Coolth’.
‘Enter The Fanatic, Stage Center’ is a neat mix of ‘Bad Day At Black Rock’ and ‘High Plains Drifter’ but completely original, I hasten to add before Harlan puts a rotten fish in the post. ‘Free With This Box!’ is an autobiographical tale of a little boy being suckered by big business then scared by the police. It was a formative experience.
All good stuff but I particularly liked the clever ones in which something mentioned briefly in the body of the story turns into the kicker at the end, kind of utilising Chekov’s old maxim about the shotgun on the wall. ‘This Is Jackie Spinning’ about a disc-jockey messing with the mob does this. So does ‘Someone Is Hungrier’ in which a dame hiding out from her mobster boyfriend is hoist by her own values.
All the stories are powerful, so powerful that in overdose they become overpowering. It’s a book best dipped into now and then, not swallowed in one gulp. There’s a strong urge to take it all in because it’s so good. While churning out all those pulp stories, Harlan did learn how to write. Practice made him pretty perfect. However, I think that like Silverberg, Ellison does himself an injustice in downplaying the hackwork. Turning out a readable, entertaining story is nothing to sneeze at even if it ain’t ‘Art’.
A brilliant collection that I enjoyed far more than I thought I would, to be honest. Ellison proves that the short story is still a thing worth doing and, obviously, worth doing well. Highly recommended.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/ ( )