John Walters

Thoughts on The Last Dangerous Visions Edited by Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski

Posted on February 1, 2025 by John Walters

This is not a book review, because at this time I don’t plan to read the entire volume. I borrowed The Last Dangerous Visions from the library to read the introduction and afterword by Straczynski, which comprise almost seventy-five pages, and to see what has become of Ellison’s original compilation. In fact, not much is left of what would have been the monumental conclusion of the Dangerous Visions trilogy. Although only Ellison’s name is on the cover, this iteration was edited by Straczynski, and few of the one hundred twenty stories Ellison gathered for TLDV, which he had intended at one time to release in three volumes, made the cut. So this is a new anthology using some of the original stories and other stories that Straczynski solicited, along with a lengthy treatise on TLDV and why it never got published as it was supposed to in 1974 but instead remained in a sort of limbo.

When I attended the Clarion West Workshop in 1973, the second volume, Again, Dangerous Visions, had just been published, and Ellison was actively seeking stories for TLDV. Some of my classmates, including David Wise and Russell Bates, had already sold him stories, and I was deeply envious of those sales. However, my own work was not yet up to professional standards.

Russell Bates was a Kiowa Native American, and Ellison had bought two stories from him, which were combined and appear on the table of contents as “Search Cycle: Beginning and Ending: 1. The Last Quest; 2. Fifth and Last Horseman.” For a time, Russ became a houseguest at Ellison Wonderland, Ellison’s home in Sherman Oaks, and he inspired and assisted with two chapters, called “The Red Man’s Burden,” in Ellison’s compilation of TV and film criticism The Other Glass Teat. Besides the particular excellence of Russ’s stories, including these tales would have relieved the monotony of white male authors in much of the rest of the book. Ellison was especially pleased about that. However, Russ’s stories did not make it into Straczynski’s anthology.

Russ and I became good friends, even being roommates for a short time in Los Angeles while we worked on a teleplay that never got produced. We lost touch for a few decades while I took off on my worldwide wanderings, but after my Greek wife and I settled in Thessaloniki to raise our sons, we reconnected via email. In one note he confided that he had withdrawn his stories from TLDV so he could sell them elsewhere, supposing that the anthology would never be made, and that Ellison had been furious. But then Russ died, and the stories never did get published. When I heard that Straczynski was reviving TLDV, I wrote to him about Russ’s stories and encouraged him to try to get them back from Russ’s family if he could. I never received an answer; I don’t know if Straczynski ever got my message. I have read both of Russ’s Native American-themed stories, though, and their inclusion would have greatly strengthened the book. After fifty years, omissions are of course inevitable, but the loss of Russ’s stories is grievous.

“Ellison Exegesis,” the lengthy essay by Straczynski that opens the book, is mainly an explanation of why Ellison never finished The Last Dangerous Visions. I found it extremely traumatic to read. My testimony is similar to Straczynski’s: reading a story by Ellison, in my case “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” is what gave me the inspiration to become a writer, and having Ellison as a teacher at Clarion West stoked the flame. For a time I devoured anything I could find of Ellison’s books. When Pyramid reissued numerous Ellison titles in a series of paperback editions in the 70s I bought them all and eagerly read them; I kept them with me as I moved from place to place and only sold them when I got rid of almost all my possessions before setting out on the road to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. As a result of living overseas for thirty-five years, I missed the whole horror story of Ellison’s decline and fall. To me, he was a literary hero, and in the mid-1970s when I left the country he was at the top of his form, winning awards right and left and in great demand as a teacher at workshops and a guest at conventions.

Reading Straczynski’s account was a profound shock. He explains that Ellison suffered severely from bipolar disorder and manic depression, and the condition manifested more and more as he aged. The symptoms had been there all along, but for a time he managed to use his gregariousness and his literary genius to shroud them. However, as decades passed, the depression and erratic behavior intensified, until Ellison was hardly getting any work done, let alone a huge project such as The Last Dangerous Visions. He became more and more unstable until he attempted to kill himself with a gun and was briefly involuntarily incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. In desperation, he finally agreed to seek help and take medications. Soon after this, though, he died after a series of strokes.

It hurt me to read this. It hurt a lot. To realize what had happened to one of my literary heroes. I almost wish I hadn’t read it, but I suppose it was important that I did. However, when I finished, I could hardly bear to hold the book in my hands. As a result I won’t, at least for now, be reading the stories that Straczynski has compiled. I mean no disrespect to the authors; maybe I’ll get back to them later. For now, I just can’t.

I did, though, skim to the back of the book and read Straczynski’s afterword, “Tetelestai! Compiling The Last Dangerous Visions,” in which he explains his selection process. In it, there is a three page spread with Ellison’s original table of contents of one hundred twenty stories, including the stories of my classmates, which didn’t make the cut. It’s sad, really, because Russell Bates, David Wise, and others waited most of their lives for the privilege of being included in this anthology, but now that time will never come. What was once conceived as a monumental literary achievement has been pared down to a single volume of more manageable but far less gargantuan length. In expressing this, I do not mean to criticize Straczynski. I believe he did the best he could when faced with an all-but-impossible task. It’s just that the dream was so much more stupendous that the eventual reality. Anticipation built for decade after decade, and now that it is here, well, it’s better than nothing, but I can’t help but lament for what might have been.

As for Harlan Ellison, all I can say is rest in peace. I know that he was a staunch atheist, but I can’t help but fantasize that he was pleasantly surprised and that he and his wife Susan are reunited and enjoying a bit of rest and fun – somewhere, somehow.

As a postscript, I’d like to mention that John Grayshaw has conducted extensive research on what happened to the unpublished stories that Ellison bought for The Last Dangerous Visions. You can find the fascinating article on his findings, called “The Last Orphan Stories,” on the Amazing Stories website here.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words. I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible. If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories. To send a one-time or recurring donation, click here. You can also donate via my Patreon account. Thanks!

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Harlan Ellison, J. Michael Straczynski, Russell Bates, The Last Dangerous Visions | Leave a comment

Panning for Gold in the Literary River

Posted on January 29, 2025 by John Walters

I love to write. If it can be said that particular occupations or pursuits are destinies, then writing is mine. For me it is a vocation, a calling, a mission, a pleasure, a joy, a delight, a thrill, a task that enhances the meaning of my existence – to name but a few of the many superlatives that could be attributed to it. I stumbled upon it as if by accident while taking a course in science fiction as literature during my one year at university and immediately I knew that nothing else in life would satisfy. In the ensuing years, most of the profound life-decisions I made were tied to my desire to write. While raising my children in Greece I taught English as a second language to pay the bills, but I continued to write on the weekends and during the summer when school was out of session. When the economy collapsed in Greece and I brought my sons to the States so that they would have more options and opportunities, I continued to write my novels, stories, memoirs, and so on, but I also looked for a job – any job – with a steady salary. Finding none, I turned to internet employment listings and took freelance work ghostwriting articles and blog posts. Of course, I didn’t consider these on the same level of quality as my creative work, but nevertheless I always did my best.

Let’s pause here and ruminate on Rudyard Kipling’s admonition in the famous poem “If” to treat success and failure the same. This is wise counsel, and it especially applies to the pursuit of the creative arts. Very few writers get rich through their writing; in fact, very few even manage to make a living. The vast majority have unrelated jobs that bring in most of their income and write in their spare time. It’s a matter of survival. You can hardly continue to produce your art if you and your loved ones end up on the streets and starve. For much of my writing life I have maintained this balance of having a money-making job and writing on the side – apart from a period when I was traveling full-time, back in the 1970s when I was in my twenties, hitchhiking around the world, content and even happy to be broke and to only take temporary work when I needed some quick cash for transportation or whatever, footloose and fancy-free, always carrying a notebook and pen so I could write down my observations and rhapsodize about the situations in which I found myself.

Now we will return to the present. As I mentioned above, for a decade or so I supported my sons and me by doing freelance writing work I found online. In the past few years, though, those jobs have dried up and the websites that offered them have shut down. Why? Because the businesses that commissioned those jobs from freelance writers have taken to using AI to produce their articles and blog posts. The results are far inferior to those composed by human writers, but the companies that want a steady barrage of content on their websites don’t seem to give a damn. For them it’s the quantity that counts, not the quality.

However, this leaves writers like me who made their living supplying content to these websites in the lurch. My income, which was already sparse and barely survival-level, has dwindled. I am of what most workers in the United States would consider retirement age, but I am in no position financially to retire. Because I spent so many years earning a living overseas, Social Security provides me with a pittance of only a few hundred dollars. I have to seek my sustenance elsewhere. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to start flipping burgers or bagging groceries at my age. I’d rather take my chances on the streets.

All this to say that I found myself in need of finding ways to monetize my writing work. I make a bit of money by selling short stories and collecting royalties from my almost forty published books, but it’s not nearly enough.

Lately I have been drawn to spending more time writing book reviews and essays and posting them on my website’s blog. As a result, my blog’s readership has more than tripled in recent months. I always hoped that eventually blog readers would become buyers of my books, but that effect has been minimal. One of my sons suggested that perhaps I should open an account on Substack, a fairly new site that specializes in subscriptions of emailed newsletters. He thought that I might have more opportunity for monetization there. So I sauntered on over to have a look. In fact, I did more than give it a glance; I dug deeply into researching the possibilities on Substack. At first glance, it seemed an attractive alternative. Some people were making good money on the platform. I even discovered that prestigious writers such as George Saunders and Salmon Rushdie were publishing on Substack. In my initial enthusiasm I wrote pages of material for introductions and so on in preparation for a launch on the platform. But then I hit a few snags. For one thing, I found out that Saunders and Rushdie and other big names did not elect to try out Substack like everyone else; in fact, the platform paid them large -up to six figures – sums for their contributions. For another, the Substack payment system is severely limited. If you want to put some of your content behind a pay wall, you have only one option as to how much to charge; you can’t offer a gradation of payment scales like you can on, for instance, Patreon. (More on Patreon in a moment.) When I wrote a well-known science fiction writer and editor with hundreds of Substack subscribers what he thought of the platform, he said he didn’t think much of it. He said that most people could do much better on Patreon, and though some people who jumped on Substack when it first launched saw rapid growth, now it was very difficult to engage new subscribers.

Wow. That posed a dilemma for me. My website’s blog was having a growth spurt in followers, and if I moved to Substack, although I could announce the move and invite people to come over, basically I would be starting again from scratch. In contrast, I have been posting on my blog ever since I started it up in 2010 when I was living in Thessaloniki, Greece. I didn’t really want to start again, but I couldn’t see an alternative.

As for Patreon, well, I have a Patreon account and for awhile a few years ago I was posting on it, but it didn’t really take off. If I transferred my efforts there, I would again have to basically start from scratch. And I didn’t really want to hide my book reviews and essays behind a pay wall, which is what Patreon is all about. What I wanted to do was give an option for readers to leave a donation, either one-time or recurring, if they felt so inclined.

It was a real dilemma. I was befuddled, bewildered, bemused, flummoxed, perplexed, and discombobulated.

After I poured out my perplexity to him, another of my sons provided a key to the escape from my difficulty. He said that sometimes after reading something particularly informational or revelatory online he would find a donation button at the end, and he was happy to click on it and contribute a few bucks. It had never occurred to me that WordPress, my website host, might have this option. After a quick search, I discovered that – lo and behold – it did. This was my answer! I could monetize my already growing website instead of starting again somewhere else. The donation block WordPress offers uses the Stripe payment system, and you can set various amounts, either one-time or monthly recurring, and also provide an option for contributors to enter a custom amount.

This was just what I was looking for. It was an elegant solution to my concern about having to start fresh on another platform: I didn’t have to!

I had a few trials and errors in implementing it. At first, I put the donation block at the end of the book review I was posting. However, it was too large and ostentatious; I couldn’t do that on every post. Instead, I created a separate donation page that could be accessed by clicking a simple link, and I wrote a small blurb with the link embedded that could be added to the end of my book reviews and essays. I also added a conspicuous blue “Leave a Tip” button that appears in my website’s right column above my featured book covers. It may not be perfect, but it works for me, at least for now. The words remain free, but I need the help, and I think that this is an appropriate and unobtrusive way to ask for it. Your answer may not be exactly the same, and that’s fine. The point is to persist until you find the solution that fits your situation, and then make it happen.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged donation, Patreon, Substack, tip, WordPress, Writing | Leave a comment

Book Review: Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits Edited by J. Michael Straczynski; Part Three

Posted on January 25, 2025 by John Walters

These days we are constantly beset by entertainment that features extreme acts of violence. We see violent deeds so often in film and television that we have become inured to them; they have, in a sense, lost their shock value. This was not so in the sixties, seventies, and eighties when Ellison was turning out most of his best, groundbreaking work. Other writers dealt with extreme subjects, of course, but Ellison was one of the first to really rub readers’ noses in it, to put a microscope to it, to create prose poetry out of descriptions of violence. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is an example of this, but the epitome of creating art out of acts of extreme violence has to be his story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” It takes place in New York, and it is based on the real murder of a woman named Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death outside her apartment building. A New York Times article, which was later disputed, claimed that up to thirty-eight people witnessed the murder and did nothing to stop it. This incident formed the basis for Ellison’s story, which involves a cult of worshipers of a god that feeds on violence. When I attended my first-ever Harlan Ellison reading, he had the lights of the auditorium dimmed so that the reading lamp on the lectern was the only illumination. And then he read this terrifying tale with great verve and elocution. I’ve been to a lot of author readings, but nobody could dive into a story and bring life to it like Harlan Ellison. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” though intense, works on all levels.

On the other hand, Ellison was often prone to excess, and as an example I offer the novelette “Mefisto in Onyx,” the longest story in this collection. It is out-and-out horror, and when it was first published it won the Bram Stoker Award for best horror story of the year. I did not enjoy it when I first read it, and I felt uncomfortable while reading it this time too; it deals with a serial killer that commits unspeakably foul murders (which Ellison describes in detail) and for me it is simply too gruesome and nasty to appreciate as art. Many others disagree, and that’s fine. It does have a satisfactory ending, I must admit. As a footnote to my opinion, I point out that it is the only story in the collection that carries a content warning above the title. I would have preferred that instead of this story Straczynski would have included the novella “A Boy and His Dog,” which does not appear herein, possibly because of its length. There are also other stories in the table of contents that I would not have included because I feel that they are mediocre and not representative of Ellison’s best work, but as Ellison expressed a popular adage referring to personal taste, “One man’s nightmare is another man’s wet dream.” I won’t point out the other stories that did not appeal to me, as your opinion, of course, may differ, and you’re entitled to it, but I will mention a few of my favorites that were excluded but that I would have added if I were editor: “Punky and the Yale Men” and “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer.”

Before I close, I will mention a couple of stories that well-earn their places in this book. The novelette “Paladin of the Lost Hour” is more subdued than much of Ellison’s work. There is little violence, and the speculative element is introduced subtly and then only becomes significant in the closing moments. For most of its length, it is a character study about two men who seem very different, but they bond in their loneliness and become friends. This story not only won the Hugo Award, but it was also adapted as an episode of the Twilight Zone, and that episode won a Writers Guild of America Award. The other story I find particularly impressive is “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.” The meaning of the tale and some of the elements therein are somewhat obscure, but it is another example of a collage of seemingly disparate pieces in which the whole adds up to considerably more than the sum of its parts.

The final story in the volume is a novelette called “All the Lies That Are My Life.” It is set apart in a section of its own, “The Last Word.” Despite having no science fiction or fantasy elements whatsoever, it was published in a science fiction magazine and even nominated for a Hugo Award, presumably because it is about an author who writes science fiction and fantasy. The main character is an abrasive but brilliant and popular writer, an obvious allusion to Ellison himself, who has just died in a car accident. The narrator, another writer of lesser talent and popularity, has come to the dead author’s mansion for a reading of his will, and as he describes the proceedings and the other attendees, he reminisces about the dead writer’s life and career. Spoiler alert: at the end, the deceased writer names the narrator as his literary executor. The placement of this particular story as the last entry in Greatest Hits leads inevitably to the conclusion that Straczynski, Ellison’s literary executor, identifies with the narrator, although “All the Lies That Are My Life” was written and published almost forty years before Ellison’s death.

My conclusion? Greatest Hits, like so many of Ellison’s short story collections, has a mix of brilliant and timeless classics as well as stories of lesser, one might even say mediocre, quality. At least it starts out with a bang, with many of the best stories in the first two sections: “Angry Gods” and “Lost Souls.” I hope that the wish in the introduction by Straczynski is fulfilled: that it helps Ellison’s works become known to a new generation of readers.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged fantasy, Harlan Ellison, science fiction, short stories | Leave a comment

Book Review: Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits Edited by J. Michael Straczynski; Part Two

Posted on January 22, 2025 by John Walters

I have been a traveler for much of my life, but my situation and finances don’t make it possible to do so at present. They do, however, make it possible for me to qualify for the national program known as Museums for All, through which I can gain admission to most of the museums in the city for free. I decided, therefore, for the time being at least, to travel through time and space by exploring the variegated and multifaceted museum exhibits throughout Seattle. Besides the Museum of Pop Culture, or MoPOP, which explores the history of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and popular music (and at which Harlan Ellison has a place in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame), I have visited museums that celebrate Asian, Nordic, and Native American cultures. I’ve also perused many works of art, from classic to modern. Sometimes I have come across beautiful paintings that at first seem to be abstract splashes of color but exude great emotional power or pieces that blend seemingly disparate materials into strikingly cohesive statements. And as I pondered these works I wondered how the same assemblies of mystery and wonder could be accomplished in prose. When I brought up the subject, one museum employee suggested that some poetry does this, and that’s true, but I was more concerned about how abstractions in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts might be rendered in story form.

It’s not easy to put a story, or parts of a story, together as a collage of language with a unifying theme, but Ellison is a master at it. He accomplishes this with great skill in stories such as “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” and especially “The Deathbird.” In these tales, each part is a shining prose gem, and together the disparate parts unite in theme to create a devastating message.

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” was written back in the 1960s, but it is as relevant now as ever as the tale of a world-encompassing AI that has run amuck and destroyed most of humankind, keeping only a few survivors alive so that it can endlessly torment them. As I mentioned before, this story changed my life with its brilliance and originality. It is a dark, dark tale, but oh so well told. One objection I have with the Greatest Hits version of it, though: in the original story, in the scene breaks Ellison had inserted streams of punchcode tapes; these were meant to represent AM, the AI’s, continuous presence. Ellison had even taken the further step of having the tapes coded in international telegraph alphabet with the phrases “I think, therefore I am,” and “Cogito ergo sum,” which has the same meaning but in Latin. Even if you don’t know what the tapes mean, these interludes are eerie and powerful. However, for some reason Straczynski eliminated them and simply titled the sections alternately “I Think Therefore I Am” and “Cogito Ergo Sum” over and over, which comes across as much blander, especially if, like me, you’ve been able to compare the two versions. It doesn’t detract from Ellison’s powerful prose, but it puts it in a slightly less effective frame.

The novelette “The Deathbird” is, in a sense, Ellison’s atheist manifesto. In it, the roles of god and devil are reversed. God is a mad maniac that destroys the Earth and humankind, while the alien Snake, the devil character, is a compassionate guide to the last human on his final quest. Whether or not you agree with the religious implications of the tale (the two creatures representing god and the devil are, in the story, alien entities), it is a heartbreaking tale of the irredeemable loss of the planet we call home, which is sentient and is likened to a grieving mother. But that’s not all. The story is told in twenty-six sections that roam from past to present to far future. Some take the form of an quiz with questions pertaining to the theme. One of the sections even has an interlude that tells the true tale of Ellison’s dog Ahbhu (incidentally the inspiration for the award-winning novella “A Boy and His Dog,” which is not included in this collection): how Ellison rescued him from a shelter, learned to love and trust him, and finally had to put him down when he became deathly ill. But all the disparate parts come together flawlessly as an intricate literary mosaic.

“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” which has always been one of my favorite Ellison works, has a brilliant storyline, but it goes far beyond mere story in the telling. It is a novelette-length piece of prose poetry, its descriptions intricate and ornate and deeply emotional. When a character dies, this turn of plot is not simply stated; instead, Ellison takes readers on a wild cyclonic rollercoaster ride through the process of dying, even using stylistic touches such as changes in margins and font size to provide graphic illustrations beyond words. In his introduction to the story in his collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: Stories, Ellison writes that the story came to him when he was in Las Vegas for a film event, and he dashed up to his room and his typewriter and began to write it out while naked in a cold, air-conditioned room. With the story half-finished, he developed pleurisy, went into a coma, and had to be flown back to a hospital in Los Angeles. One wonders if he was writing the surrealistic death sequence when he was slipping over the edge himself.

(To be continued)

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, MoPOP, Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, The Deathbird | Leave a comment

Book Review: Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits Edited by J. Michael Straczynski; Part One

Posted on January 18, 2025 by John Walters

And now we turn to a complex subject: the writer Harlan Ellison. He was a volatile, controversial figure during his lifetime, and continues to be after his death. His literary executor, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, is intent upon seeing to it that Ellison’s works do not disappear from the view of the reading public, and Greatest Hits is one of his first attempts to reintroduce the late author’s short stories to a new audience that may not have ever heard of him.

I’ve certainly heard of him. I first discovered Ellison while taking a class in science fiction as literature at the University of Santa Clara in the early 1970s, in the waning years of the Bay Area hippie revolution, where I was, in fact, spending more time smoking pot and taking psychedelics than studying. When I got to Ellison’s story, though, in the anthology that was the course textbook, my life changed. I had never read anything like the short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” (More on this story later.) Before I had finished it, I decided that I had to become a writer; no other occupation in the world would suit me.

And so I began to write and also to read a lot more science fiction stories. However, I didn’t make much progress, even after I moved back to Seattle, until another encounter with Ellison led me to Clarion West. I read in the newspaper one summer that Ellison was going to give a reading on the University of Washington campus. I’ve never encountered any writer that can read their works like Ellison. At that time he read his new story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” (More on this story later too.) I also found out that he was teaching at a six-week live-in writer’s workshop, and the next summer I enrolled. Thus Harlan Ellison, along with five other well-known science fiction and fantasy writers and editors, became my mentor. At the time he had already published the groundbreaking anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, and he was searching for material for The Last Dangerous Visions. All of us students, of course, dreamed of writing a story good enough for him to purchase for it.

In short, for years Ellison, or Harlan, as he insisted his students should call him, was one of my favorite writers, and I read a lot of his work – everything I could get my hands on. Since then I’ve reread some of his stories. I remember, for instance, finding his collection Deathbird Stories in an English-language library when I was living in Thessaloniki, Greece. Shortly after I moved back to the States, I found a reasonably-priced used copy of his door-stopper of a book The Essential Ellison on Amazon, which gave me another chance to reread some of my favorites.

Now, with this volume, I have a further opportunity to reacquaint myself with Ellison’s masterful short stories. And herein are some of his very best. In his introduction, Straczynski primarily addresses readers that might not have ever heard of Ellison, and that’s okay. But I am aware that many other readers like myself who grew up reading Ellison, even though they are familiar with the stories, are eager to obtain copies of this book.

There are three introductions. The first, by Straczynski, as I said, seeks to offer a glimpse of the complex man behind the words. The introduction that impressed me most, though, is the one by Cassandra Khaw, who writes of using pain as fuel for the creative process. There is certainly a lot of violence and pain in Ellison’s stories. However, there is much beauty too. For sheer power, visceral intensity, and precision and poetry of language, his best stories are hard to beat. And this selection certainly contains some of his best.

* * *

The collection kicks off in high gear with one of Ellison’s most popular stories, “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman.” The harlequin of the title is a rebellious man out of step with time in a hyper-organized future. The story is told in a hip, seemingly lighthearted, unorthodox style that was wildly unconventional at the time; the middle comes first, then the beginning, and then the story concludes. Ellison prefaces it with a long quote from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” Incidentally, this story introduced me to the works of Thoreau, whose writings subsequently had a profound effect on my life.

(To be continued)

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged fantasy, Harlan Ellison, J. Michael Straczynski, science fiction, short stories | Leave a comment

Concerning Empathy

Posted on January 15, 2025 by John Walters

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, empathy is “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” This contrasts with sympathy, which is a feeling of concern for another but not of actively sharing the experience, and also with compassion, which involves a desire to alleviate the other’s distress. When I speak of empathy in this essay, I refer to this vicarious sharing of another person’s feelings and experiences.

I think that empathy is a natural outgrowth of love; it takes love several steps further into a sense of bonding and the sharing of minds. The example that prompted these musings occurred just a few nights ago. One of my sons has recently achieved some major goals in his life and is in the midst of shifting from one situation to another. As with many such changes, there is a period of uncertainty in between. He has been traveling across the United States, and he called me one evening while paused at a truck stop in the Midwest. It was late, and he planned to spend the night there, sleeping in his car. It was especially cold in that part of the country, and arctic storm fronts were soon expected to move in from the north. In my years on the road, not only in the States but also in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia, I have been in similar, if not worse, situations. I know the feeling of having to bed down in an unknown, possibly risky place, and to try to sleep as best as I can in uncomfortable and unknown surroundings. I know that my son is an experienced traveler and has excellent survival training. And yet…

That night I couldn’t sleep. I felt for him out there in the darkness, in the cold, on the road. I wished that I could alleviate his distress, or at least somehow make my way there to share it with him. Instead of drifting off to sleep in my comfortable bed, I journeyed in spirit to that truck stop and I vicariously shared my son’s experience. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, nor did I want to. What I wanted to do is somehow telepathically consol him. Maybe I did; I don’t know. One thing was for sure, though: that night I didn’t get any more sleep than he did, and maybe less. In the morning, in my exhaustion, I came to realize that my son was well able to take care of himself and I needn’t have worried. However, what I went through that night went beyond worry. If I couldn’t be there for him physically, at least I could keep vigil for him and be there spiritually.

I’ve had experiences like this with my other sons, too, when they have gone through crises and were far from home. There is something in a parent-child relationship that does not dim with age. There is a link, a bond that remains strong regardless of where the vagaries of life lead us.

After the crisis was over, I continued to ponder the intensity and ramifications of empathy. And my thoughts shifted to my relationship with my mother when I was in the midst of my initial travels, hitchhiking across continents, taking the Hippie Trail, the overland journey from Europe across the Middle East to India, deliberately exposing myself to strange circumstances and possible dangers so that I could learn about life and write my impressions. When my son was in his isolated, vulnerable situation, I was able to video chat with him. But when I was traveling back in the 1970s, there were no cell phones and there was no internet. The only way to communicate with loved ones back home was by post in the form of aerograms, bits of paper that I could fold up and affix a stamp to. My mother only heard from me by means of these brief notes every few weeks, and to answer me, she had to send letters to the poste restante, or general delivery, of the main post office in the city and country where I estimated I might be next. I know that she deeply loved me. How she must have worried! Thinking, as a parent, how she must have felt, caused me to feel great empathy for her. If I would have known this back then, I might have written more often, but it took becoming a parent to really understand how deeply rooted love could become.

Empathy is a great gift, but it is a gift capable of causing great pain. In fact, in my life, at least, it seems to more often bring pain than pleasure. When my sons are doing well, I rejoice but I also become less concerned. However, when they are going through difficult times, that’s when the empathy pops out. I wouldn’t have it any other way, for it is a manifestation of imperishable love.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words. I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible. If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories, or to send a one-time or recurring donation, click here. Thanks!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged empathy, family relationships, love, travel | Leave a comment

Book Review: The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival among America’s Great White Sharks by Susan Casey

Posted on January 11, 2025 by John Walters

In the days when there were only four channels on TV, no cable, and no streaming services, my friend and housemate Rolf and I used to go to a lot of movies. On one occasion we went to a downtown theater to see Spielberg’s box office sensation Jaws. My friend usually manifested an image of bravado, but when we came out of the cinema he was visibly shaken, trembling even. When we ducked into a bar to have a pitcher of beer and play some pool, he could hardly hold his pool cue, let alone keep it steady. He confessed that he wasn’t afraid of much, but he had a strong, irrational fear of sharks. I think that there are many people with similar paranoia. After all, sharks are immense, savage carnivores of the deep, lying in wait in the depths to attack unwary prey.

The mystique and primal fear of sharks plays a large part of the allure of The Devil’s Teeth. The previous book I read by Susan Casey, The Underworld, Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, is an account of historical and contemporary efforts to study the deep ocean and its denizens. In contrast, The Devil’s Teeth reads more like a memoir chronicling several visits that Casey made to the Farallones, an archipelago about twenty-seven miles west of San Francisco. The title of the book refers to the clump of islands, which are collectively known as the Devil’s Teeth. But surrounding the islands are the devils of the sea, great white sharks, which especially during the fall months of September through November, congregate in the waters off the islands in two groups. The scientists refer to a team of males as the Rat Pack, and a team of truly immense females as the Sisterhood.

The Farallon Islands are a protected area, and there is only one inhabitable house on the island of Southeast Farallon. For decades a team of scientists has lived on the island and studied its populations of birds and mammals such as seals, but during shark season specialists also study the great white sharks and their attack patterns. They scan for attacks from a lighthouse on a hill. When they spot them, they launch a boat that is smaller than some of the sharks, and head out to document the activities with underwater cameras held on poles.

For Casey’s first visit, she was allowed a permit for just a couple of days during shark season. She came back for a short time during the summer, when the island was covered in breeding birds, but this was not enough to satisfy her journalist’s curiosity. She was not allowed to stay longer on the island, so to be able to remain for an extended period during shark season, she rented a yacht and anchored it offshore, which was technically permitted. We normally associate the word “yacht” with luxury, but this boat was old and untrustworthy, with plumbing that spewed waste, a fridge that stopped working, and unreliable electricity. During storms the boat would pitch and toss, making sleep impossible. Nevertheless, Casey endured the discomfort for the opportunity to go on shark watches with the scientists and observe how they work.

This is a thrilling book about a unique, primitive part of the world that is in fact only a short hop off the coast from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It seems strange to have such opposites in such close proximity. As I mentioned above, this book does not delve as deeply into background and history as Casey’s The Underworld. For instance, I would have appreciated, and in fact was hoping for, a historical overview of the study of white sharks. Instead, it focuses solely on the Farallones. In this context, though, it is fascinating and fully absorbing.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words. I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible. If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories, or to send a one-time or recurring donation click here. Thanks!

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Farallon Islands, great white shark, shark, Susan Casey | Leave a comment

Book Review: Playground by Richard Powers

Posted on January 4, 2025 by John Walters

My God this is a beautiful book. This is why I read: to discover gems like this. I don’t think it’s perfect; it gets a little confusing at the end and some of the threads remain unresolved. But it is absorbing through and though, and it has deep sympathetic characters, and it deals with important, cutting edge topics.

Ostensibly it concerns the proposal by a group of Americans to begin building, on the tiny Polynesian island of Makatea, floating cities whose inhabitants can live on the open sea. The concept of floating cities intrigues me, and that’s why I picked up the book. However, the floating cities idea never even comes close to initiation. It is a frame on which to construct a complex plot that involves the lives of four characters of starkly different backgrounds, the importance of protecting the ocean and its ecosystems, and the inevitability of advanced artificial intelligence.

Rafi Young, a young Black man deeply absorbed in literature and reading, forms an unlikely friendship with a young white man named Todd Keane, partially due to their mutual fascination with games such as Chess and Go. Todd goes on to become a tech billionaire (by inventing a complex game/social network called Playground) and one of the main financers of the floating cities project, while Rafi marries a part-Tahitian woman named Ina Aroita and goes with her to live on Makatea. The other main character is a French Canadian woman named Evie Beaulieu; her father helped invent the aqualung, and Evie’s early exposure to it helps to inspire a lifetime of exploring the ocean as a marine scientist. It is mainly through her eyes that readers experience the wonder and awe and vastness and importance of the ocean.

Powers tells the background stories of each of these main characters, alternating between these flashbacks and the situation concerning the floating city concept in the present day. At no time, though, do the cuts from scene to scene become confusing. Powers deftly and artistically weaves the disparate pieces into a coherent whole, so that we are carried along on what becomes a fast-paced ride from the past into an uncertain future. What is intriguing is that Powers does not make the solution simple. There are compelling arguments for both sides. If the floating cities are constructed on Makatea, it will mean well-paid jobs for the islanders, and among other amenities a new hospital and a new school. However, the construction will also cause irreparable damage to the marine ecosystems around the island and to the casual, comfortable way of life to which the island’s residents have grown accustomed.

I don’t want to give too much away, because part of this book’s appeal is in the excitement of discovering these things for yourself. What shines brighter and brighter as the story proceeds, though, is Powers’ genuine concern for the environment, a concern he passes on mainly through Evie’s life and observations as an undersea explorer and oceanographer. What also becomes clear early on is that Powers is a very powerful and poetic writer. He doesn’t merely tell the story; through his precise, complex descriptions he helps readers dive in and experience what is happening along with the characters.

All in all, this is a first-rate, absorbing novel that I highly recommend. And having now glimpsed his talent, I’ll be looking forward to reading more of Powers’ work.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged AI, environment, ocean, Pacific Ocean | Leave a comment

Resolute for the New Year

Posted on January 1, 2025 by John Walters

That title above is not a typo. I intended to write “resolute” instead of “resolutions.” At this time of year, a lot of people announce various ambitions or goals that they promulgate as resolutions, but many of these resolutions turn out to be holiday whims or wishful thinking; they might be initiated with great zeal, only to be abandoned, in the light of reality, a few weeks down the road.

To be resolute, on the other hand, means to be bold and determined in pursuing a course of action, to be confident, decisive, adamant, implacable, unrelenting, steadfast, and single-minded. Resolutions fall by the wayside because they are only individual pieces of a larger goal; when they prove to be impractical and are abandoned, this can lead to discouragement and a diminution of self-worth. If you are resolute, however, you relentlessly proceed toward your objective even if you have to experiment with diverse means of getting there. Attempting and discarding specific methods denotes progress, not failure.

Do your best at what you are already doing. If you need to reset your goals, fine: do that. So much of life involves trial and error. But it’s not a game we are playing. We are doing it for real.

In my case, I have met many of my life’s goals. I wanted to travel, and I lived overseas for thirty-five years and visited numerous countries in North America, Central America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. I married. We had children. We raised them to be strong, intelligent, thoughtful, considerate adults. Now they are grown and gone, as they should be, and they are prospering.

The one area in which I have not succeeded as much as I had hoped concerns my writing. This has been a primary life focus for me since I was a teenager. I have written and published almost forty books, and over forty of my stories and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies. However, I sometimes become discouraged because to most readers I am still unknown. That discouragement, if allowed to fester, could result in my giving up and throwing in the bloodied towel. But here is where remaining resolute comes in. I can’t force editors to buy my stories or readers to read them; those things are beyond my control. What I can do, though, is keep writing and attempt to make each piece the best it can be. Not long ago I wrote and published an essay called “Write Better Stories.” Someone on Facebook had put forth the question, “What is the best writing advice you have ever received?” My response was to quote my former teacher, Harlan Ellison, who said, possibly tongue-in-cheek, “If they are not buying your stories, write better stories.” Of course whenever I am working on a story, I try to make it the best thing I have ever written. But the underlying message of this advice is to remain resolute. Whatever you are doing, don’t give up. If you know you are on the right path, continue to move forward and make progress regardless of the obstacles that might be in your way. In the course of your journey, you may need to discard some methods (resolutions) and embrace others. No matter. The important thing is to persist. As for me, I have said it before and I’ll say it again concerning the writing: they’ll have to pry the keyboard out of my cold dead hands.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged new year, New Year's resolutions, Writing | Leave a comment

Book Review: The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides

Posted on December 28, 2024 by John Walters

I love a well-written true life historical adventure, and this is a great one. It tells the story of Captain Cook’s third and final voyage, a voyage on which he was killed in the Hawaiian Islands. The depth of research and amounts of fascinating facts are amazing, but even more amazing is that despite the abundance of details, the author Sides manages to keep the story fast-paced and thrilling every step of the way.

This voyage is one that I am content to take from an armchair, thank you. It’s not that I don’t like traveling: I’ve roamed around the world, hitchhiking and taking public transportation across the United States, around Europe, across the Middle East, and around the Indian Subcontinent. The way was often rough, and I was often broke or near broke, but I almost always managed to find congenial companionship, good food, and a safe place to lay my head. The conditions on this third voyage of Cook’s, though, and presumably on the first two as well, were appalling to say the least, especially for the common sailors: dampness, heat, cold, filth, rats, cockroaches, close quarters, and often disgusting cuisine. Why did they do it? Well, for one thing, conditions weren’t much better at home and this was probably the only job for which they were suited. But besides that, they reveled in the adventure of exploring new lands; they looked forward to liaisons with willing Polynesian women; and most of all, they craved a share of a generous reward offered by the Crown if they located and navigated the fabled Northwest Passage over the North American continent from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.

I had studied a bit about Cook’s journeys back in high school, but this is something I never knew, or at least I’d long since forgotten: that one of the primary goals of this third voyage of Cook’s was to search for a water route back to England through the Bering Sea and beyond. The trip took years, and along the way Cook charted the islands in the Pacific as well as the Northwest American coastline. He left just as the American colonists were signing the Declaration of Independence, and was unaware of the escalating Revolutionary War until many months later. He traveled from England to Cape Town, South Africa, and from thence to Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti, and other tropical islands. On his way to Alaska, he discovered Hawaii and its inhabitants, which no one in England knew existed. Then he made his way north, along the coastline of the Oregon Territory and Alaska, journeyed as far as he could before being stopped by solid ice fields, and then returned to Hawaii, where he was killed.

I’m not giving any spoilers here; you can find this all out in Wikipedia. What makes this book difficult to put down is the way that Sides tells the story. It is full of details, as I mentioned, but these details help to immerse you in the adventure, so that you can feel the sea spray, experience the frequent storms at sea, shudder from the bone-chilling cold, dread the unknown while sailing through thick fog, and revel in the calm interludes of abundance and romantic entanglements during stopovers in islands such as Tahiti. The author’s skill as a writer makes it all come alive, as if you are a participant in the action.

As I said, I am content to sit this adventure out in an armchair, but nonetheless I am thankful to Sides for making it possible for me to partake of it, at least vicariously. It’s a thrilling tale of a high-stakes voyage on the high seas that holds the attention from start to finish. Highly recommended.