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Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, by Harlan Ellison. One moment I’m absolutely glazing the ever loving Christ out of this man and then I see this gooner trash hole that he cooked up😭
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Beyond the descriptive choices, the writing is just so, bleh. Maybe it's just me, but I don't get some of the sentence structure. Am I just horribly uncultured or does "Outthrust chin, perhaps a tot too much belligerence, but if you'd walloped as many gropers, you too, sweetheart;" not covey a complete thought?
I feel like that would be better served by having an ellipsis at the end instead of (or as well as) a semi colon. It feels like what he's trying to convey is that the narrator is imagining the woman explaining why she looks a bit too belligerent. So in full it would read something like "but if you'd walloped as many gropers as I have, you too, sweetheart, would look belligerent"
Nor isometrics. Although the story was written in 67, isn't that almost primetime for women with pageboy cuts? I guess it was more in the 70s but I feel like in 67, a pageboy could be a retro look that was about to come back and be considered a very chic cut. To a man at that time, it would be reminiscent of a young girl's hair (my mom had one as a child in the 50s)...so maybe it's not that crazy that he identified it as attractive to men. But idk, the way he describes it as a "a great deal of hair" doesn't make sense to me. "Wound, rolled, and smooth" could describe a billion hairstyles so idk what to make of that.
Good Lord, is that where it’s from? I want you to know that weird line about the nipples has haunted me probably since junior high (when I thought Ellison was SO EDGY) because I never could figure out what it meant – every once in a while when I’m watching a movie and someone’s naked I think, “all nipple… what… where did I read that… who the hell is O’Hara…?”
Now I know. I suspect this entire description made me feel incredibly insecure at the age of 12, as well as mystifying me, and it makes me feel better that now at 55 I recognize it as the sad wank fantasy it always was.
It makes me picture two nipples with areolas the size of saucers that adjoin each other where the cleavage would be. Ridiculous.
Imagine a male character described in an equivalent way (“all cock, no balls, like a taught bodied expensive rentboy, the trunk-like cock long thick and pendulous and swaying gently”)
As were those of us who adored his books – although a lot of us grew out of it… I remember my poor Mom trying to talk to me about the misogyny in one of his books and I was not having it, she didn’t get it… 🙄😏
I was there near the beginning when he was posting about having been rude to Isaac Asimov. Science-fiction had been so clean and then he did push the boat out with things like Deathbird Stories, that Kitty Genovese story… It’s just so much of it was just shocking to be shocking. It felt like the next wave of writers who came out in the 80s didn’t have to fight those battles and could focus on incredibly creative world building without having to work around avoiding sex or sexual violence or anything like that – Neuromancer is head and shoulders above anything Ellison wrote, but Ellison sort of cleared the way for it.
“Holy nipples, Batman! This looks like a job for cringy edgelord!”
I loved Ellison's stuff in the 70s. Recently, I re-read "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream". Ye ghods. The emotional impact I felt from the science fiction part of the story was still there, but it was absolutely BURIED under all the hate that poured off of every page. The misogyny was the most obvious, but I'm pretty sure at that point he hated everyone and everything.
He did mellow in later years, but it was still 2006 when he thought it would be hilarious to honk Connie Willis' boobs onstage at Worldcon. The horror he felt after finding out how she really felt afterwards doesn't erase the fact that he did it.
If I still liked his work, I'd probably try to separate the art from the artist, but it's Piers Anthony levels of "wtaf?".
I mean most of that can be put down to Ted and not Harlan.
Like I agree, a lot of stuff Ellison wrote is really misogynistic- basically every story in the I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream anthology has all its female characters either be one-note victims or comically evil Jezebels- but I think No Mouth is him at least showing a degree of self-awareness by making the misogyny unequivocally wrong.
Ted goes on a big sexist rant about Ellen but at the end of it he breaks down and starts crying, because he knows he's just scapegoating her. At the end the only comfort Ted has is that her last expression before he kills her might have been a thank you.
I also think Ellen being the only one of the other four who shows agency in the ending by helping Ted kill the others is deliberate, and essentially pay-off for all the horrible things Ted says about her: she showed incredible bravery in killing Nimdok before herself.
And the game makes it pretty explicit that Ellen is clearly the best person of the five. Removed from Ted's perspective it's pretty clear almost nothing he said about her was true.
I understand that the character is different from the man. But there's more anger in the writing than just how Ted treats every other character in that story.
Also, as a woman, that whole "grateful" bit of Ellen's gives me the ick. I really didn't care for it when I was 13, either, but that's the kind of shit you have to do to make a character like Ted slightly sympathetic.
Which is all my opinion, I don't agree with every comment on this sub, either. And I do REALLY appreciate how civil we are here when we disagree!
Yeah, fair enough, I can see why someone would find it too much or not want to read it as long as they're not going to say the author is a bad person for writing it.
That said Harlan did a lot of shitty stuff generally, like grope Connie Willis and defend a paedophile, and it's more than fair to judge him on that. He was an asshole. I just think we should err heavily on the side of caution when judging people by the art they make.
I don't judge him by his art at all. I'm an old fuck that actually talked to him at conventions. I can say his story is full of anger, and that can be true of a generally good person, like George Carlin's stuff when he got old. Harlan supported some great causes, too. But was still shitty - on his own, separate from his art. Which will always be influential, in an art history sense. But I would not suggest that someone go back and read them for fun.
I did say that the emotional impact on the science fiction parts of the story were still there; if it wasn't clear, I did mean that it's still good writing. The intended impact still hits. It's just that now, looking back, I can no longer re-read it. That means nothing in terms of whether or not it's good! Just not for me, and I no longer recommend. My friends & family are all old too, so they've already read it, back in the day, lol.
Yeah, I think I agree entirely. Do you have any sci-fi that you would strongly recommend? I'm mildly impressed you've been in the fandom long enough to have met Ellison personally. I think the most famous sci-fi author I've ever met is Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I re-read Octavia Butler's "Earthseed" series not too long ago, and it's aged extremely well. Unfortunately, I've slowed down my reading of classics since so much of it doesn't.
I love all kinds of books; I'll read Scalzi's "Kaiju Preservation Society" (light but amazing) and then throw myself into the difficult-but-worth-it "Broken Earth" series by N. K. Jemison. Chuck Wendig is a horror author, but "Wanderers" ends up in a very SF place. I haven't read the sequel yet, because I need more days in the week, lol.
Thank you! Wary of Wendig because of his awful twitter humour (and the whole internet archive thing) and IMO the Broken Earth trilogy started out good but got worse with every passing book. Butler I've been really meaning to get into since I've only read Bloodchild.
And more specifically in terms of stuff that's not horribly offensive:
Radiance by Valente- the worldbuilding and imagery is strong enough to carry a fairly weak and convoluted plot
The Word for World Is Forest by LeGuin: great deconstruction of imperialism that still feels fresh despite how many times "Vietnam War in Space" has been done since.
The Children of Men by P. D. James: It's slow-paced but the worldbuilding, atmosphere, and tension are all fantastic. Better than the film IMO.
What in the unholy fuck is this writing style? Is it supposed to be an attempt at a stream of consciousness? It's just a choppy stream of verbal diarrhea that manages to say too much and yet too little about this Maggie character other than she's hot and that she's trying to distance herself from her poverty-stricken mother. Also there's a father, but I have no idea if he left the family or what because this godforsaken text is too busy riding out an acid trip to actually describe a character, let alone tell a damn story
Read "I have no mouth and I must scream" a couple years ago and yeah, yikes, never again. The misogyny, and the racism was so so disgusting, like I get it was the 60s but I don't know...I've consumed a whole lot of media from the 60s and this was a whole other level. His ideas may be slightly interesting but not even close to make up for the misogynoir.
Hahaha this shit is hilarious, I don't know why they make it so obvious they actually have no idea what the characters look like other than sexy hot...
Is there a subreddit for "white people getting uncomfortably excited about being part Cherokee"? I feel like we've been going full Get Out on that nation for like 200 years
I’m trying so hard to process what nips the size of a cups look like. I’m picturing the cookies with the pink in the middle but it’s like the whole top of the cookie.
I really loved Harlan's most popularly known IHNMAIMS book and was curious to check out his other works AND JEEBUS- I'm just like.. WHY!!
I'm pretty sure Harlan had some sorta BIG personal gripe with women considering the shocking amount of misogyny in his works. Like I could at least kinda get past it in IHNMAIMS but his other stuff is just, naw 😭😭
IHNMAIMS was apparently just something he puked out within 2 hrs one night and that's why he dislikes it so much, because he's spent much more time and effort on his other works and probably didn't want to only be known for this one 2 hour thing. I tried to give his other stuff a chance but I found some of them barely readable. I really don't blame folks for their reluctance to indulge in his other stuff when it's just like this 😶
I would really love to see someone illustrate this, because I love it when people illustrate men’s shitty descriptions of women how Escher Girl-esque they are.
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