The following reviews serve as the 38th installment of my series searching for “SF short stories that are critical in some capacity of space agencies, astronauts, and the culture which produced them.” Some stories I’ll review in this series might not fit or are poor quality. And that is okay. I relish the act of literary archaeology. I’ve previously covered two Harlan Ellison short stories for this series: Harlan Ellison’s “Psycho at Mid-Point” (1956) and “The Discarded” (variant title: “The Abnormals”) (1959). As always, if you know of any others that might fit, let me know. I’ve compiled an extensive list but like all lists it’s incomplete.

Thank you Richard, “Friend of the Site,” for these recommendations all the way back in 2022. I didn’t forget.

Previously: Clifford D. Simak’s “Madness from Mars” (1939)

Up Next: TBD

Let’s get to the stories!

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3/5 (Average)

Harlan Ellison’s “Night Vigil” (variant title: “Yellow Streak Hero”) first appeared in the fanzine Peon, ed. Charles Lee Riddle (May 1955). It was reprinted in Amazing Stories, ed. Paul W. Fairman (May 1957). You can read it online here in Peon and here in Amazing Stories.

Futuristic Press Gangs

The computer told the space military of the future to “Get Charles Jackson Ferreno only!” (117). So they grabbed him while he was lounging on his porch with his arms around his girlfriend. Pressed into service, Charles, then only nineteen, is sent to a little quonset hut on a small bleak planetary body to wait for an invasion. Why Charles? The computer brain said he wouldn’t go insane in solitary confinement for decades and decades if necessary. The enemy? It’s not entirely clear. But the authorities knew “the enemy would come, for they had found the remnants of those the enemy had destroyed” (114). So he sits in his futuristic cell. Listening to the same music. Reading the same books. Watching the same blinking red machine eye. Cycling through periods of self-loathing, despair, dislocating depression until….

This is a bleak distillation of a classic moral dilemma: do you sacrifice the life of an individual for the greater good of humanity? Charles possesses unique skills of mental self-preservation. In the almost dystopian logic of this future he must be sacrificed. Of course, Ellison harnesses the bleak solitude of space to make his point even more punchy. I do think the ending undercuts a more complex moral argument. While Ellison’s still figuring out his voice, the story does possess elements of polemical aggression and unflinching style that characterizes so much of his work.

The premise is remarkably similar to Tom Godwin’s “The Nothing Equation” published in the same magazine Amazing Stories, ed. Paul W. Fairman (December 1957) later that year. Godwin far more realistically depicts the effects and result of solitary isolation (in a far shorter timespan). I imagine he read the Ellison reprinted story and decided to enter into a dialogue. Authors published in genre magazines were consumers of said magazines. This cluster of human sacrificed for the “greater good” stories feel like the 50s take on the moral issues so adeptly raised by Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973).

Somewhat recommended if you’re interested in the theme or Ellison’s earliest fictions.

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3.25/5 (Above Average)

Harlan Ellison’s “Life Hutch” first appeared in If, ed. James L. Quinn (April 1956). You can read it online in the September 1958 issue of New Worlds here.

Like “Night Vigil,” “Life Hutch” transpires within a limited locale — the titular rescue station wedged on a pebble spinning somewhere in space. There’s a cataclysmic war with the alien Kyben transpiring in the distance. Terrence, in the life hutch, imagines the “sounds of war, across the gulf of space” (84). He had crash landed on the planetoid and attempted to utilize the equipment and supplies in the life hutch. However, the hyper violence of the galactic conflict becomes an entirely different struggle within the metaphoric womb meant to preserve the injured. Something happened to the robotic mind meant to care for the occupant. Terrence is immediately attacked by the robot upon entry. Wired to notice movement, Terrence must avoid the sensors of the robot and figure out how to survive. Interspersed with his terror-filled attempts to avoid the robotic instrument of violence, Terrence thinks back on humanity’s utter ignorance of the alien Kyben,

Ellison sets up a series of narrative parallels. Terrence remembers how his commander told him “for the next thousand we’ll be trying to figure out how [the Kyben] think, why they fight, what it takes to get along with them, what motivates them” (90). Of course, in order to survive, humans must confront the seemingly robotic Kyben with violence. This is a war without a clear understanding of the nature of the enemy. “Does it matter?” asks the commander (90). In both instances, Terrence’s fight with the robot and with the Kyben, “survival never matters until you have to survive” (90). Both parallels present only one possible choice.

I’m not sure what to make of the message of this one. Without doubt Ellison depicts humanity’s future in space as a constant struggle for survival that inevitably yields violence. Figures like Terrance and Charles (in “Night Vigil”) are caught up in vast mechanisms they cannot control. It’s unclear whether knowing more about the Kyben would have prevented conflict just like there was no time for Terrence to respond to the robot before he’s attacked. The paralleled action represents an attempt to add complexity to the narrative. It’s more effectively rendered than “Night Watch” but remains the work of a new writer trying to find his voice.

Somewhat recommended.

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