A State of Mind, Part I: Ellison Wonderland

"Would you like a bag for that?" 

"Yes, thank you, I'd rather not sweat all over this on the way back to the hotel."

Conversation with the counter staff at South Congress Books.

As per my Alamo Drafthouse posting in February, I spent most of last week attending PePCon, a publishing/epublishing conference that was held in Austin, Texas. The event itself was excellent, a marvellous professional development opportunity, but sadly it didn't leave me a lot of time for sightseeing.

However, I did manage to briefly get away from the hotel in order to see a bit of the city and perhaps do some shopping.  As you might imagine, when I say "shopping" I'm not talking about looking at shoes or picking out a cute outfit - for me, shopping involves only one thing:  books.  So I took a quick look at Google™, picked out what appeared to be the closest used book store, and headed out into the searing heat of the afternoon.

My initial thought when I entered South Congress Books was that I had made a bad decision - nothing at all against the book store itself, a compact, well organized space, but I generally feel that if I'm in a book store that doesn't have a dedicated science fiction/fantasy section, I'm in the wrong book store. Nonetheless, having exposed my pale Canadian skin to 35 minutes of blazing Texas sunlight to get there, I felt that I should at least look about a bit before leaving.

I was somewhat mollified to find an interesting selection of vintage hard cover science fiction in the rare books section, but unfortunately all priced a bit rich for my blood.  However, encouraged by this display of genre presence, I switched my attention to the FICTION section and began working my way through the alphabet.

I was pleased to discover a diamond mixed in with the dross almost immediately.  There on the shelf was what turned out to be a first edition hardcover copy of Mefisto in Onyx, by Harlan Ellison, with cover artwork and introduction by comic book artist/author Frank Miller.  Quite reasonably priced (in my opinion) at thirty-five dollars - condition not quite mint, but certainly near-mint*. 

(By the way, this is the back cover, that's the front cover leading off the posting.)

Mefisto in Onyx is an expanded version of a short story which originally appeared in the October 1993 edition of Omni magazine.  Interestingly, in a genre where authors' careers are very much defined by their novels**, Ellison's success and reputation is almost entirely based upon his award-winning short story and television script work.  Ellison has written a couple of full length novels, but they have failed to have the impact of short works such as I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, A Boy and His Dog, or "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman.

It is sobering to think that Ellison, the enfant terrible of science fiction during the 60s, will be 79 at the end of this month.  Reading his writing from that period now, it's astonishing to see how far ahead of his time he was - many of his stories read like a false dawn of cyberpunk over twenty years before William Gibson started work on Neuromancer. 

That being said, in the unlikely event that the infamously litigious Mr. Ellison should read this, I feel that some sort of disclaimer is appropriate.  Mr. Ellison, I mean absolutely no disrespect to your work in any other decades, and agree wholeheartedly that The Starlost was a horrible travesty of what it should have been.

- Sid
  

* Whenever I hear this term used, I have this terrible urge to ask if they have any other flavours.

** Isaac Asimov - the Foundation Trilogy;  Frank Herbert - Dune;  Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land;  Larry Niven - Ringworld;   Arthur C. Clarke - 2001; and so on and so on.  Not their only novels, but the ones that are most associated with their writing careers.