ixteen stories with Harlan Ellison's patented fiery introductions constitute this latest collection from the winner of innumerable awards and renowned author of over 75 previous books.
"On the Downhill Side" tracks the fates of two lonely ghosts wandering the streets of New Orleans with only a self-sacrificing unicorn for company. Ripped from his brutal future wartime environment, a "Soldier" finds that the 20th century can offer useful work even for "an ordinary man, without any special talents, without any great store of intelligence." Would you make a selfish wish now, even if you knew it would come back to haunt you a hundredfold someday? That's the fix that Hobert Krouse finds himself in, in "Rain, Rain, Go Away."
"Night Vigil" limns the fate of a poor fellow trapped as the hermit guardian of the universe. Commanded to explode the sun of mankind's enemy with his psychic powers, Alf Gunnderson finds himself desperately searching for a way around genocide in "Deeper than the Darkness." Reprinted for the first time anywhere since its recent magazine appearance, "Never Send to Know for Whom the Lettuce Wilts" finds Henry Leclair confronting the mysterious, rather demented alien demiurge responsible for much of mankind's history.
It looks as if murderous rogue cop W.R. Gropp and his henchman Mickey Rizzo have made good their escape from death row. But they have not reckoned with the occult freeway that delivers them to the hellish "Sensible City." "Life Hutch" offers a classic problem-solving story about a wounded soldier at the mercy of a killer robot with scrambled circuits. A husband and wife must deal with an ill-tempered Islamic afrit in "Djinn, No Chaser." A regimented future society that steals the very life-minutes from its citizens for trivial infractions comes under assault by a jellybean-tossing rebel in "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman." When Donald Horton pledged eternal friendship with his fellow 5-year-old Jeffty Kinzer, he had no idea that 22 years later, as an adult, Donald would still be tagging along with the unchanged Jeffty of "Jeffty is Five."
Rebel with a creative cause
This solid but unremarkable collection from the prolific and prodigious Ellison arrives hobbled by its very reason for existence. As both the publisher's copy and Ellison's main introduction make explicit, this volume is intended as an introductory one for those new, hopefully younger readers (whom Ellison upbraids continuously) who have never encountered Ellison's work before, or perhaps seen only a story here or there. Moreover, the volume has a theme. Its stories will deal with people like Ellison himself, rebels and freethinkers who have run afoul of society's strictures. It will also concern itself with the learning process, how what seems like "a good idea at the time" can prove disastrous in the face of limited knowledge (both self-knowledge and hard-earned wisdom about the world at large).
But these two aims seem almost opposed, or at least two horses in harness pulling in different directions. If I, for instance, were attempting to introduce a bright, receptive youngster to Ellison's work, I'd simply hand him one of Ellison's classic collections, or perhaps even the recent massive career-summing volume, The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective. Any gateway book should contain a preponderance of knockout stories guaranteed to dazzle and make the newcomer lust for more. And that's just not the case with Troublemakers.
In the quest to build the book around his stated theme, Ellison has chosen an uncommon number of his stories from the dawn of his career, the 1950s. Over half the entries date from this apprenticeship period (10 in total, if one counts "...Lettuce Wilts," which has been revised from its first incarnation). And, although competent and even at times mildly suspenseful, they pale in comparison to such mature masterpieces as "Harlequin," "Downhill Side" and "Jeffty." (The Sturgeonesque MacGuffin and male-female banter of "Djinn" form another high point.) Moreover, despite Ellison gamely trying to shoehorn these prototypes into his thesis, the majority of them simply do not fit the template established to perfection by "Harlequin." How, for instance, are the despicable pair of protagonists in "Sensible City" to be seen even as cautionary models of souls gone wrong? They're just brutal mooks who meet a justifiable damnation.
If Madonna issued a CD of all her oldest material in the hopes of capturing Britney Spears' listeners, such a strategy would quickly stand revealed as a misstep. Ellison's ambitions to enlist a new readership are to be applauded: but this volume is not the perfect way to do so.
