When Harlie Was One by David Gerrold

First appeared as a series of stories in Ejler Jakobsson's Galaxy and was up for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards.

Although this first appeared as stories in Galaxy, the stories never felt like stories but like vignettes or pieces of a novel fragmented off. You can sense it in his “Oracle for a White Rabbit” (collected in With a Finger in My I or now titled In the Deadlands).

But first, let’s establish what makes HARLIE unique—a foundation which will also establish that this story is more of a novel fragment. A reader claimed that this was just redigested HAL 9000, but even in this piece we get a completely different AI character. This one can be enigmatic as the nod to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in the title suggests.

“Now then, HARLIE,” Auberson types without preamble about any problem except “same thing but worse”—whatever that means. “WHAT SEENS TO BE THE PROBLEM?”

Harlie typed back:
 CIRCLES ARE FULL AND COME BACK TO THE START
ALWAYS AND FOREVER NEVER ENDING,
THE DAY THE DARK TURNED INTO LIGHT
AND RAYS OF LIFE TURNED CORNERS WITHOUT BENDING

Not great poetry, but intriguing, especially for an AI. How many writers have had AIs writing poems?

What Harlie is doing is trying to re/create art through non-rationality, attempting to distort his own senses as if he were high (this was published in 1969) in order to understand humanity. This drives his creator/programmer nuts since Harlie was designed to be rational.

The story closes by turning the tables on the creator. If the purpose of the programmed is supposed to be rational, what is the purpose of the programmer?

It’s an interesting point, but not one that brings to a close this discussion of art and rationality. As part of a novel, though, which has broader implications about the AI’s autonomy, it’s a fascinating discussion.

That is what most of the novel is: a discussion. It may drive some readers batty—so if you need traditional narrative, steer clear--but others will love the discussions, which I found novel. To enjoy this work, you have to dial your mind to more philosophical matters and away from narrative ones although there are intrigues here such as in order to maintain Harlie, he needs to find a way to support himself financially, but when he finds a way to do so (controlling other computers), he is feared, and now they want to shut him off because of that. It’s stunningly convoluted in a beautiful manner.

Auberson is interesting when he’s dealing with Harlie, or when Harlie is dealing with Auberson, but Auberson by himself not pondering Harlie is less dynamic. You can see why the novel gained attention that the stories did not.

I enjoyed the ending. It may rub wrong both the religious and anti-religious, which is a curious feat.

Although you may not be fully convinced by this portrayal (some logical conclusions appear to be those of the author than an unbiased computer), it does cover curious angles, and if you’re curious about AI portrayals in SF, this is a good starting place.

It is one of his stronger novels, despite being early work—perhaps due to the amount of speculative invention and thought that seems to have gone into this.

“With a Finger in My I” by David Gerrold

First appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions. Reprinted by James Gunn in his major SF retrospective collections.

Summary

The story is simple, or maybe not so simple. The narrator cannot see because he lost his pupil. In fact, he’s lost a number of things like his sunglasses which he can find if he stops looking for them. He finds the doctor’s office by not looking for it as well.

He asks to see a doctor. And the receptionist points one out. He asks for a doctor to look at him and a doctor looks him over and charges ten dollars. An argument with the receptionist ensues.

Discussion (spoilers)

The doctor who does look him over, discusses how people have been creating their own realities their beliefs. He goes home, overhears a discussion of finding one’s self (which he ignores because he wouldn’t be able to if he did it), and of drug altering reality. His apartment’s wallpaper is peeling—a probable to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous story about going crazy (“The Yellow Wallpaper”).

Gunn saw this in the tradition of Borges and Kafka—absurd surrealism. Gerrold discusses a critic who saw this as a tale about how language creates reality, which is true to an extent, but one would also have to append drugs and/or belief systems. Perhaps it is through language that these others have affected reality. Or vice versa.

It does seem a cut above Gerrold’s “In the Deadlands”—which did not make the cut (see link)—not only due to the stronger narrative, but also to its provoking thought about the nature of our reality. Surely many have wondered about how even our thoughts or words might affect it. Plus, it’s playful and seems to enjoy its own invention.

In Gunn’s anthology, it is curious how much emphasis he places on Gerrold’s connection with Star Trek (as a college student, he sold the franchise a teleplay that would become one of the most popular episodes of the original series), yet Gunn doesn’t select an excerpt that shows space opera tradition—guys in a spaceship battle an alien problem—but something that, if anything, flies in the opposite direction. On the other hand, both Star Trek and this story have paid homage to Lewis Carroll.

In the Deadlands by David Gerrold

First published in his debut collection, With a Finger in My I, now titled, In the Deadlands. Up for Nebula award.

“In the Deadlands” is a curious beast, written in lines and prose. Does that make it a poem? Sort of. The lines are cut in how it is meant to be read. There are rare recasting of meanings, some verbal repetition you’d find in speech, and lines endings and breaks aren’t that revelatory, so it seems more like experimental prose.

It’s the story of 23 men on patrol in the Deadlands—an apocalyptic, horror land where no green grows and rocks look like tortured people the patrollers used to know. 

While the tale is atmospheric, the land strange, and typography intriguing, the story is a wafer. The talk of thatched huts and the concern about war (published during the Vietnam War era) may have caught the eye of some. Moreover, the experimental nature of the prose may have sparkled in the lenses of New-Wave readers. It was written for Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions, which Ellison rejected (and mercilessly panned in his anthology) but apparently later said he wished he’d accepted it instead of “With a Finger in My I” although the latter may be the better tale (see link).

In the collection, it takes up seventy pages due to the poetry spacing. Even with smaller font, it would difficult to compress that length. So that would be the equivalent of about four average-length stories.

Jumping off the Planet by David Gerrold (novella vs. novel)

The novella first appeared in Scott Edelman's SF Age, and was up for a Nebula, Locus, HOMer awards. The novel won the Golden Duck (for YA SF) and the Gaylactic. 

Charles "Chigger" Dingillian, thirteen, and his brothers (8 year-old Bobby "Stinky" and 17 year-old "Weird") are on a vacation with their father who takes them up the "Beanstalk" [the space elevator] and off Earth on the elevator up. The boys all have their problems which they attribute to their parents. Their mother always yells at them and their father, they realize belatedly, is trying to kidnap off the planet.

When their mother finds out, she will try to put a stop to it... with the aid of some unlikely allies.

The strength of these two works is the description of the beanstalk seemed the most realized I've read. The narrative developments were largely intriguing.

Discussion with Spoilers:

With Gerrold's The Martian Child, I advocated reading the novel over the original novelette even though it received the most attention (due to the novel's better scenes and closure than the story).

Here, though, the novella has the edge. It does explore the family in more detail, but I'm not sure that it is to the novel's advantage. I had anticipated them getting off the planet to somewhere, but they don't. That's fine, just a little disappointing. I'd hoped for the same kind of momentum in the novel as the novella although backing up did seem to make relevant points. Also, some of the arguments went on too long and seemed to be repeating themselves.

The conclusion was hard to swallow. The parents are problematic but should they be divested of their children? Would a seventeen-year-old make a better guardian than one or both parents? Possibly, but we really need more of both parents to understand where they're coming from and why they're incompetent parents. The father we hear from, and it seems that everyone agrees with his decision to take the kids off planet (excepting his wife). He himself feels regret at taking the boys away from their mother but gives them the choice. The boys' anger seems out of proportion to the father's behavior--not that that's uncommon for children, but it is strange that the judge votes in favor of the children's independence.

It's interesting that the beanstalk becomes the backdrop in this piece about domestic and legal issues that might arise with the advent of the beanstalk. There's a macguffin here, stuffed in the robo-monkey, but maybe it plays a larger role in the rest of the series. We have a mysterious agent, too, who is from Mexico supposedly but says, "Mucho importante" leading me to wonder who he really is (or if this was a mistake--purposeful or not). Again, maybe the rest of the series explains this.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold

This was up for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Jupiter awards

This is a novel that may be exhilarate and disturb. For some, it may disgust. For others, they may see precursors as having covered this before, but the novel’s target audience will be those who delight in the bizarre “sexcapades” and time paradoxes. If you are only into the latter, read the first half and the ending.

Imagine expanding the world’s greatest time-travel story (Robert A. Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”) to novel length. It might look something like David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. There are differences, which I’ll discuss below. If you haven’t read Heinlein’s story, do so.

In Gerrold’s novel, Danny, our narrator, has inherited what he believes to be 143 million dollars since his Uncle Jim had suggested as much. So Danny is living off the fat of the land. Except it turns out, after Uncle Jim dies, that he has been living on the last of the fortune. All that is left is a belt.

The belt, though, is a time machine, which allows him to change his life.

Discussion (Spoilers Galore)

Some argue this novel should have won the major awards. The winner, Rendezvous with Rama, seems to be controversial—a mysterious, alien ship floats through space with little characterization—but others have argued for completely different novels (Lethem in favor of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), so perhaps that is why Clarke's novel won. Other reasons may exist.

It’s similarity to Heinlein’s work may have marred the work in some eyes, but it takes different narrative, tonal, and philosophical paths. The narrative changes (the time skip, the expansion into the sexual nature) aren’t especially significant in terms of meaning but the other two are.

In the sixties, sex seemed to have lost its taboo nature. A lot of books tried to exploit and explore the new boundaries of decency when court cases like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl won. Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, mined this vein. It is into this atmosphere the novel is released.

Danny and his future self go to the races and bet on horses. They win handsomely, knowing the outcome of events. They invest and become rich. But at some point (midway into the novel), Danny is warned by one future self that another future self will seduce him because being himself, the future selves understands his needs better than anyone.

Now the narrative is somewhat sly. The events may or may not have or will have happened. He is, after all, reading the diary of a future self, and he may or may not choose to fulfill these things, which is an intriguing concept in itself. It prevents the protagonist from actually committing acts he may but hasn’t yet committed.

Another interesting aspect is the textual assumption that one will be attracted to one’s self. Narcissism is usually a metaphorical abstraction, but here it’s literal—a physical reality. But not everyone is attracted to himself. So the text for those, will at best be strange, foreign angle, much as the text justifies itself.

A third aspect that differentiates this and makes it stand out is its tonal difference from Heinlein’s story. In Heinlein, the narrative is as epic and inescapable as Oedipus Rex. But here, flux and uncertainty about the future is the name of the game. What’s interesting about this is the narrator’s attempts to avoid this flux by remaining near his “home time” or his era since other eras become too foreign the further away he is from what he knows. Also, just as he maintains the livelihood of his own future, he tries to keep the present past aligned with his own memory of events since that might change his present.

The narrator is preoccupied with his own inevitable death, his failure at love outside himself (or even with himself) and this maintaining of his present. These and speculative inventions like the Time Skim (although not fully utilized) sets this tale at least a little distance from Heinlein’s.

It's a little surprising that this and Heinlein's story haven't been named for a Retro-Tiptree award.