Cosmic Striptease E-Book

Harlan Ellison

• Herausgeber: Alien Ebooks
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 30

Beschreibung

In a world where humans have just made contact with advanced Martians, a stunning cosmic television broadcast promises to change Earth forever. As the "Big Show" reveals the Martians' utopian society, it challenges Earthlings' ideas about everything from technology to morality. Television producer Roy Mallory and his beautiful assistant Edith find themselves at the center of this cultural awakening. Will the revelations from Mars uplift humanity, or will long-held hang-ups prove too difficult to overcome?

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

COSMIC STRIPTEASE, by Harlan Ellison

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Originally published in Fantastic, January 1958,under the pseudonym “E.K. Jarvis.”

Published by Black Cat Weekly.

blackcatweekly.com

INTRODUCTION,by John Betancourt

Harlan Ellison was one of the funniest people I have ever known. He was a master storyteller in person, whether at an intimate dinner or in front of crowds of hundreds at a convention. Like any good comedian, he never let the truth stand in the way of a laugh—I still remember his tale of sending a dead gopher to a publisher (along with a recipe for gopher stew from Anne McCaffrey’s cook, Cooking Out of This World) in an attempt to recover the rights to one of his old books. He had his audience laughing hysterically.

I didn’t have the heart to point out that the “gophers” in the recipe were a type of turtle, so it was a turtle soup recipe. I had just republished Cooking Out of This World and knew its contents intimately from proofreading hundreds of recipes. Including the gopher recipe.

If you never encountered Harlan in person, though, you might not realize he was anything but deadly serious. His best and most famous fiction has a true bite to it and demands to be taken seriously. News stories tended to emphasize the causes he felt passionate about, such as the Equal Rights Amendment. Even his more most comic nonfiction tended toward the biting and satiric rather than laugh-out-loud, Dave Barry style comedy.

Turn back the dial to the days he was getting started as a writer in the 1950s, though, and you’ll find some surprising work, such as “The Annals of Aardvark,” a rather silly fantasy we published recently. (I can see it starting with the line, “An aarvark, and elephant, and two Valkyries walk into a bar...”)

Toward the end of the 1950s, Harlan was gaining traction as a fantastist, and his stories were appearing regularly in many magazines. “Cosmic Striptease,” one of his not-quite-serious efforts, appeared in 1958 in Fantastic magazine under the pseudonym “E.K. Jarvis.”

Enjoy.

COSMIC STRIPTEASE,by Harlan Ellison

The Atlas didn’t make it—it blew up. And so did the Thor. The Vulcan wasn’t much better; it just went pfftt. None of them got anywhere near outer space—the real outer space. Oh, yes, they went up hundreds of miles, even thousands. The Vulcan went nearly five thousand. But they were still in the Electro-Magnetic Field. Nobody really understood the EMF. Einstein had hit on it with his final theory, before he died. He said gravity and magnetism were just manifestations of something else, some single thing that held the very secret of matter.

It was suspected that the Vulcan had reached the limits of the EMF, but nobody was sure. You can’t be very sure about a thing that just goes pfftt, and then isn’t there any more. Not there at all! That’s what radar said, and telescopes, and theodolites, and every other detection apparatus conceivable. Not until the Jason went up where no rocket had ever gone were they sure. Sure that man would never leave the confines of his EMF—at least until he solved the problem of the nature of the EMF. And that seemed the problem of the nature of matter itself. You’ll have to admit, that’s a difficult problem to tackle.

Yes, they tackled it. Theories were a dime a dozen. But just what the EMF really was, nobody could say even mathematically. Instead of wasting money on rockets that went pfftt