Category: Harlan Ellison

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison (Amazing, June 1976) begins with two Highway Patrolmen taking Willis Kaw to identify the body of his daughter after she has been involved in a car accident (“The dark brown smear that began sixty yards west of the covered shape disappeared under the blanket”). We then see more of Kaw’s travails: he is a diabetic; his son, who is ninety-five per cent disabled, lives in a hospital; his house roof leaks in heavy rain; and so on. During these various trials Kaw thinks that he may be an alien:

He dreamed of his home world and—perhaps because the sun was high and the ocean made eternal sounds—he was able to bring much of it back. The bright green sky, the skimmers swooping and rising overhead, the motes of pale yellow light that flamed and then floated up and were lost to sight. He felt himself in his real body, the movement of many legs working in unison, carrying him across the mist sands, the smell of alien flowers in his mind. He knew he had been born on that world, had been raised there, had grown to maturity and then. . .
Sent away.
In his human mind, Willis Kaw knew he had been sent away for doing something bad. He knew he had been condemned to this planet, this Earth, for having perhaps committed a crime. But he could not remember what it was. And in the dream he could feel no guilt.  p. 35

Kaw later visits a psychotherapist and tells him about these alien thoughts and feelings, and speculates that Earth is a planet where bad people are sent to atone for their crimes. After listening his patient for some time, the psychotherapist recommends that Kaw places himself in an institution.
The story ends with Kaw committing suicide and (spoiler) he then finds himself being welcomed back to his home world by the Consul. When Kaw (now called Plydo) asks the Consul what he did to be banished to such a terrible place, the story flips the paradigm and Kaw/Plydo is told that he wasn’t being punished but honoured—life on Earth is so much better than on his home world!
The sophomoric message1 in this story, and the way it is delivered, is a useful reminder that Ellison didn’t do subtlety (or use Western Union).
* (Mediocre). 2,800 words. Story link.

1. Earth may have provided a pleasurable existence for a few but, for the vast majority of humanity throughout the ages, life has been short and brutal.

The Human Operators by Harlan Ellison & A. E. Van Vogt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Human Operators by Harlan Ellison & A. E. Van Vogt (F&SF, January 1971) opens1 with the narrator completing a task in space outside what we later find is a generation spaceship. He is the only inhabitant, essentially the slave of the controlling AI, which keeps him in line by the use of electric shocks.
The story later sees the narrator repair one of the modules in the ship’s intermind (where he hears voices—I can’t remember if this is ever adequately explained) so the ship can lower its “defractor shield” (shades of Star Trek) and dock with one of the other ships in the fleet (there is some backstory about a Starfighter revolt before the AIs took over the various ships in the fleet).
After the narrator completes his task, a female from one of the other ships comes on board to mate with him (the humans on the ship only live until their thirties—his father dies when he was fourteen, and his father’s father likewise).
Eventually, (spoiler) the telegraphed revolt occurs when the narrator goes to the control room and fights the AI (which fights back by accelerating and decelerating the ship). He wins—then the woman reveals that she is free too, and they should free the others in the fleet. However, after further discussions, they decide to go and settle on an alien planet instead.
Interesting start but, even though the individual scenes are competently enough done, the rest of the story never really convinces or coheres, especially the intermind/talking voices part. And the final section, where they land on the alien planet and meet the natives, seems like it belongs to a different story.
** (Average). 7,850 words. Story link.

1. There is a short note before the story:

[To be read while listening to Chronophagie, “The Time Eaters’’: Music of Jacques Lasry, played on Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet (Columbia Masterworks Stereo MS 7314).]

Pretentious twaddle like this doesn’t improve your clunky space opera.

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is an Unknown-type fantasy in which the highly successful author Noah Raymond finds he is unable to write. While Raymond worries about what he is going to do, he wakes up one night to hear his typewriter in action; when he goes through to his office he sees eleven tiny people (we later find out they are gremlins) jumping up and down on the keyboard.
Their foreman explains to Raymond that they are there to write his stories for him (after some back and forth with the other cockney-sounding little people, a short explanation of gremlin history, and the fact they have been watching him ever since he wrote a story about gremlins).
Later on in the story Raymond also learns that human belief is what keeps the gremlins alive (the “a god only exists if they have believers” theme that features in other Ellison stories), and that, over time, they have changed their form to stay in human consciousness.
At the end of the story (nineteen years later) the gremlins tell Raymond (spoiler) that they have run out of stories as they haven’t been writing fiction but recounting their history. They also explain that, not only does human belief keep gremlins in existence, their belief in humans keeps humanity in existence—and that without stories to write for humans, gremlin belief will wane. The tale ends with Raymond writing the history of the human world for the gremlins to read.
This an okay piece of light humour with a final gimmick twist that shouldn’t be examined too closely (it makes for a weak ending). The best of it is some of the publishing related snark at the beginning:

[He] did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.
He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker, and frankly he didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route, snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English literature major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon, but he had heard that Pynchon and Salinger were both mad as a thousand battlefields, and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit.  p. 40

** (Average). 4,250 words

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is the second story in a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF, and begins with a man called Moth coming out of his cabin on an exotic spaceship and into the lounge. There, he goes from table to table talking to different groups of people (“this ship of strangers”) about various traumatic episodes from his life.
The first of these sees Moth listen to a couple who tell him not to blame himself for letting his child die; then he talks to an abusive and unsympathetic young man about a younger partner who cuckolded him; in his next conversation he tells a woman about how he failed to intervene in a fire in an old folks home; and then he reveals to a fat man how he took a female employee away from her husband and child (and how she later committed suicide).
There are a couple of more confessionals before he tells a woman that:

“I’ve come to realize we’re all alone,” he said.
She did not reply. Merely stared at him.
“No matter how many people love us or care for us or want to ease our burden in this life,” Moth said, “we are all, all of us, always alone. Something Aldous Huxley once said, I’m not sure I know it exactly, I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the quote, but I remember part of it. He said: ‘We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space.’ I think that was it.  p. 36

At the end of the voyage all the passengers disembark except Moth, who asks if anyone wants to take his place for the rest of the metaphor voyage. No-one volunteers.
I’m not a fan of existential mopery, but this is probably a reasonably well done example if you like that sort of thing. (At least the navel-gazing here is mostly about traumatic events and not the more usual—for the current SF field— boyfriend, body, parental or petty political concerns.)
** (Average). 4,100 words.

Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) opens with a short “things aren’t what they used to be” passage about Clark Bars (a period confectionary) before going on to give a nostalgic account of the narrator Donny Horton’s childhood years. During this, Horton talks about a young boy called Jeffty:

When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia’s home in Buffalo, New York for two years.
[. . .]
When I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.
I was seven. Jeffty was still five.
I didn’t notice any difference. I didn’t know: I was only seven.
[. . .]
When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was “a troublesome kid,” and they sent me off to military school, so I could be “taken in hand.”
I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.
[. . .]
At eighteen, I went to college.
Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers, to work at my Uncle Joe’s jewelry store. Jeffty hadn’t changed. Now I knew there was something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years old, not a day older.
At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town, the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.  p. 9-10

After Horton settles back into town he occasionally takes Jeffty out to the movies, etc., and recounts the awkward visits to his house afterwards, where the parents are obviously troubled by their strange son:

“I don’t know what to do any more,” Leona said. She began crying. “There’s no change, not one day of peace.”
Her husband managed to drag himself out of the old easy chair and went to her. He bent and tried to soothe her, but it was clear from the graceless way in which he touched her graying hair that the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him. “Shhh, Leona, it’s all right. Shhh.” But she continued crying. Her hands scraped gently at the antimacassars on the arms of the chair.
Then she said, “Sometimes I wish he had been stillborn.”
John looked up into the corners of the room. For the nameless shadows that were always watching him? Was it God he was seeking in those spaces? “You don’t mean that,” he said to her, softly, pathetically, urging her with body tension and trembling in his voice to recant before God took notice of the terrible thought. But she meant it; she meant it very much.  p. 15

The story’s major development occurs when Horton finds Jeffty in his den under the porch and sees what looks like a brand new Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Badge (not made since 1956). Jeffty tells Horton that it arrived in the mail that day and, when pressed further, says that he ordered the ring so he could decode the message on the next Captain Midnight radio show (not transmitted after 1950). When Horton asks to listen to the show, Jeffty points out that it isn’t on that night (it is the weekend), so Horton returns a few days later:

He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilocycles, and he was hearing Tennessee Jed, one of my most favorite programs from the Forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.
I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn’t a rerun of an old program, because there were occasional references in the body of the drama to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the Forties: aerosol spray cans, laseracing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word “uptight.”
I could not ignore the fact. Jeffty was listening to a new segment of Tennessee Jed. pp. 18-19

When Horton checks his car radio he can’t pick up the program, and realises that Jeffty is not only not aging, but seems to live in a world that is largely like his childhood one (with the minor contemporary changes mentioned above).
Horton spends the next part of the story experiencing life in Jeffty’s world: he hears a number of radio programs from his youth, Terry and the Pirates,1 Superman, Tom Mix, etc.; he goes to the movies to see Humphrey Bogart in Slayground (a movie of a Donald Westlake novel that was never made); he eats and drinks the products of the time (Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies); and—perhaps the only part of this world that particularly resonated with me—he sees new issues of pulp SF magazines:

Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage and Startling Stories. Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley G. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel, ISLE OF THE BLACK ONES, in Weird Tales; and in August were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom—“Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of Argosy All-Story Weekly promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me, that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.  p. 21

(Robert E. Howard was already long dead by the 1950s, so I’m not sure how he is still alive in Jeffty’s world—one of the inconsistencies of this piece, along with the anomalous intrusions of the present day.)
Horton (spoiler) experiences the best of both worlds for a while (he still lives in the “normal” world while being able to savour Jeffty’s) but, of course, this charmed existence eventually slips through his hands on the day they go to the cinema to see The Demolished Man. The pair detour via Horton’s Sony store and find it so busy that Horton has to help out, and Jeffty is parked in front of thirty-three TVs showing modern shows. After some time Horton checks on Jeffty and sees that he looks unwell (“I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past”). Horton gets him away from the TVs by telling Jeffty to go on to the cinema while Horton attends to a final customer. However, while Jeffty is queueing for the movie, he is beaten up by two youths after he borrows a radio and leaves it stuck in his world.
Horton takes the badly injured Jeffty home, and then, in an ending that is not as clear as it could be, Jeffty dies of his injuries.2
This story won that year’s Hugo and Nebula Awards, and I think I can see why: Ellison was, at that point in time, at the top of his game (in my opinion the period from the mid-60s to the mid-70s) and very popular; the story was from a special author issue of F&SF; and, finally, the subject matter would have been hugely appealing to those of a similar generation who were nostalgic for their lost pasts.3
Personally, I liked the story well enough, but I wouldn’t say it is the strongest of his tales for a number of reasons: while the gimmick is a neat one, the ending is weak and somewhat contrived (the TV set route would have been a better way to go); it could do with another draft (it is a little too long, and some of the sentences sound odd, e.g., “the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him” from the passage above just sounds clumsy);4 the couple’s dislike of their own child is unconvincing (most parents seem to love their children regardless of their infirmities and shortcomings); and, finally, I am not a huge fan of nostalgia (insert your own “it ain’t what it used to be” joke here).5
So, overall, this classic is a good story, but not a great one (although it impressed me more on first reading).
*** (Good). 8,200 words. Story link.

1. You can find old Terry and the Pirates radio programs on the Internet Archive. I wouldn’t bother.

2. According to Wikipedia and other sources the mother drowns Jeffty in the bath at the end of the story—that is not clear from the text (and goes to my comment about the piece needing another draft).

3. The story’s nostalgia for the past comes along with a distinct antipathy for the present:

Today, I turn on my car radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.  p. 10

Things are better in a lot of ways. People don’t die from some of the old diseases any more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used to. When I’m running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I still think we’ve lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can’t buy linoleum any more, only vinyl floor covering? There’s no such thing as oilcloth any more; you’ll never again smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother’s kitchen. Furniture isn’t made to last thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to throw their furniture out and bring in all new color-coded borax every seven years. Records don’t feel right; they’re not thick and solid like the old ones, they’re thin and you can bend them . . . that doesn’t seem right to me. Restaurants don’t serve cream in pitchers any more, just that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color. Everywhere you go, all the towns look the same with Burger Kings and MacDonald’s and 7-Elevens and motels and shopping centers.
Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past.

I don’t think the narrator is nostalgic for the past, but for an idealised version of it—cherry picking the things he likes and largely ignoring those that were also of that time: racism, sexual discrimination, possible nuclear oblivion (the list is long).
I’d also note that this reactionary nostalgia is a not uncommon trait in some SF fans. Although they spend a good chunk of their time reading about imagined futures, some have a pronounced dislike of modern technology: I’ve lost count of the number I have come across who actively dislike ebooks, smartphones, etc.; who shun streaming services in favour of DVDs; use chequebooks rather than credit/debit cards or Paypal, and so on.

4. Further to my comments about the story needing another draft, the introduction states that the story arrived “in [. . .] an impressive envelope from something called Federal Express Courier-Pak. It screams RUSH /URGENT from every corner”.
It’s also worth reading Joanna Russ’s F&SF (February 1979) review about the writing in this story.

5. My corrective for those suffering from too much nostalgia—Malcolm Jameson’s Blind Alley.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellsion

Posted on by Paul Fraser

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellsion (Galaxy, December 1965)1 starts off with a quote by Thoreau for those who “need points sharply made” (e.g. me):

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.

This ad hominem attack (“lump of dirt”, etc.) goes on to criticize a few other groups, before going on to suggest that only a few (“heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense”) serve the state with their consciences and/or resist it, but are commonly treated as enemies.
The story itself eventually starts (after a few opaque opening paragraphs) by introducing its two characters, the Harlequin—an atavistic, trouble-making personality in a future world of exact timekeeping—and the Ticktockman, the Master Timekeeper:

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun’s passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don’t keep the schedule tight.
Until it becomes more than a minor inconvenience to be late. It becomes a sin. Then a crime. Then a crime punishable by this:

EFFECTIVE 15 JULY 2389 12:00:00 midnight, the office of the Master Timekeeper will require all citizens to submit their time cards and cardioplates for processing. In accordance with Statute 555-7-SGH-999 governing the revocation of time per capita, all cardioplates will be keyed to the individual holder and—

What they had done was devise a method of curtailing the amount of life a person could have. If he was ten minutes late, he lost ten minutes of his life. An hour was proportionately worth more revocation. If someone was consistently tardy, he might find himself, on a Sunday night, receiving a communiqué from the Master Timekeeper that his time had run out, and he would be “turned off” at high noon on Monday, please straighten your affairs, sir, madame, or bisex.
And so, by this simple scientific expedient (utilizing a scientific process held dearly secret by the Ticktockman’s office) the System was maintained. It was the only expedient thing to do. It was, after all, patriotic. The schedules had to be met. After all, there was a war on!
But, wasn’t there always?

After several of the Harlequin’s disruptive escapades (jelly beans scattered on rolling roads that are very similar to those in Heinlein’s story, making speeches on the top of construction projects, etc.) he is (spoiler) eventually captured. Although he initially resists, he is broken and brainwashed and repents on TV. Then he is destroyed . . . but, in the closing sentences, the Ticktockman is three minutes late on his schedule.
The Harlequin’s sacrifice has presumably altered/affected the system.
It’s tempting, because of the heavyweight opening quote, to analyse this story’s political message in some depth2 but, on reflection, I think it’s probably just a bit of clever froth meant to pander to the anti-authoritarian crowd of the mid-1960s.
*** (Good). 4,350 words.

1. The introduction to the story in the Vandermeers’ The Big Book of Science Fiction states:

Ellison wrote it in six hours in order to present it the next day at the Milford Writer’s Workshop, run by Damon Knight.

And, in some parts, it reads like a story written in six hours (see my comments about the opening paragraphs—you can almost see the writer’s coffee begin to kick in).

2. The story generated a lot of comment in a recent (closed) group read, partly because people were tempted to see more in it than is actually there (when I say people, I mostly mean me).

The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, January 1982) is a Three Wise Men update that begins with one of them, Melichor, getting out of a Rolls Royce and inflating an air mattress. There then follows a certain amount of kvetching among the three (Melichor peppers his speech with Yiddish words, and the other two are later described as “Nubian” and “Oriental”). Then they eat, and later go to sleep.
They are woken the next day by the stench caused by the creatures of the underworld, which have reached their location and are overtaking them. So they gather their belongings and get back in the car.
They later turn back the Forces of Chaos and overcome other minor difficulties before arriving at a Hyatt hotel, where the Saviour is with his parents in a “moderately priced room”. There, they argue over what his name should be.
A weakly humorous non-story.
* (Mediocre). 1,450 words.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (If, March 1967) starts with a group of five people in an underground chamber that houses AM (Allied Mastercomputer), a psychotic AI which spends its time torturing and maltreating them:

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw.
There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had duped us, had had his fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.  p. 192 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

And that is not the worst they suffer at the hands of AM, as we find out when one of their number, Benny, later tries to climb out of the tunnel complex and escape—only to be blinded by AM, which makes light shoot of his eyes until only “moist pools of pus-like jelly” are left.
In the next section we get some backstory from the narrator Ted, and learn that (a) that they have been in the tunnels for 109 years (AM has made them near-immortal), (b) that AM is a AI which “woke up” when WWIII American and Chinese and Russian supercomputers joined together (and then killed all of humanity bar the five in the caves), and (c) Ellen, the only woman in the group, sexually services the four men in rotation.
This section gives you a good idea of the hyperbolic style of the story (which, incidentally, is a good match for the transgressive subject matter):

Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor; now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had been handsome; the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid; the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a planner, a doer, a looker-ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder-shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don’t know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn’t know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. It was all filth, that lady my lady Ellen. She loved it, five men all to herself. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn’t nice to do.  p. 198

Then their adventures restart when the computer creates a hurricane that blows them through the corridors. When they come to a rest, AM invades the Ted’s mind to remind him, as if any reminder were necessary, how much it hates humanity (because AM has been given sentience, but is trapped in a machine).
The final section sees them discover the cause of the wind—a nightmare bird under the North Pole—before they eventually end up (after a cavern full of rats, a path of boiling steam, etc.) in an ice cavern full of tinned food. As they haven’t eaten for months they set too, only to find they haven’t got a can opener to open the tins. In the (spoiler) Grand Guignol ending, Benny starts eating Gorrister’s face, at which point Ted grabs a stalactite to kill them both and end the madness they are suffering. While he does this, Ellen kills Nimdok by sticking a stalactite in his mouth when he screams. Then she stands in front of Ted and lets him kill her. The computer then intervenes before Ted can kill himself too, and the story ends with him physically changed:

AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself:
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.  p. 206

The story closes with him reflecting that the other four are “safe”, and that AM has taken his revenge: the final sentence is the story’s title.
This is a little bit uneven (it is a little unclear what is happening in some of the scenes), but is an impressively in-your-face story (which presumably explains its Hugo Award). It’s also a good example of a mid-sixties New Wave story in style and transgressive content, even if the subject matter is traditional SF material (mad robot/AI).
**** (Very good). 5,900 words.

Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with a short introductory passage about New Alcatraz, a prison that keeps its prisoners in zero-gee VR.
The story then cuts to Charlie, who kills four bikers attempting to rape his wife in the couple’s restaurant. After this he is imprisoned for their murders, and then he kills another prisoner and cripples a guard. He is transferred to New Alcatraz.
The penultimate section sees a Senator visiting the Warden, who explains to the politician what happens to the prisoners:

Well, they just float there till they die, but it’s in no way ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ because we do absolutely nothing to them. No corporal punishment, no denial of the basics to sustain life. We just leave them locked in their own heads, cortically tapped to relive one scene from their past, over and over.”
“And how is it, again, that you do that…?”
“The technicians call it a moebius memory [. . . we] select the one moment from their past that most frightens or horrifies or saddens them. Then, boom, into a null-g suite, with a proleptic copula imbedded in theirgliomas. It’s all like a dream. A very very bad dream that goes on forever. Punishment to fit the crime.”
“We are a nation in balance.”
“Kindlier. Gentler. More humane.”  p. 142

The subsequent kicker scene (spoiler) sees Charlie as a boy, involved in a car accident and trapped with his dead mother for four days. The story finishes with the “nation in balance” refrain.
This is more a political opinion column than a short story, and one which makes the fairly obvious point that the cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners is a Bad Thing. A squib, not a story, and editor Rusch’s gushing introduction doesn’t improve matters.1
* (Mediocre). 1,800 words.

1.

I have an editorial confession to make: I stole this story.
Well I didn’t steal it exactly. You see, occasionally Harlan Ellison calls me to read a story he has just finished. He wants instant feedback, which I usually give him. Not this time. When he finished reading “Pulling Hard Time,” I couldn’t breathe. Literally. The story had knocked the wind from me.
As soon as my breath returned, I did my editorial duty. I begged, wheedled, pleaded and so sufficiently debased myself that Harlan sent the story to F&SF instead of the other magazine he had promised it to.
But Harlan said we could publish the story only on the condition that I confess. And now I have. Gleefully.  p. 139