{"id":3381,"date":"2022-04-02T12:28:38","date_gmt":"2022-04-02T12:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3381"},"modified":"2022-04-08T12:47:29","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T12:47:29","slug":"alive-and-well-and-on-a-friendless-voyage-by-harlan-ellison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3381","title":{"rendered":"Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage<\/em><\/strong> by Harlan Ellison (F&SF<\/em>, July 1977) is the second story in a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF<\/em>, 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 (\u201cthis ship of strangers\u201d) 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve come to realize we\u2019re all alone,\u201d he said.
She did not reply. Merely stared at him.
\u201cNo matter how many people love us or care for us or want to ease our burden in this life,\u201d Moth said, \u201cwe are all, all of us, always alone. Something Aldous Huxley once said, I\u2019m not sure I know it exactly, I\u2019ve looked and looked and can\u2019t find the quote, but I remember part of it. He said: \u2018We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space.\u2019 I think that was it.  p. 36<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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<\/s> voyage. No-one volunteers.
I\u2019m 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\u2014for the current SF field\u2014 boyfriend, body, parental or petty political concerns.)
** (Average). 4,100 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[289],"tags":[40,17,826,25,290,12,825],"class_list":["post-3381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harlan-ellison","tag-40","tag-17","tag-confessional","tag-fsf","tag-harlan-ellison","tag-short-story","tag-spaceship-journey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3381"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3442,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381\/revisions\/3442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}