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The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World

Thoughts

Highlights

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Standing in the hotel window staring out at the Atlantic Ocean, nightcrashing onto the Copacabana beach. Down in Brazil on a fool’s mission, talking to myself. Standing in the window of a stranger whom I suddenly know well, while down the Avenida Atlantica in another window, one I know well, who has suddenly become a stranger. 🔗

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THE WAVES IN RIO 🔗

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I have drawn my parallels, have sighted down the gun, have sounded the clarion call. To what end?
Perhaps to finally codify for myself what my stories have been saying for the last few years: that man is building for himself a darkness of world that is turning him mad; that the pressures are too great, the machines too often break down, and the alien alone cannot make it. We must think new thoughts, we must love as we have never even suspected we can love, and if there is honor to violence we must get it on at once, have done with it, try to live with our guilt for having so done, and move on. 🔗

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For the record, and for those who need to be told bluntly, I do not believe there is such a thing as “New Wave” in speculative fiction (any more than there is something labeled with the abhorrent abbreviation “sci-fi”, though I do not expect reviewers outside the genre to exercise enough taste to drop this convenient, though totally despicable, slang bastardization of a term presently unsuitable for that which the field has become). It is a convenient journalese expression for inept critics and voyeur-observers of the passing scene, because they have neither the wit nor the depth to understand that this richness of new voices is many waves: each composed of one writer. 🔗

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Yet there can be no denying that there is something happening: you don’t know what the hell it is, do you, Mr. Jones, but you know it’s happening, so you call it New Wave, and that makes it easier to feel uneasy about, can you dig it, Mr. Jones? 🔗

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(Today, the person who out-of-hand denies anything experimental because it is experimental, is not even considered square; he’s merely pathetic. 🔗

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The fuddy-duddy yesterday can certainly be revered, for it contains the roots of our heritage in the form. But to revere is one thing, to totemize is another. To expect to hold up the future merely to let ghosts of yesterday feed on a today they don’t own, is encystment. 🔗

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I suppose, then, that the bottom line of what I’ve rambled on about here, ties the stories in with what I felt in Rio (and with “waves”, of all kinds): the stories that are merely stories—what Vonnegut calls foma, harmless untruths—are for entertainment. The others are to tell you that as night approaches we are all aliens, down here on this alien Earth. To tell you that not Christ nor man nor governments of men will save you. To tell you that writers about tomorrow must stop living in yesterday and work from their hearts and their guts and their courage to tell us about tomorrow, before all the tomorrows are stolen away from us. To tell you no one will come down from the mountain to save your lily-white hide or your black ass. God is within you. Save yourselves.
Otherwise, why would you have traveled all this way…just to be alone?
HARLAN ELLISON
RIO DE JANEIRO
25 MARCH 69 🔗

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THE BEAST
THAT SHOUTED LOVE
AT THE HEART
OF THE WORLD 🔗

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ALONG THE
SCENIC ROUTE 🔗

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Adrenalin pumped in geysers through George’s system. 🔗

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“You’re no hotrodder, George. You’re a family man, and this is the family car!” 🔗

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She meant well. It was simply that…well, a man had to work hard to keep his balls. 🔗

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In the world of the Freeway, there was no place for a walking man. 🔗

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PHOENIX 🔗

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The sun hung above us like a great eye, punched by a sharp flaming stick…a bloody, dripping eye that turned the stinking desert red around us. Illogically, I wanted a good cup of coffee.
Water. I wanted water, too. And lemonade. With ice all the way up to the top of the glass. Ice cream. Maybe on a stick. I shook my head…I was buzzing. 🔗

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Sand was yellow ochre; sand was brown; sand was gray; it wasn’t red. Unless you poke the sun in the eye and let it bleed all over the earth. 🔗

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I would get back to Atlantis, and tell them that time was, indeed, circular. That New York City had risen. 🔗

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I slunk back to my place and stared off at the stars. There weren’t any. It wasn’t that kind of night. 🔗

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Like a child. I wanted to cry. But it wasn’t that kind of night, either. 🔗