Children of the Streets by Harlan Ellison (Edgeworks Abbey Archive, 2020). Cover photograph by Marty Woess.
Note: This is a preview of “From the Gutters to the Streets”, my 2,200-word article on Harlan Ellison’s fourth short story collection, Children of the Streets, originally published in the now-out-of-print Archive edition of that book. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It came from the morgue…” level.
Harlan Ellison’s fourth short story collection, Children of the Streets, was—until the twenty-first century—one of the writer’s most elusive collections. Compiled as a follow-up to his first book of juvenile delinquency tales, The Deadly Streets (Ace Books, 1958), the collection was originally titled Children of the Gutters, a phrase that still appears in several of the story-specific introductions.
“Ten Weeks in Hell,” the general introduction, was Ellison’s first professional sale, to Lowdown magazine. Despite paying the author $25, the magazine ran someone else’s words with the title “I Ran with a Kid Gang” under the byline of Phil “Cheech” Beldone—the alias Ellison used while undercover with the Barons in Brooklyn—and alongside a photograph of the author with an airbrushed scar in the October 1955 issue. …
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Note: This is a preview of “The Write Place with J. Michael Straczynski”, my previously unpublished 8,700-word interview with J. Michael Straczynski. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $10 “Fresh copy!” level.
“The best part of it is knowing that it wasn’t due to personality, lord knows,” said J. Michael Straczynski of his writing success. “It was due to making black marks on a piece of paper. Over and over again. For thirty or forty years. Somewhere along the line, you learn something. That’s how you become a writer. You sit down at a keyboard, and ten years after, when you stand up again, you’re a writer.”
“They’re exquisitely arranged black marks,” I said. “They’re not just tossed out there.”
“One certainly hopes so,” said Straczynski.
This career-spanning interview from 2008 focuses on the craft of writing in general, but makes reference to the challenges of showrunning Babylon 5 (1993–8), the frustrations of Crusade (1999) and Jeremiah (2002–4), as well as Straczynski’s success with Changeling (2008) and the difficulties he faced in adapting World War Z (2013) and the unproduced They Marched Into Sunlight.
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The Deadly Streets by Harlan Ellison (Edgeworks Abbey Archive, 2020). Cover photograph by Steven Barber.
Note: This is a preview of “Knocking Over the Candy Store”, my 2,000-word article on Harlan Ellison’s first short story collection, The Deadly Streets, originally published in the now-out-of-print Archive edition of that book. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It came from the morgue…” level.
On 5 March 1958, editor Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Book wrote to U.S. Army PFC Harlan Ellison in Elizabethtown, Kentucky about the possibility of purchasing his long-delayed novel, Web of the City, from Lion Books, which was selling off its properties and going out of business. While Pyramid Books would have the honor of publishing Ellison’s first novel—as Rumble (1958), much to the author’s chagrin—Wollheim suggested Ellison assemble a 60,000-word collection of juvenile delinquency stories for publisher A.A. Wyn. Within five days, Ellison’s first book of short fiction, The Deadly Streets, had been assembled and shipped off to New York.
Subtitled “a collection of stories about juvenile delinquency,” only eight of the thirteen tales originally earmarked for inclusion made the final table of contents…
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On 13 September 2023, I joined Warren Frey, Steven Schapanski, and Annette Wierstra on an off-format installment of the Radio Free Skaro podcast to discuss The Starlost, the ill-fated 1973 television series created by Harlan Ellison. The discussion begins 38:25 into the episode, after the latest Doctor Who news.
From 3 January 1993, Harlan Ellison’s Watching—a cultural commentary by the eponymous writer, named for his film criticism column—closed episodes of the Sci-Fi Channel’s weekly news program, Sci-Fi Buzz. It was my first sustained exposure to a writer who would—sixteen years later—become one of my closest friends for the last nine years of his life.
Those Watching segments shaped my opinions and tastes in ways it would take too long to enumerate, but what really established a sense of one-way kinship between Ellison and I was his affinity for The Prisoner (1967–8), which had permanently warped me when KUHT ran it in 1990.
On Labor Day, 1993, Ellison met McGoohan in my mind:
“Feeling trapped? Feeling paranoid? Are they out to get you? Are they listening to your every word? Thought so. Which makes you absolutely ready for The Prisoner marathon. I’m Harlan Ellison, world famous author and outcast, just like you. And I’ve been trapped into hosting the seventeen episodes of this classic and controversial series. They’ll be shown uncut, and in their entirety, right here, on Monday, September 6th.”
“Arrival” is always the beginning.
The Prisoner was the first television series that confronted me with the possibility of multiple viewing orders. When I first saw it on Houston’s PBS affiliate, the seventeen episodes were presented in the “official” sequence determined by ITC, the show’s corporate owner. That order had more to do with when the episodes were completed by the post-production crews than what was going on within the story. (This was also the order used by MPI Home Video for their VHS and Laserdisc releases of the series, as well as the sequence proffered by several books on the show.)
In 1991, the A&E cable channel screened The Prisoner and I was startled to see the episodes appearing in a different order, a sequence I’d later learn was preferred by Six of One, The Prisoner Appreciation Society.
For the Sci-Fi Channel marathon, Harlan commented upon the ordering controversy and supplied his own iteration, fixing at least one major continuity issue in the Six-of-One sequence. (Some kind soul uploaded a very dodgy recording of the tail-end of Ellison’s linking material to YouTube, if you’d like to take a look. One day, I must exhume my videotapes to revisit the earlier part of the marathon.)
How, you may well ask, could a mere seventeen episodes be ordered in no less than three sequences? (As of this post, Wikipedia.org lists six viewing orders for The Prisoner, so the question is twice as complicated as you might have thought.)
But none of them are Harlan’s order.
“I’m Harlan Ellison, asking if you know how many sides a round building has? And assuring you we’ll be back directly, with yet more of The Prisoner marathon, on the channel whose name will never pass my lips.”
During the marathon, the Host echoed the Prisoner’s refusal to explain his resignation by not speaking the name of the channel, instead gesturing to the logo superimposed in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Harlan had a long-standing aversion to “sci-fi”, “that hideous neologism”, which he likened to the sound of insects fucking, so it was all in character.
Harlan’s order:
01 Arrival 02 Free for All 03 Day of the Dead 04 Checkmate 05 The Chimes of Big Ben 06 The General 07 A. B. and C 08 The Schizoid Man 09 Many Happy Returns 10 It’s Your Funeral 11 A Change of Mind 12 Hammer into Anvil 13 Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling 14 Living in Harmony 15 The Girl Who Was Death 16 Once Upon a Time 17 Fall Out
“I’m your host, Harlan Ellison, and the answer is: a round building has two sides…inside, and outside…and you’re watching the five thousandth hour of The Prisoner marathon, exclusively pumped into the Village by…”
“Fall Out” is always the end.
Thanks, Harlan. I miss you.
In the interest of embracing new ideas, I commend to you Alex Cox’s 2017 book I Am (Not) a Number: Decoding The Prisoner, in which the writer-director of Repo Man (1984)—a movie I first encountered thanks to Harlan’s review—offers a radical reinterpretation of the series…and another viewing order.
I tried Cox’s order in March 2018, when I was ill with what I still regard as the most congenial virus that’s ever infected me.1 While low-maintenance as illnesses go, I regret that my memory of how Cox’s order played went with the infection. It’s probably time to try it again.
I Am (Not) a Number is a beautifully designed—by Elsa Mathern—book, by the way. The 6 on the cover is spot glossed, and the word “not” is rendered such that the book appears to be titled I Am a Number from a distance, but becomes I Am Not a Number when you pick it up. Kamera Books is to be commended for the production.
If this review has compelled you to purchase I Am (Not) a Number, may I request that you use one of the Amazon links below, which will earn me a small commission on the sale that will fund my ongoing research and publishing work:
For seven days, the virus robbed me of the ability to sleep, filled my head with an oppressive pressure, and supplied my body with an indistinct ache. There were no coughs, sneezes, or other respiratory issues—which are what I hate most—just a sort of living death that vanished after seven days. ↩︎
On 19 February 2022, I recorded material for two episodes of the Doctor Who Literature podcast.
For my first episode, I told host Jason Miller how my love for Doctor Who led me to Harlan Ellison, who wrote the 1978 introduction for the U.S. editions of Doctor Who novelizations published by Pinnacle Books. (I share the segment with Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe, who returned to pay tribute to writer Chris Boucher.)
