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Episode 461 - The Hour That Stretches (Patreon)

Published:
2019-07-27 16:50:56
Imported:
2021-07

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Content

Tune in to some radio about a story about radio about stories! It's The Hour That Stretches by Harlan Ellison - all about the science fiction show Hour 25!

Special thanks to our reader Levi Nunez!

We'll be back this week with a bonus episode on how we produce the show!

Comments

Anonymous

For the Lovecraftian character, I thought Ellison was referring to characters like the man from "The Picture in the House" or "The Terrible Old man." Sort of the secretive, foul individual looking to express their dark desires.

Anonymous
>>25154664

Or, of course, the old couple in "The Cats of Ulthar" who loved torturing cats to death.

Anonymous

Not listened to this one yet but I just read the show notes while it's downloading and saw that we're getting a behind the scenes special!! Hell yeah!!

Steve

Go Levi!

Anonymous

On the subject of the “Tormented Souls” Lovecraft wrote about, I was thinking about like the end of Rats in the Walls (“Okay, it’s ‘Rats In the Walls’... but it’s CATS!”)

Anonymous

Great show. This story humanized Ellison a bit for me as he took self-aware jabs at his own notorious persona. Looking forward to the bonus show about production, which I image goes like this: CHAD: Okay, we’re down to editing. Should we add anything? CHRIS: How about we start the show with the sounds of NFL linebackers racing camels? CHAD: Chris, you waterheaded a$$hole. No. CHRIS: I have this idea where we start the show with a fake promo for a story about a tree octopus that haunts a Scottish navel-gazing band. I call it “Octo Cocteau”. CHAD: Chris, you’re a great guy but that’s the most lamebrained idea I’ve ever heard. You a$$hole. CHRIS: So… weird scream? CHAD: Weird scream. {FIN}

Steve

All the inhabitants of Innsmouth and Red Hook seem pretty tormented.

Anonymous

Chad, I think your take on the story as a whole, especially the last guest being the personification of bad ideas, is spot on. While Ellison had a lot of good ideas over the course of his very long writing career, I have very mixed feelings about how well he took his own advice about leaving bad story ideas to the void. For example, "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"--long thought to be one of Ellison's master works--is an efficient meditation on revenge, & has interesting imagery and a unique plot device (for its time). But I don't think it has aged well. I think what came before in literature, namely cosmic indifference by more advanced beings, is more terrifying than a concentrated, angry revenge by AI. I'll be curious to hear what you think if you cover this or more other stories of his.

Anonymous

The story about people growing fur and it becoming the fashion of the time was done. I can't remember the name, but I read it in a sci-fi collection back in the 80's, and the book dated to the 50's.

Anonymous

The throwaway mention about area sf/f happenings in the 70s once again underscored for me how lucky nerds in the US were (at least in terms of access to a wider group of people with common interests). Growing up in Singapore in the 80s and 90s there was no real access to the wider genre culture. I picked up sf/f books here and there but until the internet came along there was no way to talk to anyone else with similar experiences and really until Amazon came along in the early 00s you were stuck with whatever limited genre stuff the local bookstores and Borders had. And that was in a wealthy and developed city(-state). I presume nerds in less developed countries were even more out of luck.

Anonymous
>>25185076

I mean the concentrated, angry revenge AI is just religious horror with sci-fi trappings. It's Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God- just like the Calvinist God AM has condemned the four survivors for no fault of their own but for being human (original Sin in this case being the creation of AM). Now I can run with religious horror but IMO using it like Ellison did makes it a one trick pony. It's just weeping and gnashing of teeth without any of the Weirdness that animates Lovecraft (cold indifferent intelligences) or MR James (strange incursions into the normal).

Anonymous

... Is THIS where the tree octopus originally comes from?! A ‘convincing’ webpage about them was used as a ‘vet your internet sources’ cautionary tale back when I was in high school! I thought it was a Internet faux-cryptid of some kind.

Anonymous
>>25189297

It depends Sanjay on where in the US you grew up. Coming of age on a farm in Georgia in the 70's meant I might as well have been on the dark side of the moon when it came to access to anything geeky except for what might get picked up on the rabbit ears (and I'd be allowed to interrupt somebody's viewing of hee haw or wrestling). Eventually, I got to a town which did have those wonderful Bantam books of Robert E Howard. My first Lovecraft was in some old hardback collection of horror stories my grandparents had. If they had known, I'm sure it would have been burned and the earth salted as they were always threatening to do to any comic book I happened to get a hold of. I guess it can be imagined what the opinion of anything D&D was.

Anonymous

Was the story about the kid and the candle perhaps a reference to himself? I don't really know much about his childhood at all.

Anonymous

I thought the three minutes to midnight bit was a reference to the doomsday clock, a quick look on wikipedia says the clock was at four minutes in 82.

Anonymous
>>25173359

As arguably are most of the folks we encounter in Dunwich (especially after the Horror), Arkham, and _certain_ parts of Providence near old abandoned churches.

Mark Brett
>>25190742

That's immediately what I thought of when I got to that point in the story. I remember running across it on-line years ago, and not knowing whether or not to believe it at first. I settled on "not" by the time I finished reading it, mind you, but I DID read the whole thing nonetheless...

Darth Pseudonym

I think this is a story that has a lot of purposes. I think it was a way for Harlan to publish some story ideas that he'd played with, but ultimately discarded as unworkable, while at the same time allowing him to poke fun at some of the common obnoxious behaviors that he ran into with fans, like the "Have I got an idea--!" MadLibs stuff, or asking him to come up with something horrible and then telling him he's sick when he does as requested.

Anonymous

I love Patton, but why does he keep recommending these particular Ellison stories? Is it because he's a stand-up comedian and these have a lot of one liners? These last two have seemed like collections of bits. Occasionally interesting or funny but pretty low stakes.

Anonymous

I kinda know how you guys feel when you don’t like a story. You can hear it in your voice, how you feel like your somehow not supporting weird fiction by not liking an author but man I don’t like these stories. Don’t know if it’s Ellison as I am able to set aside Lovecraft the person and enjoy Lovecraft’s stories. But the more I looked into Ellison the person. Errr. Not a fan. Sorry guys.

Anonymous
>>25244766

I feel the same way. I can normally separate the individual and their faults from their work. For example, I still listen to Guns N Roses, in spite of the kind of people they are. Same for Ozzy Osbourne. Despite his biting the heads off things and snorting ants, I still enjoy his songs. Ditto on Lovecraft. But when it comes to Ellison, he just gets my hackles up. Something about him feels really dark and cruel to me, and sets off warning bells inside my head. During the first Ellison story all I could think about was him groping Connie Willis' breast at WorldCon. The second story I was able to put that aside and enjoy it. But this story just brings me back to being disturbed by what a negative and hateful person he was. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I am not giving him a chance. But I honestly suspect he has been given too many chances already.

Anonymous

I kinda liked reading this one. It seemed like being in undergrad and kicking around ideas with some friends -yes, a bit geeky, but just sort of trying to see what you can make out of a really bad idea for short story or poem concept. On the other hand, dealing with news about Tool's new album and Keenan's shenanigans, Morrisey's comments of lately, and and thinking about other artist I adamantly disagree with but love their art, Ellison, this show, and listener comments have forced me to come to terms with how I feel about separating the Artist from the Art. Just curious if anyone else out there ends up really connecting with a work yet finding it really hard to support the artist on a personal level. I generally end up purchasing the work despite my personal feelings about the artist.

Anonymous

I thought I wouldn’t make any comment about Ellison as a person because I didn’t see any reason to try to defend what I know very well is a lot of indefensible behavior and words, and everyone commenting about him being beyond the pale has every right to have that reaction. But after listening to the most recent episode of Revisionist History where Gladwell brought up moral licensing, it struck me that if I wanted to add that this guy has been a childhood hero of mine from practically the first ever short story of his I ever discovered and even more so the first time I heard him speak, I decided that if I can’t defend him I would at least offer some alternative to the narrative that he’s a horrible miscreant (please note Harlan would absolutely love to be called that). As I grew up, I just thought that if I ever became a writer or any kind of creative, I would want to be just like Harlan Ellison. He took crap off nobody and if you didn’t like it, then just go - well insert all the expletives. I really admired that. His remark about being called a gadfly when you are no longer relevant and instead wanting to be a troublemaker, a rebel seemed to me the whole point. However, what he did to Connie Willis is inexcusable, but I would add (and many said at the time) that if it had been a man in Willis’ role asking Ellison if he was going to behave, Ellison would have put his hand somewhere equally inappropriate on the man. I don’t think he was ever trying to be Harvey Weinstein, but the Norman Mailer or Jack Kerouac of scifi. I definitely thought of him as trying to personify the role of the trickster or the fool whether as seen in tarot cards or Jungian archetypes. He spent practically his entire life screaming at those who dismissed genre fiction, especially science fiction, calling every critic every name that his overly fecund brain could come up with. He championed Octavia Butler and others. But none of these things really excuse being an atrocious person of course, except perhaps by seeing his life/behavior through the lens of moral licensing (if no-one has realized by now, if I can’t mix up some metaphors to make a lovely word cocktail, then I’d just rather not write or say anything). He knew (believed) he was right and everyone else was more than wrong, plus he was acting on what he thought was right, opposing the Vietnam War, supporting civil rights, the recognition of women and poc writers in scifi, etc, so he could, at least in his own mind, or was allowed to also do and say things that even other crazy wacky liberal folk of his time thought was more than too much. These have not been the best stories of course that could have been recommended (no offense to Patton), and I’m not going to suggest that anyone has to accept him as a great American writer of science fiction, but growing up on the traditional big 3 (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke), discovering Harlan Ellison was like suddenly being able to breath in a world of really heavy ideas, because he took those same concepts/tropes and said to the reader “I bet you think I can’t do something completely unbelievable with these incredible toys. Well, kid just watch me.” I did and I really wish he were still around.

Anonymous

The joke here of course is that lovecraft gave us the rAts in the walls and Harlan gives us the cats in the wall. This is not to be confused with my new horror story of a house infected with insects called the gnats in the walls or my sequel concerning haunted insulation called the batts in the walls

Anonymous

I genuinely expected the final caller to be Satan, announcing that the show was actually going on for eternity, and all the lines are hot!

Anonymous

Hey all! This kind of reminded me of Kilgore Trout. I am a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, and speaking from memory only, one of the many purposes of his often-appearing character Kilgore Trout, the little-known science fiction author, was to allow Vonnegut to take short story ideas that he had conceived, but was sure would never be written, and turn them into reminiscences of one or another of Trout's old stories. If I remember correctly, his role grew in importance as the various media by which one could sell short stories began to die out, seeing one magazine after another either fold, or change format. Vonnegut, who was always coming up with ideas, found himself with lots of short story ideas, but with no good outlets to sell short stories. So he would make sure that they would show up in his novels as stories that Trout had "written." It would amount to an entire science fiction/fiction tale condensed into a paragraph or so. The main difference however, is that most of Trout's stories were intriguing.