[I spoil the entire story.]
It is well documented that Harlan was known for being a bombastic writer who did not give a damn about the way he wrote stuff. In many ways, that's one of his best qualities. But this story was structured in a way that I don't consider very good. It has features in it that I dislike even in more modern stuff. Basically the story goes out of its way to educate you in the slant of his own personal atheistic views.
The story itself has to do with a man named Stack that turns out to just be Adam, the first human, who is alive at the end of the world. It's somewhat prefaced throughout the story that he was living various lives throughout the history of the world. This story also has it canon that his first lover was none other than Lilith, not Eve. That's a stupid reference that I don't really want to explain right now. It might make some good reading material for you, or you might already know about it. It's dumb though, and it was a hateful thing for Harlan to put it in this story.
It is the end of the world, and Adam wakes up to find that the days of the earth have ended. There's nobody left. And his only friend is the Snake who he once thought was the bad guy. Yep. Satan is now his good ol' buddy. He goes on a brief adventure to find that God is just some pitiful old man that just won't admit that he made a bunch of mistakes. Interestingly, the author compares God to the humbug wizard from "The Wizard of Oz," citing the burning bush as one of his parlor tricks. Ultimately, Stack (Adam) had just enough time before the earth ends to reject God in his madness and die peacefully with the earth.
Harlan uses some extremely pretty imagery of a large bird, called the Deathbird, that envelopes things when they die. It does this to the entire Earth, which I do admit to being rather pleasing in its presentation. But that's about the only compliment I can give this one.
The most annoying thing about this story are the brief interludes that interrupt the story. They make you feel like you're in an atheist class at school, giving you actual assignments that have a serious bent to them. They even make you read some of "Genesis" with some of the verses omitted and then ask you to consider whether or not the Serpent was really doing anything bad. I hated this so much. He couldn't just tell his story. He had to try and shove his beliefs down my throat in such an overt way.
Weirdly, the final chapter of the story is just a dedication to Mark Twain. This is something I do understand. Harlan very likely read "The Mysterious Stranger" before he wrote this. There were similar themes in that one, but they were far more subtle, and I actually consider that a great book.
I do not recommend this book. For everything good about it, there are a hundred things bad about it. It's just an annoying read by someone who had become so hateful of God that he actually joined up with Satan to create an artificial mockery of Him. Steer clear of this one.
This blog was written on June 27, 2024.
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The screenplay writer Roger Avary is the same way. He was good ideas but ruins them with tantrums against Christianity. The fiction is not good make believe when you can see the strings... and we see the strings. It kills the immersion.
ReplyDeleteIt never sits well with me. You can be an atheist without being a dick about it.
DeleteAtheists tend to believe the strangest things. Having denied the Creator, they employ the most unworthy substitutes. In the end, even inside they are left with nothing.
ReplyDeleteOh absolutely!
DeleteIt is completely fair not to agree with everything Ellison wrote, but to dismiss the entire story because it does not align perfectly with your own beliefs feels short sighted. Science fiction, by its very nature, is meant to challenge us, to twist familiar ideas into something new so we can think differently about the world. The Deathbird is not a sermon trying to convert anyone. It is a thought experiment that pushes readers to question the roles of good and evil, and how easily those roles might flip depending on perspective.
ReplyDeleteThe interruptions in the form of “tests” and strange side stories may feel distracting, but they serve a purpose. They frame the larger ideas for readers who might otherwise miss the parallels. They are not filler. They are context.
And regarding Adam and Lilith: while Christianity today widely upholds the Adam and Eve account, older Jewish traditions contain stories of Lilith as Adam’s first companion. Ellison’s choice was not random hatefulness. It was a deliberate nod to an existing tradition that complicates the standard reading of Genesis. To dismiss that as stupid not only oversimplifies history but also overlooks the richness of the mythologies Ellison was drawing from.
Ask yourself: if Ellison had simply swapped the names, God as Satan and Satan as God, would you have reacted the same way? That in itself reveals what the story is really doing, making us confront our assumptions.
At the end of the day, you do not have to like The Deathbird. But to write it off as nothing more than an atheist attack on God misses the deeper layers. Ellison’s writing is strange, yes, even abrasive, but it is also imaginative, daring, and worth wrestling with, even if only to sharpen your own understanding of what you believe.