I read a piece in
That led me to wonder how we would react, as a nation and on a more personal level, if some greater power established a military outpost here the way we have done in many places around the world. It’s a topic I’ve found myself writing about in several stories in magazines like
In this particular case, I also wondered how we would react if that greater power abandoned us to the enemy the way we abandoned the Filipinos.
There is a narrow brutality to that sort of imperialist thinking—we seem so willing to sacrifice others for our welfare—how would we handle the reverse of that? How would the great power’s arrival corrupt us? And what might be the final outcome of that corruption? “War Bride” tries to speak to these questions.
Harlan Ellison’s published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He was editor and anthologist for two groundbreaking science fiction anthologies,
WHEN THEY UNSCREWED THE time capsule, preparatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing.
Every head turned away. The word that sprang to mind first was, “
They wouldn’t tell Enoch Mirren’s wife he was back. They evaded the question when Enoch Mirren’s mother demanded to know the state of her son’s health after his having taken the very first journey into another time/universe. The new President was given dissembling answers. No one bothered to call San Clemente. The Chiefs of Staff were kept in the dark. Inquiries from the CIA and the FBI were met with responses in pig Latin and the bureaus were subtly diverted into investigating each other. Walter Cronkite found out, but after all, there are even limits to how tight security can get.
Their gorges buoyant, every one of them, the rescue crew and the medical team and the chrono-experts at TimeSep Central did their best, but found it impossible to pry temponaut Enoch Mirren’s penis from the (presumably) warm confines of the disgusting thing’s (presumed) sexual orifice.
A cadre of alien morphologists was assigned to make an evaluation: to decide if the disgusting thing was male or female. After a sleepless week they gave up. The head of the group made a good case for his team’s failure. “It’d be a damned sight easier to decide if we could get that clown out of her… him… it… that thing!”
