Customer Reviews

Phoenix without Ashes

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Read this book, and see why Harlan Ellison, the best short story writer ever, also got an award for best screenplay. The book is the screenplay in novel format, but I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT! The basic storyline is this (I got to tell you something because only one other person has commented on this book, which is really sad.): In outer space there is a spaceship consisting of tons of biospheres. Each biosphere contains a culture, but these cultures have no contact amongst themselves. In fact, they've been in space so long that they don't even know they're in space! They think that the biosphere is the world! Anyway, in this one biosphere, an exiled man is driven away for his heretical preachings. A large man-hunt takes place . . . and that's when things REALLY get interesting and you finish this book in one sitting. The writing is excellently done. The chapters end with bangs, the characters act and do things that actually bring out all sorts of emotions in you. When you finish this book, all you can say is WOW! I've read it once, but I KNOW I'm going to read it again . . . and again, etc. This book deserves more than four stars, even more than five. All Harlan fans must read this.

Phoenix Without Ashes is the novelization of Harlan Ellison's ill fated TV venture from the early 1970's. If you missed the short lived science fiction series from Canada you might want to pick up this book. The novel is not written from the television show script, but rather from Mr. Ellison's award winning teleplay. Be warned this book ends with you wanting more, and as a first book in a series this would be superb, but there are no others. Much better than catching an old rerun of the Starlost!

The story behind Phoenix Without Ashes is almost as important as the story itself.

In 1973, famed science fiction author Harlan Ellison was hired to write a television series to be called The Starlost. The producers did not stick very closely to Ellison's vision and Ellison ended up taking his name off of the pilot episode. Only 16 episodes of the series were shot, and it disappeared into obscurity.

But Ellison didn't completely let his story die. In 1975, writer Edward Bryant adapted Ellison's original pilot script into a novel called Phoenix Without Ashes. Although it was positioned at the time as book one in a series, no other volumes were ever published.

Flash forward to 2011, and now we have Phoenix Without Ashes, the graphic novel, which adapts Ellison's screenplay and Bryant's novel into comics form. Ellison himself is credited as creator and writer of the graphic novel, although there is nothing to indicate he actually scripted the comic book version. The art chores are handled by Alan Robinson, who provides some lovely layouts and linework, and colorist Kote Carvajal, whose tones make the book shine.

So what's the story of Phoenix Without Ashes? It starts with a young Amish man named Devon, who lives in a tiny community just a few hundred miles wide that no one ever leaves. Devon is in love with a young woman named Rachel and wants to marry her, but the Elders who rule his community have promised her to another. That conflict leads Devon to rebel against his leaders, which puts him on the run as he uncovers a terrible truth: that the machine that supposedly dictates the will of God to the Elders and the community is nothing less than a lie.

As Devon runs, he discovers something else. His community's tiny world is just that--a fake world in a steel bubble, attached by a secret corridor to a large ship (an ark) full of other bubbles (biospheres) carrying other, isolated communities, none of whom know that the larger ship or the other inhabitants even exist.

What's worse, Devon finds that the ship's crew have long since died, their homeworld of Earth has been destroyed by some unknown disaster, and the ship is off course, heading into the heart of a nova that will in a few years destroy all aboard.

It's a well-told story, full of danger and mystery, and unfortunately, that's also the main problem with this book. Since it's adapted from Ellison's original pilot script, which was intended to start a long TV series on its multiseason path, this graphic novel is all setup. It's the beginning of a much larger story intended to go on for many more chapters, if not many more years. All of the conflict is established, but nothing is resolved.

And nearly 40 years after the original airing of The Starlost, it appears that nothing in this story ever will be resolved. IDW published this book in February 2011 (after serializing it in 2010) and has yet to announce a second volume. That's a shame. A lot of work obviously went into Phoenix Without Ashes, and it's a pretty, engaging portion of a story, but it's not a complete book, and probably never will be. Too bad. It would have been nice to see this phoenix finally rise. Alas, it's nothing but a ghost of what could have been.

-- John R. Platt

All my life I've had vague memories of a show called "Starlost," involving people lost in space and maybe having some connection to Silent Running. A few years ago I looked around on the Internet and found that there actually had been a short-lived TV series called The Starlost. I hadn't just imagined it! Recently I watched Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth and learned of Ellison's ill-fated involvement with the series. I rented the series DVDs and made it through the first four episodes before reluctantly giving up in disgust. (Well, not before skimming Walter Koenig's appearances and the final episode.) Such potential, lost to a ridiculous system that neither understood nor appreciated the concept. Maybe I was still nostalgic, but I bought this book just to see what might have been. I was floored.

The story, while treading familiar ground science fiction-wise (but what SF concept is truly original?), was rich and full and detailed. (Off the top of my head I can think of only two concepts that no longer hold up: cassette tapes, and holo cubes that must be physically picked up and placed in a slot to be accessed). Edward Bryant's writing is straightforward and clear (I devoured it in one sitting), and I felt Devon's awakening to knowledge so powerfully that I actually got misty. In a testament to the acting of William Osler, who played the sphere projector "host" in the series, I heard the sphere projector's dialogue in Osler's voice.

This book lived on my wish list for a few months before I finally got around to buying it, but I'm glad I did. My only regret is that there will be no further adventures with Devon and Rachel. They live now, to borrow a phrase, only in our memories.

If you were a child in the early 1970's you might remember a short lived show called star lost. We'll this is the original idea for the pilot, and it really shows what the show could have been had it been taken seriously by the network.

The current (six) reviews of Phoenix Without Ashes listed here seem to be reviews of Edward Bryant's novelization of Mr. Ellison's script, not the graphic novel. The pen name Ellison used for the TV series was Cornwainer Bird. And the idea of people in a closed universe-type of story has been utilized in a number of books besides Orphans of the Sky -- Starship by Brian Aldiss, and Captive Universe by Harry Harrison, for instance.

I've seen only the first two issues of the original comic series, but am about to get the hardback collection. What I've seen so far of the story looks to be a faithful adaptation. My rating is based on what I've read so far.

With the right folks involved, it could indeed be a fantastic mini-series for TV.

There was this TV show in the 1970's, shot on crappy video tape, on a crappy sets, that told the sci-fi story of a ship carrying biospheres of the last survivors from earth, seeking a new home in a distant star system. The story centered on a Devon, an outcast in one of the biospheres based on Amish society, who discovers the truth of the situation: Their world is not the whole world, they are in a great spaceship, some accident has occurred and killed the crew of that ship, and it is off course, doomed to slam into a star in about five years if the course is not corrected. It was called Starlost, created by some guy named Codrwainer Bird, and though it was sloppy and slow, there was such a great idea in it that you still watched it, wondering what the genesis of the story was, and how it came to be this disaster.

Well, it turns out Harlen Ellison was "Cordwain Bird", that his script for the Starlost was mangled and ruined by executives on the show to the point where he would not let them put his name on the screen. Yet his original script won some major awards in 1974. Back in 1978 sci-fi author Edward Bryant wanted to get that original story out to fans of Ellison who wondered after Starlost, and Phoenix Without Ashes was the result. Now hard to find, this book - blessed by Ellison and containing a lengthy and fascinating treaty from Harlen on the business of making Starlost - is that award winning story we never saw.

It is a great read, dealing more with Devon and his love, Rachel, fighting against a closed society to see the truth. In the book, Devon finds the hatch to the ship accidentally, must go through greater tribulations than the series allowed to discover the truth of the Ark, and generally creates characters of actual depth (where the TV series seemed to use cookie-cutter good-guy bad-guy stereotypes). This would have been a great TV show. Perhaps an HBO mini-series in the original eight two-hour part idea Ellison wanted to create. It is a revealing read for followers of Starlost, and a fun read for sci-fi fans in general.

For Christmas season 2010, a graphic novel of this story will finally be created, authored by Ellison himself. I have to say, I have already pre-ordered it with excitement!

This is obviously, to put it politely, "inspired by" a Heinlein novel called Orphans of the Sky... a good short novel, by the way. Ellison has essentially lifted the idea and expanded upon it, but really shouldn't get a lot of credit for the idea. Not original at all.