“Roller Ball Murder”

Care to join me for a quick walk down memory lane?

I was in third grade, I think, when Rollerball came out in theaters. Just about every boy in my class of eight-year-olds somehow saw that R-rated futuristic dystopic sports flick. Everybody but me. But that didn’t stop me from playing some crazy sort of low-violence version of it on the playground, analyzing the game with my friends, drawing pictures of it in art class.

A few years later I saw the paperback on one of the shelves in the off-limits den of the father of one of my chums. After securing his approval to temporarily borrow the book without his dad’s knowledge, I took it home and read the story – riveted – in about an hour. Then, to my disgust and incomprehension, I realized that none of the other stories in the book had anything to do with James Caan rolling around a rink smashing guys heads in and avoiding motorcyclists with spiky gloves and speeding metallic bowling balls.

You see, “Roller Ball Murder” is an approximate 5,500-word short story. (I counted the words on one page and multiplied it by all the pages in the story.) The other dozen stories are, well, other non-related stories author William Harrison published in other periodicals in the years between 1966 and 1973. “Roller Ball Murder” just happened to be made into a moderately-successful mid-70s movie two years later. None of the other stories made it to the big screen as far as I can tell, though Mr. Harrison, who died pretty recently after a lengthy career, later had another story cinematized.

After a gap of some thirty-five years, I finally re-read it. (In that time I must’ve seen the movie two or three times, though never in its entirety. And I didn’t see the remake a few years back on advice of a couple thousand movie reviewers.)

What did I think?

Well, it kinda held up over the years. Much more so than the 1975 movie does.

I am of two minds concerning the story. On the one hand (forgive the transition from brains to hands), the setting of the story is ingenious. Though its most likely not the first story to mutate the American obsession with sports into something dangerous, deadly, and all-consuming, I am at a loss to think of anything before that reached such a large audience. The mechanics of the game, going outward from the players, the rules, the teams and the league to the society it flourishes in, is pure perfection to my mind.

In fact, only two novels in my long experience with science fiction come close. For the dystopia elements, as well as the mindset of the players, the societal structure of teams, a league, a hooked society, 1975’s Killerbowl by Gary K. Wolf is right up there. Killerbowl is a perversion of the sport of football. For a completely unique and addicting game – rules and strategy and all that – I’d recommend Jack Vance’s Trullion: Alastor 2262, a futuristic novel that involves a game called hussade, a bizarre sport kinda like field hockey played atop a labyrinth obstacle course that has some primitive ritualistic behavior thrown in for good measure (i.e., stealing the ring of a virgin’s dress).

Anyway, the sport of “Roller Ball Murder” gripped me.

But on the other hand, I was somewhat disappointed with the way the story unfolded. Not so much how the hero, Jonathan E, how his disillusionment with the Game. It came from a weird place where I felt the writing should be a higher level. Not as “pulpy,” if I’m making any sense. Though this is not to disparage “pulp” writing – which I love – or Mr. Harrison’s. It was just the odd reverse déjà vu that intuited to me that when I last read this story, it packed a more powerful punch.

Or perhaps I need to face the fact I’m not an eleven-year-old boy anymore, and the golden age of Science Fiction has passed me by.

There are twelve more stories in the anthology, and I will get to the all, eventually. I scanned a couple of “first lines”, a quick test to gauge my interest, and quickly realized my interest is engaged.

Grade: A / B. (The whole setting/mechanics thing.)