Over the Edge/An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  Curiously, there was a time when I thought the core of fandom was basically good people; it was only the fringes who were dangerous…. I’m not willing to believe that any more. I’m not willing to be as accessible to fandom as I used to be. To do that would be to subject the writer inside to the kind of shitstorms that produced the slump in the first place…. Since I left the fans behind, I have become the writer I want to be.

  Not just to writers comes this unwanted attention. Ask any one of a dozen artists whose names have appeared on Hugo ballots the past ten years how they respond to their paintings being stolen from the art show exhibition rooms, no matter how tough and wary the Security Guards; ask them how swell they feel when the fat fan scrutinizes the minimum bid on a painting and turns to the creator to snarl, “Who the hell d’ya think you are, Frank Frazetta?” ask them how their hearts sank when they got back the unsold artwork after the convention and found one of the oils had been slashed, how they felt that there were footprints on the black-and-white sketches.

  But don’t ask Tim Kirk about conventions, because his face is a mask of sorrow. He hasn’t been to a convention in more than nine years and, if he’s lucky, he won’t have to attend another one. He’s more than disenchanted. He’s forlorn about what fandom appears to be in his eyes these days. He won’t use the word pathetic, he prefers bathetic. But he knows that whatever pinnacles of artistic achievement he has scaled, or yet will scale, it has been in spite of fans and their “support.” Because all they ever required of him was that he draw cute and harmless five-finger exercises. (By the thousands, for fanzines, who never paid him a dime.) Tim doesn’t berate fans, or put them down, or rail against them. He doesn’t say what I’m saying here in public. He knows better, as do so many other artists and writers—who seem to fear this loving cadre of vampire fans—not to stir the pot.

  But if you catch him late in the evening, when he’s other than his usual quiet, charming self, he’ll make it clear that the worst thing fans did to him was deny him the challenge of being as complete an artist as he wanted to be. Perhaps it’s not their fault—they like what they like, and they want more and more of it, without change, without growth, without experimentation—but if an artist has a responsibility to his craft, then it doesn’t seem uncommon to expect the audience that also demands the artist’s attention to show some sort of responsibility to the artist.

  From Gregory Benford:

  The oddest incident I recall is a fellow who sent along the predictable idea for a novel, with the usual deal: you write it, split the money with me. When I sent it back, unread, he replied with a warning—not that I shouldn’t use the idea myself in fiction, but rather, a demand that he’d better not see me publishing research on this idea in the scientific literature!

  He honestly thought his notion was Deep Stuff, and I, the sinister scientist, would ache to enhance my skinny publication list with a milestone paper on the wonderful whatsit.

  Ah well.

  Ah well, indeed. The heartfelt sigh, the resigned shake of the head, and the dismaying certainty that the variety of these individual lunacies is uncountable. If they don’t get us with the compendium of horrors already explicated, they do it like this…

  From Spider Robinson:

  Total stranger calls up from “somewhere in California” at 2 a.m. Says he’s been thinking hard about suicide, and wants to know, is there really a Callahan’s Place, and if so how do I get there, I have to know, tonight. Five minutes after the conversation ended, of course, I figured out just how I should have played it: told him yes, The Place is real, given him a set of bogus directions to anywhere on Long Island, and hoped that on his way across the continent he ran into something that cheered him up. But I am not a trained crisis-call jockey or suicide counselor; what I did on the spur of the moment was what any jerk would have done. You make your own Callahan’s Place wherever you go, always darkest before the dawn, a year from now you’ll look back on this and laugh, why don’t you tell me a little about what’s bugging you and maybe we can find a way out together…

  He hung up abruptly.

  My firm belief is that he either died or tried to, very hard, within the ensuing fifteen minutes. I’ll never know. I don’t even have a first name for him. I went through changes the next few weeks. What I came away with was anger. Because I once entertained that guy for an idle hour, he repaid me by dropping his entire karma, too heavy for him to heft, onto my lap, while making sure I’d have no place to put it.

  Big surprise, Spider. That’s standard operating procedure for this kind of emotional vampire. I wish I had a quarter for every “suicide” who has called me…and always at an indecent, inconvenient hour. And they never tell you who they are, they only want to whimper and moan about their unfortunate state of existence. The first hundred or so times it happened to me, I got all puffed up with human compassion and a sense of responsibility, and tried to talk them down.

  Perhaps it helped, maybe it didn’t. Who’s ever to know? Because these wee hours parasites haven’t the common decency ever to let you know, later, that you were of any value. They just flap in, unload their shit, make you feel awful, and then cut off. These days I have a very different manner with such intruders on my privacy.

  But that was only the beginning of Spider’s letter. He had a second story about another looneytune who appeared at his door. And then he offered this charming (and absolutely emblematic) delineation of the Fan Mentality at full flower, the stone fan being itself in excelsis:

  Jeanne and I are at a con; some fans announce they’re taking us to dinner. Great, we’re broke, and we’re starving. So we drive, and we drive, and we drive. An hour, and Jeanne, as even-tempered a woman as ever lived, is threatening mutiny if we don’t arrive soon. I should have guessed, from the way the driver kept giggling. An hour and a quarter after we had eyes to eat, the three-car caravan of fans pulls up in front of a roadside beanery called, you guessed it, Callahan’s. The food was awful, the prices were horrendous, the service slovenly, and when the check came we learned for the first time that no one had figured on paying for our dinner. I mean, we’re all fans together, right?

  We did not pay for our dinner—we couldn’t! We were broke and living off editorial charity for the weekend. But it was an unpleasant moment, complicated by the infuriating awareness that they had done all this to show us how much they loved us…

  And he went on to deliver up a few more pain in the ass stories, ending his letter like this:

  Hope all this is of help to you. Frankly, I don’t hold out much hope that anything can smarten the little darlings up.

  The list of authors and artists who have been stiffed with bounced checks for their services at fan-engineered conventions and media “spectaculars” is as endless, as well-tenanted as is the list of writers and artists who have had fans mooch meals, lodging and loans from them. Whether such productions have been conferences cobbled together by hubris-surfeited fans at colleges they attended (who rigged the gig just so they could meet “their favorite author”), or at hotels in large cities, whether as Star Trek conclaves or as comic book/movie-tv/science fiction gatherings. Writers as prominent as Sturgeon, Herbert, Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Simak, Bova, Moorcock and Sheckley (to name just the few whose unprofitable experiences come quickly to mind) have found themselves lured at one time or another to some speaking engagement or convention that was nothing more than a demented wish-fulfillment in the litter-filled head of an adolescent fan, have found themselves having lost actual speaking gigs or trips because they thought they were committed for a job that never materialized, have found themselves at one time or another holding bad paper laid on them by a sweet-faced fan.

  Joe Haldeman wrote:

  One recurrent problem is that I write hard-science sf but am no scientist, and so occasionally screw up. There are legions of weirdos out there who read with a calculator in one scabrous paw…. There have been a couple of potentially dangerous crazies. I got a scrawled note after T
he Forever War came out, congratulating me for “giving it to the Jews.” All I can figure out is that one of the first people to die in the book is named Rabi, a Muslim name. But that guy probably sees Hitler’s face in his Rice Krispies…. One strange time a drunkish fan followed me around a convention rather late at night, trying to talk me into playing poker. I finally acquiesced, and three or four of us went up to his room, where he produced fancy chips and cards. At that time I showed him that I only had two dollars’ cash on me, two antes. He was outraged and actually pulled a knife. I took it away from him easily enough…but it was one of those experiences that’s more scary in retrospect than it is when it happens.

  I mean, Charlie Manson was a science fiction fan. I’m not so worried about the crazy letters and the occasional fan who starts sputtering at you in public. I’m worried about the quiet guy with a hair up his ass and a pistol in his pocket. Face it, Harlan; we get up on enough stages and sooner or later that guy is going to be in the audience. Let’s hope he can’t shoot straight.

  He was in one of my audiences, Joe. He shot straight enough. Remind me to tell you that story some time.

  That’s one of the stories I can tell. There are many more anecdotes and horrors I’ve been asked not to pass along. There are stories I’ve been told “off the record,” in strictest confidence, sotto voce and sub rosa, stories whose tellers could not stop themselves from imparting the fine news, but who, as they completed their tale of woe, suddenly realized this would see print. And they asked that their names be withheld. These are stories I cannot verify…from sources who insist on remaining unnamed….

  Such as the very famous older writer, a golden age star name, who took a fan in to stay at his home, who only asked the fan to baby-sit when the writer and his wife had to go out, who didn’t discover till weeks after the fan had left, that his “guest” had sodomized the writer’s eleven-year-old granddaughter.

  Such as the fantasy author who had written a strongly sexual novel, who was spat upon at a convention.

  Such as the elderly writer who was forced to move from her apartment to escape the attentions of three fans who would not stop calling her, writing her, and coming to her house unannounced.

  And more, and more, and more. But this becomes only the heaping on of redundancies. To what end? To the end of buttressing the reality of what writers suffer with many of their “loving fans” so solidly that not even the smallest rathole of rationalization—such as the “Well, Ellison is such a visible target, he deserves what he gets” non sequitur—is left to the guilt-ridden apologists who will bristle and rage at this essay.

  After I had delivered this material at Westercon 37 in Portland, in 1984, I received a great many letters from pros and fans, horrified by the extent of this problem.

  How about this, from Simon Hawke:

  Not long ago, my agent was trying to sell something of mine to an editor who shall go nameless. (And I will not divulge the name, don’t ask.) Keep in mind, this is an editor I’ve never met or spoken to, but one who knows that Simon Hawke used to write under another name. (I am a very different person now in many ways. Older, wiser, calmer and more philosophical about life’s various disappointments.) This editor took one look at the proposal, at my name on it, and—I have on very good authority from someone who was in the office—rejected it without even bothering to read it. Apparently, this editor was once on a train, en route to a convention in Boston, and recalled a group of female fans, sitting at the other end of the car and talking loudly enough that she could hear them, discussing my “sexual excesses,” rather like a group of high school girls comparing notes, apparently in so detailed and graphic a manner that she was so put off, she remembered it years later and it influenced her opinion of me. I was not someone she wanted to do business with. And the reason I know this is that she mentioned the incident in the office, where my acquaintance overheard.

  Now, at the risk of seeming overly self-effacing, while I have, in the past, occasionally gone to bed with someone I met at a convention, I am not Warren Beatty, nor am I De Sade, and I am not exactly John Holmes. In short, I am an average lover at best, I like to think considerate, affectionate, and giving, but by no stretch of the imagination am I a sexual athlete. Not to put too fine a point on it, I don’t know who those women were, and while it’s certainly possible I may have met one or more of them, perhaps even been intimate with one of them, though I cringe at the thought, I certainly did not do anything so out of the ordinary that it would excite any comment. Certainly nothing that would disgust anyone. And yet, though this incident does not begin to approach the sort of awful things you spoke of, it tarnished my reputation in that editor’s eyes and it cost me a sale.

  Like many people, I used to think that you attracted that sort of thing, unintentionally, by virtue of your highly visible profile and your aggressive, up-close-and-personal demeanor. I was wrong, as you so demonstrably proved by citing those who gave your letter a serious response. I had dropped out of sight, not going to cons or even speaking to editors, letting my agent handle all my business, anxious to put to rest, once and for all, the sort of gossip that had been floating over my head like a Sword of Damocles.

  Mildred Downey Broxon wrote, in part, “That was a zinger of a speech at Westercon, and was the sole topic of conversation for many hours afterward, at least among the shaken and drained group in which I found myself.

  “Your inclusion of ‘testimonials’ from other sufferers added verisimilitude. It could, after all, be argued that your high visibility and assertive personality make you a natural target; but the evidence of other, widely-assorted victims was damning.”

  She said something even more interesting, and I’ll get to that in a moment; but the authentication of what I’ve set down here, by the testimonial of the editor, parallels my actually displaying the letters at that Guest of Honor banquet. This time I didn’t want the alleged Mr. Osborns of fandom to have a free shot at invalidating the message, muddying the water, diverting the focus…by calumny heaped on the messenger. Even if I cop to all the ugliness rumor and gossip lay at my door, even if I am as beastly as the fan mill suggests, how do the apologists explain all the rest of this litany?

  As Malzberg said, the ninety-five percent of you out there who are decent, sane, rational and courteous, those of you horrified at these revelations, will not know what to make of it all, because you don’t act that way and you won’t be able to fathom how others can act that way and think they’re cute or anything less than loathsome. But the five percent—a few of whom will no doubt appear in the letters column in a forthcoming issue to explain just why writers do deserve to be treated like shit, how we would be nowhere if it weren’t for their valiant support of our careers by expenditure of their hard-earned pennies, how we have no right complaining and should be slavishly grateful for even vicious notice—that five percent will continue in its brutish ways.

  And after I delivered the material you’ve just read (which has been augmented by additional contributions from writers whose replies reached me after the Westercon, or who were solicited recently for a few updatings), here’s how I ended my Guest of Honor speech:

  (I said:) “I’ve saved the best for last. Of all the things that have been done to me—and I have only scratched the surface here—and of all the things that have been done to other writers and artists, the prizewinning monstrousness, the anecdote that I think will put the last nail in the testament, comes from Alan Dean Foster.

  “I’ve saved it for last, because not even the most vicious detractor can find a bad word to say about Alan Dean Foster. He is as decent and courteous a man as one can hope to meet.

  “You ain’t gonna believe this one:”

  Dear Harlan,

  In re yours of the 5th. I have only one incident that might suit your purposes and I still haven’t quite figured it out. I was heading back to my hotel room in the company of one of the con staff, after delivering the guest of honor speech at the past Okon, wh
en someone yelled, “Alan Foster?” and I turned around and they hit me in the face with a paper cup full of warm vomit.

  To this day what puzzles me is not the attack itself, which one comes to expect after a while, but the type of mind that not only could conceive of such a thing but actually find amusement in the preservation of its own vomit for purposes of using it to assault another person. Someone had to throw up carefully into a cup and then carry it around with them while in the process of searching me out. To me, that’s infinitely sicker than actually throwing the stuff.

  Oh, gentle reader, you should have seen that banquet hall as I read from Alan’s letter. The room was packed—if I recall correctly, something in the range of fifteen or sixteen hundred attendees at that Westercon—and delivering this talk took an hour and a half. As time went by, and name after name came before them, as incident of awfulness followed incident upon anecdote, the room fell silent…the timorous, nervous laughter that had accompanied the telling of the first few stories, even that had ceased. At one table a woman was crying, her head laid down across her arms on the tabletop. At another table a man kept striking the padded seat of his chair, over and over, hardly seeming to know he was doing it. A woman was in the rear, moaning stop it, stop it, please stop it. A man standing against a wall had his eyes closed, swaying, rocking, back and forth. And from everywhere in that large ballroom, when I read Alan’s letter, came the gasps of disbelief. At last, at final measure, now they couldn’t deny the underlying message of the speech. All had been preamble. Now they were drained, horrified to their shoetops, stony-eyed and pale, a great room filled with decent human beings who had to admit, at last, that their ranks contained a few of those who are unforgivable.