An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  …and having put down these words by scientists far more knowledgeable than I, will urge you to get hold of this book. Knowing the usually slovenly practices of many bookstores, when it comes to ordering a book not presently vying with Judith Krantz or Harold Robbins for a spot on the bestseller lists, it behooves me to advise you that Jerome’s book can be ordered through the publisher: Prometheus Books, 700 E. Amherst Street, Buffalo, New York 14215. It was published in December of 1977, runs 233 wonderful pages, and costs $14.95—which is a chunk of change, I’ll agree, but is one of those books into which you’ll dip again and again, especially to get rid of the twinks, flakes and oddballs who ask you, “What’s your sign?”

  (I make a practice of answering that question, at parties or when confronted by people who put themselves instantly beyond any consideration of friendship by the mere asking, of saying, “I’m an orphan. I was left on the steps of a foundling home. I don’t know when my birthday is; so I celebrate it every day of the year.” Or I simply lie and tell them I was born in September or February. Then I let them run those dumb numbers about how they absolutely knew I was a Pisces or a Leo or whatever because of this trait I manifest or that attitude I display. And then when they’re all puffed up like pouter pigeons with their perceptive insight, I knock them in the head with my actual birthdate. Try it sometime. Watch how they back and fill and blame it on you that they made asses of themselves.)

  Now you may feel that attacking something as patently ludicrous as astrology is a waste of our time here; but I submit that the undercurrent of belief in the irrational that astrology contributes to our society speaks directly to the scientists’ assertion that such things keep us from facing the pragmatic realities of our complex and demanding lives, that in a time of widespread education, of availability to everyone of the data that tell us how the world really runs, relying on bugaboos like astrology is one more manifestation of our refusal to deal with the materials at hand, to put our fate in the grip of irrational, non-existent forces.

  And in so doing, we become powerless. We tend to feel inferior, helpless, manipulated. And we become pawns. We find ourselves hustled into jobs, lifestyles, relationships, situations we despise, which debase or use us. And as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

  Meaning: there is a lot less roll-of-the-dice in what happens to us than we care to admit. There is a power inside us, having nothing to do with The Force or Zen or God or any of the other names we give to self-determination, that can help us order lives and rule our own destinies. It is called, surprise surprise, intelligence and reasoning.

  Look: I know what you’re going through. You’re not alone. They’re all around you, trying to divert your attention, trying to convince you that you can’t make it alone, without their help. If it’s not the clowns on the religious television network haranguing you that you aren’t decent enough or clever enough to get through life nobly on your own without slavish bondage to an ancient bearded myth, it’s some peer-group Mephistopheles telling you ludes or freebasing is just what you need to get your head straight. The lame love to try leading the halt. Misery loves company.

  And television and movies—the two most effective handmaidens of institutionalized obeisance to the existing power-structure—don’t give you much help. F’rinstance, consider these two items:

  (From the AP wire, out of Detroit, dated 16 December 1977): “A Detroit newspaper thought it had an offer few could reject—$500 if a family agreed to turn off its television set for one month.

  “The Detroit Free Press approached 120 families with the offer. And 93 turned it down.

  “The paper said it was trying to study ‘television addiction.’

  “Only 27 of the families that were approached agreed to exchange their TV viewing for the $500, the paper reported. A typical response came from a Romulus (Mich.) woman, who said: ‘My husband would never do it. He comes home from work and sits down in front of the TV. He gets up twice—once to eat and once to go to bed.’

  “The newspaper selected five families that agreed to accept money in exchange for television and sent TV repairmen into their homes on Sept. 19 and 20 to disconnect their sets.

  “The paper reported these results:

  “Two people started chain-smoking—one going from one to 2 ½ packs a day.

  “While some children played together peacefully, others became cranky, bored and begged to have the set turned back on. Most of the fathers said they got to know their children better, men and women alike said they had gone back to reading books for the first time in years, and four families said they were drawn closer by the experience.”

  Huddling against the terror of ostracism, no doubt.

  (From the Los Angeles Times, datelined 8 January 1978):

  “…‘the movie house has become the sacred church’ for the pseudoscientific faiths, said Paul Kurtz, head of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

  “The movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind strikes Kurtz as ‘extremely religious,’ involving ‘semigods from outer space.’ Kurtz believes the entertainment media are abetting ‘attacks on rationality’ by presenting various speculations as scientifically possible….

  “Finding the terms adequately to cover the range of new beliefs is difficult, Kurtz admits, but he lists three categories:

  “1: Space-age religions. By-products of actual ventures into space—UFO-ology, astrology revival, Scientology and the genre pioneered by Erich Von Daniken’s now-almost-universally-debunked book CHARIOTS OF THE GODS.

  “2: Psychic phenomena, the interest in claims of ESP, precognition, prophecies, psychokinesis, levitation, out-of-body experiences, Seth-ism, reincarnation, Edgar Cayce-ism, etc.

  “3: Occult faiths, including exorcisms, devil cults, neo-Oriental religions and psychological interest in Eastern wisdom.

  “Kurtz (a philosophy professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo and editor of The Humanist magazine) said he does not believe that the born-again movement and the pseudoscientific faiths are entirely separate.”

  And that was in a time prior to Jim Jones and the Guyana slaughter, a time prior to the power-mad decay of Synanon that turned a once-dynamic force for social improvement into a paranoid nightmare, in a time before the sect calling itself The Church was revealed to be a hype providing rake-off to fund a racquetball factory in mainland China owned by the son of the founder. All examples of following new Messiahs. Born-again, duped again. There’re a million suckers born every year.

  Chance favors the prepared mind.

  And the world is teeming with sharpers who want your mind as clouded with silly stuff as they can shovel into it, so you can be manipulated more easily. In short, they want you as uneducated as possible.

  Which leads me to the two terrific items by Isaac Asimov.

  The first is Isaac’s entertaining and exhaustive treatise titled EXTRATERRESTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS (Crown, $10), which is the very latest thinking on the possibility that there’s someone out there. For any but the pimple-brained, this book should, once and for all, shine all the light one ever needs on that fascinating contemplation. I won’t go into any lengthier support and praise of Dr. Asimov’s closely reasoned work, save to suggest you get this one, too, along with ASTROLOGY DISPROVED, as a bulwark against the nuttiness spread by your friends, unscrupulous tricksters, parochial know nothings and perennial adolescents who want to share their fear of living in the world as we perceive it.

  The second item from Isaac goes straight to the heart of how dangerous it is in these times to be ignorant of what’s really going on, in politics, in the sciences, in cultural and social changes. He wrote it as one of the regular “My Turn” op-ed columns in Newsweek (21 January 1980).

  Every one of you should read this piece. I’ll give you a couple of snippets in a moment, but if you want a photocopy of the entire thing, send a stamped and self-addressed envelope to me, care of Future Life, and mark on th
e outside in bold print ASIMOV ESSAY. I’ll make sure the editors forward them to me, I’ll reproduce Isaac’s column and fire one back to you free. A public service defying the Forces of Dumbness.

  But just to whet your appetite, and to promulgate further the message of this month’s column, here’s one paragraph:

  “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

  It’s that old saw that everyone is entitled to his/her opinion. In my own wonderful elitist fashion I’ve never accepted that for a moment. What I will accept is that everyone is entitled to his/her informed opinion.

  Chance favors the prepared mind.

  Knowledge, education, use of reason, constructive cynicism. Those are what keep us from becoming like the man I saw on the news the other night, the item I mentioned earlier.

  We’re having horrendous busing problems here in Los Angeles. All those hypocritical lip-service Liberals who condemned the Deep South for its racism, for keeping the blacks down, for not integrating, are showing themselves to be a solid part of the racist tradition of this country. As long as de po’ nigguhs was over there in Watts and South Central L.A., getting shitty educations (if any at all), everyone out here could be as bold in their speech as they cared to be. But the minute Judge Paul Egley said all them there lily-white urchins had to share schools with darkies…they suddenly went crazy.

  And on tv the other night, at a meeting held in one of the San Fernando Valley all-white schools, where a lottery was being held to determine which half of the students would be bused, somebody’s father got up, screaming, ran to the podium and threw the baskets of name-slips all over the floor. He was roundly cheered by the rest of the audience, except for the few rational parents who realized, in a way that commends their nobility to our attention, that the discomforts and problems of busing are one of the prices we as a nation must bravely pay for hundreds of years of enslavement of a large segment of our people.

  That man is a racist.

  He doesn’t know it.

  He can rationalize it any way he chooses—usually on the basis of not wanting to put his kids through any travail—but the core recognition is that he has inherited a racist attitude from the overwhelming weight of American historical practice.

  He is uneducated. His mind is unprepared for the tide of history. And he will suffer for it. Worse, he will make his kids suffer, and his community. Multiplied by thousands, he is a living example of the ugliness of the human spirit that prevails when we live with superstition, gossip, myths, corrupt misconceptions about the state of the pragmatic universe.

  There’s only one danger attendant on such an attitude, of course. And it is that we as a species will drive ourselves right into oblivion.

  But then, the cockroaches probably wouldn’t invent the equivalent of The Love Boat, Laverne & Shirley, or The 700 Club.

  Interim memo

  Originally, there were to have been sixty entries for columns in this volume, but actually only fifty-nine pieces included. Not too perplexing, the explanation. Installment number six, during the year An Edge In My Voice appeared in Future Life, was a 5000 word essay on the NASA Voyager I flyby of Saturn, 11 November 1980. It was my thought, when assembling this collection, to exclude that entry as it was previously published in my story-and-essay collection STALKING THE NIGHTMARE (Phantasia Press, 1982; Berkley Books, 1984). Rationale: from time to time I’ve heard the distant bitching of a very few of the most picayune collectors of my books, to the effect that I “recycle” stories from book to book. This kvetching usually boiled down to their not understanding that ALONE AGAINST TOMORROW (1971) was intended as a retrospective of work I’d done to that date; the inclusion in DEATHBIRD STORIES (1975) of previously-collected stories was pursuant to the completion of a cycle of works I’d written on the subject of “new gods”; but no more than half a dozen other—of the thousand stories I’ve written—were duplicated in a second collection. To mollify the shrikes I’ve made a conscious effort to remove all duplications from reissues of my books. And so, with the exception of DEATHBIRD STORIES as noted above (ALONE AGAINST TOMORROW has now been rendered out-of-print and I do not intend to allow it to be republished), and a 35-year retrospective titled THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON (published in 1987), everything appears only once in my published oeuvre. Yet despite my determination to pursue this once-only policy, after AN EDGE IN MY VOICE went to the publisher I was urged by my editor Kay Reynolds, and others who had read the full manuscript, to replace the Saturn flyby column. I pointed out that the essay had been reprinted in Astronomy magazine in August of 1981, and that it was very much in print in STALKING THE NIGHTMARE, and I felt uneasy about including it here. Don’t be a bigger jerk than nature intended, I was told by Kay and Gil and Ed Bryant and Sarah. But mostly by Kay. Why force anyone who is curious about that excluded column to buy another book? she said. Because I need the money? I suggested coyly. Not nice, they responded, and hit me with heavy ethical objects. And so, braving the displeasure of the few to win the approbation of the many—thus equipping me with the basic attitude for being a politician—I have replaced Installment 6, and you get every last one of the columns in this cycle. (You also get a late-entry bonus, Installment 61; but that’s another story, to be told at the conclusion of this journey.)

  INSTALLMENT 6: 13 NOVEMBER 80

  PUBLISHED 20 JANUARY 81 FUTURE LIFE #25 COVER-DATED MARCH

  Saturn, November 11th

  And we beheld what no human eyes before ours had ever seen.

  The world outside was strictly alien. Heavy fog had been slithering across Southern California for two days. Jack the Ripper would have felt right at home. A seventy-car daisy chain crackup on the Golden State Freeway had killed seven people the night before. Creeping through the hills past La Cañada-Flintridge, it was a scene Chesley Bonestell might have painted thirty years ago to illustrate an extrapolative article about the surface of Titan.

  The time for patience with artists’ renditions was at an end: I was on my way to see the actual surface of Titan. What no human eyes had ever beheld.

  Tuesday, November 11th, 1980. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. NASA’s Voyager I was on its way to its closest approach with Saturn; with Titan and Tethys; with Mimas and Enceladus and Dione; with Rhea and Hyperion and Iapetus.

  In the Von Kármán Center, where the press hordes had begun clogging up since 7 AM, it was hurlyburly and business as usual. The women in the mission photo room were several decibels above hysterical: nothing but hands reaching in over the open top of the Dutch door demanding photo packets.

  The press room was chockablock with science editors and stringers and lay reporters fighting to use the Hermes manuals lined up six deep. They were all there: the guys from Science News and Omni, the women from Scientific American and Time; heavyweight writers with their own word processors and Japanese correspondents festooned with cameras; ABC and NBC and CBS and Reuters and the AP. The stench of territorial imperative hangs thick in the crowd. I slip behind an empty typewriter and begin writing this column. An enormous shadow blocks my light. I look up over my shoulder at He Who Looms. “That’s my typewriter,” he says, of a machine placed there by JPL. What he means is that he got to it a little earlier than anyone else and has squatter’s rights, as opposed to a sharing configuration. I smile. “Need it right now? Or can I have about ten minutes to get some thoughts down?” He doesn’t smile. “I’m Mutual Radio,” he says; in his umbrage that is surely explanation enough. My eyes widen with wonder. “Are you indeed? I always wondered what Mutual Radio looked like. And a nice job they did when they turned you out.” I pull the paper out of the Hermes and vow that tomorrow I’ll schlep my own machine in. They were standing in line at the coffee urns. Everyone looked important.

 
; Everyone was watching to make sure no latest photo slipped past. And the JPL press liaisons were hiding the nifty Saturn buttons.

  And everywhere the talk was of the mysterious “spokes” radiating out across Saturn’s rings, of the ninety-plus ring discovery, of the inexplicable darkness covering Titan’s northern hemisphere.

  In the course of human events, far fewer are real than we are led to believe. The staged press conference, the artificial happening, the protesting crowd that wanders somnolently until the television cameras cast an eye and zombie walkers begin chanting, waving their fists. Planned, choreographed, manipulated—to make us believe great things are going down. But they are not. It is sound, it is fury, and as usual it signifies nothing. But occasionally there are genuine moments during which history is being made.

  This was written by one of The New Yorker’s unsigned editorial hands a number of years ago:

  This is notoriously a time of crises, most of them false. A crisis is a turning point, and the affairs of the world don’t turn as radically or as often as the daily newspapers would have us believe. Every so often, though, we’re stopped dead by a crisis that we recognize at once as the genuine article; we recognize it not by its size (false crises can be made to look as big as real ones) but because in the course of it, for a measurable, anguished period—sometimes only minutes, sometimes hours, rarely as much as a day—nothing happens. Truly nothing. It is the moment of stasis between a deed that has been performed and must be responded to and the deed that will respond to it. At a false turning point, we nearly always know, within limits, what will happen next; at a true turning point, we not only know nothing, we know (something much more extraordinary and more terrifying) that nobody knows. Truly nobody.

  There are times when the world collectively holds its breath. The assassination of John Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the day the Vietnam War ended, the Manson family murders, the Hungarian uprising in November 1956, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Real things were happening, the world was changing; the breath paused in our bodies.