An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  Putting the results together, the Voyager team has tentatively come up with an awesome mechanism operating within the ring, namely, electrical discharges—lightning—occurring over tens of thousands of kilometers.

  The Voyager was literally being shot at by Saturn as it flew past. The “spokes” seem to be—hold your breath—enormous linear particle accelerators!

  As best I can explain it to you (and most of this comes from Dick Hoagland), here’s what causes this phenomenon that cannot be explained within the parameters of known celestial mechanics.

  The density of material in the B, or center, ring is the highest. The highest number of, literally, icebergs per cubic mile. Because of the inevitability of Keplerian mechanics, the bergs closest to Saturn are orbiting faster. Any ice object with an eccentric orbit, even a few meters of eccentricity, will collide with other bergs. Because of the brittleness and cold of this ice they naturally fracture producing, well, producing chips off the old block. Then those fragments collide and chip again and again, getting smaller and smaller. These collisions continue in a never-ending rubble-producing process.

  But. When this occurs in Saturn’s two-hour shadow, when the fragments sail out into sunlight the smallest particles—micron-size, perhaps—are charged up by interaction with solar ultraviolet light and, because like charges repel as any dummy clearly knows, they literally try to get away from the rings. Producing a levitating cloud of charged ice crystals elevated above the average ring plane who knows how far…several miles to several thousand miles.

  Grabbed by Saturn’s magnetic field (magnetic fields and electrical charges, Hoagland assures me, go hand-in-hand), they are lined up in a linear feature tens of thousands of kilometers long, stretching from the outer edge of B ring in toward Saturn. Straight and narrow as a flashlight beam. These appear in the optical images as “spokes” which rotate anomalously around the planet defying all explanation. At this moment.

  Give them a week more.

  And so these electrified ice crystals apparently discharge along the length of the spoke creating, in effect, the Solar System’s largest radio antenna as well as a natural linear particle accelerator.

  Even I, scientific illiterate, aware of the breakthroughs in particle physics that have come from such terrestrial plants as the Batavia, Illinois proton synchrotron, can extrapolate what it would mean to harness that “spoke” mechanism to aid us in discovering precisely of what matter is composed, how it works, how it came to be.

  Explain that to the feep who said, “So what?”

  I overload. I cannot contain any more new information. I pack it in and lie down and turn on the radio.

  The news is all taken up with how high the stock market has jumped with Reagan’s latest fiscal pronouncements. And the war between Iraq and Iran. I close my eyes and slap the button off on the radio.

  I sigh deeply. Ain’t we a wonderful species.

  Interim memo

  A couple of updates of material in this column. The Ennio Morricone Film Score Society seems to have gone out of business. The sf newsletter noted herein is now out of business. I’d enumerate those publications that have gone belly-up, but frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn. You shouldn’t be reading that crap, anyhow. It’ll break you out all over with pimples.

  INSTALLMENT 7: 1 JANUARY 81

  PUBLISHED 10 MARCH 81 FUTURE LIFE #26 COVER-DATED MAY

  Sitting here listening to an absolutely superb recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 in F-Sharp Minor, Opus 10 (1908), performed by The Sequoia String Quartet on a Nonesuch Digital pressing (D-79005). A miraculous series of musical entities that finally, in the fourth movement, surges into a kind of cosmic atonality. As appropriate for background as anything I might have selected to accompany the task of writing a column that replies to your many letters. I warn you, some of you are veering dangerously near to sanity in your remarks.

  As usual, most of you can’t follow simple directions. I specifically begged you not to write letters, to send postcards with your comments or questions simply and directly stated. So of course hordes of you wrote long and dithyrambic letters in envelopes that were cleverly sliced off when the nameless person at Future Life committed a federal offense by opening mail addressed to me with some sort of berserk guillotine machine. In future, chums, I’ll only answer post cards. Letters will be heaped immediately on a bonfire and you’ll miss out on getting that sick attention you all seem to need.

  Thank yous are herewith extended to the several hundred people who wrote in requesting the Asimov essay and followed the directions by enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope and the words ASIMOV ESSAY on the outside. Those have all gone off. I even returned the 15¢ to the lady who assured me in this life nobody gets nothin’ for nothin’. What a cynic. I told you it was a public service.

  And so to the mail at hand.

  Douglas Gray of Johnson City, New York was annoyed by the L-5 Society advertisement in Future Life #20, the first issue in which my column appeared. He took umbrage at the Society’s solicitation of funds to oppose the Moon Treaty. He made some very sensible observations about the arrogance of the human race in its desire to “colonize” space and compared it to the ethnocentrism of the European nations that “colonized” South America (for instance Spain, that “colonized” whole civilizations out of existence while introducing such cultural necessities as the Inquisition). He believes the Moon Treaty is a rational way to keep the lunar landscape from becoming yet another territorial imperative battlefield for the human race, and he asks my position on this question.

  I must confess I know less than I ought about such an important matter. I’ve tried wading through mountains of L-5 material, sent to me from every corner of the globe, but most of it is so badly written and obtuse that I have never been able to work up the sufficient interest to do my homework. I have a gut feeling that any organization that seriously tries to further the space program is an okay outfit, but in my reading I also get a resonance that I’ve detected when dealing with Scientologists, members of Mensa, players at Dungeons & Dragons and suchlike role-filling games, and true believers who know with a messianic fervor that science fiction is better than any other kind of literature. It occurs to me that even as mild a querulousness as that will net me hundreds of feverish letters from L-5 proselytizers attempting to “correct my thinking” as born-again types have tried to “correct my thinking.” I urge them not to bother. I’m not that firm in my concerns. Just sorta chatting idly about it, friends.

  Dozens of you, like Rick Eshbaugh of Greenfield, Wisconsin and Marc Russell of Los Angeles and Pat NoLastName in Minneapolis, have sent me lists of irrationalities to supplement the congeries I entered here several issues ago. I’m saving them all up for a later column.

  Dianne Channell of Santa Fe is a terrific human being who has subscribed, she says, because of my column. Her husband is also nifty, because he recommended Richard Hofstader’s excellent study ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE, which I commend to you. She also wanted the September through January issues of Future Life because her subscription started late and she wanted the columns she’d missed. Well, she’s not missing as many as she thought because Future Life isn’t published monthly, it’s published every seven weeks, or eight times a year, so An Edge in My Voice appeared in August, September, November, December and February. What this means in terms of what Ms. Channell is missing, I do not know. All I know for sure is that she should write to the subscription and back number fulfillment department where yet another nameless personage will lose her request. This is what we call one of life’s little challenges.

  Steven Philip Jones of Cedar Rapids, Iowa read a story of mine in another magazine, a story in which a writer tells his heirs to build dorm rooms so struggling young authors can live at his large home after he’s dead, where they can write in peace and seclusion. Mr. Jones writes me to ask if the place really exists, if it’s here at my house, and how he can take up residence. M
r. Jones seems to have trouble differentiating between fiction and reality. There are such places, of course, and they are called writers’ retreats or workshops, but one usually has to pay, or get a grant to live in such an operation. My home ain’t one of those. And though I usually have one or another of my writer-friends hanging out here in Ellison Wonderland, the operative word is friend. As sincere and talented and wonderful a person as Mr. Jones may be, I assure you that if he were to turn up at my door with a rucksack and a battered Royal portable, I would sic my gargoyles on him. I have spent many years finding my sanctuary, and I frankly don’t want it festooned with hungry writers.

  Peter & Kathleen in Seattle: I didn’t write “the taste for Armageddon,” whatever it is, and if I ever saw Ray Milland and Jane Wyman in The Second Time Around I have forgotten it.

  Clarice Dickey of Hartford, Connecticut asks me what music I listen to while writing. She read somewhere that I cannot write without music blaring. She asks if punk or New Wave is conducive to my working situation. First, she’s correct. I work to music, as indicated by the reference to Schoenberg at the top of this column. Second, with the exception of Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band, the Lamont Cranston Band and a little Elvis Costello, I outgrew rock a long time ago and find most of the shit being listened to today so devoid of craft or message that I would sooner listen to disco, which makes me wanna womit, so that answers that. (And again, I’ll get a thousand letters from wimps extolling the manifest virtues of the B-52’s or The Dead Kennedys or X or Red Crayola or whichever overnight hot flash has you drooling at the moment. And though I’ve been listening to and enjoying Captain Beefheart for more years than some of you have been extant, that does not mean I confuse the dreck Tower Records has stacked at point of entry with genuine artistry. So you need not write me trying to “correct my thinking.” Arthur Byron Cover spends many of his waking—and several of his sleeping—hours trying to get me to listen to groups who run the risk of being electrocuted by their own Fenders when the Clearasil smeared over their paws and faces carries the current. And one nuhdz for rock in my life is enough.)

  What I do listen to is primarily classical; a lot of old jazz heavy into Django Reinhardt, Bob Dorough, Ellington, Monk, all the early sides Miles cut on Prestige, Bird, Prez, Art Tatum; big band stuff from the Thirties and Forties; Moody Blues still holds up, Richie Havens, Return to Forever, Stevie Wonder, Mike Nesmith, Dave Grisman, Hubert Laws, Willie Nelson, Alan Price, Peter Allen; a lot of old Al Kooper stuff and a lot of old Gerry Mulligan cuts; Chick Corea, Dory Previn, Billy Joel, Dick Feller, Howard McGhee, Stephane Grappelli.

  But mostly I like classical music. I won’t run down the list, I’ll just recommend a special nifty album that I managed to luck onto recently that you will go nuts over, if your brains haven’t been turned to spackling compound by repeated exposure to The Germs, The Damned, Tortured Puppies or The Plasmatics. (These last four groups I got from Arthur Cover.) (My all-time favorite name for a group stands unchallenged, even with the monstrous inventiveness of the New Wave appellations. It is: JoJo & The Sixteen Screaming Niggers. Now that’s class!)

  The record I urge you to order—by mail is its only current availability—is a most unusual rendering of Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E Major, Poulenc’s Sonata and (this is a stunner) Bartok’s Roumanian Folk Dances (originally written for full orchestra) as performed by Tatsuo Sasaki on xylophone, with Howard Wells at the piano. I am not much one for “novelty” renditions of classical works—Tomita, for instance, bores my ass off—but Mr. Sasaki’s interpretation of the Bartok Dances is, simply put, astonishing. I have written two new stories to this music already, and if you crave a singular listening experience I cannot recommend highly enough this album (Microsonics CG003, $8.00 including postage, available directly from Tatsuo Sasaki, 5842 Henley Drive, San Diego, California 92120). You may use my name when ordering so the gentleman will know whence comes all this attention.

  But my best working-to music are the film scores of Ennio Morricone. You may know his sound from the Sergio Leone Italian westerns—A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, etc.—but you probably don’t know that he’s done almost five hundred film scores, songs, albums of background music, television tracks, arrangements, orchestrations, canonical and ecclesiastical works, full orchestra pieces for modern classicism, incidental music and what all. His “sound” ranges from the dramatic exuberance of, say, The Big Gundown, a 1967 Lee Van Cleef oater, to the exquisite loneliness of Terry Malick’s film Days of Heaven, for which work he was nominated for an Oscar. Morricone is my best companion when I’m deep in the world of what I’m writing.

  Which probably answers Ms. Dickey’s question more fully than she might have wanted. But you asked.

  George Andrews of Cleveland, Ohio writes to buttress my recommendation that you pay no attention to astrology; and he offers the Bible as support. He points out that in the Old Testament God says do not believe in astrologers, soothsayers, necromancers or the like; believe in me only. Which is keen, having God on my side…except it seems a bit self-serving on God’s part. I mean, if I were running for Supreme Deity, I’d say the same thing. Now if God had said don’t believe in them and don’t believe in me, believe in yourself, then I’d feel a lot easier about aligning myself with Him. Or Her. Or It. Or Them. Or None of the Above.

  Alma Jo Williams of the James A. Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York picks a semantic tibia with me as follows:

  “In…your first column you make this statement: ‘Those millions go to maintaining the status quo, also known as entropy. I am foursquare for chaos; I am anti-entropy.’

  “Status quo is NOT entropy. Entropy, as understood by the physical chemist, etc., is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which states that matter and energy can only be changed in one direction, i.e., usable to unusable, available to unavailable, or order to disorder. As one of my Physical Chemistry instructors neatly put it, entropy is a measure of messiness. The opposite is enthalpy which is the extracting of useful work from the energy.

  “If you are for chaos, you are pro-entropy. (It takes energy just to maintain the status quo. As the Red Queen said to Alice, ‘You have to run as hard as you can just to stay in one place.’) So much for thermodynamics.”

  Hmpphh!

  Definition four, THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE; page 477; column 2:

  “Homogeneity, uniformity, or lack of distinction or differentiation: the tendency of the universe toward entropy.”

  Ms. Williams is, of course, correct.

  Further, deponent sayeth not.

  Greg Higginbotham of Springfield, Missouri sent along some photos taken of me when I was lecturing there four years ago, and asks how I view the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the throne. Apart from the small succor I derive from the knowledge that historically we go to war under Democratic presidents and have extended periods of economic upturn under Republican presidents (and Reagan believes, as did Calvin Coolidge, that “the business of America is Business”), I recall with a shiver Ronnie’s instant response to the Free Speech Movement sit-ins at Berkeley in 1964 when he was California’s governor and a member of the university’s board of regents: he called out the troops and the police, and almost singlehandedly lit the fire that became a conflagration of student-administration confrontations for almost a decade (between January 1st and 15th of 1968 there were 221 major demonstrations involving nearly 39,000 students on 101 American campuses). Yes, it was the times, but doesn’t it give you a momentary shiver to know that at the initial pressure point Ronald Reagan had the choice of rational negotiation and irrational force…and chose the latter?

  That, and Reagan’s selection of anti-ecologist James G. Watt as Secretary of the Interior (his first utterance upon being named to the post was, “I’m not against ecologists, I’m just against ecological extremists, those who would stand in the way of commercial development of unused lands”), make me shudder at the id
ea of Bonzo’s playmate in the White House. But then, I voted for Carter the first time around (Anderson this time), and I was sorely disappointed; so what the hell do I do now?

  Richard Latimer of Dayton, Ohio asks me to do a column on filmmaker Peter Watkins (The War Game, Privilege, Punishment Park) or an interview. Well, an interview isn’t likely: last I heard, Watkins was in Australia and I have no plans to go tromping off to the bottom of the world unless Future Life pays my way, which seems unlikely. But Mr. Latimer enclosed a dandy long quote from Watkins that I want to reprint here, not only to encourage you to look into his films, which are exemplars of social conscience, as well as being damned good cinema, but because it speaks to my intentions with this column. You see, when I first engaged to do these screeds, Kerry O’Quinn, one of the publishers, had some trepidation about what he termed my “frequent pessimism.” He was afraid I’d unload a lot of negative vibes on youse folks and that would run sales down the tube. I tried to tell him that I’m actually a cynical optimist and that when I do a smash&grab on some subject it’s usually out of a sense of viewing-with-alarm. Well, I’m not sure Kerry is complacent even now that I’ve been at this for seven installments. I get the feeling that he doesn’t know quite how tough or lackadaisical you can be. I have faith in your ability to deny the corrupt state of the world to your own ease of existence, chums; and I know my pitiful rages won’t have much effect. But as to this canard of being pessimistic, I offer Peter Watkins’s comments, as published in Joseph A. Gomez’s biography of the director:

  “I should have thought that you would have been bloody glad that I didn’t come out with a silver tray with answer 475 and say, ‘Here you are, darling; go home and take this piece of dogma.’…If I were a pessimist, I would have made Laurel and Hardy reruns since 1965. I think our society is totally caught up in the abuse and misuse of these words ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic.’ I don’t believe that one is pessimistic to look at very real problems that we are involved in…I think I am an optimist to talk about these problems in the sense that if I don’t talk about them, it would be because I couldn’t care less about humanity or the potential of mankind. But I do care very much, which I think is optimistic. I also care enough to make these films. I also care enough about your own sense of responsibility not to do what is done with you every day in your life—in education, in television—which is to force feed you with directives, force-feed you with answers, force-feed you with directions to move—until you are zapped left, right, up and down. I won’t do that to you. I will try and show you a problem as hard and as strongly as I can; but what to do about it, even if I had the answer, which I don’t usually, I would never say to you. I would never reveal it. I would chew it over in my own head; because I would leave you to try to develop your own strength to find the answer.”