An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  Liz Wilderson of Leavenworth, Kansas wants me to do a column on the Hugo Awards and asks how fans can vote for the Hugos and how they can obtain the annual list of nominees. Despite my having won 7 ½ of the large metal things, I am the last guy in the world to chatter about the Achievement Awards of the World Science Fiction Convention. I won’t go into any long diatribe about the Hugos and how they’re awarded, save to note that Richard Lupoff has just had published through Pocket Books a splendid anthology called WHAT IF? VOL. 1, subtitled Stories That Should Have Won the Hugo; a collection that includes as strong and convincing a set of arguments for the revamping of the Hugo-awarding mechanism as any I might cobble up.

  The paperback is only $2.50 and I commend it to your attention more for the Lupoff editorials contained therein than for the stories, all of which are gems; which says a lot about how important I think Lupoff’s comments are.

  As for how to vote, well, all you have to do is become a member of the World Convention each year, and you automatically get a ballot. As to how to join a convention, and how to obtain a list of the nominations as soon as they’re released, well, you might care to subscribe to one of the newsletters of the sf / fantasy world: Fantasy Review (monthly, Robert A. Collins, 500 N.W. 20th Street, Boca Raton, FL 33431, single copy $2.75, $20 per year). This publication will give you the address of the current WorldCon convention committee, and will keep you abreast of the selections. Vote for me. I’m greedy.

  Lori Bailey of Alton, Illinois suggests that the two books of tv criticism I wrote (THE GLASS TEAT and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT) were not enough horror for me to suffer and that I should do it, as Count Basie puts it, one more once! I suggest she read that one more once written as the introduction to my book STRANGE WINE. It is as much update on the ghastliness of tv as I can muster in these, my declining twilight years.

  David A. Green: forget it. Roderick Sprague, Moscow, Idaho: dumb idea, forget it. James J.J. Wilson, Downers Grove, Ill; Cadence Gainey, Hatfield, Penn; Robert Wayne Richardson, Bristol, Tenn; and Christy Ory, Scottsdale, Ariz; thank you thank you thank you. You are each and every one a credit to your species. Chris Summers of Hanover Park, Illinois and Kim Tankus of Dusseldorf, West Germany: don’t send me your stories. I don’t read stories submitted to me. I’ve already said why in a past column. Sorry to cut you off, but it ain’t me, babe.

  Eric Shinn of Columbia, Maryland: yes, I may have written an introduction to a book of stories by Keith Laumer, who was once my friend, but we have not been friends for a long time and the last thing in this life I’d want to do is get involved doing the screenplay for a Laumer book. As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Laumer no longer exists in my world. I’m sure the feeling is mutual. And that’s how I want to keep it. Try Paul Schrader or Stirling Silliphant.

  Tom Looby of Vergennes, Vermont writes to say he read my apocalyptic introduction to APPROACHING OBLIVION and he’s scared about what’s happening to the human race, and wants me to tell him what to do. Well, I’ll tell you, Tom, it’s a long and arduous process, this what-to-do business. Every time we cut off the censors at the pass, some bunch of self-appointed guardians of morality like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority rise out of the slime-pits to burn books. Every time someone beats an institutionalized criminal like, say, a movie studio or a tv network for plagiarism in a court of law, a dozen other thugs steal a little more craftily. Eternal vigilance, kiddo. You have to be as smart as you can be, as tough as you can be, and as pragmatic as you can be. Don’t believe everything you read or everything they tell you. Keep asking questions. And when you get angry about something that’s going down, in your school, your town, your state or the world at large—DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Put yourself on the line! Risk a little! And even if you only do a little bit of good, you’ll feel like a bloody hero, you’ll alter the state of the universe a tot, and you’ll get tougher for the next time. Here’s one to start on now: help get gun control passed in the U.S. Senate. No more Lennons being gunned down senselessly. Don’t buy that bullshit about people needing to protect themselves from crooks with guns. Most of the murders every year aren’t by crooks or muggers…they’re by people getting pissed at people and blowing them away. Or guns in the hands of nutcases like the one who offed Lennon. Gun control, gun elimination can help. In a big way. And I say this as a resident of Los Angeles, which in 1980 became #1 Murder City in America—1,042 slayings.

  Jim Dawson of Sterling, Virginia wants me to do a column on vasectomies, noting my history of having had one. It’s on the way, Mr. Dawson. Most of the time, though, I just sit on top of the silent tv set, smiling at the ceiling; otherwise, it hasn’t had a deleterious effect on me. Hmmmmmmmm.

  Some of you, like Sharon Norberg of Miami, Florida, wrote me letters that required no answers. Mrs. Norberg wanted to tell me how much she liked the Star Trek movie. Others wanted to deliver long panegyrics on topics almost as boring. I have read as much of as many of these letters as I can. (Sometimes I fall asleep.) Before Mrs. Norberg lectures me on how my putting down of dull movies can inhibit tender souls’ dreaming of the future, I suggest she do something concrete about getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed in Florida, a matter that has much more immediacy for dreams of the future than her plonking down $5 time after time to see the exploitation of what little love remains for Star Trek by its fans.

  While we’re on the moronic subject of the Star Trek movie, back in April a Mrs. Lisa Baker of Castle Rock, Colorado wrote Starlog columnist Bjo Trimble asking her to rap my knuckles because I had, in her view, made an error in noting when I reviewed the film—Paramount’s contribution to the Ennui Enhancement of life in general—that an ornament on a headband worn by Persis Khambatta hung on the left side in one shot, then over the right on a follow-up. This seeming error in my otherwise flawless reportage of the year’s dullest movie apparently drove Mrs. Baker, a grown woman, into paroxysms of anger. Bjo wrote her, quite properly, that her Starlog column was intended for other purposes than vilifying Ellison and that it was none of her, Bjo’s, business and that if Mrs. Baker was that outraged at my assailing her sacred cows, she ought to write me directly. Since I have not heard from Mrs. Baker directly, but since the matter has come up nonetheless via a Xerox copy of her letter, forwarded to me by my editor, Bob Woods, let me just say this:

  Mrs. Baker is a pathetic case. A grown woman so distanced from reality that her ire is raised enough to prompt the writing of a letter not about how high her taxes are, not about how much she’s paying for gas, not about nuns being shot to death by government troops in El Salvador, not about gun control or abortion (pro or con) or Nestlé selling death-dealing baby formula to underprivileged countries…but about a minor point in an undistinguished movie.

  I may well be taken to task for pillorying this woman. What harm is she doing by objecting to my alleged error in a critical article, it may be said. Why kill a gnat with a howitzer? Well, I’ll tell ya, gang, it’s like this: Mrs. Baker is a classic example of what many of you have become. And the name for that is zombie.

  Mrs. Baker will no doubt reject this. I’ll be apprised in short order that Mrs. Baker has led the fight for equal rights in Colorado, that she cooks meals for shutins and old folks every day and then drives them over to the recipients free of charge, that she rescued eleven orphans from a burning building, that she discovered a cure for bone-marrow cancer last week, that she is a serious political cartoonist whose work in the Castle Rock Blat has brought dozens of crooked politicians to book, that she is beloved of her family and friends, that she has written the definitive social conscience work on the Dreyfus Case, and that in her spare time she does RN work at the local leprosarium. No doubt I’ll be told all of this, to prove how shallow and vicious I am in calling Mrs. Baker a zombie.

  But until such time, I judge only by the internal evidence of her letter. A letter that is concerned with silliness, a letter that reveals her dander is gotten up not by what goes on in the real world, not even what goes on in the slapdas
h world of an imbecile movie, but what goes on in a piece of criticism of that slapdash movie! I submit Mrs. Baker as an object-lesson to all of you who justify your obsessions with movies whose sole purpose in this life is to make money for multinational corporations that own movie studios by lying to yourselves that these movies bear some relation to life, either as we know it today or as it pertains to the future.

  I submit that all of the multi-million-dollar monstrosities you’ve slavered over in the past five years—from Star Wars to Alien—and I liked Alien a lot—that not all of them, taken in totality, equal by one one-millionth the humanity contained in The Elephant Man or The Competition. Not one of them says as much to us as human beings, instills as much hope in us, speaks as clearly to the human condition as do Paths of Glory or A Child is Waiting or The Deer Hunter.

  Even to discuss empty and empty-headed persiflage like the Star Trek movie in the same breath with Oh, God! or, again, The Elephant Man is to elevate transient commercial dreck to the level of serious attention. And for Mrs. Baker to spend even a microsecond of concern on my being right or wrong about such a minor cavil in the first place, even to dignify her concern by suggesting all my critical faculties should be called into question because I didn’t perceive—as she suggests—that the second shot of Persis Khambatta was seen in a mirror, indicates that Mrs. Baker read the critique and then went back to see the goddamned movie again, just to be able to say I was wrong. Now Mrs. Baker may well be correct. That second shot may have been a mirror reflection (though if a viewer sharp enough to see that the ornament was hanging on the opposite side couldn’t tell it was a mirror image, that says something about the quality of direction in the film) but I’d have to go see the film a second time to ascertain same. And frankly, if I need a couple of hours sleep I won’t pay $5 to Paramount for the privilege, I’ll just reread Mrs. Baker’s letter and doze off.

  I attack not Mrs. Baker herself, but what she has become. A person whose concerns are trivial in a world where triviality and mediocrity are used to keep us diverted, entertained, oblivious to what Tom Looby has begun to suspect, that we are in trouble, that we are becoming ever more helpless because great forces push and bend us, that we must be alert and awake and aware…and never permit ourselves to forget that sports and trash movies and dope and God-shouting and all the other toys of the Status Quo, whether called Entropy or something else, are intended to turn our senses and our anger away from the desire to fight back.

  Mrs. Baker attacks the wrong foe. Television is her enemy; the venal corporations that put together a bad movie to take her $5 from her are the enemy; the designers of products that fall apart on schedule and for which she cannot get replacement parts are the enemy; stupidity and triviality are her enemies. Our taste in films may differ, Mrs. Baker, but when I walk out of the theater, at least I live in the Real World. God or whoever’s in charge only knows where you live!

  There are more letters. Seventeen more as I sit here. But I’ve spent too much time on Mrs. Baker and a few others. So I’ll have to save them for the next roundup, just a mere six months away. I hope this interlude of sweetness and light has buoyed up your spirits. Feel free to drop me a postcard. Workouts like this merely get me in shape for the serious work to be done.

  And have an angry New Year.

  Interim memo

  I got a letter the other day from George. Damned if they aren’t discussing this “creation science” bullshit all over again in the pages of the San Diego Union. At a lecture I gave in Grand Forks, North Dakota in March of this year, someone asked me how do we finally knock the fools and obscurantists and believers in craziness out of the box once and for all. I told the woman that we can’t. Apart from hydrogen, the most common thing in the universe is stupidity. They keep coming up out of the Bandini like stinkweeds, folks. And if they aren’t after John T. Scopes’s scalp, they’re after ours; and their mission is to keep us all as imbecilic as they are. So, no, we never finish fighting them. It’s a holding battle. But if they win the foray, books get burned, and we go back to the Flat Earth. So hang in there. I’m getting a little weary, but I’m with you. If I can just get these spikes out of my wrists.

  INSTALLMENT 8: 27 FEBRUARY 81

  PUBLISHED 28 APRIL 81 FUTURE LIFE #27 COVER-DATED JUNE

  Up to now, I’ve been playing with kids. Assaulting the nonspecific targets of irrationality and obscurantism in my view. And apart from the deranged mercenary who wrote me today telling me that he had survived the Nam, Angola and Rhodesia wars (ostensibly he gets his kicks opening up with an M-16 at little brown babies) and that I didn’t know what honor and patriotism were all about, I haven’t had too much angst thrust upon me by these columns. But all that is done. Here and now I take on the big demon. Beginning with this column, my friends, I declare myself at arms against The Moral Majority.

  And now we will find out how deeply runs the stream of courage you and I have perceived in the publishing and editorial staff of Future Life (and by extension, Starlog).

  Because this demon doesn’t pull in its dripping fangs. It will take on television networks, major industries, the organized church and even the United States government. So when the ka-ka hits the colander, we will soon see if the magazine in which these columns can be found is ready to go up against the direct lineal descendants of Torquemada, Cotton Mather, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Josef Goebbels and the House Un-American Activities Committee: those who would censor and legislate and boycott every opinion that doesn’t conform with their own repressive, provincial, reactionary and down right antediluvian perceptions of the universe.

  All of which they do in the name of Motherhood, Apple Pie, Bleeding Christ and The American Way.

  Which makes it hard to fight them. Because as soon as you try, they start screaming Degenerate or Commie or Antichrist or Perverter of the Minds of Children.

  I said to someone the other day that if I were to take them on, I’d damned well better pay off the mortgage on my house, because if they choose they can unleash a million letters to my sponsors, saying they’ll never again buy this or that product if I’m permitted to go on raging with all this evil and immoral rot, and then I couldn’t make a buck, and that would mean I couldn’t make the mortgage payments on Ellison Wonderland, and would lose the house and find myself out in the street…as happened to so many people during the blacklist days of the Fifties. I also said I’d have to find sponsors who were beyond the vengeance of The Moral Majority. The few that occurred to me—and you might suggest a few others, friends, one never knows when the hard times will hit—were Playboy and the manufacturers of toilet paper. Or the phone company.

  But, after all, we are writing a column for Future Life, not for The Nation. And so it should definitely be in genre, don’t you think? This frontal assault on those who want to pull CATCHER IN THE RYE from public libraries, it ought to deal with science and the future and like that…right?

  Glad you agree, chums.

  Because we wish to start the festivities with one lovely aspect of The Moral Majority’s crusade against reason. It is called Creationism. As opposed to the theory of Evolution. You remember all that stuff, don’t you? The Scopes Monkey Trial and such good jazz. You thought that was all settled in the film Inherit the Wind, did you? You thought Spencer Tracy had won the day for Darwin and the descent of species.

  Wrong and wrong.

  Which leads me to introduce to you, in this corner, a nifty little scrapper for sanity named George Olshevsky; and over there in that corner a small group headed by Duane T. Gish, Gary E. Parker and a shadowy legion of slavering, slope-browed, prognathous jawed atavists who were apparently bitten by a 35 mm print of One Million B. C., who believe that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time.

  But…enough from me. I turn the column over now to a replay of letters and newspaper clippings from last January. I wish you well on this deranged journey, and I’ll be back next issue to make some comments.

  Oh, and by the way: don’t show
this column to your local Creationist. It’ll only make him / her fwow up his / her cookies.

  Dear Mr. Ellison:

  Last month the San Diego Evening Tribune carried an item on creationists which carried statements by one Duane T. Gish, creationist, in response to comments at the recent AAAS symposium held in Toronto. I couldn’t take that bullshit being printed in a newspaper without a proper rebuttal, so I duly composed one and sent it off to their editorial page. Lo and behold, they printed it in full and I felt vindicated. Then a week later, they printed a letter from Gary E. Parker, which tries suavely and rather articulately to put down the points I made in my own letter. Unfortunately, Parker is full of it, despite his professorship and Ph.D. (professor at Christian Heritage College?? Give me a break!), but his writing is good enough that the average reader could be swayed into believing that creationism is actually a defendable hypothesis, and that I, who have studied evolutionary theory for some time and purposely kept things simple and clear in my original letter, actually don’t know what I’m talking about. So I wrote a second letter pulling out a few creationist quotations from their own books (actually, a children’s book by Gish) for the world to see. I had had enough of evolutionary scientists constantly being forced to defend their work against the irrational onslaught of the creationists and had decided to carry the attack into their own camp a bit.