I did have two things going for me. I had a control freak’s ferocious determination to find out how things work, and I had just enough skill at stringing words together to make an occasionally readable sentence. But I had nothing to say.
I had nothing to say about life because I hadn’t lived it.
Which brings me back to that horrendous clash of symbols we called the sixties. If the fifties were about innocence, then the sixties were about losing it. Big time.
It was a decade that started in promise and stumbled into disaster. The civil rights struggle boiled over into church bombings and violence and murders; President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas; the flower children turned into dropped-out hippies; drug use became hip; Vietnam escalated into a full-blown war; riots broke out in the urban ghettos; draft riots broke out on the college campuses; the peace movement turned violent; LBJ developed a credibility gap; Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; Woodstock turned into Altamont; and, as if to seal the deal, a night of horrific murders terrified Los Angeles. There was no escape from the avalanche of time.
Not even the awe-inspiring sight of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin broadcasting live from the moon could redeem the decade. As the decade collapsed into history, it seemed as if most of us were so scarred and traumatized by what we’d been through that we just wanted to retreat into a nice safe cocoon.
We had started the decade with a clear sense of who we were. By the end of those years, we had lost our sense of self and it hurt so much we couldn’t stand it.
So if the sixties was about anything—and it was about a lot of things—it was also about the search for self. At least, that’s how I experienced it. Who am I, anyway? What am I up to? Where do I go from here? And why? (Yes, I was right on schedule.)
I won’t go into the details of my own personal soap opera, I’ll save that for another time, but it was pretty ghastly. If I had still been spiritual, I would have seen it as evidence that God is a malignant thug.
By the end of that last year, I felt so beaten up and so beaten down, so alone in the moment, so abandoned and confused about everything, that I felt I had lost purpose. I felt I had nothing left. I wasn’t all that nice a person to be around. Ask those who were there.
What I did have was an empty little apartment, a desk, a typewriter, a ream of paper, and yes . . . finally, something to write about: the question that HARLIE had so casually asked before my life blew up in my face.
What does it mean to be human?
So I sat and I typed. I had long conversations myself—with HARLIE. We looked at the big question and all the little questions that attached to it like barnacles. We held all the questions up to the light and took them apart, piece by piece. I sat. I typed. I hammered away, one sentence at a time.
Every time I stopped to read what I wrote, I realized there was more to say. More sitting, more typing. Pages passed through the typewriter five times, ten times, sometimes more. All that editing, all that rewriting—it was like having multiple conversations with myself, a changing self, one that was being revised by the processes of time and story.
Sitting and chatting with HARLIE was my own personal turnaround. No, please don’t call it therapy. It wasn’t. Those chats were about creating a more informed conversation about life, that’s all. They grew into four expository stories, enough to become a complete novel. In the process, I also learned to examine every sentence carefully to make sure it actually communicated a clear thought and didn’t just use up words. I started learning to pay attention to what I was really saying.
I’m not so arrogant as to assume that I answered any questions in the process, but I’m pretty sure that I asked some very useful ones, and they were certainly questions that I needed to look at for myself. So the act of inquiry became a worthwhile journey regardless of the ultimate destination.
When I was done, I knew I had written something very unlike any other science fiction book I’d ever read. I had either written a very good book or a very embarrassing book.1 With a great deal of fear and trembling, I sent the manuscript off to Betty Ballantine. She decided it was a very good book and published When HARLIE Was One in 1972.
It was my first novel, even though it wasn’t the first one published. It received some very nice reviews and went on to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards—the first time a first novel was ever so honored. (Isaac Asimov eventually won both awards for The Gods Themselves.) But the best compliment was from Robert Silverberg, who had two excellent novels of his own on the ballot. He asked me to warn him the next time I was planning to write a book that good, so he wouldn’t have to compete.
When HARLIE Was One is also the novel that introduced the concept of the computer virus to popular thought. For that I am profoundly sorry.
I first heard the idea of a computer program called a VIRUS (and the corresponding VACCINE software) in the late summer of 1968. A programmer shared it as a joke. I thought it was a funny and fascinating notion and incorporated it into the next HARLIE story, even postulating that it could be used as a means for extracting data illegally and moving it around to other machines. It made for an interesting plot device.
When I wrote that bit, I thought it was merely speculation about what computers might someday be able to do. I had no idea that all sorts of malware variants, worms and trojans and virii would someday become a global epidemic, let alone a whole industry of malicious criminal schemes. To this day, I still do not understand why anyone would write malicious software, especially when there are so many more interesting and exciting things to do with a computer.
A couple of other notes about this edition.
Back when this book was written, computers weren’t just quaint, they were primitive. Most of the interaction was on teletype-like printers or occasionally an alphanumeric terminal. There were no graphics. Everything was text and numbers. And most of it was all caps—not because we were all shouting at each other, but because it was easier to write code that way in a world where every byte was expensive.
I didn’t even see my first computer until a year after When HARLIE Was One was published. (It was a DEC 10 and it looked like a refrigerator full of wires.) So my experience of the state of the art at the time I wrote this book was an IBM Selectric typewriter.2 (Look it up.) It had an infuriated golf ball that clattered back and forth across the page. The keyboard had a satisfyingly tactile clickety-click feeling that no subsequent keyboard has ever matched. That machine was as solid and dependable as you could imagine. It was my first technological love affair.
Typing on that Selectric, it was easy to imagine that I was having a conversation with a dispassionate intelligence engine embodied somewhere in its metal chassis. The back-and-forth of the Selectric type ball paralleled the back and forth of ideas and insights.
All the conversations with HARLIE were written in capitals because it was the way computer conversations showed up on printouts. It was the convention of the time. Today it looks quaint, ugly, and almost unreadable, but I have resisted the temptation to reformat the text because if I allow myself that first change, pretty soon I’ll be rewriting the whole thing all over again. Nope, not gonna do it.
The only change I did allow myself, and only fanatic readers would have noticed it, is the spelling of one character’s name. Handley has been changed to Hanley to honor my friends John Hanley Sr. and John Hanley Jr.
Meanwhile. . . .
HARLIE’s still with me today. Sort of.
I’ve been off my own journeys for a while, studying what I call the technologies of consciousness, so I don’t need him at the keyboard anymore, but the question I typed so many years ago is still rattling around in my head.
As of this writing, this is how it looks to me. If I were still using HARLIE’s voice, this is what he would say:
The function of life is to make more life.
To accomplish that, life creates consciousness.
The purpose of consciousnes
s is to make more consciousness.
To accomplish that, consciousness creates contribution. Contribution is about making a difference for others.
The function of contribution is to make more contribution so that consciousness can expand and life can spread into new domains.
Sentience is a product of contribution. It is not just self-awareness, but awareness of the selves of others as well. It is created in partnership and demonstrated in combined efforts that are greater than all the individual selves.
As for me, in this long, long journey from adolescence to senility, with occasional stops at what passes for maturity (but is more often sheer exhaustion), I remain enormously indebted to large numbers of people, starting with those who resisted the temptation to strangle me in my crib, all the way up to those who put up with me as I struggled with my involuntary humanity, and concluding with those who believed I was worth the effort to coach and encourage.
You guys know who you are. Thanks for the adventure!
—David Gerrold
____________________
1 Eventually, I learned to recognize that feeling as a good one. I had it again with The Man Who Folded Himself and The Martian Child, two other books that turned out very well.
2 You can see Malcolm McDowell pushing one off a table in Stanley Kubrick’s movie of A Clockwork Orange.
Author’s Notes on
the 1987 Edition
Personally, I thought 1969 was a ghastly year.
I think you had to be there to understand, but I’ll give you the short version:
I’d run out of trust.
Trust had become politically incorrect. Trust was an exercise in naïveté. Only stupid people trusted. Trust was merely the first part of betrayal. Trust was how you let pain into your life.
You probably shouldn’t even trust yourself.
And in the middle of that—the only person I wanted to trust, a friend of extraordinary virtue and compassion, was killed. Murdered. He stopped his car in the wrong place at the wrong time. The circumstances were so bizarre as to constitute irrefutable proof that God is a deranged practical joker.
It was the ultimate outrage in a year of outrages. It was the final betrayal of trust in a world where everything was supposed to work out all right.
Rage is not a strong enough word.
This was not right. This was not how life was supposed to be lived.
Where was the justice? The purpose?
There didn’t seem to be any.
Indeed, the evidence was compelling and overwhelming that we truly were an unjust and unworthy species—one of the universe’s great mistakes. If there was just one truth that you could depend on in 1969, it was this: Other people are the source of all pain.
Corollary: Stop caring about people and you eliminate all the pain in your life.
Simple and easy.
The only problem was, I hated that answer.
Because it denied everything that was good and kind and joyous in human beings. It denied love and enthusiasm and the simple sense of wonder that happens in the space between two people.
It was the fashionable answer, though; the politically correct answer. This was what had shaped the politics of the decade. This was why the nation was tearing itself apart. This was why the bullet had become the last word in any—it seemed like every—disagreement. From Dallas to Memphis to Vietnam.
I hated it.
I hated what it said about us as a people—and I hated what it suggested about myself as an individual. I hated what it meant about us as a species.
There had to be something better.
I had a typewriter, a ream of paper, and a delusion of grandeur. That was enough.
Truly, that’s all it takes to be a storyteller—a vision of something else and the urge to communicate it, even in the face of massive disagreement.
The thing about writing, as the craft is practiced today, is that you don’t have to do it face-to-face. You don’t have to tell your story to real people until after it’s finished. You only need to tell it to the typewriter, and I think that’s what makes the whole thing possible at all.
By nature, anyway, I am a reclusive person. I stay home and I write. I type. I stop and think—and then type some more. I stare out the window. I read the comics. I type. I change the disc on the CD player. I type some more. I open a Coke. I look at the clock and it’s always a surprise. I realize I’ve missed two meals. I go back and type some more. The phone rings; I lift it up from the cradle and replace it without answering. If the person calls back, I snarl, “Go away. I’m working.” I look up a word. I type.
That’s what storytelling looks like.
People who know me know that I disappear into my work like an obsessive spelunker of the human experience. Storytelling is never about what the writer knows—it’s about what he can discover, and the stories that result are simply the profound expression of a desire to report back.
I took my grief and my rage and my pain and I poured it into my work. I locked away the world and spent a year conducting my own personal inquiry into the question: “What does it mean to be a human being?”
After a while, the question took on a life of its own. The question had no (obvious) answer, but it did suggest another question. And that one suggested another—and then another and another.
That’s where HARLIE came from.
He lived in my typewriter and he spoke to me with my own fingers. No mysticism here, I knew what was going on. HARLIE was me, the other half of my brain. He was someone I could talk to where trust was not the issue. He was an innocent and he was wise beyond his years—and like me, all he had were questions, not answers.
He was a reflection of everything I cared about in the grisly summers of ’69 and ’70. I sat at the typewriter day after day, pounding the keys, talking to myself, listening to what I was saying and crossing out the stuff that even I could recognize was stupid.
No, I did not find any answers. (Sorry. You’ll have to look elsewhere for answers. I’m not in the guru business.) What I found were more questions. But what questions! Here were more fascinating questions to consider than I had ever considered possible. Here was the grandest adventure a mind could ever have—inventing another mind.
—and in the process, inventing itself.
Something woke up.
I did.
What happened was this:
First, I rediscovered my enthusiasm and my passion. They were exactly where I had left them. They were both somewhat the worse for wear, but still very serviceable. If I’d gotten nothing else out of the process of writing the book, it was still time well spent.
And then . . . something else happened. A realization crystallized about what it means to be alive, but I’m not sure it can be explained. It can only be lived. I know, that’s a strange admission for someone who is supposed to be good with words to make; but that’s what else I discovered. I’m not in the business of making words. I’m in the business of making a difference.
Listen. Here’s the only answer I know: The power isn’t in the answers. It’s in the questions. Asking the right questions, asking the next question. That’s what makes the difference.
That’s why this book is a special one for me, and why it’s such a privilege to bring it back again to the audience. This is a book about the discovery of humanity—from the inside. It’s a story about us discovering the height and depth and breadth and passion of our own humanity.
Of course, the joke was on me. There was a question that I’d forgotten to ask. What happens to the storyteller in the process of telling such a story?
Right.
That’s what happened.
And that’s why the book is so special.
Add this one to your notes: Writers don’t write books. Books write writers.
Betty Ballantine bought When HARLIE Was One for Ballantine Books and published the first edition in 1972. Despite my enthusiasm for what I had accomplished, I was still terrif
ied that she would tell me it wasn’t good enough; I could see all the things that were wrong with it, all the things I still didn’t know how to correct; I was most afraid that it was naive and sophomoric and badly written. But what she said to me instead was, “David, you’re going to win the Hugo Award for this book.”
That was one of the most terrifying things anyone has ever said to me. (Never mind why. It’s too long a story. Let it suffice that I think awards should not be casually handed out to whatever is the most popular work of the year, but should be saved for those deeds that transform your perception of what is possible in the universe.)
Fortunately, she was wrong. Isaac Asimov won the Hugo Award that year for his novel The Gods Themselves. I came in second and won the right to pretend I wasn’t really disappointed. “Well, heck—” I said, digging my big toe awkwardly into the dirt, “ ’Tain’t no disgrace to lose an award to Dr. Asimov—” I learned to do this performance so well that once I even convinced someone I meant it.
Now, fifteen years after HARLIE’s initial publication, I can actually be relieved that the book didn’t win that award. Upon rereading the original novel, all of my worst fears were confirmed. Computer technology has advanced so rapidly in the intervening years that most of my original notions have become embarrassingly obsolete. And the book was naive and sophomoric and badly written. It was small relief to discover that it was nowhere near as bad as I had come to believe in my mind, but it was still dated enough to make me cringe in more than a few places. Had it been an award winner, I would not have been allowed to rewrite it or tamper with it in any way.
I suppose, I could have comforted myself with the thought that my ability to recognize so clearly what was wrong with the 1972 edition of When НАRLIЕ Was One represents clear evidence of just how much I have grown both as a writer and as a human being; but in truth, I worried more about all those copies of the original edition still hiding out in collectors’ libraries and the recesses of used-book stores. They didn’t represent my best anymore, but my name was still on those covers.
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