Over the Edge

by Harlan Ellison

  “Mr. Epstein?”

  A sleepy, querulous “Yes?”

  “This is Harlan Ellison, Mr. Epstein.”

  A worried, startled “Uh…”

  “For a long time now you’ve been having fun with me, haven’t you, Mr. Epstein?”

  A slow, reluctant “I guess so.”

  Well, that was because you knew where I was, and who I am; but now I know who you are, and where you are. Now I start having some fun with you, Mr. Epstein. And as nasty as your sense of humor is, mine is plain downright ugly. I’m a winner, Norman, and nothing is beneath me to make the other guy lose. You’re the other guy, Norman, You’ll be hearing from me. Not immediately, but soon. Soon, Norman. I look forward to it.

  He began babbling, trying to tell me it was all a gag, that he meant no harm. But I had the dozens and dozens of his wretched little notes in front of me, the ones that defamed Phil Farmer and Damon Knight and other of my friends. I was easily able to dip down into the well of memory and bring back the anxiety and frustration Id felt each day one of those unmarked envelopes appeared in the mail. The fury of not being able to respond! His cowardly anonymity! I hung up on him. I never learned his motivation for spending so much time and nastiness harassing me.

  Norman Epstein has changed his phone number.

  He’s done it several times.

  Do you have any idea how easy it is to ferret out a new, unlisted number, particularly if you represent yourself to Nynex, the New York Telephone Company, as Detective-Lieutenant Hemphill of the Los Angeles Police Department?

  When I sat down to write this article on June 6th, 1984, I had not heard from Norman Epstein for the many months since Id spoken to him, very late that night. As I finished typing the preceding paragraph, the mail arrived. I went downstairs and brought it in. Atop the stack, a mere five minutes ago (as I sat writing this paragraph), was a postcard—without return address, postmarked New York—that read as follows:

  Harlan, I liked Stalking the Nightmare very much. Keep writing.

  —Best wishes, Norman Epstein

  With charming familiarity, he has signed it Norman.

  Have you ever noticed how few people in this life know whats good for them?

  Soon, Norman. I look forward to it.

  In biology there is a phenomenon known as xenogenesis. It is a pathological state in which the child does not resemble the parent. You may remember a fairly grisly 1975 film by my pal Larry Cohen titled Its Alive! in which a fanged and taloned baby gnaws its way out of its mothers womb and slaughters the attending nurses and gynecologist in the delivery room and then leaps straight up through a skylight, smashes out, and for the duration of the film crawls in and out of the frame ripping peoples throats. Its natural father is a CPA or something similar. Most CPAs do not, other than symbolically, have fangs and talons. Xenogenesis.

  In the subculture of science fiction literature and its umbilically attached aficionados, we have the manifestation of a symbiotic relationship in which the behavior of the children, that is, the fans, does not resemble the noble ideals set forth in the writings and pronouncements of the parents, the writers. For all its apocalyptic doomsaying, its frequent pointing with alarm, its gardyloos of caution, the literature of imagination has ever and always promoted an ethic of good manners and kindness via its viewpoint characters. The ones we are asked to relate to, in sf and fantasy, the ones we are urged to see as the Good Folks, are usually the ones who say excuse me and thank you maam.

  The most efficient narrative shorthand to explain why a particular character is the one struck by cosmic lightning or masticated by some nameless Lovecraftian horror is to paint that character as rude, insensitive, paralogical or slovenly.

  Through this free-floating auctorial trope, the canon has promulgated as salutary an image of mannerliness, rectitude and humanism, The smart alecks, slugs, slimeworts and snipers of the universe in these fables unfailingly reap a terrible comeuppance.

  That is the attitude of the parents, for the most part.

  Yet the children of this ongoing education, the fans who incorporate the canon as a significant part of their world-view, frequently demonstrate a cruelty that would, in the fiction, bring them a reward of Job-like awfulness.

  One demur, herewith offered, but doomed to be ignored or misinterpreted: not all fans are malevolent. Let me repeat: there are many wonderful fans. Kindness, courtesy and self-sacrifice are as frequent, as common, among fans as flowers in the spring. In more than thirty years of linkage with sf and its fandom, I have made friends whose decency and support have made life (infinitely) more tenable. Casual generosities and life-saving assistance have ever been available to me, not only from those I know well, but through the good offices of readers Ive never met, random acquaintances at conventions, passersby who saw an opportunity for largesse and leaped at the chance to be of aid. What I say here will, please note, exclude all the Good Guys. They know who they are. I’ll say it a third time, and hope the message gets through: I speak here not of all fans!

  The ones who will produce static at this essay are the ones whose consciences chew on them. The ones who will pillory the messenger serve their own secret agenda. They feel guilty, so they will try to behead the messenger. Nonetheless, what we deal with in this tract are the ones known to us all…the rude, the vicious, the stunned and the insensitive. And they don’t know who they are, because the very meanspiritedness and playground bully cruelty that marks them also poisons them with an arrogance that prevents their perceiving how vile they are to the rest of us, how embarrassing they are to the preponderance of decent and gracious men and women who make up the literary support-group we call fandom.

  What you will confront in these pages is the colony of grubs that has already driven too many writers and artists from the company of the rest of us; the maggots whose random and irrational gaffes have compelled those we come to conventions to meet, to say, “No more. I can’t face another weekend with those creeps!” (Or haven’t you wondered why you never see Stephen King at conventions these days?)

  They are the result of xenogenesis. They are the ones who yell Jump! at the damned soul on the ledge. They are the meaning of arrested adolescence. They are the canker on your rose, the worm in your apple. And the rest of you, the fans and readers, have to stand the gaff for their leprous behavior. And here is the litany.

  One fan who was invited into my home stole more than two thousand dollars worth of rare comic books during a period of more than six months of friendly visits. Another fan walked off with the virtually irreplaceable Shasta Press books that bear Hannes Bok covers, all of them in mint condition, all of them bearing my bookplates. Yet another fan I caught as she walked out the front door of my house, with the first three issues of Unknown in her tote bag. And there was one who pocketed as memento of his visit, a collectible pinback button from the old Kellogg’s Pep cereal series of comic book characters, Annie’s dog, Sandy. Another relieved me of the worry of winding a wristwatch sent to me by an executive of the Bulova company; an instrument produced in the number of two: one I owned, the other belonging to Winston Churchill. Another took a leisurely riffle through my files in the dead of night while the rest of the household was asleep, and got away with a series of original letters from the author of THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, B. Traven, as well as the carbons of my letters to him in Mexico. And still another managed to cop—one by one, under his shirt—several dozen first editions that I’d bought new in the mid-fifties, when I’d been a fan myself, and had started collecting, paying for the books by saving lunch money. At the Kansas City Worldcon a number of years ago, a fan who still comes to conventions showed up at a party in my room and stole the only Virgil Finlay artwork I’ve ever been able to find for a reasonable purchase price.

  These are not isolated instances of theft so casually performed that the question of morality never occurs to the footpad. If you want to hear other such tales, speak to Forrest J. Ackerman, whose home has been robbed a
gain and again by young fans he’s been kind enough to show through his vast collection. Or speak to Lydia Marano of the Dangerous Visions Bookstore in Sherman Oaks, California, or Sherry Gottlieb of A Change of Hobbit in Santa Monica, or any dealer or bookstore owner at any convention you ever attend.

  I didn’t know Slans had such taking ways.

  A fan from the Seattle area pulled the subscription coupons from more than fifty magazines ranging from Good Housekeeping to Hustler, typed in my name and address, and signed me up for subscriptions. Have you ever tried to get Time magazine to stop sending you its journal, and billing you endlessly? Have you ever received twelve dunning letters from bill collection agencies for goods you never requested, all in one day? Have you ever considered how much time and money you expend calling computerized subscription services in Colorado, trying to get them to trace where bogus subscription coupons came from?

  And the ugliness of that fan’s nature reveals itself in an additional little twist put on the scam. Each subscription was made in the name of another science fiction professional…Isaac Asimov or Stephen King or…well, here, take a look at this bogus gift subscription returned to me by the National Review fulfillment department: Thus, each stone bruises at least two of us. Casual, sidebar wickedness; and the creep thinks it’s cute. The subscription was sent to an approximation of my address, to “Helen Arlison.” Yeah…cute.

  But the prank went further: the fan also ordered a raft of expensive art items from The Franklin Mint, signed me up for the Columbia Tape Club, for whole series’ of porcelain figurines and vases from the Collectors’ Society, for albums of country and western golden oldies, for junk mail addressed to pet shops, for catalogues of clothing, women’s lingerie, computer supplies, yachting equipment, farm implements. In one week I received six Slim Whitman albums. In the space of one year I had to hire an assistant at considerable cost, just to handle the cornucopial flow of magazines, catalogues, unordered product, retail credit demands and time-wasting problems this single fan visited on me.

  I am not alone in suffering thus. This has happened to almost every writer I’ve queried. They have asked me not to use their names. Monkey-see, monkey-do: they’re afraid a few of you might not yet have had this perverted behavior occur to you, that once you learn of it, you’ll do it to them. They’re afraid of you; what does that tell you?

  And each company that received my name sold the name and the address to a dozen other mail order companies whose unsolicited junk mail jammed my mailbox every day. I came to dread the arrival of the postal truck.

  There was the fool who signed me up for every book club in America, from the Literary Guild to the Time-Life Library of World War II. We had stacks of unordered books to return every day for six months. Consider the packing, the trips to the post office. Consider what happens to one’s writing schedule!

  There was the jerk who registered me for lonely hearts clubs, organizations that supply the names of Oriental women who want to become American brides, computer dating firms, pen pal associations, porn photo outfits that run ads that say, “Hi, I’m Rhonda, and if you’d like to see candid, full-front shots of me and my friend Roxanne, doing what we like to do best, just send us fifteen dollars and your special wants; we’ll do the rest.”

  There was the monster who anonymously called the police when I was living in New York in 1960, and told them I had an apartment filled with drugs and weapons, and on a quiet day recorded in my book MEMOS FROM PURGATORY, I was arrested and taken off to the Manhattan holding tanks called the Tombs, and though there wasn’t so much as a NoDoz tablet in my apartment, I was arraigned and had to go before the Grand Jury.

  Amusing. All terribly amusing. Each little high school prank a giggle. And how many hours spent cleaning up these unnecessary contretemps might have been spent producing more stories? How many hours wasted, how many books lost, unwritten? Now multiply what has happened to me, the hours lost, by the number of writers who’ve had this kind of crap pulled on them, too. A writer has only talent, a finite amount of visceral material, and a little time…never enough time. Amusing.

  They are cowardly little scum, these brain-damage cases who demean honest fans by calling themselves aficionados of the literature of imagination. They spread the gossip behind your back, they make the snide remarks as they zip past you in the convention halls, they put no return address on the vile letters, they make up false names when they write the hate letters to the magazines that run your stories, they use the telephone. For them, courage and rational behavior are alien concepts only to be read about in slambang space operas. Such concepts do not impinge upon their miserable lives in the real world.

  This essay came into being one evening at a reception given for John Brunner during one of his visits to Los Angeles. At that gathering, I found myself sitting at a kitchen table with Robert Bloch, Philip José Farmer and the late Kris Neville. We were discussing what had happened to me the night before.

  I had only recently, at that time, begun living with a woman I’d met in Boston. She had come out to L.A. to stay with me, and we had gone to see the Woody Allen film Stardust Memories. In one scene of the movie, Woody, playing himself in the role of a world-famous comedy director, attends one of those film weekends held all-too-frequently at resort hotels in the Poconos. He is swamped by pushy, impertinent, gauche and sycophantic fans of his work. They chivvy and harass him; and at one point a woman stridently demands he autograph her hand. When he refuses she gets insulting.

  I leaned over to whisper to my new friend from Boston, “That’s my life you’re looking at.”

  She laughed at me, and later, when we had left the theater, she accused me of unjustified self-importance and advised me that even though she was from Boston, she hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck the day before. I smiled and said no more.

  Two nights later, on the Friday before the reception for John Brunner, I had to speak at a fund-raising event for imprisoned writers in Latin American nations, sponsored by P.E.N., the international journalism society, and as we sat in the front row waiting for the event to begin, a stout woman behind us gave a hoot, clamped a paw on my shoulder, and demanded, “Are you Harlan Ellison?”

  I turned with fear, saw this behemoth apparition, and acknowledged reluctantly that I was, indeed, that doomed soul. My new friend from Boston also turned, her eyes wide, as the woman proclaimed, with the rustic charm of a farmhand calling in the hogs, “I’ve read everything you’ve ever written! I love your stuff! Here, sign my breast!” And she wrenched aside her ruffled top to expose a mammary the size and richness of Latvia. My lady friend stared with horror, then looked at me and blurted, “Jeeeeeezus, you weren’t kidding, were you?”

  I was discussing this not-uncommon event with Kris and Phil and Bob, at John’s reception, and in fun we began telling each other of the horror scenes we’d gone through with fans.

  Kris Neville regaled us with a story of pyramiding impositions by a young male fan who had come to pay homage, culminating in his taking up residence on Kris and Lil’s front lawn until they were forced to call the juvenile authorities.

  Bob’s most bizarre fan story involved the receipt, one day in the mail, of a birthday card from an unknown enthusiast who had attached to the felicitation, a green gemstone. Bob tossed the card with rock attached, into a junk drawer. Years later, when the drawer’s contents were sent to one of the university archives that preserve the papers of famous writers, Bob received a call from the curator who advised him that they’d had the stone appraised, and it was valued at seven thousand dollars.

  On the day I sat down to write this essay, June 6th, 1984, apart from the Epstein postcard mentioned earlier, and hundreds of other items of postal wonderfulness, I received a letter from one Leroy Jones of Philadelphia. His request was not unlike hundreds of similar missives I receive in a year. It was as follows, and I quote directly from the scrawled note before me:

  Dear Mr. Ellison—

  I collect quotes of authors (s
ic) works. Could you please pen a few dozen quotes from your work on the enclosed cards. I’m only 16 so have not read too much on you. I’m not sure I’d like all you write but I know you have done a movie The Oscar and I saw that. I need some quotes.

  —Thanks, Leroy.

  When I saw that note, with its casual impertinences and its gratuitous rudeness and its utter lack of understanding of the value of time to a writer, I thought, I can’t be the only poor devil who gets this lunacy every day.

  And I remembered the conversation with Kris and Phil and Bob, and I put together a letter that I Xeroxed and sent off to eighty-five writers and artists of my acquaintance. The letter was an imposition precisely of the kind I despise most, and so I made it very clear passim the copy that this was a lark, a frippery, an amusement, and if it interfered with the recipient’s writing in even the smallest way, it was to be ignored.

  The letter read as follows:

  Companions in Suffering:

  This is a minuscule request for a bit of data. If it’s convenient, respond. If you’re busy, forget it. It’s strictly by way of a small favor, and if it imposes at all, just smile and toss it. No guilt attaches to a no-response. Honest, folks.

  What it is, is this:

  Your friend and mine, that little dickens Ed Bryant, somewhichway conned me into being the guest of honor at Westercon 37 up in Portland (29 June–3 July). As you may know, I look on the prospect of appearing naked at conventions with all the joy I reserve for root canal surgery. Nonetheless, I said I’d do it, so I’ll do it. Smiling all the way.

  But for my “guest of honor speech” I would like to present a talk that came to me as a lark during a conversation one night with Phil Farmer, Bob Bloch and the late Kris Neville. We were shootin’ the breeze, us old hands, around the kitchen table at a party thrown for John Brunner, and we began exchanging horror stories of the most bizarre things fans had done to us through our long and exhausting careers.