Over the Edge

by Harlan Ellison

  And they say fan sensitivity is dead.

  Terry Carr isn’t with us anymore, but here’s one he told me, that you might not’ve heard. When his first novel came out, half of an Ace Double called WARLORD OF KOR, it was around the time of DisCon, 1963. The first wife of a well known fan (who was sitting in the audience as I delivered this essay verbally), came sauntering up to Terry, and Terry was expecting some small recognition from her that his first book had at last been released, and she said to him, “I’ve just read your novel. I wanted to introduce myself.” And Terry smiled, because we all expect kindness our first time out, and she said, “What did you write that miserable piece of shit for?” And she stood, hands on hips, waiting for the pain to translate itself into guilty apology. And Terry said, “I wrote it for seven hundred and fifty dollars,” and he walked away.

  This one is from Gene Wolfe:

  The worst was inviting me to be guest of honor at Icon in Iowa City. Rusty Hevelin was fan guest of honor, and we were told we would give our speeches Friday afternoon.

  Then Friday evening.

  Then Saturday morning.

  Then Saturday afternoon.

  Then Saturday evening before the play. At no time were explanations of any of these postponements made.

  I arrived at the play at about eight p.m., once more keyed up and ready to speak. First Rusty, then me. Right.

  The co-chair got on stage and announced that the guest of honor speeches would be given after the play, and I walked out.

  About fifteen minutes later, Rusty found me and asked if I were going to speak after the play. I told him no—he could, if he wished; but I would not. He explained that he intended to refuse, and he’d wanted to suggest we act in concert. Our little meeting ended with our agreeing to strike the convention, which we did. To the best of my knowledge, it was the only time the fan and pro guests of honor (all the GoH the convention had) have staged a concerted labor action.

  This was the convention at which the banquet (Saturday evening before the play) was held in the corridors and on the stairways, because the committee had failed to arrange for a room, tables, and chairs.

  Here’s a nasty little one from the elegant L. Sprague de Camp.

  On the whole fans have treated me very kindly. There was, however, a time a few years ago when a group of admirers of H.P. Lovecraft became so exercised over the critical remarks in my biography of HPL that they discussed hitting me in the face with a cherry pie at a convention.

  At the Fantasy Convention in Fort Worth, in 1978, word reached me that someone in this group would undertake this form of literary criticism. A pair of large, muscular fans, who make a hobby of martial arts, appointed themselves bodyguards. When I finished my presentation, a young man, bearing a brown-paper package of about the right size, approached. My defenders asked him what he wanted. Without a word, he turned and went away. So I shall never know for sure what was in that package; but I can bear my ignorance with becoming fortitude.

  From Bob and Ginny Heinlein.

  Dear Harlan,

  Since we retired behind—

  [Get this, Folks!]

  Since we retired behind an unlisted telephone number and chain link fence and electric gate, we’ve been pretty free of horror stories. Except one.

  One night I was working in my office. There’s a pane high up in the door, but it would take a giant to look in through that pane of glass. I can’t see anyone shorter than that if I look through the pane.

  The bell rang. Startled, because I hadn’t let anyone in the gate, I answered the door, and there was a creep. His first words were, “Someone killed my peacock.”

  I’m afraid that I told him to get out, and that if he didn’t, I would call the sheriff.

  He didn’t climb the fence again, but for days there was some kind of wire “sculpture” left at the mailbox. Each day a new one. And letters. Etc. I never laid eyes on the man again, but I haven’t forgotten him….

  There were endless drop-ins years ago when we lived in Colorado, and quite a few here until we had the gate installed. Robert once had a phone call—during a cocktail party we were giving. A woman called from Kansas, wanting to know whether she should go to the Menninger Clinic. And we’ve had our trees decorated with toilet tissue, and so on. We’ve even had our lovely house sign stolen.

  Here’s a quickie. Raymond E. Feist tells one about a fan who showed up at his door a bit before seven AM of a Sunday, while Ray’s nursing a fever of 102, after a restless night and he’d finally fallen asleep. So he staggers to the door, looking like hell, and here’s this cheery little fan cherub with a paper bag full of books to be signed. Maybe a dozen books. But since Ray had only had a few titles published at that time, what he was looking at was three of each, probably to be sold.

  And this kid demands Ray sign the books, right there, right then. And Ray says, “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m sick as a dog, hundred and two fever, I feel like hell.” And the kid sorta blinks and doesn’t say anything, but he just stands there. So Ray says, “Could you come back another time, this is a little inconvenient,” and the kid says, “I’m flying back to Hawaii.” And Ray snuffles, and says, “I’m sick…couldn’t you maybe…” but the kid just keeps on demonstrating this absolutely sensitive demeanor, and keeps wanting the books signed.

  “That, and the death threat I got on my answering machine,” Ray says, “convinced me to take my number out of the phone book.”

  Another major writer I contacted for this piece was so nervous about fans giving him trouble, though he called them “creeping morons,” that he refused to let me use his name in any way. He said that attending conventions had thrown him so far off his writing that all he wanted to do was absent himself utterly from any access by fans to his life.

  I won’t yank your chain on this. There were some writers who answered my request with letters that said they tended to stay away from fans, stay away from conventions, and so they didn’t have any gruesome anecdotes to relate. There were about half a dozen—Marvin Kaye, Algis Budrys, Dean Ing, John Varley, Jack Williamson, David Bischoff—who said they’d had nothing but pleasant relations with their fans through many happy years of association, and they were sorry but they simply had nothing to pass along. Those letters, however, were written in June of 1984, and I’ve had four of that group of six admit that they had, in fact, suffered a number of wretched experiences—which they recounted with detail and anger—and they simply didn’t want to cause any trouble.

  But how about Joanna Russ? If there has been a writer more passionate and outspoken about what concerns her in art and in society, who has been more forthcoming about putting those concerns in her work, I don’t know who it might be. Unlike many of the writers I contacted, who were “prudent” about saying anything for fear one of you little psychotic darlings might seek retribution, Joanna was candid; and she wrote:

  Yeah. The worst.

  Well, besides the folks who send novel manuscripts with instructions to tell them where to send it, (I got three last week) without postage—

  I guess the worst was several years ago in Boulder, when I got a letter from what appeared to be a junior high school student, asking me to answer three pages of questions about my “philosophy of life” since her teacher had told the class to do a research paper on a living writer. She also asked for one (1) copy of everything I had written.

  I wrote gently back, explaining as tactfully as I could, that no living writer had time to answer three pages of questions about anything, and that I barely had enough copies of my work for myself. I suggested that she buy some of them herself, since I had to pay for them, too, and that she ask her teacher how to do library research, since I suspected that was the sort of thing her teacher had had in mind originally. I then wished her good luck in her career and ended the letter.

  Several weeks later I got a letter from her older sister, who threatened to expose me in Ms. and a few other magazines, since my cruel answer had blighted
her sister’s life and career. Sister (she said) had planned to become—a writer, but after my callous and vicious treatment, said sister only lay on her little bed and cried all day. I had utterly ruined her life. (I am not making this up.)

  Or maybe it was the consciousness-raising group that threw me out on the grounds that I was too articulate.

  Or the folks who ask for a signed photograph ($9 to me) sans remuneration and also sans stamps.

  The funniest was a fellow who wrote from Walla Walla that he had read The Female Man and just loved my mind. He also loved my photograph on the back and assured me that he was a fun-loving soul who wanted to correspond with me about my philosophy of life (what does that phrase mean?). When I wrote back that I had no time for handsome men of 5’11” with fun-loving souls, or anybody else, I got a second letter which dwelt on my physical charms and sort of lost sight of the book, which I don’t think he read (just between you and me and the lamppost).

  And the women who write me, complaining about what I let be done (me?!) to covers of paperback books of mine, and refuse to believe that I had nothing to do with it—

  Or the friends and colleagues who say, “Why don’t you just live off your writing?” and refuse to believe that I have never gotten more than a $3,500 advance for a novel, save once—

  My favorite horror story, after the sisters business, was an open-mike women’s coffeehouse where I read one Saturday night. Two solemn and impressed young women were talking afterward, and I heard one say (of me), “She’s so creative.” A friend found me bashing my head against a wall in sheer frustrated rage. After a bloody quarter of a century of enslavement to this peculiar obsession, after work, work, work, endless work, to be told, yes, you are so “creative.” Pork chops.

  Good luck with your speech. It ought to make wonderfully ghastly reading.

  Oh, it does make ghastly reading, Joanna.

  But you think you’ve got problems, what with naive readers blaming you for what publishers put on your covers? Well how about when they pretend to be naive, merely to cause you grief? What do I mean? Well, here’s a classic, fortuitously recent, example of just how malicious fans can be.

  In the Letters section of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine for December 1989, there appears a communiqué from one Paul Osborn of Bremerton, Washington. (At least, the letter is signed as being from someone named Paul Osborn, and the postmark—I’m told—was Bremerton, Washington. But not all is what it appears to be, in the world of science fiction’s feral aficionados; as we shall shortly see.)

  After dealing with other matters in the previous March 1989 cover-dated issue, the alleged Mr. Osborn writes as follows:

  “I liked the Ellison story very much, but why was it listed as a novelette when it was shorter than two of the short stories in the issue?”

  Now that’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and as anyone familiar with Occam’s Razor would reply, “It was probably an editorial glitch, a production error that no one caught.” Which is exactly what it was.

  The story in question, “The Few, the Proud,” is a mere 3,600 words. It runs seven and a third pages. It is obviously not a novelette. (The universally-accepted designations for story-length are as follows: short story, length under 7500 words; novelette, 7500 to 17,500; novella, 17,500 to 40,000; novel, 40,000 and up.) My preceding appearance in IASFM, in the previous year’s mid-December issue, had been a novelette: “The Function of Dream Sleep” at 9900 words. So it’s conceivable that the Production Director or one of the editorial assistants got them switched around in memory. Whatever.

  The point is, even to the slowest intellect going, this is a simple, human error that took place prior to publication; and a transposition so unimportant (appearing as it does only on the table of contents) that it didn’t amount to a mote of dust in the course of literary history.

  And had the alleged Mr. Osborn stopped there, having asked a reasonable question, it would have been the kind of letter one would expect to receive from a rational reader. But he didn’t. Here’s what follows, in the same paragraph:

  “I suppose a cynic would say that Mr. Ellison, The Guy With Lord Knows How Many Hugo and Nebula Awards (But Always Ready for MORE MORE MORE!!!) is trying to put a fast one over on Duh Hicks from Duh West by calling a short story a novelette. Since there are always fewer novelettes published in a year than there are short stories (in 1988 Asimov’s published thirty novelettes versus fifty-three short stories), this stratagem gives ‘The Few, the Proud’ a decided edge. As I said, this is the response of a cynic, and I’ve given up cynicism for Lent. But by the time the annual index rolls around (and with it, the Readers Award poll—another chance for MORE MORE MORE!!! awards) Lent will be over. I’m looking forward to it.”

  Heaven knows there is no shortage of paranoia in the world; but even in a Universe of Conspiracy Theories that load of ignorant drivel is laughable. As if I, in Los Angeles, managed somewhichway to gull the editor—who paid me by the word and knew very well how long the piece was—the managing editor, the editorial assistants, and the contracts manager, all of them three thousand miles away in New York, into letting me suborn them into mislabeling a short story as a novelette for the demented purpose of affording the story a chance to win an award, the designations for which are set by parties unknown to me, who count the wordage!

  And how did I manage to do this?

  Do I have unspeakable secrets that can be used to blackmail these individuals? Did I pay out vast amounts of money to insure a better shot at winning awards that are basically useless to me after thirty-five years at the writing profession? Is there anyone in his or her right mind that could credit any of what the alleged Mr. Osborn suggests as anything more than lunacy?

  Even the most naive reader, unfamiliar with the more esoteric aspects of magazine publication, would perceive that this was a straightforward production error of the most common, most inconsequential sort. And one would dismiss the alleged Mr. Osborn’s babbling as the ruminations of someone being intentionally silly.

  But let’s look at what he actually wrote.

  As one who lives in Duh West, the paralogical reference to Hicks from Duh West makes no sense at all.

  But consider the suggestion that lies passim the convoluted assumptions of the alleged Mr. Osborn’s proposal: Ellison has won all these awards, but he’s greedy, never has enough awards. But those awards weren’t won for the quality of the work, they were somehow managed, coerced, manipulated, all the way back to the first one in 1965, and for the next twenty-five years. By incredibly clever means, Ellison has managed to put it over on the hundreds and hundreds of individuals responsible for awarding the Hugos, Nebulas, Edgars, Bram Stoker, P.E.N., Writers Guild, British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards this Machiavellian no-talent has accumulated.

  Not to mention somehow managing to hypnotize the readers of, say, Locus, who have voted for Ellison work over the years, in the number of thousands.

  When the letter appeared in Asimov’s, the magazine should have allowed me the courtesy of replying on the same page to the alleged Mr. Osborn’s fever-dream. But not even the managing editor, Sheila Williams, took the letter very seriously. It was clear the author of that delusion was so sophomoric and so off-base, that there wasn’t much point in replying. Nonetheless, Ms. Williams wrote a response:

  When the Fourth Annual Readers’ Award poll does appear, readers will be asked to look at the stories carefully and to only rank them in the category under which they are listed in the Index.

  Which is beside the point.

  It doesn’t address what Mr. Osborn (alleged) was really up to.

  Because, if it were simply an overly punctilious reader being foolish enough to comment on a glitch as obvious as this even to a neophyte, then why the need for all that glop about MORE MORE MORE!!! (and each time the phrase appears, he puts three exclamation marks)? We are drawn to dismiss the whole thing as, well, ignorant drivel; and I would have done so, too, except years of
dealing with this kind of mentality makes my antennae quiver.

  And so I got the address of the correspondent from Asimov’s (there had been no direction by the letter-writer that the address was to have been withheld), and I called information in Bremerton, Washington. And not only is there no Paul Osborn at the address on the letter, there is no “Paul Osborn” listed in Bremerton at all. And a simple check of public records in Bremerton advises that the parties listed as living at the address the alleged Mr. Osborn gave as his own, do not seem to go by the name Osborn.

  So who is this letter-writer, who cobbles up gratuitously insulting codswallop? From the evidence of the letter, it is a regular reader of science fiction…what we call a fan.

  And it is one who thinks himself (or herself) devilishly clever, to go into left field to spread just another tidy slather of ugly supposition on a loaf already redolent with myth and bullshit. What kind of mentality is so meanspirited?

  How many other writers have suffered this kind of odious letterhacking opprobrium through the years? And how many work-hours have been lost in trying to rectify the lousy impressions made by these people? Enough hours to write enough books to fill a large showcase. Books no one will ever read.

  What toll does it take? Here’s a small part of a four-page, single-spaced letter in response to my original query. It is from David Gerrold:

  “The thing is, Harlan—I made a mistake. I thought that fans were important. If I’d never been introduced to fandom, I’d have saved five years of mistakes. Indeed, I credit my relationship with the more hostile elements of the fannish community with being partially responsible for a five year slump in my writing.” David then goes on to relate anecdote after anecdote—one deranged woman who convinced a group of fans at a convention that she was carrying David’s baby—a fan who sent him a greeting card that was personally inscribed, Merry Christmas to Everybody. Except you.—a fan who solicited contributions supposedly intended for the benefit of another fan who had been robbed—who didn’t even exist—and he ends his letter as follows: