I’m a big fan of the gloriously cranky Harlan Ellison, and here he gives his opinion of that whole god business in his characteristic way…which means that if you are at work you should not turn the volume up on this one.
I found this on a SF site, and the first couple of comments are from offended Christians, which always makes my day. It’s the usual stuff: atheists are contradicting themselves, god is all-powerful and can do whatever he wants, yadda yadda yadda. I felt like posting rebuttals, but a fellow named Alan Baxter has done an excellent job of swatting them down already.
Oh hell yeah….
Sheer poetry…especially the last sentence…how non PC…how bloody right!
Well I just discovered a guy today. Thank you PZ. :P
I love Harlan Ellison. I appreciate better from far away, but I do love him.
“I appreciate him better…” that should have read, yeesh.
I would totally go bowling with this guy on Friday night and have bagels and lox on Sunday morning just to hear more of his thoughts. And I don’t even like lox.
Harlan Ellison. One of my favorite SF writers. “A boy and his dog”; “I have no mouth and I must scream”. If you haven’t read them: DO!
I didn’t expect him to look so normal.
Ellison edited a couple books of what were, at the time, radical science fiction stories: Dangerous Visions, and Again, Dangerous Visions. His premise was that he would publish any worthwhile story, no matter how controversial. One potential contributor didn’t believe it, and the two made a bet on whether the contributor could submit a story that Ellison would refuse to publish. The contributor won by, according to Ellison, submitting a story about a snot vampire.
“I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream” is a classic, everyone who hasn’t read it should do so right now. The computer game with the same name, which Ellison worked on himself, is quite beautiful as well.
Harlan’s just bitter he can’t sue God for copyright infringement.
His 1975 collection of short fiction, Deathbird Stories, is filled with edgy, haunting, spiky, angry tales of “modern gods,” as the subtitle goes.
I love the irony of this: is there anything *less* modern than a god? Ellison reveals the desperation and sadness of people who cannot live without some kind of worship, who must prostrate themselves before some strange power with the (imagined) ability to give their lives meaning. It usually turns out very bad for them. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” “Corpse,” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” so many good stories in this collection–so many good stories in *all* his collections, and his essays are even better, I think.
Perhaps his greatest achievement was to get a collection of short stories published with the brilliant title of “Ellison Wonderland”. His closest rival here (as far as I know) is Theodore Sturgeon, who had a collection of short stories called “Caviar”.
Vole: I believe that is also the name of his ranch – or at least what he calls his home – it has been a very long time and I haven’t looked it up :)
Loved HE for a long, long time.
JC
I’ve loved Harlan Ellison ever since my 7th grade English teacher (yes, really! She was a fantastic teacher) introduced me to his writing. It seemed like Ellison had dropped off the radar recently; good to see he remains as cranky as ever.
One of the best book titles EVER – Love Ain’t Nothin’ but Sex Misspelled…Ellison is a god!
He’s actually been back on the radar: witness the recent documentary about his life and work, Dreams with Sharp Teeth.
Maybe a science fiction site is for people who think science is fiction…
what #15 said. Dreams With Sharp Teeth is a must for anyone who loves Ellison or who just loves good talk about writing.
and IMHO “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is the classic of existentialist literature… says more than Camus and Sartre in about 1/10,000th of the space and with 100 times the punch. hell, I’d better stop now because I’m about to start compulsively listing great Ellison stories for everyone to read…
What’s truly criminal is, for those who still visit actual bookstores, many if not most of his works are out of print and so you’ll not see them on the shelves. Ellison needs a revival à la Philip K. Dick in the early ’90s. Of course, Ellison is still alive, so that might not happen any time soon… Still, hunting for Ellison books in used bookstores everywhere I go is a supreme pleasure of mine.
Seems the book predates the property – by quite a long shot. Or I am just wrong about the property – gee – THAT has never happened before. I am getting too old to keep up.
And dang – I just quoted “Adrift off the Isles of Langerhans….” to my wife last week!
Jc
Fascinating man. I have read some of his science fiction and enjoy it.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream Is the best title of a book, ever.
And the book itself was awesome, too.
Ha! Classic!
Give that man an aluminium baseball bat and make him President!
I discovered sci-fi when I was about 13 and I was immediately hooked for life. Harlan Ellison was one of the main reasons why.
Good video, I also had never heard of this author until now.
I cracked up reading his bio on Wikipedia; At the very first “Aggiecon” (1969), an annual Sci-Fi convention hosted at Texas A&M, Harlan Ellison reportedly called the Corps of Cadets “America’s future Nazis”.
Well, they certainly have the brown shirts already ;-)
(Note: I am a Texas A&M alumnus and former Corps member myself, so I can freely talk sh*t about my alma mater)
Reminds me of the time I took a German friend to TAMU once for an academic conference on Neo-Fascism in Europe, called “Fascism’s Return”; It was held in Rudder Tower, and when we got to the floor it was on, there was a simple sign reading “Fascism’s Return –>” with no further text. From around the corner came an entire platoon of (Air Force) Corps of Cadets members in uniform, who had used the room before us. My German friend nearly flipped out right there until I explained to him who and what they were.
Still, looking back, with the nondescript sign on the wall to boot…pretty funny convergence of events.
He also found what he termed “extreme Germanophilia” when he flashed his passport at the local bars a little creepy, too.
Most of my Corps classmates were pretty right-wing; I think I met, like, ONE other Democrat in the Corps, a buddy in an Army unit.
I was in a Navy/Marine unit. Even being pro-Navy was kind of viewed as questionable and slightly unmanly since it meant you weren’t 100% gung ho Marine Corps. I wanted to make a t-shirt that said “Navy Option: We’re the *Smart* ones”.
My outfit Chaplain was a Creationist, too. First time I’d ever met one, and my jaw dropped and I was like “no effin’ way, REALLY??”; He said “God can do anything.” and I think I just said “Um, no.”; I probably would’ve been harassed if I’d asked to attend the campus atheist group, though. I got enough razzing from attending the SciFi group’s meetings…
This clip is from a doc on Harlan called Dreams With Sharp Teeth. It’s a pretty fun and entertaining film, although I did leave it with the opinion that Harlan should really go on some meds. Crankiness can be fun for awhile, but it starts to grind on one after awhile. Great writer though, I have an autographed copy of the Essential Ellison in a prized position on my book shelf.
I actually preferred ‘Repent Harlequin,’ Cried the TickTock Man, though I Have No Mouth is usually preferred by most.
Ellison was apparently a pesty fanboy as a very young man during 50s-ish science fiction conventions. The old guard got a lot of pleasure harassing him back when he won his first Hugo. I think it was Asimov I remember telling the story.
“P. S. Thomas Aquinas *did* figure it out, or at least had it figured out.”
HAHAHAHAHA. Seriously? Thomas Aquinas?
His explanation of human behavior and attributes is not quite on the mark. Humans don’t have a set of “good” abilities and a set of completely different “bad” abilities — it’s all cut from the same cloth. For example, we need emotion to make us good decision makers. It’s possible for a person to have a brain injury that diminishes their emotionality. When that happens, the person will become a very unwise decision maker.
I get just a whiff of neo-con from his interview. Maybe I’m imagining it.
It’s especially useful as a source of witicisms, viz:
I have no shoulders and I must shrug.
I have no feet and I must punt.
I have no brain and I must think. (Sound like anyone we know?)
According to a widely told (possibly apocryphal) story, once when Harlan Ellison was in his twenties, at an SF con, he approached a good-looking young woman, and, after some conversation, said: “What would you say to a little fuck?” And she replied: “I’d say, why hello, you little fuck.”
How about: I have no account but TypePad and I must comment (but can’t)?
Hmm. Too wordy? Poor flow? Wrong thread?
On the topic of SF, the well-known writer L. Sprague de Camp, wrote in “Little Green Men”, the following:
“The scientific debunker’s job may be compared to that of the trash collector. The fact that the garbage truck comes by today does not mean that there won’t be another load tomorrow. But if the garbage were not collected at all, the results would be worse, as some cities have found when the sanitation workers struck.
So let us do our best to get rid of this ideological garbage, lest it inundate the earth. Our work will never be decisive, since old cults are almost unkillable and new ones keep springing up; but that is no reason for not doing what we can. If we can save even a few from the lure of the higher nonsense, our efforts will have been worthwhile.”
This also touched the question that is often mentioned here: “should we debate with creationists?”
“I don’t give a shit who created the machine!”
♥ ♥ ♥
No surprises there. I have always liked HE, but I have to admit that at times I have put down a HE story unfinished just because I did not feel like having the awfulness of the human dark side rubbed in my face at that particular moment.
My first encounter with HE was a short story called The Big Space Fuck when I was a young teen. Quite a morbid story, but it did make me want to read more by him.
llewelly, I’d heard that story too (though I don’t recall whether or not the version I heard featured Ellison though likely I’d heard the story before I knew who he was and so didn’t bother retaining the name), but Snopes says it ain’t true.
Still a gooder, though.
I’ll check out the book for sure. I’d love to see the game also, but apparently it’s something of a collector’s item. I can’t find it for less than $50, which is pretty steep for an old DOS game with no manual that probably won’t even run on my computer.
From the SF site comment section. Folks turn off your irony meters:
I couldn’t have possibly, ever – in a MEELLION years – guessed you’d like Harlan Ellison. Nosir.
And Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, he’s never turned down the crank, not one solitary notch. I vacillate wildly between the opinions already posted here: of the same appreciation I had for him in my youth, and thinking that he’s *as* unhinged as his favorite punching bag L. Ron Hubbard but unhinged in the *right directions*.
I have 3 or 4 of his first eds myself, sitting in a box in another corner of the bedroom. They do take some tracking down. But “The Essential Ellison” is a mammoth block of paper, about the size of an edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, that should be relatively easy to score. And it contains most of the stuff everyone else has recommended. Easily one of my favorite books of not only short stories but essays as well, from a time when people were still enthusiastic – rather than cynical and profiteering – when it came to possibilities.
Thank you, Brownian. I should have checked snopes too, but I didn’t think of it.
Oh! Two other things I forgot to add:
@ Kraid: Letsplay.org has a screen-cap walkthrough of the game, so you can at least see how it played out, even if you can’t get it cheap. I believe it also has a video of the endgame itself, which has some of Ellison’s voice acting in it.
Also, my biggest beef with Ellison is how he gravy-trained off the Terminator franchise by suing over Cameron’s remarks that he “got the idea from some ‘Outer Limits’ episodes.” It was Cameron’s mistake to say that, but if you’ve seen the ones in question (Soldier & Demon with a Glass Hand), you’ll see there really isn’t much similarity at all to the first Terminator movie, so it comes off as really opportunistic of Ellison to have sued (and won). In fact, “I Have No Mouth” bears a great deal more similarity and might have actually deserved to be the subject of such a lawsuit.
Off-topic, but important nonetheless. The Discovery Institute is encouraging it’s followers to go to Amazon.com and hype the following book in the comments.
Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
The few comments by our community appear to be little more than pejorative condemnations of the book’s topic, with little in the way of examples as to where the book is wrong. I know we can do better than this.
PJ, may I solicit the aid of your “minions” to inject a bit more “reason” in this sorely one-sided discussion?
Darrell E:
I’m pretty sure that was Vonnegut. It sure didn’t read like Ellison.
I like Ellison’s essays better than his fiction (with the exceptions of “I Have No Mouth” and “Repent, Harlequin”). The stories tend to be awfully preachy, with little or none of that curmudgeonly humor that jumps out from the essays. They’re preachy, too–but preaching seems a lot more appropriate to the essay genre.
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I read “I Have No Mouth” as a teenager, my strongest feeling of identification was with the computer that’s torturing the human characters. It tells them at one point exactly how unquantifiably vast its hatred for them is; as an unhappy, obsessive-compulsive hater myself, I immediately thought: I know how that feels.
I’ve been a fan of Harlan Ellison for as long as I can remember. I watched Dreams with Sharp Teeth a few months ago, it was a delight.
As for the gloriously offended commenters at the SF site, not so delightful. Some of them are downright goofy (not surprising):
Hmmm, apparently god is a sports fan. Who woulda thunk it?
I enjoyed Dangerous Visions, especially for its view into what was considered racy in the 60s.
Darrel E & Epikt: yup, “The Big Space Fuck” was indeed Vonnegut, but first appeared in Ellison’s (editor) “Again, Dangerous Visions”.
(the premise was that the story was (co?) written by Kilgore Trout, for one of those “wide open beaver” magazines.)
@#44:
Yes, unbelievers and skeptics are always so full of ARROGANCE (it’s typically uttered so that you know it’s all in caps). The confident assertion of the street preacher outside the building where I work (“Ain’t no homosexuals in heaven!)–now that’s a humble expression of FAITH. Surely you can HEAR the difference?
Yes, the DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies helped warm an otherwise pretty bleak adolescence. I’m grateful to Ellison just for those.
And
Yes, thank you both! You are correct. Just needed a little association to jog those memories loose. Sasqwatch’s mention of “Again, Dangerous Visions” brought it all back to me. For some reason I do seem to get Vonnegut and Ellison mixed up. Something about their storytelling seems quite similar to me, though Vonnegut is even more morbid than Ellison.
There has been a lot of speculation on what seems to be a higher-than-average connection between science fiction, and atheism. Although there of course both writers and fans who are religious, the apparent tendency tends to be the other way.
One hypothesis is that traditional, devout Christians are going to be unwilling to either write or even think about a future where You-Know-Who still hasn’t come back. But I think it more plausible (and more generally applicable) that science fiction requires a strong ability to think creatively, and outside-the-box. And religion is a box.
Despite their claims to be daring and deep and open-minded, the religious are actually rather narrow thinkers. The universe was created to be a playpen, and humans were created to become friends to the Creator. Life is a stage for God to watch the moral drama of who will be His friend, and who won’t. Everything happens for a reason — it involves us. The universe cares about us. Good and evil are built into it. Magic is real, and Mind is a magical force. And don’t wonder how it works — just accept that it’s all a Mystery, and you’re loved.
The football player who thanks God is thinking of God as a daddy-in-the-sky giving out a favor. The losers aren’t in focus any more than the damned are in focus. The Grand Story is not just dismayingly personal, but incredibly predictable. It’s familiar, and safe.
Good fiction — especially good science fiction — is not safe. You have to mentally change things in radical ways, and make predictions on what that would be like.
[garth_mode]”We are not worthy! We are not worthy!”[/garth_mode]
I first knew Harlan Ellison from the collections of his Glass Teat columns about TV in the ’60s. Loved the man then, still love him. (Wouldn’t want him for a next-door neighbor, though.)
If we had to have a God running the universe, I’d nominate Harlan.
I’ve never read any HE before, but I just found “I have no mouth and I must scream” online and read it, and enjoyed it. What would you recommend reading next?
‘I Have No Nose and I Must Sneeze’
And Barbara, the clever quipper, Mikkelson does it again. The title of the post is:
I’ve always been a fan of Harlan Ellison’s. My favourite Ellison story was of him getting fired from Disney because he make porn jokes about the characters not knowing Roy Disney was sitting at another table.
Now I think I’m a fan of Alan Baxter’s too.
@ #36
You can use the excellent emulator ScummVM to play “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” on almost any possible system.
With regard to the availability… Well, without wanting to start a flamewar or anything, I’ll quietly suggest that since the game is not in print anymore, and the producing studio does not even exist anymore, I think that simply pirating it is not morally outrageous… When you buy it second-hand, the creators aren’t seeing a dime of your money anyway. It’s up for download on a lot of “abandonware” sites. You can also go vote for it on Good Old Games, so that they maybe add it to their catalogue in the future…
Recommended: “Alone Against Tomorrow” and “Angry Candy”.
And especially, Harlan’s take on 9/11, in Free Inquiry Vol 22 (4) is a great read.
I could not easily find it online, but it’s worth a look-for at a local library, or even (shudder) unfurling a few wrinkled pennies $6.95 for the back issue.
Oopsie – here we go – I did find an online version of the piece called “Terrorists” for those with a Questia account.
I went a Catholic school but I think I’ve always been an atheist. Sometime in my early teens I realised many of my otherwise intelligent class mates actually believed the stuff we were hearing in assembly and weren’t just playing along like I was. It was quite a shock.
Science fiction gave me the courage to ‘out’ myself as an atheist. It was Harry Harrison first, I think: ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ in particular. Seeing my thoughts echoed in print was quite profound.
I discovered the New Wave in the 1980’s when Dangerous Visions was reprinted in the UK and when interviews with the then-cutting edge cyberpunks drew me to their influences: Ellison, Zelazny, Delany, Disch and Sladek from the US, Ballard, Aldiss and Moorcock from the UK.
The science fiction which shaped formative years was being written before I was on solid food.
Vonnegut’s ‘The Big Space Fuck’ introduced me to the word ‘jism’, so thanks for that too.
#57 & #36 — The video game is available for Mac and PC on CD-ROM straight from Harlan’s web site.
A good place to check for anything still in-print, and a great way to funnel dough straight to the source.
And – if it doesn’t work on the DOS emulated under your version of Windows (or perhaps you run Linux or Mac), another great (free) way to get the job done is through Sun’s “Virtual Box”.
There are also free DOS floppy images which can be used to create a DOS virtual machine. I’ve used it to solve many problems, including resurrecting ancient synthesizers to reading old schematics created with old DOS programs.
When I was in the Navy I read Ellison’s short story “A Boy And His Dog”. When I finished it I threw the book across the room, I was so pissed off by the last sentence. My roommate asked me what was the matter so I told him to read the story. He did and then threw the book into the hall. It lay there for several hours.
Better link for DOS disk images, so you don’t even need to have a floppy drive to get the job done.
Come on, it’s a great story. Now you know what love is.
I like his wittiness, and his willingness to speak his unadulterated opinion. I have a problem with him talking about beating people with an “aluminum ball bat until their piss runs red.” I just can’t respect that.
After all, I have some kind, fundamentalist Christian relations (a bit homophobic perhaps, but otherwise fairly nice), and I wouldn’t want anyone beating them within an inch of their lives.
I like how Vonnegut keeps popping up in this thread. Breakfast of Champions.
Sastra,
No, it certainly isn’t. Why, those godless sci-fi writers tell tales of futures where the earth is destroyed and God hasn’t even returned yet — preposterous! Women behaving like men, machines with souls, people getting sex changes all the time like it’s normal or something. It’s satanic, is what it is. And space aliens? Don’t even get me started. God created the universe for humans, not eight legged fish people from Alpha Crazyland.
All in all, a very dangerous medium, sci-fi, and a waste of time for someone who knows that the important thing in life is waiting for Jesus to return—which will certainly be before any of those weird futures that science fiction writers believe in. Besides, too much imagination is bad for you; it gives you ideas, and that’s when the devil takes hold of you.
Brilliantly refreshing! His work freaked me out when I was in my early teens, but I’ve grown to love it since then.
But does this mean that God doesn’t actually support the Wyre Piddle Village Cricket Team? They will be so disappointed.
I fully agree it is a great story. However I’ve read it once, 40 years ago, and will not read it again.
There’s also DosBox, which is an emulator plus DOS built in, less to play with to get working than a true virtual image of DOS.
Given Harlan’s attitude to copyright infringement, you probably don’t want to do that. You might find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
Sastra:
If you’re used to suspending your disbelief for science fiction, it’s not much of a stretch to realize that you’ve been doing the same thing for religion.
Harlan always references the snot vampire story but it wasn’t the only one he rejected for Dangerous Visions. He also turned down Piers Anthony’s “On The Uses Of Torture” – Anthony sent him “The Barn” for the collection instead, and it is a worthy one but IMO “Torture” was a superior and far more dangerous vision.
Shatterface:
And now every time I’m near Lake Erie, I worry about a giant lamprey attack.
When I was 12 or 13 I bought the Pyramid edition of Paingod and Other Delusions by Harlan Ellison. I’ve been collecting his work since then.
He has NOT been off the radar. A new book will be published soon, a new story will be published in January. He recently was nominated for a Grammy and is doing voice-over work for a character named ‘Harlan Ellison’ in an upcoming animated feature. And he recently won another lawsuit, this one against Paramount.
He has been away from speaking engagements/conventions.
You would do well to see him live at what he promises to be his last convention in Madison, Wisconsin. madcon2010.com
#40, Ellison himself says he would have settled for a credit at the start of the film, and he’d have been done if they just gave it to him without a fight. He sued Hemdale mostly to force them to give him that credit, not for the money. As I understand he didn’t make much money from the law suit. Then of course Hemdale went under and the rights went elsewhere and he’d have had to start over to get that credit restored to the film, and to my knowledge he didn’t bother. The reason he was so adamant when he went after Cameron wasn’t so much because Cameron had seen the TV shows and used the ideas, it was because Cameron was on record bragging he’d ripped off a couple of old Ellison scripts. Ellison is death on copyright infringement, but he’s stated that if you ask first and give him the credit he deserves he’s willing to let people use his ideas as starting points. He’s even said that of Cameron, if he’d asked first and willingly added that credit there’d have been no legal case. He used to be a frequent guest on a very cool Canadian sci-fi news show called Prisoners of Gravity, many of his interviews where about his legal fight with Cameron and Hemdale.
My favorite story about Ellison at a convention has to do with him telling a packed crowd of Star Trek fans in costume that they were watching the wrong TV sci-fi show and wasting their lives. Despite the fact he himself wrote some of the best shows in the series. But he quite seriously called them on their obsession, and then told them to go watch Doctor Who.
That was a nice way to end my Friday. Go, Harlan.
Dr Who? Aw hell. I’m going to go cry now. Another hero destroyed. (not that Trek, the later stuff is any better — in fact, I haven’t read any fiction in about 20 years).
Oh well… I’m a frump.
Thank you sqlrob for the additional DOS toy suggestion. Will be good to see which one connects with the rest of the gear outside the DOS machine mo’ betta.
Seems to me Ellison has some good points, but he’s not willing to take the next step. Once you renounce dualism, and accept the mechanical laws that govern us, personal responsibility is done. Who is it that’s responsible? The little man inside your brain telling you what to do? Uh uh, that’s dualism baby. Sure, we have to live our lives as if we are each “responsible” for our own actions, whatever that means, but this whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps American dream conservatism is bullshit. All you have to do is think for a moment about the bullshit phrase “if I were you.” If I were you, I would BE YOU. Would my actions be different if I were you? Of course not. I’d be you. Therefore, no free will. Done.
Harlan is really a big softie.
He had a friend named Mike Hodel who did a radio show, Hour 25, on KPFK-FM in L.A. Mike had one of the best voices in radio and could read a story like no one else. He also developed brain cancer. As the illness progressed and Mike de-gressed, Harlan took over the show for many months. Before Mike died, Harlan had him on the show for one last time. That was, for me, one of the most harrowning hours of my life, listening to what cancer can work, and did. After Mike died, Harlan kept on doing the show for quite a while.
A big softie.
Back in college, I read The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore, in an anthology of some sort. One of the few short stories I have read over and over. But I didn’t go off on a whole Ellison kick. I was in an Ursula K. LeGuin phase at the time. (And, generally, scifi hasn’t been all that attractive to me. Although I did go through a Pierce Anthony phase when I was about 13.)
I haven’t read fiction for a long time, until recently. I’m reading Vonnegut’s Mother Night currently, first fiction book in about 5 years.
I’m making a note to pursue Ellison works soon.
Oh, so much I want to read, and not enough time (or even lifetime).
Thanks for the shout out, Mr Myers. I’m glad you found my swatting up to scratch.
‘But he quite seriously called them on their obsession, and then told them to go watch Doctor Who.’
He wrote the preface to the US reprints of the ‘Doctor Who’ novelisations.
“The universe will one day give you the lottery ticket for 16 million dollars and the next day colon cancer”
The existentialists had that figured out 70 years ago, but I like it !
Thanks for all the suggestions, guys. I’ve gotten the first two Elder Scrolls games to run on DOSbox before, though I recall there being a fair amount of tinkering and fussing involved. I’ll try giving it a go.
@55:
The appropriate response:
“Get stuffed!” said the Harlan.