Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  Originally written by science hobbyists and aficionados of imaginative literature who were more Technocrats than Tellers of Tales, early sf was topheavy with gimmicks, the physical sciences, papier-mache heros and the cliches of “romantic fiction” that avoided reality as much as possible. In the late Fifties and early Sixties the new writers coming to the form found themselves hamstrung and frustrated by conventions in the genre that limited their horizons. Experimental writers like Ballard, Moorcock and Aldiss in Great Britain and Disch, Wilhelm and Spinrad in America (to name only a six-pack), began writing and getting published stories that spoke about war, politics, sex, race and labor relations, interpersonal relationships, the drug culture and a wide range of other “excluded” topics; they wrote about the real world in fantasy terms—in ways that had never been permitted between the covers of magazines often edited for the acceptability of the mothers of fourteen-year-old boys only recently weaned from The Incredible Hulk and Tom Swift, Jr.

  The foofaraw should have died away immediately. It was no big deal. There’s always been more than enough room in sf for every kind of writing. But those who had grown up with sf as a secret vice, who had been laughed at by their contemporaries for reading that crazy stuff, saw in the New Wave a desire to accept the traditional literary values of the mainstream, of “good” writing. Nothing could have threatened them more. “Good” writing always meant, to them, dark and introverted examinations of the twisted souls of losers and other non-subscribers to the Protestant Work Ethic. They foresaw sf anthologies and magazines filled with Portnoys. (But the closest they got was Malzberg’s Herovit, which was bad enough for their tender psyches.) Everything was moving too fast for them, everything was changing as sf became popular very quickly. And while there was balm in being accepted as legitimate, finally, at last, they resented the blurring of the boundaries. Why, one could board the New York-Washington, D.C. air shuttle and see simply anyone reading a Philip K. Dick novel, or a hundredth reprint of van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops.

  It’s a recognizable syndrome. The Cahiers du Cinema-oriented crowd in New York loved the work of Sam Peckinpah…as long as he was starving and couldn’t get a gig; today he’s accepted everywhere, and they put him down. The rock ingroup at Rolling Stone enthused over Three Dog Night until they became enormously popular with the mindless masses Stone rejects in its infra-hip columns…now they won’t even mention the group. The in places to dine, the unknown writers, the singers with one record…they’re much beloved, till they’re “discovered” and become common coin. Then the bloody faithful who have borne with, through insult and being ignored, turn like asps. And when Vonnegut—wisely, for the sake of a promising career and an enormous talent—made it perfectly clear that though some of his early stories were published in sf magazines, he was not a science fiction writer (and not coincidentally hit the bestseller lists soon after), you could hear the screams of betrayal and denunciation from the sf audience a hundred light-years off.

  But the truth of the matter is simply that the incredible popularity of sf on college campuses and in intellectual circles can be traced to the new breed of sf writers who, while maintaining the best elements of what was written before, conceive of themselves as writers, not science hobbyists. Some of them, without the slightest touch of pomposity, in almost an antic sense, look on themselves as serious creators. They laugh at themselves and the world, but they know damned well what they are doing is meaningful; something the old guard always doubted. Can’t blame them, really: one cannot be laughed at for forty years without some feelings of ego-weakness and insecurity rubbing off.

  And that is one part of the reason for the current success of sf. Its practitioners are committed men and women. The other part is that sf writers have grasped the import of the reality-into-fantasy concept. They understand that most of the things happening to us cannot be interpreted by Schlesingers or Theodore H. Whites or even Updikes and Susanns in any ways that relate to our pain. In short, mimetic fiction has done had it. When the contemporary novel dead-ends in the cul-de-sacs of Chuck Barris and Harold Robbins and Rona Barrett and poor, sad Portnoy making love to a piece of flanken, those who still have dreams seek elsewhere for that which uplifts and ennobles and explains. Apparently, desperate, the ones with hope have turned back to the ancient tradition of the myth, the fable, the allegory…science fiction.

  In a world where lies abound, where parents and teachers and politicians and clergy and one’s peer-group try to pass off the three-dollar-bill as stable currency, the sf writer simply says, “What if?” And it is that ability to extrapolate, to seek the new rationale, the hidden design that fascinates so many hungry minds. For those unable to accept the ready rigamaroles of Business-as-Usual, Jesus-freakdom with all its anal retentive Fascism, the endless confusion of the sex-wallow, the sterility of middle-class suburban life, the soullessness of the academic tower, the mudfly madness of occultism or the empty roads leading from the lands of dope and liquor, sf suggests: Find a new order to the universe, Dummy! An order in which you play a major part, not just as a cog. Be strong, be wise, and understand life has to amount to more than paying off the mortgage, or getting laid regularly, or earning an extra thirty cents an hour, or landing that windowless berth at National Cash Register, or simply going bananas and shooting motorists from an overpass.

  They perceive in sf stories a common thread of humanity, that there is a community of life to which we all owe allegiance before the false karasses of city, state or nation, color, religion or social set. There is a bigness, a oneness that vibrates throughout all sf, that says we are not alone down here, as Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson put it, “lost in the stars.” We are cognitive elements of something universal that has an unkillable cathexis for survival…for form!

  Struggling to cope with the ever-more-deadly pressures of a world in which order changes daily, in which generations come every fifteen minutes, in which language is so polluted that “the inoperative statement” becomes acceptable euphemism for “lie,” young people of all ages find a refreshing truth in the fantasy-lies of science fiction.

  And not even bad movies like Zardoz or Soylent Green or The Omega Man (for all the money they make because the audience is manna-hungry for good sf), or bad tv series like “The Immortal” or “The Starlost” or “Planet of the Apes,” or bad books whose numbers are legion—not all of the unspeakable shit shoveled at the massmarket and the moron mentality and called sf can slow or kill the hyperthyroid attraction of science fiction.

  It is a literature of ideas.

  A literature of imagination.

  And with the real world turning into an Hieronymous Bosch landscape before our very eyes, with Fords pardoning Nixons, with whole countrysides being swallowed by concrete and Colonel Sanders grease stops, with the persistence of attempts to make us behavior-modified Barbies and Kens, the mad dreams of the fantasists emerge as far more than amusing entertainments to be sniffed at by the Epsteins and The New York Review of Whatever.

  They become a subversive weapon in the preservation of our sanity. They become the twopenny nail we’ve hidden in our palm, to cause us the pain we need to resist the mindwashing. They become the secret whimseys on which our thoughts fasten when, like Winston Smith in 1984, we are thrown into whatever Room 101 the System thinks will whip us into shape.

  If Henry David Thoreau were alive today, when he wasn’t busy taking a leak in Walden Pond, he’d be writing science fiction.

  DEFEATING THE GREEN SLIME (HONEST TO GOD, A) MODEST PROPOSAL TIMOROUSLY VENTURED WITH TREPIDATION BY HARLAN ELLISON

  The Nebula Awards are presented each year by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) at their annual bi-coastal banquet to those of their colleagues who have produced the best work in various categories during the preceding year. (Harlan, incidentally, has three of them.) The Drama Nebula, the category addressed in the following article, no longer exists. And that, in fact, is what the noise is all about. This article
first appeared in the January 1976 Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

  Did you ever have the nervous feeling that the next letter you opened would contain a freeze-dried boa constrictor that would spring to life on contact with the air and squeeze you to death? Writing this little piece, on request of [SFWA] President Fred Pohl, gives me precisely that feeling.

  So before I set it all out as simply and softly as I can possibly make it, please believe, on the sacred memories of my father, Gernsback, Socrates and Diogenes, I have no vested interest in this matter. It is a subject that has been raised among many of us who work in films and television over the past few years, and due to an apparently incurable case of foot-in-mouth disease, I’m the schmuck who voiced it publicly at the SFWA West Coast Regional Business Meeting last August at the NASFIC † convention in Los Angeles.

  It is a topic to discuss, not an attempt to logroll, nest-feather, secretly govern or in any way pollute the integrity and/or cultural naivete of the SFWA. I make this introductory statement in the interests of sanity and calm discussion. Our membership has a lovable tendency to exercise itself about some of the most insignificant questions, and there are those of us in the film/tv arena who would like to see this one thought out gently, easily, without loud voices or special interests being served. I think that can best be accomplished by just stating the problem, throwing it open for comment, and then working out a solution. There’s no need to get too stimulated over this.

  And I’d like to be kept out of it as much as possible.

  The Nebula(s) for Best Dramatic Presentation could perhaps be selected in a more propitious fashion.

  That is the form of the resolution.

  Historically, in SFWA, we’ve voted on the Drama Nebula in precisely the same way the print media Nebulas were nominated and awarded. We haven’t been quite as concerned with the Drama Nebulas as with the more familiar categories, chiefly because a small percentage of our membership has been employed in the areas that Nebula touches, and so it has been something of an illegitimate offspring. But sf films and tv shows and stage productions and sf-affiliated record albums reach a much wider audience than even our most popular novels and stories. And to a large degree the public image of sf is conditioned by these mass-market presentations. So if we issue a Nebula to a film such as Soylent Green, and put our stamp on it as the best filmed sf of a given year, that is sf for a great many uninformed observers.

  So far, I don’t think I’ve said anything to offend anyone.

  Putting aside, for the moment, our affection for Harry Harrison and Make Room! Make Room! (from which Soylent Green was very loosely adapted), that was a film about which many of us had grave reservations. Not so much as an action-adventure film, but as a stalking horse for sf in general. In the same year Soylent Green was on the ballot, it ran against Michael Crichton’s Westworld, a theatrical feature; Bruce Jay Friedman’s Steambath, a stage production done as film for the Public Broadcasting System; and Brian Moore’s Catholics, a made-for-TV film. I have no way to substantiate this, but I think I’m on fairly safe grounds when I suggest that one of the reasons Soylent Green won the Nebula was that at least two of the other nominees were never seen by a sufficiently representative segment of our membership to win them the votes they deserved. Soylent Green may well have been the best dramatic sf offering of 1973 but because a) it was highly publicized, b) it was open and available nationwide, c) it was in local theaters during the time nominations were open and could be seen at leisure, and d) was written by “one of our people” and based on an accepted sf work…it had a far better chance to cop the votes.

  I am suggesting that this may not be the fairest conditions for selecting something as specialized as a Drama Nebula.

  Books and stories are always there. If something gets ten or fifteen recommendations, most of us who give a damn about choosing the best will seek out that item and read it. Such is not always the case with a film, a play or a staged happening that may be available only in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or San Francisco. There’s really no need for me to go into this aspect of the problem. Think on it for a moment and you’ll come up with the same unhappy truths I find about the availability of “art” throughout non-urban areas of the United States.

  Superlative art films such as the Czech animated film La Planete Sauvage or the briefly-seen Broadway production of Warp simply don’t make it to many small towns or even to many large cities. Distribution and other problems are at the core of the thing, but that’s not our concern.

  What is our concern, it seems to me, is making sure that the best dramatic presentation wins that block of lucite each year.

  What has been suggested, not only by me but by others, is that a special rotating blue-ribbon panel of writers directly concerned with the visual media select the winner.

  Now the screams begin.

  But please hold your peace for a moment.

  I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.

  We have an excellent group of members who have worked in these areas. Not just Robert Bloch and John Jakes and Dorothy Fontana and Norman Spinrad, but George Zebrowski, Leigh Brackett, Russell Bates, Forrest Ackerman, Jerry Bixby, Ralph Blum, Ben Bova, Ray Bradbury, Larry Brody, Ed Bryant, Arthur Clarke, Richard Delap, Robert Silverberg, Richard Lupoff, Chip Delany, Phil Farmer, Larry Niven, David Gerrold, Dick Geis, Ron Goulart, Jim Gunn, Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, A. E. van Vogt, Fritz Leiber, Baird Searles, Joanna Russ, Mike Moorcock, Fred Pohl, Tom Reamy, Gene Roddenberry, Bill Rotsler, Tom Scortia, Frank Robinson, Henry Slesar, Jerry Sohl, Ted Sturgeon, Bob Tucker, and David Wise have all been involved with film/tv or criticism of same in varying degrees of commitment for years. (I’ve no doubt missed a batch of names. These are the ones that memory and the 1975 Directory brought to my mind first. Apologies to the others who are qualified for such a blue ribbon panel, whom I’ve overlooked.)

  Mechanics for such a panel would, of course, have to be worked out. But apart from the obvious elements—a small group that would overlap a few members from year to year but which would be replaced in toto every two or three years…members whose work was eligible being dropped during that period…nominations accepted from anyone, anywhere during the open eligibility period—it doesn’t seem too difficult.

  The only objection I can foresee to such a proposal would be that it removes from the open membership control of one Nebula award. But that control has been removed de facto as the system now works.

  On the plus side, I suggest that truly deserving works that are missed entirely by the membership at large would be brought to all our attentions…the judgment as to who exactly deserves the physical award would be simplified, thus eliminating the expense and embarrassment of proliferating Nebulae given to three producers, a director, a scenarist and the creator of the source material…the presently unfair edge given to big box-office smashes would be eliminated…regional drama (such as in Dayton, St. Louis, Chicago and other centers of way-off-off-Broadway production) would be considered…radio dramas, educational tv offerings, foreign films, record albums, art exhibits could all be considered.

  Well, that’s it.

  Two small final comments, however.

  First, I’m aware of a kind of snobbishness on the part of some of our older, more print-oriented members toward film and tv. I suggest to them that while they may think the only good sf is that which comes writ in lines on paper, that to several succeeding generations, the visual interpretations of imaginative fiction are equally as potent. We are a film literature, whether we care to admit it or not. And it’s perhaps about time we started to pay some serious attention to that truth. Everyone else seems to understand the power of film/tv. SFWA doesn’t. This proposal, and the calm, reasoned discussion I hope it engenders, ought to open the question for examination.

  And second, and last, I suggest that those who are not familiar with script, or film, or the problems of judging visual presentations, hold off their comments till th
e writers working in the field have opened this all up a bit. What I’m suggesting is that Bob Bloch and John Jakes and Norman Spinrad and Leigh Brackett and David Gerrold and a few others who deal with this kind of thing regularly dash off your thoughts at once, just to present some other aspects of the question from a fully-informed point of view, before the less-concerned elements of the membership begin running amuck.

  And if at all possible, let’s try to remember that we all present ourselves as honest men and women, without private axes to hone. If we hold to that belief, we may be able to deal with this thing without someone suggesting all of us slimey Hollywood hacks want to build our stock with the gullible studios.

  Was that soft enough, Fred?

  …but they didn’t listen to him, so Harlan finally got disgusted and delivered his famous

  resignation speech from the Science Fiction Writers of America, 30 April 1977 New York City

  It is important to remember that Harlan’s disenchantment with SFWA’s parochialism was even more meaningful in light of the intensity of his involvement with the organization up to this time. Not only was he the recipient of the first short story Nebula awarded by SFWA, but he had in fact served as its first Vice President.