Just for the record I am a big fan of Harlan Ellison. I consider him to be one of the century's great genre writers. I still have fond memories of reading Strange Wine as a boy; Croatoan was my earliest foray into the world of not only short fiction, but horror fiction as well. Harlan's work inspired me earliest and that inspiration has proved to be the most enduring. I feel like I have to say all this because I'm about to say things about Harlan Ellison that do not portray him in a positive light.
But first a quick rant a bit about the nature of speculative fiction, science fiction in particular. The purpose of science fiction, as I see it, is to understand the present by predicting the future; it's the closest thing to a modern mythology we can find, which is why the same geeks who salivate over Star Wars and vintage Asimov are also the same kind of geeks who read everything Tolkien in sight. It's part of that quest to understand the present in larger than life terms, and it's beautiful.
Sci-fi geeks are obsessed with the future; they very seldom look back. And when they aren't thinking about the future, they're generally obsessed with what's happening right now, with things that are readily obtainable because the present is really the future all Christmas wrapped; it just hasn't been opened yet, and while geekdom may be a lot of things, one of them isn't sentimental. Geekdom is, on the contrary, fundamentally pragmatic.
All of this is what makes Harlan's hatred of the internet so hard for me to understand. To be honest Harlan's philosophical stance on technology breaks my heart in a small but annoying way; it's like peeing in your pants a little bit - not enough to necessitate a change of clothes, but just enough to make you feel squishy. That's Harlan.
It hurts my brain. The cognitive dissonance is enough to make reading him unbearable. How is it possible for one of the great writers of speculative fiction to be such a flaming Luddite?
In retrospect I guess I should have known - his short fiction is rife with technophobia, and the consternation that results from knowing that these stories rank among my favorites is something I'll just have to learn to live with. From I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream to Jeffty Is Five , the writing was on the wall. Both stories represent technology in the worst possible way. On the one hand computers evolve to entrap and torment humanity forever. On the other technology is the ultimate destroyer of childhood innocence. In either case technology is the stuff of nightmares. So if Jeffty is Harlan's alter-ego then it's no surprise that Harlan hates what he sees in the world today, the computers, the Playstations, the Ipods - the unyielding, uncaring progress that left him behind so long ago.
That, however, is no excuse for being the total jerk that people say he is. It's no excuse for being litigiously on the wrong side of history. And it's no excuse for trying to subvert the greatest technological invention in the history of the human species. Harlan may be notorious, but being an artist does not give him the right to be less of a human being. If anything it's a call to arms, an obligation to stand apart and be better than the common herd, and that involves more than art; it requires a higher standard of behavior as well.
So here I am running Mandriva Spring 2008 on a home built custom brew machine writing my latest blog on Google Docs while I check my RSS feeds... and feeling so cutting edge, so part of the very near future, and it occurs to me that that is the very nature of geekdom, that persistent forwardness of vision. It's impossible to ignore these things and contemplate the future of science or speculative fiction at the same time. If science fiction is the attempt to understand the present in terms of the future then these things will continue to be the stuff of speculative fiction for a long, long time. At least if we're talking about speculative fiction that has any hope of being relevant at all.
So sorry Harlan, but that's just the way it has to be, no matter how long and hard you rant, no matter how loud you yell and no matter who you frivolously sue. The internet is here to stay and it doesn't need your permission to exist.
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