In July 1998 Harlan Ellison was an online guest at Parcon, a SF convention in Chotebor in the Czech Republic. The following are his responses to the questions posed on-line by the Czech fans: HELLO, MY NAME IS HARLAN ELLISON Greetings to all of you at Parcon. I am pleased and honored to be asked to speak directly to the Czech and Slovak fans, professionals, and readers in Chotebor. It was very gracious of you to have asked me to participate. In return, you are all invited to my home in Los Angeles next Tuesday night. We are boiling and eating a Mike Resnick novel. ------------------------------------- >To all: >There is a talk about "crisis" in contemporary "sci-fi", be it film, TV, >books or WEB while even moderates talk about stagnation, at the best. I do >not subscribe to that opinion, however it is true, that after several >decades, the themes, forms and stories are partially exhausted and >worn-out. > >Much of the literature is devoted to aliens, who are portrayed mostly as >violent or destructive creatures at best. At the same time they are >-supposingly - greatly advanced to be intelligent enough to suppress that >rather primitive behaviour. Is our fantasy so shallow or is it because our >readers - thanks to Hollywood - cannot imagine excitement without killing >or anihilation? > >Their mental processes somehow does not reach the level of their >technological advancement and one wonders if their Darwin didn't work some >strange way, missing the "human level" of intelligence completely. Either >way, we people seem to be quite strange to their world. We all know that >"fantasizing" of Jules Verne became reality in our century. I cannot >imagine the same happening with today's science fiction. > > That is not to say that the core of the sci-fi literature is not artistic >or healthy. Unfortunately, the repetitious efforts of some authors are >alarming. Are we really running out of steam? Shouldn't quality again >prevail over quantity? What is - according to you - the mission of sci-fi >and how can we achieve it? HARLAN'S RESPONSE: First of all, the hideous neologism "sci-fi"--which sounds like crickets fucking--is at the core of this seeming malaise. What is called "sci-fi" is _not_, repeat NOT, science fiction. It is special effects movie/television produced by and for imbeciles. Giant lizards, moronic space battles with spaceships acting as if they were Spads and Fokkers dogfighting in atmosphere, recycled fairy tales, and illiterate appeals to paranoia. They bear as much relation to science fiction of quality (whether film or tv or books or magazines) as Dachau did to a health spa. When you talk of the "crisis," what you're talking about is the fact that-- universally--the electronic and visual mediums have captured the attention of the possible participatory audience, as books used to do...and so we have what could be called the "graying" of the readership. Younger readers are simpy not going to books for their Sense of Wonder. They're going to things such as this very internet web on which I'm placing my gloomy opinion. As for all that bother about aliens, well, aliens function in sf stories the way lynched black men or mongol invaders did in the fiction of William Faulkner and Harold Lamb. They are just another tool, another kind of ambulatory furniture, because (sad to say) most writers of sf are unable or incapable when it comes to creating real characters. They use tropes, images, stereotypes. That's why science fiction has never produced its equivalents of MADAME BOVARY, THE GREAT GATSBY, THE IDOT or ELMER GANTRY. Every once in a great while, we get someone like Heinlein's The Great Lorenzo, or Alfred Bester's Ben Reich, or Jack Vance's Demon Princes, or van Vogt's Jommy Cross. But for the most part, in this one respect only, the Outside World is right on target pointing to sf as a "recreational" fiction, as opposed to "literature". Yes, we have the ideas, and the scope, and the dazzling concept, and the Sense of Wonder blah blah blah...but nowhere on that magical landscape do we see the habitation of Human Beings We Can Call Memorable. So don't worry about all that alien crap. Stanley Weinbaum is dead, and so is Eric Frank Russell, and what we get now from the movies is bad, bum, stupid Roland Emmerich crap. ------------------------------------- >> Which do you believe is your best book - the one I should >> definitely read? >> jirka What is my best book. Hmmm. The usual answer is: my latest book...because it represents my most recent writing and so, I hope, reflects the lessons I have learned, and the current level of my thinking and expertise. So that would mean my new book, SLIPPAGE. In fact, whoever can get my money from Jaroslav Olsa, I will send ten (10) of my books, in mint condition, personally autographed. And I'll include SLIPPAGE. But, in truth, my favorite book is the large art book I did with the exquisite Polish surrealist, Jacek Yerka. The book is called MIND FIELDS, and it came out last year, and it is gorgeous. I wrote 33 new stories, unpublished anywhere else, to accompany 34 brilliant paintings by Jacek. It is as lyrical and magical as any book I've written. Beyond those two, I suppose I have been at my best in the stories that are collected in a 35-year retrospective of my work: THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON. ------------------------------------- At 05:02 AM 7/4/98 -0600, you wrote: >There is a problem with translations here in Czech Republic. >Some publishing houses try to minimalize price of the book by hiring "fast >and cheep" translators. The overall impression from such novel is then >questionable. >Do you, as a writer, any control about the translation of your texts to >foreign languages? To Zdenek Rampas and Pavel Suchmann: I wish I had greater control over who the publishers use. But the simple truth is that I am at a great disadvantage, as are all the other writers translated from English. We have to rely on their "good offices" to hope that they're picking people who can not only translate idiomatically--and my work is very hard in that respect-- but who can capture the underlying tone and color, the sub-currents and poetry. That's a tall order. It takes a remarkable man or woman, versed eloquently in BOTH languages. If any of you know of such people, please send me their named and then--if I get a Czech publisher who will deal more honestly with me than Jaroslav Olsa,--I can make the hiring of those people an integral part of the contract. I would be very much in your debt for such a thing. ------------------------------------- >*** American (and British) SF dictates the canon of the world s SF. But we >can just see that European movie directors like Verhoeven or Besson >refreshed the old Hollywood schemas and brought us some inventive movies. Do >you think that there is an equal potential inside European writing? That SF >from the Continent could somehow shake the SF genre in the near future? I think you underplay the quality and excellence of the European sf that has ALREADY been published. I have found the work of writers from a dozen different European nations (in translation) to be inventive, fresh, compelling. Just because Americans and Brits own the store, doesn't mean there isn't room on the shelves for some tasty European delicacies. >*** How much do you feel limited by success of your past books and stories? >Would you write a book which you strongly want to write but which would seem >like a totally non-commercial title? Not a problem for me. I *NEVER EVER* write something simply because it's commercial. For forty years I've been writing only what it pleases me to write. Money is what I am paid for doing the job well...it is not my incentive. Mr. Olsa? >*** Do you regard the internet publishing and hypertextual approach to the >text as a challenge? Could it change the future of book writing? Let's stay friends, don't ask me this one! ------------------------------------- >Do your experiences influence your work? It seems some writers try to do >many jobs before their writers career begins and use the knowledge from this >"school of life" for writing. >How much of your work is about you and how much of it is a pure abstraction? The answer of course is...BOTH. Neither one nor the other, used to the exclusion of the opposite element, provides a sufficiency of richness for a well-rounded story. We are, each of us in the craft of fiction arena, a gestalt creature, a made-up entity of all the experiences we have ever had, plus all the experiences everyone else from the dawn of recorded history, have had...which we have assimiliated though the received universe, books, films, legends, conversations, biographes, the study of history. So even if someone *things* he or she is writing from "pure abstraction" that is clearly foolishness, because *all* of it is filtered through the individual intelligence of that gestalt creature. Just like God, who is a creation of Man (not the other way around), so is all fiction. There is, therefore, no such thing in a work of fiction as "pure abstraction." Unless one has no human content...or even alien content, because aliens, as written in sf stories, are only metaphors for human behavir, variations on such human capacities. Because to write a *truly* alien character, it would be utterly incomprehensible to us. I have tried that several times, and the stories were *always* semi-pointless. Aliens are interesting in our stories only as they relate to emotions and hungers and drives and needs and passions with which we can identify. Pure abstraction would be about the way a block of milled zinc thinks, and how it responds to the universe. The moment you suggest that block of zinc has consciousness, is the moment you begin to deal with human concepts, and the author's resonance to those concepts makes it "about him" and not pure abstraction. So, I would say, you shouw me a stroy that is "pure abstraction" and I will show you a bad piece of writing, that is dull and boring, and at best pedantic. It ain't writing, it's a parlor trick perpetrated by a non-writer to prove a point not worth proving. As Herman Mellville wrote: "No great and undying work has ever been written on the flea...though many there be who have tried." When it comes to *my* work, anyone familiar with my *oeuvre* knows that having been the only Jewish kid in a small Ohio town, having run away and joined a carnival at age 13, having worked my way through a brief year-and-a- half of college before being thrown out, having been on the road and earning my living since very young in life, and having lived fairly dangerously for the first fifty of my 64 years...has provided me with a wealth of oddments and circumstances and characters and situations that inform my work. I never strive for *realism* in what I write, but rather I insist on *verisimilitude*. I hope when you translate that, the important distinction can be made. I don't need things to *be* true, I must have them *seem* to be true. So my life is *always* the unspoken wind that whispers through my work. Whether I'm writing of a woman, or a black man, or a Latino child, or a cynical dog that is telepathic...I'm borrowing from my own life, and other people's. I once wrote that writers take tours through other peopel's lives. I think that's accurate. The "idea"--what the person who asked the question meants, I think, ny "pure abstraction"--is only the beginning. An idea is not a story. That's an important, basic, urgent thing to bear in mind, for reader as well as writer. An idea is just a concept, a "what-if?" It is something to tickle your mind. *What you do* with the idea is what we call writing; it is what we call a story. ------------------------------------- >1) Could you recommend us the best WWW site with a reliable information >about you? >(from moderator: the address which would be placed to our conference site >after finishing our discussion for a convenience of visitors.) >2) Do you want to address notes to other participants (writers) of our >discussion? (please use an oportunity to meet your colegues virtually.) >3) How much do you use Internet and for what? e.g. do you watch usenet >newsgroups? >J. Vanek jr. With these questions, Harlan and I have to say farewell--although I will pass on anything else you send, it's getting late here and Harlan also needs to get back to his life: The last questions I received all deal with electronic mail, the use of the Internet, and contact sites for information about me and my work. You will no doubt find my response amusing. I am not on the web. I do not use a computer. I don't have a modem. I have no electronic mail. I work, as I have worked for more than forty years as a professional, as I have in my pre-sf and fannish lives, on a manual typewriter. I use the Olympia exclusively. I have a dozen typewriters, both large office machines (on which I'm typing these replies) and portables which I have carried with me all over the world, inclouding two Olympia "wafer" models that were designed for war correspondents. I am not a Luddite. I have a fax machine, an Elektrodex that contains phone numbers, my office has a photocopying machine, and my home has four television sets (used for different purposes). I do not ride in a horse and buggy, I do not wear shoes with buttons on them, we microwave much of the food we cook here at home, and though I own a beloved 1947 Packard automobile (which is lovely beyond description, second only to my wife, Susan) we do have a 1989 Geo for daily driving. But I *like* to work on a manual typewriter...not even an electric, just a plain good sturdy finger-driven Olympia. It is my core feeling about technology that not all change is necessarily progress. The mad rush to jettison one mode of process for another, and the accompanying slanders against those who resist such universal changes, makes me bare my teeth. I think it a rational and efficient attitude to use the technology that best gets the job done, in the most efficient and personally rewarding manner, and anything beyond that is what we call, here in America, "trying to keep up with the Jones family"-- meaning that you're afraid you'll look old-fashioned and out-of-date if you don't have a rotating pink flamingo on the roof of your house, like Mr. and Mrs. Jones next door. I work marvelously--otherwise why would you have asked me to participate in your convention--with a manual typewriter. It makes music. I sit here and type at 120 words per minute, almost without typos, using only two fingers; and I have done so for the entirety of my career. I have tried working on the PC, and it is too slow for me. And it takes forever to format it. And it produces copy that is sterile-looking, and ugly. And it doesn't know how to space the dots in an ellipsis ... like that. And it is stupid, and tries to make me misspell words I have spelt correctly. No, you can all have the Internet, and I will stay with decent, human mail, by post, with letters that are signed by hand...with faxes that are delivered on real paper, signed by hand by real human beings...and with the telephone, through which I can hear real human voices. The web is something that has valuable uses, but I prefer to stay in the Actual World, not the Virtual World. The Virtual World is a prison, the Actual World is the open frontier of human experience to me. I have no negative things to say to, or about, those who worship the web, but I ask in return that they honor *my* choice of existence. For those of you who *must* use a web site, my friend Rick Wyatt has taken pity on me, and accepted the onerous task of overseeing my primary website. The address is: http://www.menagerie.net/ellison And one other site that well represents me is called "Islets of Langerhans" (from one of my stories) and its Reigning Monarch, or sys-op as you say, is Mr. Michael Zuzel. "Islets" is more concerned with actual discussions of my work, and far less with a running commentary of my life, where I'll be speaking, what books are coming out, and such other interesting (but not necessarily academic) topics. It is a splendid source and, coupled with Mr. Wyatt's "Ellison Webderland," it provides all the reliable information anyone could want. Let me repeat that word: RELIABLE. One of the most ugly and destructive qualities of the worldwide web is that if offers a platform to any idiot who cares to spread incorrect information, meanspirited gossip, pointless blather, humorless and dangerous practical jokes, and all the other sort of garbage that used to be relegated to the schoolyard and back-fence gossip. So "Ellison Webderland" and "Islets of Langerhans" are authorized by me, and you can belive what you find tehre. You need go to no other sources for information. And if anything important comes up, you can ask Rick to pass it on to me (note: my address is rwyatt@menagerie.net--Rick), as he has done for several of your convention's attendees. Again, you can find ELLISON WEBDERLAND at: http://www.menagerie.net/ellison And ISLETS OF LANGERHANS at: http://www.teleport.com/~mzuzel/ Apart from those two sites, where the webmasters apprise me of what's happening, should I need to know...I have no interest in, or connection with, this electronic mummification of the human imagination. But is we could arrange it, my wife and I would much admire to come to Czechoslovakia one day, to share good times and talks. In person. For real. Actual. So we can look into each other's faces and see the truth of what we are saying. Thank you for inviting me to be part of this *very* productive event. A blessing of the 18th Egyptian dynasty: *God be between you and harm in all the empty places you walk.* Harlan Ellison 5 July 1998