Closing with Ellison is perhaps almost mandatory because in his short stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things which horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives. Ellison is haunted by the death of Kitty Genovese-a murder that comes up in his "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" and in several of his essays-the mass suicides in Jonestown; and he is convinced that Iran's Ayatollah has created a senile dream of power in which we are now all living (like men and women in a fantasy tale who ultimately come to realize they are living in a psychotic's hallucinations). Most of all, it seems to me that Ellison's work is the proper place to conclude because he never looks back; he has been the field's point-man for fifteen years now, and if there is such a thing as a fantasist for the 1980s (always assuming there are a 1980s, ha-ha), then Harlan Ellison is almost surely that writer.
He has quite deliberately provoked a storm of controversy over his own work-one writer in the field whom I know considers him to be a modern incarnation of Jonathan Swift, and another regularly refers to him as "that no-talent son of a bitch." It is a storm that Ellison lives in quite contentedly.
"You're not a writer at all," an interviewer once told me in slightly wounded tones. "You're a goddam industry. How do you ever expect serious people to take you seriously if you keep turning out a book a year?" Well, in point of fact, I'm not "a goddam industry" ( unless it's a cottage industry); I work steadily, that's all. Any writer who only produces a book every seven years is not thinking Deep Thoughts; even a long book takes at most three years to think and write. No, a writer who only produces one book every seven years is simply clicking off. But my own fecundity-however fecund that may be-pales before Ellison's, who has written at a ferocious clip; at this point he has published just over one thousand short stories. In addition to all the stories published under his own name, Ellison has written as Nalrah Nosille, Sley Harson, Landon Ellis, Derry Tiger, Price Curtis, Paul Merchant, Lee Archer, E. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, Clyde Mitchell, Ellis Hart, Jay Solo, Jay Charby, Wallace Edmondson-and Cordwainer Bird.*
The Cordwainer Bird name is a good example of Ellison's restless wit and his anger at work he feels to be substandard dreck. Since the early sixties he has done many TV scripts, including produced scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents , The Man from U.N.C.L.E. , The Young Lawyers, The Outer Limits , and what many fans feel may have been the best Star Trek episode of them all, "The City on the Edge of Forever." ** At the same time he was writing these scripts for television and winning an unprecedented three Writers Guild of America awards for best dramatic television scripts in the process-Ellison was engaging in a bitter running battle, a kind of creative guerilla warfare, with other TV producers over what he regarded as a deliberate effort to degrade his work and to degrade the medium itself ( "to Cuisinart it," in Ellison's own words).
*All quoted in the Ellison entry by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia . To point out the obvious, "Nalrah Nosille" is Harlan Ellison spelled backwards. Other names Ellison used-E. K. Jarvis, Ivar Jorgensen, and Clyde Mitchell-were so-called house names. In pulp terminology, a "house name" was the name of a totally fictional writer who was, nevertheless, extremely prolific . . . mostly because several (sometimes dozens) of writers published works under that name when they had another story in the same magazine. Thus.
"Ivar Jorgensen" wrote Ellison-style fantasy when he was Ellison and sexy, pulp-style horror, as in the Jorgensen novel Rest in Agony , when he was someone else (in this case, Paul Fairman). To this should be added that Ellison has since acknowledged all of his pseudonomous work, and has published only under his own name since 1965. He has, he says, a "lemminglike urge to be up front.”
**This may be the longest footnote in history, but I really must pause and tell two more Harlan stories, one apocryphal, the other Harlan's version of the same incident.
The apocryphal, which I first heard at a science fiction bookstore, and later at several different fantasy and science fiction conventions: It was told that Paramount Pictures had a preproduction conference of Big Name Science Fiction Writers prior to shooting on StarTrek: The Movie . The purpose of the conference was to toss around ideas for a mission that would be big enough to fly the Starship Enterprise from the cathode tube to the Silver Screen . . . and BIG was the word that the exec in charge of the conference kept emphasizing. One writer suggested that the Enterprise might be sucked into a black hole (the Disney people scoffed that idea up about three months later). The Paramount exec didn't think that was big enough. Another suggested that Kirk, Speck, and company might discover a pulsar that was in fact a living organism. Still not big enough, the writer was admonished; the writers were again reminded that they should think BIG. According to the tale, Ellison sat silent, doing a slow burn . . . only with Harlan, a slow burn lasts only about five seconds. Finally, he spoke up. "The Enterprise ," he said, "goes through an interstellar warp, the great-granddaddy of all interstellar warps. It's transported over a googol of light-years in the space of seconds and comes out at a huge gray wall. The wall marks the edge of the entire universe. Scotty rigs full-charge ion Masters which breach the wall so they can see what's beyond the edge of everything. Peering through at them, bathed in an incredible white light, is the face of God Himself.” A brief period of silence followed this. Then the exec said, "It's not big enough. Didn't I just tell you guys to think really BIG?” In response, Ellison is supposed to have flipped the guy the bird (the Cordwainer Bird, one assumes) and walked out.
Here is Harlan Ellison's recitation of the True Facts: "Paramount had been trying to get a Star Trek film in work for some time. Roddenberry was determined that his name would be on the writing credits somehow . . . . The trouble is, he can't write for sour owl poop. His one idea, done six or seven times in the series and again in the feature film, is that the crew of the Enterprise goes into deepest space, finds God, and God turns out to be insane, or a child, or both. I'd been called in twice, prior to 1975, to discuss the story. Other writers had also been milked. Paramount couldn't make up their minds and had even kicked Gene off the project a few times, until he brought in lawyers. Then the palace guard changed again at Paramount and Diller and Eisner came over from ABC and brought a cadre of their . . . buddies. One of them was an ex-set designer . . . named A-Park Trabulus.
"Roddenberry suggested me as the scenarist for the film with this Trabulus, the latest . . . of the know-nothing duds Paramount had assigned to the troublesome project. I had a talk with Gene . . . about a storyline. He told me they kept wanting bigger and bigger stories and no matter what was suggested, it wasn't big enough. I devised a storyline and Gene liked it, and set up a meeting with Trabulus for ii December (1975). That meeting was canceled . . . but we finally got together on 15 December. It was just Gene (Roddenberry) and Trabulus and me in Gene's office on the Paramount lot.
"I told them the story. It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when Man first emerged. I postulated a parallel development of reptile life that might have developed into the dominant species on Earth had not mammals prevailed. I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek future, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem.
"Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, `You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?’ "I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, `There weren't any Mayans at the dawn of time.' And he said, `Well, who's to know the difference?' And I said, "I'm to know the difference. It's a dumb suggestion.' So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn't I do it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, "I'm a writer. I don't know what the fuck you are!' And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie.” Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but "Right on, Harlan!”
In cases where he felt his work had become so watered down that he no longer wanted his name on the credits, he would substitute the name of Cordwainer Bird-a name that comes up again in "The New York Review of Bird" in Strange Wine , a madly amusing story that might well be subtitled "The Chicago Seven Visit Brentano's.” Cordwainer is an archaic English word for "shoemaker"; so the literal meaning of Ellison's pen name for scripts which he feels have been perverted beyond any kind of useful life is "one who makes shoes for birds." It is, I think, as good an explanation as any for the work that television is engaged in, and suggests quite well the nature of its usefulness.
It is not the purpose of this book to talk about people per se , nor is it the purpose of this chapter on horror fiction to fulfill a "personal glimpse of the writer" sort of function; that is the job of the Out of the Pages section in People magazine (which my youngest son, with unknowing critical acuity, insists on calling Pimple ). But in the case of Harlan Ellison, the man and his work have become so entwined that it is impossible to pull them completely apart.
The book I want to talk about here is Ellison's collection of short fiction, Strange Wine (1978). But each Ellison collection seems built on the collections which have preceded it- each seems to be Ellison's report to the outside world on the subject This Is Where Harlan Is Now. And so it becomes necessary to discuss this book in a more personal way. He demands it of himself, and while that doesn't specially matter, his work also demands it . . . and that does matter.