[ed. Wow, somebody got an actual interview with Harlan Ellison. I've been a fan since college after reading I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and The Glass Teat. Enjoy... one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time.]
DW: Harlan, first of all, can you confirm that you are indeed the great Harlan Ellison?HE: For all my sins – and I assure you, the only thing that has ever held me back from God-like greatness is my humility – I am the Harlan Ellison, the only one. I'm in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, right between Ellis Island and Ralph Ellison.
DW: Are you the writer of over 1,000 stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays and essays?
HE: Yeah, it's probably more like 1,800 now. I find that I have continued to write. I had 10 books last year, and that at my age I think is pretty good. While I always aspired to be Alexandre Dumas, if I reach the level of – I don't know, Donald Westlake – I'll be more than happy.
DW: You must have seen and done as much in speculative fiction as anyone, so can you tell us just what is speculative fiction?
HE: I will give you the only answer that there is. It is the game of "what if?". You take that which is known, and you extrapolate – and you keep it within the bounds of logic, otherwise it becomes fantasy – and you say, "Well, what if?". That's what speculative fiction is, and at its very best, it is classic literature, on a level with Moby Dick and Colette and Edgar Allan Poe.
DW: So it's definitely not fantasy.
HE: Fantasy is a separate genre, and it allows you to go beyond the bounds of that which is acceptable, where all of a sudden people can fly, or the Loch Ness Monster does not have a scientific rationale, but is a mythic creature. It is in the grand tradition of the oldest forms of writing we know, all the way back to Gilgamesh, the very first fiction we know, and the gods. Fantasy is a noble endeavour. Science fiction is a contemporary subset that goes all the way back to Lucian of Samosata, and Verne and Wells, and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.
DW: It seems to be everywhere, with video games, massive movie franchises and millions of people going to conventions. So why is it so popular now?
HE: Well, we live in a technological age. Time has passed, and we have stepped over the ruins of our own societies, and our own civilisations, and we come now to the fruition of those things about which the human race has dreamed. We have flight and we have electronic assistants. The entertainment media – which are always very timorous and step very carefully out of fear and loathing – don't know what they're doing so much. So they go back, and they are catching up on the kind of science fiction – and they call it, in that ugly, ugly phrase, "sci-fi," which those who have worked in speculative fiction despise, it's like calling a woman a "broad" – they are catching up on ideas that were covered with hoarfrost 60 years ago. That's why you have an overabundance of zombies and walking dead, and world war and asteroids from space. They have not yet tackled any of the truly interesting discussions of humanity that are treated in speculative fiction. But they are a break from standard 19th, early 20th-century fiction, and so they seem fresh to an audience that is essentially ignorant. (...)
DW: In many of your stories there is the oppressor or the bully, who wants to have their way with humanity, with whoever is in the story. The worst of these, I think for me, is I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which is a story of –
HE: Oh, yes, God. God is a shit.
DW: Yeah. It's a story you wrote in a single night. I read it in my teens in a hallucinatory state over the course of a single night. Is there something about – you have to be in this state to find that oppressive being out there? You have to find it in the night?
HE: Well, I wrote another story – I'm not steering away from the question, I'm answering it in an ancillary way, but I'll get right back to it – I wrote a whole book of stories called Deathbird Stories, which are retellings in a modern way of the godlike myths. And one of the short stories that I did, that is in the Best American Short Stories, is called The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore, and it is in a way my atheist tract. I'm a stiff-necked Jewish atheist, and I, like Mark Twain, do not believe that there is a great bearded avuncular spirit up there watching us carefully to see whether we masturbate or not. He's got better things to do creating star systems than to worry about whether we do Feng Shui with the furniture.
When I talk about God, I talk about him not believing in him. If there were a God, and you believed in him, and then instead of saying something ridiculous like, well, God has these mysterious ways, we are not meant to know what it is he's doing, or she's doing, or it's doing, I say, in defiance of Albert Einstein, yes, the universe does shoot craps – God does shoot craps with the universe. One day you'll win £200m in the lottery and the next day you'll get colon cancer. So when I wrote I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, I put God in the form of a master computer, AM – cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am – and had him preserve these half a dozen human beings, after having destroyed the world, to keep them down there and torment them forever, for having created him but giving him no place to go. And I believe – much to the annoyance of my various fervid aficionados – they wish I had more faith.
I say, I have faith in the human spirit, that something noble enough to have created GaudÃ's cathedral in Barcelona is noble enough not to have to go to war over sheep in the Falklands. That's what I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream says. In fact I did a video game called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and I created it so you could not win it. The only way in which you could "win" was to play it nobly. The more nobly you played it, the closer to succeeding you would come, but you could not actually beat it. And that annoyed the hell out of people too.
[Laughter]
HE: I spend a lot of time annoying people. That's my job on this planet.
by Damien Walter, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Mark Hanauer/Corbis Outline
