We Have No Sleep, But We Must Dream

SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers for most of Harlan Ellison's work is discussed here.

Harlan Ellison is perhaps the last, among the cadre of science-fiction writers who redefined the genre for the second-half of the twentieth century, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Octavia Butler, and countless others Ellison would berate my illiterate mind for not naming. These were creatives who not only wrote exciting stories, but also pricked our conscience, teaching us of the boon and the terror science could bring, reminding us of our commitment to our fellow man, sharpening our minds with skepticism of both religion and government, and first and foremost, ensuring that reading never vanished from the Earth.




Ellison was a writer like no other, with a distinct, confident voice that never shied away from honesty or offense. His short story, "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" created a vision of Hell rivaled only by Dante, and brought a totalitarian terror just as intimate as Orwell's "Big Brother." It featured a sadistic supercomputer so sick of humanity that he brings about Armageddon, but leaves a few souls to thrive in his virtual world. He tortures them endlessly through a variety of perversities, with death being the prisoner's only escape, but one them surrenders his own chance at death to help another's suicide. He is rewarded for his sacrifice by being permanently deformed by the vengeful supercomputer, "I am a soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move." I have no mouth and I must scream. Horrifying. Another post-apocalyptic hell was crafted in the novella "A Boy And His Dog", in which young men hunt the anarchic wastelands for scarce women to rape. A twisted spin on the old coming-of-age-with-dog stories, like Where The Red Fern Grows or Lassie Come Home. It ends with the boy feeding his prized girl to his starving dog. A bonding moment, indeed. Ellison's writing also transitioned well into comics. His humorous take on Batman was to have the Caped Crusader unable to fight crime for night, with the citizens of Gotham more than capable to handle themselves. His take on Hulk had the green beast shrink smaller than an atom, and fall in love with a royal. The most emotional of Ellison's literary works is his short story "Susan", about a man whose nightmares come to life when he sleeps, so his Volkswagon bed lies far in the forest, the Brim of Obscurity. His four previous wives were killed by his nightmares, and his wife knows this, but still she greets him every morning when he returns and kisses him goodnight when he departs. One night, she finds him weeping, and asking why, he replies, in an achingly moving way,

"I'm crying for the loss of all the years I've spent without you, the years before I met you, all the lost years of my life; and I'm crying that there are less years in front of me, than all those lost years behind me."

Harlan Ellison with Ray Bradbury

Harlan, it must be said, was quite adept at television, as much as he despised it. For the science-fiction anthology series, The Outer Limits, he wrote the episode "Soldier", which featured a warrior from an dystopian future . If it sounds familiar, it's because James Cameron later stole the idea for his Terminator film, at least for the first three minutes. Trekkies will remember him most fondly for having penned "The City On The Edge Of Forever", the finest episode of the original Star Trek series. Kirk and Spock travel back in time to look for McCoy. They have landed in pre-World War II America, are taken in by a peace activist who runs a soup kitchen for the poor. Kirk falls in love with her, but is told by Spock that if she lives, she'll garner enough influence to make America pacifist, and make it vulnerable to being conquered by the Nazis. In one of the more tragic moments in the series, Kirk lets her die. Peace activists are sometimes so ahead of their times to be a detriment to the times they're still in. A sobering meditation on the brutality of the past, and foreboding notice over the present day.

Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman.

Ellison was a strong advocate for the integrity of the writer and against cultural illteracy. He made his opinions loud and clear on the Sci-Fi channel segment, "Harlan Ellison's Watching." He was the cranky Andy Rooney of science-fiction. We all know of his famous "pay the writer" rant, in which he urged writers not to do any work for free, and his critiques on political correctness from both right and left. I want to focus, however, on his attacks on cultural illiteracy. With the ascendancy of garbage television, Ellison lamented not only the lack of reading, but the shallow knowledge of those who did. Consider that two of the most popular poets of our time, Rupi Kaur and Kanye West, don't read much at all, and their shallow works reflect as much. Ellison once gave a chilling anecdote in which nearly of his audience in a science-fiction lecture, didn't recognize the Nazi death camp "Dachau", he ranted, "People who read science-fiction should have a sense of historicity. They should have a sense of the past. They should abide by Santyana's adage that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I said how can you not know the name Dachau, Birkenwald, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen? How can you not know this?"

Needless to say, Ellison could also be an asshole, and reveled in the obscene. He was stupidly fired from working at Disney from joking about a porno where Minnie gets gang-banged by the Seven Dwarves. This propensity could carry more serious consequences. While accepting a science-fiction award, Ellison groped Connie Willis's breast in front of the whole audience. While Ellison apologized for his behavior, I don't think Willis ever forgave him, and I can't blame her.

Why science-fiction? Of what value is there in speculating on possible worlds and futures? Is it just another soma, another opiate of the masses to keep us distracted and amused? What value, then, really of Harlan Ellison's life, of literary fiction as a whole? I think Ellison best defended the dimensions of imagination in this passage from his short story, "Repent Harlequinn, Said The Ticktockman", in which he argues that imagination reveals our freest selves, our truest selves,

"...the madness of which I speak is what the Late George Apley might have called "eccentricity." The behavioral pattern outside the accepted norm. Whatever the hell that might be. The little old man sitting on the park bench having an animated conversation with himself. The girl who likes to dress as an exact replica of Betty Boop. The young guy out on the sidewalk playing the ocarina and interspersing his recital with denunciations of the city power and water authority. The old lady who dies in her two room flat and the cops find sixty years' worth of old newspapers plus two hundred thousand dollars in a cigar box. (One of the wooden ones, the old ones you simply can't find anymore because they don't make them. They're great for storing old photos and comic character buttons. If you have one you don't want, send it along to me, willya?) The staid businessman who gets off by wearing his wife's pantyhose. The little kid who puts "S" on a bath towel and, shouting, "Up, up, and awaayyy!" jumps off the garage roof.

"They're not nuts, friends, they're simply seeing it all through different eyes. They have imagination, and they know something about being alone and in pain. They're altering the real world to fit their fantasies. That's okay.

"We all do it. Don't say you don't. How many of you have come out of the movie, having seen Bullitt or The French Connection or Vanishing Point or The Last American Hero or Freebie and the Bean, gotten into your car, and just done a wheelie, sixty five mph out of the parking lot? Don't lie to me, gentle reader, we all have weird-looking mannerisms that seem perfectly rational to us, but make onlookers cock an eyebrow and cross to the other side of the street. 

"I've grown very fond of people who can let it out, who can have the strength of compulsion to indulge their special affectations. They seem to me more real than the faceless grey hordes of sidewalk sliders who go from there to here without so much as a hop, skip, or a jump."