Fantastic Metropolis

It’s been said that fantasy makes us see the world with new eyes. Harlan Ellison, the recipient of more awards than any other living fantasist, breathes life into that old adage, juggling the real and imagined with the finesse of a born showman. His fictional universe has room for harlequins, telepathic dogs, mad computers and a watch that stops time. Battles of conscience occur in unlikely venues: In “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” a man at the last extreme of hopelessness encounters a slot machine possessed by the spirit of an amoral young woman. Before the tale reaches its fantastical conclusion, Ellison makes some cogent points about the addictive allure of gambling and the rotten way people treat each other from time to time.

Pay attention, Ellison tells his readers, and he isn’t above shocking them to make a point. But literary pyrotechnics are just part of his approach. Unlike a lot of career fantasists, he abhors long-windedness. Though he has written a handful of novels and even more screenplays, Ellison considers the short story part and parcel of the way he works. Slippage affiliate link, one of his most recent collections, contains “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,” a deft piece of magic realism that was picked for the 1994 Best American Short Stories affiliate link anthology.

Ellison knew he had written something special upon completing the tale. “It’s my literary declaration in praise of atheism,” he says, chuckling. “It says the universe doesn’t know you’re here. It doesn’t give a shit. It’s neither for nor against you. One day it’ll bring you true and everlasting love, the next day it’ll give you cancer of the lymph glands.”

Perhaps because of such outspoken observations, some critics have labeled Ellison’s writing dark, but he counters, “My fiction is only dark to those who think ‘The 700 Club’ offers an accurate view of reality. If there’s a current of darkness that runs below the surface of my work, it’s because I’ve always been interested in the troubling aspects of the human experience. I think it was H.L. Mencken who observed, ‘Troubled people are usually interesting people.’ I like to write about interesting people.”

Ellison refuses to repeat himself and has steadfastly avoided the trap of self-parody that has afflicted many of his contemporaries. He’s explored virtually every genre, from hard-boiled detective stories to far-flung space operas. He’s even crafted an elegiac western. However, till now, even with 75 titles to his credit, he had never written a book for young adults. Let’s face it; Harry Potter would foul his pants and shatter his spectacles if confronted by the merciless stone gargoyles of “Bleeding Stones,” a story published in Ellison’s landmark collection Deathbird Stories affiliate link.

And Troublemakers affiliate link (iBooks, 2001), his latest collection, was not originally intended for young adults. But when the publisher made it clear that was what he wanted, Ellison faced the challenge of addressing a new audience. He wanted to explore “the kind of problems that I had when I was a teenager, simple problems that lead to deep water, things like getting in trouble because of your curiosity, or because you can’t control being a smartass, or making dumb mistakes out of ignorance because you’re just not informed enough to know the right way to do things. I’m an expert; I’ve got a solid background of fuck-ups myself. I didn’t pretend my book was going to get anybody off dope or convince them to stay in school. I just wanted to address the everyday concerns that kids, and even adults, have.”

Like many writers whose work pushes past traditional boundaries, Ellison has had problems with marketing. “Because the word fantasy is stamped on the spine, it’s keeping bookstores from sticking the book in the y/a section, which is where it should be, not the science fiction section. I’ve been fighting this battle for thirty-five years now. There’s not much I can do about it… except objecting and walking off NPR talk shows and other venues that would define me as something I’m not.”

Ellison’s feistiness and refusal to chase trends are legendary. He writes short stories in a time when the majority of writers have turned to trilogies of bloated novels to pay the rent. Because of his willingness to dig beneath the surface of our mortal dreads, he’s had a seminal effect on the modern horror genre, influencing writers as diverse as Poppy Z. Brite and Clive Barker. “His presence is formidable,” Barker says. “You can picture Harlan, with feet planted firmly on the ground, telling you the tale in his inimitable way. Even though he writes more from the gut than I do, we both share a desire to affect readers in the most direct way possible.”

Ellison doesn’t outline when he writes, preferring to have only the vaguest idea where he’s going when he starts a story. “You have to be able to surprise yourself. Otherwise, how can you surprise your reader?”

But sometimes finding readers can be a problem in itself. Ellison is frustrated by the current state of literature, saying publishers have “bastardized the audience so that they can only read these large, windy tomes with ideas cannibalized from earlier volumes of the series, all stale and repetitive. It’s come to the point where very few people in these strange times can make a living writing short stories. I’m able to do it because I’m one of the last of that breed. There was Borges, Bradbury and me, and that’s about it.”

Ellison takes pains to clarify that “there’s nothing wrong with novels.” It’s just that too many bad ones get the green light. He mentions as examples the works of Tom Clancy and Judith Krantz, or the latest lawyer-in-jeopardy offering by John Grisham.

The glut of half-baked literature has made Ellison a seemingly tireless promoter of his and other’s work. He’s even written stories in bookshop windows all over America, in France and England, allowing astonished but fascinated passersby to take a peek at his latest creation, page by page, as it’s taped to the store’s front window. “Keyboard,” one of his most recent creations, was written in a single day at a San Francisco bookstore. And “Goodbye to All That” was conceived on his trusty Olympia portable typewriter in the middle of a crowd in a gallery at the Lake Oswego (Oregon) Arts Festival.

Ellison is engaged in a new David vs. Goliath battle these days championing creator’s rights against Internet piracy. In April of 2000, he discovered someone was illegally posting some of his copyrighted and registered stories to an online newsgroup. The newsgroup was offered as part of a subscription to America Online. As the investigation continued, aided by members of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America), Ellison filed a lawsuit against AOL and another service provider, RemarQ/Critical Path, believing that both companies were negligent when it came to policing these acts of copyright infringement.

“I never wanted a lawsuit,” he says. “They were allowing copyrighted material to be sent out over their server. When we contacted the people at AOL who were supposed to be the watchdogs, they fobbed us off on other people as if they didn’t give a shit. There is a difference between creative properties and information but they don’t seem to make the distinction. We couldn’t get them to take the stuff down until we hit them over the head with the proverbial baseball bat.”

Ellison is frustrated that publishers haven’t joined the fight, believing that the case will be as historically significant as the recording industry’s battle against Napster. A handful of writers, including Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey, have contributed to the cause, as have many of Ellison’s readers (for more information -and donations-, visit the KICK Donation Page). Even though the lawsuit has affected his time, energy and finances, he believes he will emerge triumphant, having struck a blow for creator’s rights in the so-called digital age. In fact, a groundbreaking settlement with one of the Internet giants is about to be announced in an imminent press release.

Ellison says that corporations have amassed too much power and become dangerously arrogant. “These eight-hundred pound gorillas think they can do whatever they want and are aided and abetted by a generation that hasn’t had to pay for anything. These young punks think they’re some kind of fucking Zorro, flauting the rules and stealing the work of others. They have an unjustified sense of entitlement that knows no bounds.”

Ellison, who still uses that manual typewriter, isn’t a big fan of the Net but admits the lawsuit compelled him to wade in its waters. He was pleasantly surprised when he checked out the bulletin board at his own website, Ellison Webderland. “The Net is filled with too much malicious gossip and people ‘flaming’ one another. I’m happy to say this bulletin board is an island of sanity, filled with smart people. I have to give credit to Rick Wyatt, who runs my site. He keeps the level of discussion fairly high. I’ll pop in from time to time, just to let everyone know I’m paying attention, as a courtesy. But I’m more a lurker in my own electronic hometown.”

Because of his deeply held convictions, Ellison has been called a contemporary Jonathan Swift. Like the author of Gulliver’s Travels, he uses the lens of fantasy to shed light on the truth.

Ellison remains a highly visible and controversial presence, even after nearly fifty years as a professional (The Essential Ellison affiliate link, a 50-year retrospective was published last June, by Morpheus International, at more than 1250 pages). He believes seeing a writer at work helps demystify the creative process. He also says that a good writer, like a good magician, startles by misdirection. Ellison lives and breathes that tenet, making readers believe ancient gods lie slumbering in hidden places, that time is the ultimate enemy, and that a unicorn might visit you one night on a dimly-lit New Orleans street.

Not a bad feat all in all.

Copyright © 2002 by John Thompson.