INSTALLMENT 14 ½:
In Which The Unheard-Of Is Heard, Kind Of

In the November 1985 issue of a magazine called Starlog there appears the first half of an interview with your humble essayist, given to a very nice young man named Lee Goldberg. Mostly, it concerns my work for the past year on The Twilight Zone.

Mr. Goldberg began his introductory notes about me with the following sentence: "No one will ever accuse Harlan Ellison of keeping his mouth shut."

There is a widespread belief that columnists such as myself or Budrys or Erma Bombeck or John Simon or Robert Evans always have a ready opinion on anything that occurs anywhere in the world at any time, past, present or future.

That is because we have deadlines.

We are expected to find a new crusade every time we put pen to paper. We are expected to plumb the depths of every isolated incident, and we are expected to track the path of every emerging trend. And for our sins of regularity in print (or in my case, semi-regularity) we are rewarded with the encomiums Big Mouth, Know-It-All and Vicious Critic.

If one of us raves about a film, say for instance Dune, not only is it instantly forgotten that we praised something, but we are pilloried for not following the party line that Dune was awful.

(This is much like my situation as regards fiction. Because I once wrote a story in which—for good and sufficient plot reasons—a young woman is killed and eaten by a dog, I am stereotyped by casual readers of my work as one who writes nothing but stories of violence and cannibalism. When I wrote three pages of an X-Men "jam" comic book, proceeds of which went to feed starving children in Ethiopia, a reviewer in Amazing Heroes wrote, "Harlan Ellison who, perhaps surprisingly, wrote the most upbeat and positive of the Entity-induced nightmares." Not surprising, perhaps, to those who have read, say, "Jeffty Is Five" or "Paladin of the Lost Hour" or "With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole," or any of the hundreds of other stories I've written in which friendship, courage, kindness and true love are the themes. But you get what I'm trying to say, don't you?)

And if we rationally and painstakingly savage a film we think is ka-ka, like f'rinstance Back to the Future, we get letters such as this one from Forrest J Ackerman:

"Do you suppose you're the only person on Earth who didn't like/love Back to the Future? Or can you name me five others? Or don't you give a damn how many cinemicrocephalons there are in the world?"

To which I replied: "Forry, with affection for you personally, I will let Anatole France respond to your question. 'If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.'"

And so the general feeling is that we are Big Mouth, Know-It-All and Vicious Critic. Because we are required to meet the deadlines by which the magazines in which we appear live and die. When you turn to our columns, there we are, opening our big mouths. Because that is what we're being paid to do. And so the Lee Goldbergs of the world say, "No one will ever accuse Harlan Ellison of keeping his mouth shut."

But, in weary truth, there are times when some of us don't have anything to say. Times when we haven't seen any films that require analysis. Times when we start an essay on why it is that most sf writers cannot write television scripts, or on why after ten years of publicly denouncing tv I went to work for The Twilight Zone, or . . . well, whatever. But we have those deadlines, so we do it.

And all those who cannot wait to pounce on the latest essay as yet another example of the Big Mouth Know-It-All Vicious Critic shooting off his bazoo nod sagely and say, "Doesn't he ever shut his mouth?"

For all of those kindly folks, and for those of you who know what it is not to have any particular opinion burning in you from time to time, I offer this installment, for which I am asking the editors of this magazine to pay me only one dollar:

I haven't anything to say this time. Maybe next time. Maybe not.

Mr. Goldberg: the millennium is at hand.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / February 1986