Speechless, we stand before Van Gogh’s Starry Night or one of those hell-images of Hieronymous Bosch, and we find our senses reeling; vanishing into a daydream mist of what must this man have been like, what must he have suffered? A passage from Dylan Thomas, about birds singing in the eaves of a lunatic asylum, draws us up short, steals the breath from our mouths; and the blood and thoughts stand still in our bodies as we are confronted with the absolute incredible achievement of what they have done. The impossibility of it. So imperfect, so faulty, so broken the links in communication between humans, that to pass along one corner of a vision we have had to another creature is an accomplishment that fills us with pride and wonder, touching us and them for a nanoinstant with magic. How staggering it is then to see—to know what Van Gogh and Bosch and Thomas knew and saw. To live for that nanoinstant what they lived. To look out of their eyes and view the universe from a never-before-conquered height, from a dizzying, strange place.
This, then, is the temporary, fleeting, transient, incredibly valuable, priceless gift from the genius dreamer to those of us crawling forward moment after moment in time, with nothing to break our routine save death.
Mud-condemned, forced to deal as ribbon clerks with the boredoms and inanities of lives that may never touch—save by this voyeuristic means—a fragment of glory…our only hope, our only pleasure, is derived through the eyes of the genius dreamers; the genius madmen; the creators.
How amazed…how stopped like a broken clock we are, when we are in the presence of the creator. When we see what singular talents—wrought out of torment—have proffered; what magnificence, or depravity, or beauty, perhaps in a spare moment, only half-trying; they have brought it forth nonetheless, for the rest of eternity and the world to treasure.
Ah, but using an artist’s life to judge his work is a childish habit, and anything that helps kick it out of us does us good. (It’s a mean-spirited practice, as well, since it’s used only by people who want to sneer at the artist. Do these high-minded types ever say how marvelous it is that such exquisite work could rise out of a sordid life? Do they eagerly pick up a dull book when they learn that its author had a beautiful soul?) As for the hero worship, that’s childish and unfair as well. Why does the creation of a work of art impose on the artist the obligation to lead an exemplary life? Why do we demand an unreasonable nobility that none of us possess? The artists have fulfilled their contract with us by producing work that gives pleasure or insight or both. Why hold them to an unwritten morals clause?
And how awed we are, when caught in the golden web of that true genius—so that finally, for the first time we know that all the rest of it was kitsch; it is made so terribly, crushingly obvious to us, just how mere, how petty, how mud-condemned we really are, and that the only grandeur we will ever know is that which we know second-hand from our damned geniuses. That the closest we will ever come to our “Heaven” while alive, is through our unfathomable geniuses, however imperfect or bizarre they may be.
And is this, then, why we treat them so shamefully, harm them, chivvy and harass them, drive them inexorably to their personal madhouses, kill them? Lock them away in darkness? Cell doors slam, and the dream light goes out.
Who is it, we wonder, who really still the golden voices of the geniuses, who turn their visions to dust?
Who, the question asks itself unbidden, are the savages and who the princes?
Fortunately, the night comes quickly, their graves are obscured by darkness, and answers can be avoided till the next time; till the next marvelous singer of strange songs is stilled in the agony of his rhapsodies.
On all sides the painter wars with the photographer. The dramatist battles the television scenarist. The novelist is locked in combat with the reporter and the creator of the non-novel. As Voltaire has said, “Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.” On all sides the struggle to build dreams is beset by the forces of materialism, the purveyors of the instant, the dealers in tawdriness, the tunnel-visioned censors, the Authorities, the jailers, the preservers of the Public Morality. The writer, the creator falls into disrepute. Of what good is he? Does he tell us useable gossip, does he explain our current situation, does he “tell it like it is”? No, he only preserves the past and points the way to the future. He merely performs the holiest of chores. Thereby becoming a luxury, a second-class privilege to be considered only after the newscasters and the sex images and the “personalities.” No one calls for his release; no one wishes to hear his bad news. The public entertainments, the safe and sensible entertainments, those that pass through the soul like beets through a baby’s backside…these are the hallowed, the revered. How many noted that John Gardner died in a motorcycle crash mere blocks from his home, on the day Grace Kelly died and commanded all the headlines?
And what of the mad dreams, the visions of evil and destruction? What becomes of them? In a world of Tiny Tim, there is little room for Magwitch, though the former be saccharine and the latter be noble.
Who will speak out for the mad dreamers? Who will open their cells?
Who will ensure with sword and shield and grants of monies that these most valuable will not be thrown into the lye pits of mediocrity, the meat grinders of safe reportage? Who will care that they suffer all their nights and days of delusion and desire for ends that will never be noticed? There is no foundation that will enfranchise them, no philanthropist who will risk his hoard in the hands of the mad ones.
And so, till they go to prison or madhouse they go their ways, walking all the plastic paths filled with noise and neon, their multifaceted bee-eyes seeing much more than the clattering groundlings will ever see, reporting back from within their torments that Reagans cannot save nor Falwells uplift. Reporting back that the midnight of madness is upon us; that wolves who turn into men are stalking our babies; that trees will bleed and birds will speak in strange tongues. Reporting back that the grass will turn blood-red and the mountains soften and flow like butter; that the seas will congeal and harden for iceboats to skim across from the chalk cliffs of Dover to Calais.
The mad dreamers among us will tell us that if we take a woman (that most familiar of alien creatures that we delude ourselves into thinking we rule and understand to the core) and pull her inside-out we will have a wondrousness that looks like the cloth-of-gold gown in which Queen Ankhesenamun was interred. That if we inject the spinal fluid of the dolphin into the body of the dog, our pets will speak in the riddles of a Delphic Oracle. That if we smite the very rocks of the Earth with quicksilver staffs, they will split and show us where our ghosts have lived since before the winds traveled from pole to pole.
The geniuses, the mad dreamers, those who write of debauchery in the spirit, they are the condemned of our times; they give everything, receive nothing, and expect in their silliness to be spared the gleaming axe of the executioner. How they will whistle as they die!
Let the rulers and the politicians and the financiers throttle the dreams of creativity. It doesn’t matter.
The mad ones will persist. In the face of certain destruction they will still speak of the unreal, the forbidden, all the seasons of the witch.
They will end unnoticed like Gardner, or humiliated even in death as was Garcia Lorca. They will write from inside prisons and read their thoughts to rats. But they will persist.
They have no choice.
One of their number, Mario Vargas Llosa, has said, “Writers are exorcists of their own demons.” And as mirrors of their species, they will continue to deliver the good news and the bad news, that We are God, that We possess in language—the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our Fate by understanding it—the means to reach the center of the universe and, our salvation, the center of our hearts.
For this, they live forever in darkness.
SCIENCE FICTION: TURNING REALITY INSIDE-OUT
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This piece originally was written in 1974 for New Times. In it, Harlan lists real-life scenarios which would be labeled preposterous if written as fiction. “Yes, Virginia,” Harlan says, “I now believe in the Easter Bunny, the Great Pumpkin, Santa Claus, Ronald Reagan and other mythical beasts.” (1974, remember.) That Harlan’s “mythical beasts” include a future President of the United States goes farther toward proving his point than even he could possibly have predicted.
If you stuck your hand down inside Richard Nixon’s mouth, and reached as far as you could, down where the morality ought to be, and grabbed onto whatever was handy in that empty space, and yanked the sonofabitch inside-out, what you’d have would be something the first astronauts who’ll land on Delta Eradini IX might have to dicker with. An alien.
No. Strike that. If I had been predicting what the final disposition would be in the matter of Milhous—and events have moved so fast I’ve had to rewrite this lead four times since I began—if I had been writing it as science fiction…speculative fiction…that hideous neologism “sci-fi”…whatever we’re calling it currently…it would have read like so:
Ford wouldn’t have been such a patsy, he would have crossed Nixon up and refused him the immunity that turkey won in the plea-bargaining just to go away; then, in my little fantasy, events would move swiftly. They put him on trial, they move with all deliberate speed (like the Galapagos tortoise trying to find the sea), a miracle gets passed and they convict him. And they sentence him to be put on public display, every day for ten years, in Washington, D.C. Not in the stocks, nothing like that. Just standing there on a little platform, maybe three steps up; and every single American citizen, every man, woman and child, would be permitted to come and get in line and walk up those three steps and confront him, the King of the Thugs, and have the right to slap him. Just once. No closed fists. Just flat palm. Across the cheek. Or if it was a legless vet from the Nam, maybe across the mouth. But only once. Four hours in the morning. Break for lunch. Four hours in the afternoon. That’s how I’d write it.
And some poor sap would call that science fiction.
Yeah. Sure.
Catch this: fantasy has become reality AKA reality has turned into fantasy. If you, for a nanosecond, doubt the inescapable truth of that theme, consider the following “fantasy” concepts which, if a heavyweight sf writer like James Tiptree, Jr. or Kate Wilhelm were to use them as the basis for a story in Analog or Galaxy, they’d be receiving letter-bombs from crazed Trekkies out there in The Great American Heartland.
•A chief executive is faced with the choice of exploding or not exploding a thermonuclear instrument that, he is advised by responsible scientific authorities, may well break off a large chunk of the North American continent and float it off toward the polar ice cap. And he does it, sort of lackadaisically, with his left hand, offering without substantiation to the public, the rationale of “national security.”
•A woman is knifed to death in a city street over a period of forty-five minutes, while 38 people watch from their windows, draw up chairs to get a better view, turn up their radios so they don’t have to hear her scream and plead for help, open their apartment doors and see the murderer slashing her throat and then having relations with her half-dead body…and do nothing to stop it.
•The attractive young daughter of a millionaire publishing magnate gets kidnapped by revolutionary militants and, in a cliche replay of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, falls in love with her captors and joins them, becoming a burp-gun-toting bank robber herself.
•A soldier massacres an entire village of innocent people, down to the last terrified infant and, when he’s court-martialed, doesn’t go up before a firing squad, he’s put in a cozy bungalow with visiting privileges for his girl friend.
•Out of nowhere, an “energy crisis” develops in a world long-warned of impending depletion of natural resources. It lasts six months and the sole effect it has on anyone is that gas jumps thirty cents a gallon in price; the “crisis” vanishes as quickly as it appeared, and no one seems to care they’ve been jobbed for millions of dollars.
•A mediocre novelist dreams up a bogus biography of a mysterious recluse billionaire, markets it to cynical and businesswise publishers for a small fortune, convinces the most trusted national periodical that it’s authentic, and only gets caught because his ineptitudes are so flagrant even a microcephalic could not overlook them.
Don’t stop me. I could go on for days. Are they utterly fantastic, science fictional phantasms you’d reject if you read them in a short story or a novel? The ayes have it. No self-respecting writer, in or out of the field of sf would touch them. Too silly. Too ripe for being exploded by simple logic. Far easier to write about bug-eyed, guacamole-colored extraterrestrials from Proxima Centauri.
But. Nixon did explode the Amchitka bomb, Kitty Genovese was slaughtered in Kew Gardens while her neighbors watched, Patty Hearst is still at large, Lieutenant Calley hasn’t yet gone to prison, we’re still spinning widdershins from that “crisis” only six months ago and nobody’s driving at 55 mph, Clifford Irving did flummox Life and McGraw-Hill, and yes, Virginia I now believe in the Easter Bunny, the Great Pumpkin, Santa Claus, Ronald Reagan and other mythical beasts.
All of which sorta kinda answers the question sf writers get asked at cocktail parties, “Do you have a hard time keeping up with reality in your fantastic stories?”
And in case you don’t catch my drift here, the answer is, hell no, we don’t have a hard time keeping up with reality; we try to ignore it; we’re way ahead of it; who can deal with such craziness? Fantasy makes more sense. Or more precisely, we’re too busy reaching down into its gullet and yanking it inside-out to worry that Mars is another Okie Dust Bowl instead of the faerie landscape of spires and minarets that Ray Bradbury envisioned in The Martian Chronicles. Ray isn’t even worried; you ain’t gonna catch him in a million years. Nor any of us.
We’re your special dreamers.
We’re busy interpreting your nightmares, analyzing your neuroses, plumbing your libidos and sucking out your ids. We know you’re scared shitless that some computerized waldo-armed machine is going to replace you at the chicken-flicking shop. We know you can’t handle the rise of feminism, you poor machismo-drenched wimps. We know future shock and the information-drain and technology confuse you. And God has sent us to make it all better. (We’ve got a few thoughts on that subject, as well.)
Which is why academicians who used to be sunk to their armpits in dissections of the use of the semi-colon in the lesser works of Henry James have fastened themselves like succubi to the throat of science fiction, sucking here and there for a pulsing carotid artery of Doctoral Thesis Material.
No longer is there a need, in articles of this sort, to explain what it is “scientifiction.” You know. It’s being taught in almost a thousand U.S. colleges and universities as an accredited course; learned papers are delivered by Jesuit priests at Modern Language Association conclaves, sandwiching in discussions of the Utopian visions of Ursula K. Le Guin between Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner; Fowles writes sf, Nabokov writes sf, Pynchon writes sf, even Allen Drury (God save us), writes what he thinks is sf. Asimov can be seen lounging next to this year’s cinema sex symbol on the Cavett show, Robert Heinlein gets only slightly less for a lecture than Jeb Stuart Magruder and doesn’t even have to go to the slam for the privilege; and the World SF Convention now draws over four thousand rabid fans who come to touch the hem of Roger Zelazny’s coat-of-many colors.
You don’t need to know that sf in its modern incarnation began with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in April, 1926. You don’t need to know that the lineal history of the art-form goes all the way back to Lucian of Samosata and can be heroically traced through the works of Homer, Thomas More, Swift, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Poe, Hawthorne, Balzac, Doyle, Wells, Kipling, Verne, Huxley, Orwell, Hersey, Barth, Burgess, Borges…that whole crowd. It isn’t necessary any longer to reiterate those musty credentials
. (Though every time a television talk-show features sf it lumbers through that boneyard; and sf writers featured as guests on such shows murmur the ritual incantations of “acceptable” writers who’ve worked in the form, thereby demonstrating the persistence of an inferiority complex that began with the pulp magazines and their lurid covers.)
Validation of the importance of sf as virtually the only credible fiction form being written these days comes from anomalous and unexpected corners: pianist Garrick Ohlsson is featured in a booze ad and lists as his most memorable book (sic) Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End; the taste in leisure reading matter for government clerks and congressmen in Washington has switched from spy novels to sf (and doesn’t that send a chill up your spine!); the staid and conservative Hayden Planetarium puts on a series of sf films—which series gets sold out the first day—and has the editor of Analog Science Fiction/Fact magazine as host; porn star Georgina Spelvin (“The Devil in Miss Jones”) comes out of the closet and cops to her most secret vice…she’s a sf freako-pervo-devo.
As an explanation, in part, of the booming popularity of speculative fiction—it’s the only category of fiction outside Gothic novels that consistently makes money for paperback publishers—two words must be herewith entered, at the risk of causing massive coronaries among many of the old guard of sf fans. The words are “New Wave.” In 1965 when the “New Wave” controversy exploded in the genre, I would have insisted no such thing really existed. As recently as last year I found myself saying in print that no such thing as a “New Wave” ever had existed, that it was merely a great number of writers suddenly breaking loose, all at the same time, and taking the form in directions quite different from the traditionally accepted paths. But this year, what with the many learned re-examinations of sf by critics and other noble types, I’m compelled to admit that, yeah, I guess New Wave was a real thing. (You’ll never know how it pains me to have to admit it. Humbly, I now accept the label of Antichrist slapped on me by the hard-science types who insisted I was a cabal leader in the New Wave movement. There’s even one brain-damaged fan who takes every possible opportunity to write in to magazines where my work appears, to pillory me for singlehandedly polluting the precious bodily fluids of science fiction. Watch the letter column of this magazine; he’s bound to surface…like the rotting skeleton of a stegosaurus in a bubbling tar pit.)