[Harlan Ellison]                        

Since you've been called a "noted               
futurist," I'd like to ask you if there is      
anything that you predicted that has come
to pass.                                 
"Noted futurist"? Oh, Jesus. Do you have
any idea where that's from?
                           
I know you were tagged "noted futurist" on
the Geo Metro commercials, but --
Right! I'm no more a futurist than the man
in the moon! For your opinion to matter, 
you have to have a title, whether it's the
pope, or the grand kleagle of the klavern
of the KKK, or professor, or doctor, or
whatever. "Noted futurist"! I suggested
that they call me "professional liar."

Your story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must
Scream" has been made into a computer
game. But it's been causing controversy
because it deals with issues like
insanity, murder, rape, and the Holocaust.
What the hell kind of game is that?
Well, first of all, my basic philosophy of
video games is this: They're one of the
greatest wastes of time ever invented. So
when Cyberdreams came to me, I told them I
would do a game that you can't win. I
wanted to do a game that teaches ethics
and courage. And they said, "But don't you
think somebody should be able to win the
game?" And I said, "No, not really." I
think you ought to be able to lose more
heroically than otherwise. The idea of the
game is to stretch people's imagination
and to make them aware of their
responsibility to the rest of the human
race -- not to shoot down dinosaurs for
four hours.

So why have some found it objectionable?
Apparently some stores will not carry this
game because they're afraid it may offend
someone, to which my response is "Who?
Nazis?" We had someone say, "This
trivializes the Holocaust." I got really
pissed about that. In this age of
skinheads and morons who believe the
Holocaust was all made up on a Hollywood
soundstage, there's nothing that can
trivialize the Holocaust. Put the
Holocaust on cocktail napkins! Put it on
Tampax ads! Put it on television every
fifteen minutes! The only way you can
trivialize the Holocaust is to forget
it -- and this game refuses to let you
forget it.

One of your books, The Glass Teat, had on
its back cover the words AMERICA: CHANGE
IT...OR LOSE IT! Do you think we're losing
it?
We lost it long ago. Look at our country,
for Chrissake. We're nothing but
purchasing machines for giant
conglomerates. We're ruled by the tyranny
of the stupid.

How would you propose to get America back?
What do you mean, "get America back"? The
great idea that was promulgated by
Jefferson and Adams and Washington is an
America that exists only in noble
documents. We're a nation that rode
roughshod over the Native Americans. We're
a nation that enslaved a fifth of our
population. We're a nation that denied the
vote to women and still denies them many
of the privileges men are accorded. We're
still a nation that believes that
homosexuals are evil monsters that deserve
to be struck down in dark alleys. We've
still got Mark Fuhrmans and skinheads and
KKK idiots -- not to mention phony
patriotic militiamen who blow up buildings
in Oklahoma and derail trains. They're all
too cowardly to admit that the kind of
America they want never did exist.

You've spoken out for decades for women's
rights, and yet you don't seem to have a
problem publishing stories in skin rags
like New Rave. Why is that?
Well, if I publish a story in The Atlantic
Monthly, then eleven intellectuals will
read it, nod sagely, scratch their gray
pates, and that will be the end of that.
If, on the other hand, some sexist,
racist, no-neck gazooney of a truck driver
is sitting in a pay toilet in the Howard
Johnson's on the Pennsylvania Turnpike,
and he's whacking off to a picture of a
woman with a vagina the size of Au Sable
Chasm, and then he turns the page and
finds my story, and maybe that story says
to him, "You are a no-neck, slavering,
prognathous-jawed, gimlet-eyed moron, and
you should be better, because you are
human," then maybe it'll do some good.

Is living in an increasingly technological
world doing us any good?
The danger is that as technology gets more
complex, the more likely it is to leave
behind masses of people. Most of the
Simpson jury were average people, and they
said, "Oh, we discounted all that DNA
stuff." They didn't understand it. If
you'd said, "We found his fingerprints on
the knife that was stuck in Nicole's
throat," they'd have said, "Oh, I
understand that." Now extrapolate that
into the larger arena of general society,
and you will see that most people are
terrified by technology. At the same time,
there is a push by commercial interests to
get you into technology, whether you need
it or not.

Is there such a thing as too much
information?
Absolutely. The phrase that annoys me the
most these days is "the information
explosion." It's a slogan coined to sell
you computers you don't need. We know
everything we need to know to get through
a day, to write a book, to do the
shopping,to raise our kids -- information
that's been available for hundreds of
years in libraries. These people could
have saved their money and bought a
goddamn Encyclopaedia Britannica. There's
too much information because it's
noninformation. It's like television --
television has to fill time twenty-four
hours a day. You have to fill it with crap
like Jerry Springer and fishing shows and
gossip shows and crap like the Home
Shopping Network. And we say, "It's all
entertainment." But we are entertaining
ourselves out of existence. The world is
dying around us, and we're busy watching
fucking television.

Is there anything you like about TV?
I watch Friends, I watch Cybill, I watch
PBS, I watch the World Series. Television,
taken selectively, is okay. But television
is the most perfect opiate ever created by
the human race. If at three in the morning
you need a fix, you can turn on the set.
You may be watching right-wingers like
Jerry Falwell shrieking their lunacy, but
nonetheless you will be entertained.
That's the problem with television: It
won't go away.

I take it you're not right-wing.
All the right-wingers keep screaming about
how much liberal disposition there is on
TV and radio and movies, which is
bullshit. There's very little extremely
liberal thinking done in any of these
mediums. Christians constantly complain
that someone is doing an anti-Christian
thing. But nobody is allowed to say, "Hey,
atheism might not be a bad idea." Freedom
from religion is also guaranteed by the
Constitution, not constantly having to
listen to this crap and having our
political agenda dictated by people who
believe that people walked on water.

Is the Internet a major step for
humankind -- or is it just a faster car, a
new tool?
It has enormous positive aspects --
doctors being able to conference over it,
being able to do a diagnosis
immediately -- but I personally don't have
any need for these special aspects, so I
look at the general population. What I see
is that the Internet is a way of allowing
the inherent bad habits of people to
flourish: gossip, the spreading of
misinformation and disinformation. People
have already found ways to do computer
scams, to lure people out of their homes
to faraway cities where they can be raped.
If there is a way in which technology can
be misused, the infinitely wonderful and
variable mind of humanity will find a way
to do it.

People will do that stuff with or without
the Internet.
There's nothing inherently wrong with
technology, including electronic
communication. But when you are able to
get your rocks off immediately -- if
someone pisses you off, and you just bam
off e-mail -- you are indulging the worst
aspect of the human psyche. It allows you
to shoot your mouth off before you think.
When I write a letter that's really angry,
sometimes I let it sit for a day or two.
When I get back to it, if I still feel
that anger, I know it's okay to send it.
It's important to remember that the
Internet is not human communication, it's
a simulacrum of human communication. When
you have a colon and a parenthesis to show
you're doing a smiley face -- this is
interactive? Give me a break. This is
dehumanizing.

How is progress -- exposure to information
and technology -- affecting us on the
personal, individual level?
One of the great quotes of our time was
made by Howard Cosell. He referred to
professional sports as "the toy shop of
life" -- something that distracts you from
the really important things. If you can
root for some artificial nuclear family
like the Indians or the Buffalo Bills or
the Ducks, then you don't have to worry
that your neighbor next door is dying of
cancer and his kids are going to be out on
the street and have to go to an orphanage.
We allow ourselves to be distracted so
easily, gulled so easily.

What is our responsibility as human beings
to the future of the human race?
I suppose, boiled down, it is that you
leave this place slightly cleaner and more
swept up and better than it was before you
got here. There's a quote I like from John
Calder, one of Samuel Beckett's English
publishers: "The purpose of art is not
just to depict reality, but to give us the
courage to face it." And Teilhard de
Chardin said that the task assigned to us
is to climb toward the light. Anything
that assists in that is worthy of purpose
and is noble, and that's what I try to do.

There's a flat, grooved disk of gold in
space right now, stuck to the side of
Voyager , hurtling toward distant star
systems with recordings of the laughter of
children and music from different
countries, a depiction of the carbon atom,
and a map of the solar system. If you
could send your own selection of
information, what would you send?
I would send a self-activating hologram
that would show a naked man, woman, and
child walking toward you, with their hands
open and extended, showing that they mean
no harm, and that they are hiding nothing,
and that we welcome congress with some
other species. On the other hand, if I
really gave a shit, I would figure out a
universal warning that said Stay away from
this planet, because these people are out
of their goddamn minds!

Details, April1996