This is the original piece Harlan wrote for Newsweek
magazine for the week ending April 5th, 1997. The piece was requested by Newsweek
to examine the link between the Heaven's Gate cult's mass suicide and science
fiction. For those of you who have been living in a cave, 39 members of the
cult committed suicide near the end of March 1997 based on a belief their souls
would be joining up with a UFO hiding behind comet Hale-Bopp, said UFO taking
the cultists to a higher level of existence.
Everywhere, today, the question is being asked: what did the Heaven's Gate cultists
have to do with science fiction. Try this for an answer: nothing.
They had everything to do with that hideous verbal crotchet "sci-fi,"
however. And they are light-years apart, so don't confuse them. At peril of
your life.
Almost exactly one year ago, my heart tried to kill me. Before I could die,
they cracked me open and did a quadruple bypass. But for a moment, I shook hands
with death, and in that bonding I got a tough insight; and this I now know for
certain: In those gasping last moments of the Rancho Santa Fe cultists, as they
were descending into their death sleep, they were thinking Please help me;
I'm going into the darkness and I need to know! Yeah, we all want to
know...the answers that make sense of a world growing ever more complex, of
lives that seem to be controlled by forces too big for our puny intellects,
of a journey without sufficient noble purpose.
Traditionally, answers have been sought in philosophy or religion or mysticism
of one kind or another. What's the sense of it all, in a bewildering universe
that doesn't seem to know or care that we're here? But from those sources no
fully integrated or fully satisfying answers have come.
And those answers may not be anywhere in the literary genre called science fiction,
either, but one thing is for damned sure: they are not to be found in
the cheapjack foolishness of "sci-fi."
The concepts that abound in fantastical literature have the magical capacity
to inspire dreams that become enriching reality. Science fiction, like The
Whole Earth Catalog, is only an implement, a tool of the mind's imagination.
It employs the technique called extrapolation, allowing us to play the game
of what-if?. A game of intellect and daring, of special dreaming and
determination not to buy into all those boneheaded beliefs that always tell
use we're too stupid and too inadequate to prevail. That we need some kind of
mythical alien or supernatural babysitter to get us over the rough spots. Science
fiction says otherwise. It is an idea-rich literature that is, at core, hopeful
and progressive, that always says--with a nod to the reawakening of a competent
human spirit--there will be a tomorrow. It may be troubling, and it may
require us to get a lot smarter, but there will be a tomorrow for us
to work at.
"Sci-fi," that hunchbacked, gimlet-eyed, slobbering village idiot
of a bastardized genre, says only that logic is beyond us, understanding must
be crushed underfoot, that the woods are full of monsters and aliens and conspiracies
and dread and childish fear of the dark. The former is a literature that can
open the sky to all the possibilities of change and chance; the latter is hysterical
and as overripe as rotten fruit, that can turn all rational conjecture into
a nightmare from which one escapes only by phenobarb-laced applesauce or a slug
of grape Kool-aid straight up with cyanide. The former says responsibility for
your life is the key; the latter assures you that you ain't got the chance of
a hairball in a cyclotron.
And that is the dichotomy of science fiction, as opposed to the tabloid
mentality of UFO abductions, triangular-headed ETs, reinterpreted biblical apocrypha,
and just plain bone stick stone gullibility. It is obscurantism and illiteracy,
raised to the level of dogma. It requires that you be as ignorant today as you
were yesterday, that you be no brighter than the sap who keeps playing three-card
monte on a street corner with a hustler who will never cut you a break.
"Sci-fi" is what the Rancho Santa Fe sleepers bought, in that flashy
but adolescent shell-game called Waitin' for the UFO. They were philosophical
suckers who turned away from the genuine wonders of the real world and all its
solvable mysteries, to embrace the sophomore horse-puckey of astrology and government
conspiracies and recastings of Jesus as a deep-space navigator. That has nothing
to do with the problem-solving and curiosity of science fiction...it has everything
to do with the monster fear and dread produced by the dumbness of "sci-fi."
Stop being exploited by greedy thugs who only want to sell you movie tickets
and poisonous delusions that enrich them by your stupidity and fear. Because
the truth is in this: neither Heaven nor Hell, and certainly not a flying saucer,
can be found in the tail of a comet.