Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself.
In 1978, Harlan Ellison published a fine collection of his short stories, called Strange Wine, with an Introduction entitled, “Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself.” This was Harlan’s classic broadside against the watching of television.
I was reminded of him while reading a news story headlined: “Almost 40% of university students surveyed are addicted to their phones.” Harlan could have easily updated his Introduction against all of social media. (If you’d like to read the full version of the Introduction, go to Strange Wine on Amazon Kindle, click on the “Look inside” cover image, and scroll down.
Let me give you the highlights:
He begins by saying that it’s all about drinking strange wine, and that it will seem disjointed and will jump around like water on a griddle, but it all comes together, so please be patient.
He mentions a news story about an anchorwoman who committed suicide on camera, making a statement about television on television. (Echoes of the film Network.) Next, he recaps a talk with Dan Blocker of Bonanza about a fan who seemed not to understand that Lorne Greene was in fact not in reality his father.
Once during a college lecture, Harlan casually mentioned that he had actually thought up the words spoken by the Star Trek cast in the sole episode he had written. A young man jumped up in tears and screamed, “Liar!”
Harlan says that these stories about people who merge television and reality illustrate how television is a bad thing. And that he took stock of how much time he himself spent watching television, and it scared him.
In college students, he had noted a zombiatic response, manifesting primarily in the kinds of questions he was asked. Not about his lengthy body of written work, but rather, “What was it like to work on Star Trek?” and “Why did Tom Snyder keep cutting you off on the Tomorrow show?” And Harlan gets angry with them about how shallow and programmed television is making them. And they don’t like him for it.
Television, unlike books or old-time radio, “is systematically oriented toward stunning the imagination.”
For him, “A book is a participatory adventure. It involves a creative act at its inception and a creative act when its purpose is fulfilled. The writer dreams the dream and sets it down; the reader reinterprets the dream in personal terms, with personal vision, when he or she reads it. Each creates a world. The template is the book.”
After a couple of pages of detail, he concludes, “Quite clearly, if one but looks around to assess the irrefutable evidence of reality, books strengthen the dreaming facility, and television numbs it. Atrophy soon follows.”
Yes, and what does social media do to the imagination and ability to think complex thoughts? Even to us, who use it much more than we should?
A high school teacher told him three stories:
First, a 15-year-old student rejected reading books because they weren’t real. “Because it was your imagination, and your imagination isn’t real.” What was real? Television. Because you could see it.
Second, students missed an important school function one night because they stayed home to watch the drama Helter Skelter based on the Manson murder spree. The next day the teacher compared the movie as being not real compared to a living event that was real. Another student insisted that it was real, he had seen it.
Third, each class had a television set, mostly unused. When the teacher had trouble controlling the class, she would turn the set on with nothing but snow, and they would settle down.
After several pages of more stories, some horrific, Harlan comes to his conclusion, which should not be paraphrased, because it is perfectly written, and is best to end this meditation:
Published in EntertainmentAll this programs the death of reading.
And reading is the drinking of strange wine.
Like water on a hot griddle, I have bounced around, but the unification of the thesis is at hand.
Drinking strange wine pours strength into the imagination.
The dinosaurs had no strange wine. They had no imagination. They lived 130,000,000 years and vanished. Why? Because they had no imagination. Unlike human beings who have it and use it and build their future rather than merely passing through their lives as if they were spectators. Spectators watching television, one might say.
The saurians had no strange wine, no imagination, and they became extinct. And you don’t look so terrific yourself.
Where would we be without our Drews, our poetry, and yea, where would we be without our Percivals, our Mark Camps, to take posts too literally? Where, indeed?…one shudders.
I got a threatening phone call from Harlan Ellison, followed up by an anonymous threatening postcard probably from him.
Still, I miss him. Today, the science fiction community desperately needs somebody to advocate for freedom of speech the way he did.
What did you do to piss him off, say you didn’t like one of his books? Or say that you DID like that Star Trek episode? Or, worst of all, you LIKED The Starlost???
Ellison had published a long, long essay in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine criticizing science fiction fans’ behavior, and I wrote a letter to the editor pointing out some shortcomings in Ellison’s reasoning.
The first I knew that the letter had been published was when Ellison called to argue about it. (Thus was actually the second time he had called me, though the previous call was friendly.)
After we went back and forth for a bit, Ellison wanted us to agree to “leave each other alone”; which I interpreted as him continuing to write whatever he pleased, while I kept my opinions to myself. I refused; he promised unspecified dire consequences, and hung up.
Aside from the aforementioned threatening postcard — I had a mental image of a little man staggering to the post office with a box full of threatening postcards — no dire consequences ever eventuated. I figure Ellison’s enemies list was so long, I got lost in the shuffle.
It’s sometimes still amazing how he seemed to think nobody had any kind of right to disagree with him or to criticize him. The only other person I’ve actually seen (it may be a somewhat common malady, but very few of them get any kind of national attention) who behaved similarly was Bill O’Reilly, who apparently thought his TV show could get the Saudi government to do things differently, etc.
That sounds like his essay “Xenogenesis” which was very harsh, but then annoying and socially clueless fans were not rare.
On the other hand, Harlan did tend to paint with a broad brush, and in black and white.EDIT: I have struck out the preceding sentence for the reason noted in a subsequent comment.
In his essay, Ellison condemns fans for engaging in impersonations to get what they want.
But later in the same essay (I pointed out in my letter) he talks about impersonating a police officer over the phone to get information on an enemy.
I remember a piece he did for Heavy Metal that accused Heavy Metal readers of being what was wrong with science fiction/fantasy. I laughed, because I didn’t usually buy Heavy Metal, but did that month because they had Ellison listed as an author.
That was, I believe, a felony. One might forgive Harlan, of course, given his grief at the death of an friend and the cruelty of the anonymous letter writer, but it was still a crime.
Your comments prompted me to track down and re-read the essay (it has been reprinted in one or more collections): My 30-year-old memory was quite hazy, which made the horrific acts of abuse freshly shocking. I’d like to revise my previous comment: It was unfair of me to write, in regard to this case, that Harlan tended to “paint with a broad brush, and in black and white”: He notes more than once in the essay that it is only a small percent of the fans who behave badly so it was unfair to suggest that he was condemning all or even most of them.
I do wonder about the comparative frequency with which such abuse is experienced by popular writers in other genres, as a check on Harlan’s thesis. (Never mind film and TV stars: we all know that they are frequent targets.) The statistical work that would be needed to draw sensible conclusions would, of course, be discouragingly great.
Apparently George R. R. Martin received multiple threats of death should he ever stop writing more Game Of Thrones.
Twitter doesn’t count.
On Twitter, nobody knows you’re an acne-faced 13-year-old in your mommy’s basement.
No, but that is the universal suspicion.
Welcome to the Internet.
Where Men are Men.
And Women are Also Men.
And Young Children are the FBI.
For all of Ellison’s denouncement of television, he was the creative consultant on Babylon 5.
And appeared in an episode, too.
Yeah, well, my son toured for 3 years with SOJA despite not being enamored of Reggae music or drugs. Sometimes it is difficult for artists to make their way.
Yes, he was a scold for marketing purposes. Not that the last two seasons of Lost in Space did not earn some lambasting. The vegetable people? Characters selected to make the colors pop on the novel color television sets? And it got him a writer’s critic on TOS for “City on the Edge of Forever” and another dip of the beak by publishing the original script. I actually liked many of his short stories, but even his enjoyable story introductions screamed “visceral scold, here.” The story]ie from him and about him contributed to me not going to conventions until I was way older and he was crippled by a fatigue syndrome.
Yeah, I think he had one line. Maybe two.
Well, I don’t care what he might think of me in the slightest, and despite its faults I LIKED The Starlost!
He got awfully noisy about his little Orphans in the Sky “homage”. I liked it well enough.
The storyline of The Starlost was supposed to be the search for the space ark’s Control Room. But the filmmakers had mistakenly built the large set at the beginning, and could not afford to leave it unused, occupying a whole stage for months. So instead the hero finds the Control Room right away — and then spends the rest of the series searching for the “Backup Control Room”!
Embarrassed to put his name on this ill-made revision, Ellison exercised his right to use a satirical pseudonym, “Cordwainer Bird”.
Having them find the control room, but it’s heavily damaged and they don’t know what to do with it anyway, and there are no people around that DO, wasn’t that bad. And really, think about it. “They can’t find the control room” seems like just an easy plot contrivance. But it doesn’t seem like it would really be that difficult to find, either because it would be in a fairly obvious location – which it actually was in the show – or because everyone OTHER than the people in the biospheres might be able to visit there regularly in normal conditions, there would be signs along the way, etc. There was no need for the main bridge to be HIDDEN. Just the opposite, really.
The backup bridge – or in Star Trek-ese, “auxiliary control” – might very well be a more difficult task. And in one episode they thought they had found it, but it turned out to be a training setup for “cadets.”
A better question is why The Astro Medics (from the episode of that title) apparently didn’t know where the backup bridge was… (Although even if they had, once again you have the lack of qualified people to do anything once it was found…)
Neither did the crew of the Pisces, apparently…
Perhaps a better BETTER question is, how do these people keep going to medical school etc and becoming doctors, 400 years after the Accident?
Yes, it’s hard for most musicians. But I am certain that Ellison was paid only a token amount for that walk-on appearance and that J. Michael Straczynski offered it to him as a friendly tip of the hat.
[ Raises eyebrows. Jots name in book of Enemies of Fine Art. ]
[ Adds to list. ]
No, everything I know says that his Angry Young Man personality was genuine, not a contrived persona. Possibly stemming from a very difficult childhood in Ohio where he was regularly harassed and beaten up by Jew-haters (although his high intelligence and quick mouth may have had something to do with it, too.) Not that this is an excuse, and his tendency to depict conservatives as Bad People who could not possibly know anything he didn’t know detracted from his credibility.
Not even MOST of TV has to be “fine art,” let alone ALL of it.