John C. Wright's Journal

As Gods, the members of the Martian Church are responsible to no higher power for their evil actions, but fortunately are so enlightened that they commit no evils they consider evil. The author merely has it be the case that Mike’s followers do not suffer from lust, or greed, or pride, or envy, and therefore they can share all goods in common, share concubines without any ill-will, and, for all I know, share each other’s toothbrushes without any risk of spreading bad breath. The Church suffers no schisms and no disputes or debates, because everyone is perfect. There is no St. Peter who denies his Lord. There is no Judas.

There is also no healing of the sick and no forgiveness of sins. Instead, Mike the Martian kills various people, such as hypocritical preachers or men guilty of no capital felonies found behind bars. But it is explained that since Martians believe in reincarnation, killing a scofflaw without benefit of trial is no crime; and keeping a man behind bars is an offense to human dignity, unlike, say, sharing a concubine, which is perfectly dignified.

Mike the Martian, raised by sexless creatures, has the attitude toward copulation one might expect from a totally ignorant and innocent nonhuman: he regards it as a pleasant recreation, or as a religious ecstasy. But for all his orgies, he never actually manages to father a family, or vow faithfulness to one woman. Neither he, nor anyone in the book, mentions any connection between the use of the reproductive organs and reproduction.

But Mike is a Nietzsche-style Superman, and therefore beyond good and evil: whatever he does, fornication or murder, is right and good by definition. You see, because he does not come from earth, and therefore has no experience or understanding of human things, his conclusions about how we should conduct ourselves is automatically right; the wisdom painfully gained over generations by our forefathers is worthy of nothing but scorn.  

Mike is stoned to death by an angry mob at the end of the book, and he flies to heaven wearing a halo. I am not making this up: he has wings and a halo. This event has no set up in the plot: unlike a similar story in the Book of Matthew, there is no foreshadowing of the martyrdom, no metaphysical or theological purpose, and nothing in Mike’s previous preaching gives any indication that passive submission to violence is meritorious in his philosophy. It sort of just happens, and we are supposed to feel sad and angry at the stupid yokels in the mob. (Please note the mob is white Christian Americans, probably from the Deep South. They are not outraged Muslims, or even irate Sikhs or Hindus. It was not even a crowd of unruly Irishmen. This would not have served the author’s purpose.) Whether or not the mob contained any persons whose relatives were killed, or daughters seduced, by the Man from Mars is not stated.  

We are assured (in his last bit of dialog with Jubal Hershaw, his mentor) that Mike’s followers will carry on spreading the Gospel of Free Love, and will come to rule everyone else: the stupid people will all die out.

Even objecting to the eating of human flesh is regarded with righteous indignation. Not the cannibalism: that is merely a custom worthy of respect. The objection is what is objectionable, so much so that the Righteous are morally obligated to discharge loyal employees from the work whereby they earn their bread, and throw them out into the street with scorn, if they voice any queasy reservations. Does someone have even the most minimal standards of human conduct, such as even the most remote ages of history learned at the dawn of time? He is a sinner! Virtue consists only of having no virtues at all!

The moral of the story: religion is a scam, marriage is a trap, people are stupid, do as you please when you please to whomever you please. Such is the message carried from a superior civilization to the poor backward dolts on Earth. Oh, brother. 

1. Timeless? Being a satire is no disqualification here. Jonathon Swift’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS is just as critical of human laws and customs, and it is timeless. A story about a lone iconoclast, a Diogenes-style cynic mocking the Pharisees will always have an appeal. If the author had stuck to mockery, and not gone out of his way to advertise the Adamite heresy, I might call this timeless. The whole philosophy of irresponsibility popular since 1968 has had a sufficiently obvious effect in increasing the sum of human misery that I doubt it can maintain its appeal. Whatever preaches disregard for the long term, either in marriage or in war, has nothing to say once the long term arrives.

2. Infinitely Re-Readable? My personal experience has met no book that wore out its welcome more quickly and more completely. I found it a delight to read when I was a child and thought as a child, for I was eager to hear that my childish impulses and little teen lusts were a sign of my great mental and moral superiority over The Stupid People (by which I meant my elders to whom I owed obedience). Flattering the innocent wears thin on a second rereading, when they are not so innocent. The unserious copulations with unmarried women seemed, on rereading, as unrealistic as the amours of James Bond: mere sexual fantasy. When I read the book again as a grown-up, the book was a chore to read. Far from being re-readable, this is a shallow book that gets shallower on every return visit.
The ideas presented are so comical, and so comically naive, one wonders if the author intended an irony: the Martian-raised man is ignorant of human nature, so that when he attempts to put into practice ideas that could never work on Earth, he is justly killed for his inability to adapt to reality.

I seem to recall a similar scene in GLORY ROAD, where Oscar the hero is upbraided as a fool by his fiancee, Star the Sexy Space-Empress, because he refuses to have an orgy with the attractive wife and three attractive daughters (one underage) of his generous wife-sharing host. It is explicitly stated there that those who do not adapt to the customs of their hosts are fools deserving death. I do not recall any scene in any Heinlein book where the hero is traveling among Puritans or pious Muslims and adopts the chastity and reserve in fashion among his hosts. For that matter, I don’t recall a scene where the hero has to sleep with the ugly wife of a generous Eskimo to avoid offending his host. Apparently the rule of doing as the Romans do when in Rome is restricted to the times when Romans are having an orgy, and, at that, only when pretty people are invited.

3. Relevant? There is talk in here about the nature of justice and the family and God and art. So at least some deeper points are addressed. But the work is certainly relevant, if not to the Great Conversation among the Great Books, then at least to the Good Conversation among Good SF.
STRANGER broke new ground by breaking conventions, and is among the first SF to attract a wider attention outside the genre. A book meets this criterion if the books that come after it, in this case, later SF books, have to take into account what the author has done here, and take a stance for or against, lest they risk being dismissed as irrelevant. For better or worse (I think it very much for the worse) the notion of moral and cultural relativism, once raised in this book, eliminates the possibility of an alien planet or alien culture being portrayed as having our values and our philosophy: if such a planet is portrayed, the author must give a convincing explanation to account for the similarity. A clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia landing on Mars and rescuing a princess from a four-armed Green Martian cannot now simply marry the girl, without the reader wondering about their marriage customs.  

Let us turn to our next three criteria:

1. Is the language graceful? This is not a fair criterion for a satire: one must ask a satire if it is biting or witty or funny, with that peculiar acrid humor natural to satire. I would say at least in part this book matches that criteria: there are quotable lines. The word “Grok” has entered at least partly into the popular vocabulary. 
2. Are the characters multifaceted and natural? Well, Jubal Hershaw is a character that is memorable. I remember him in all the other Heinlein books also, include A TRAMP ROYALE, which was autobiographical. You sort of know the kind of things he’ll do and say: he has a Mark Twain sense of humor and a Nietzsche contempt for the common man. He is a hedonist, selfish and ornery, a self-made man.  He is a soapbox for his author’s voice. The other characters in the book are either two-word descriptions (the ornery newshound, the phony preacher, the crooked politician) or one-word descriptions (the girl). I seem to recall that there are four characters fitting that description “the girl”, and they are as alike as the sexbots from AUSTIN POWERS. Mike had to memorize their pores and freckles to tell them apart, but the author does not give us even that.
No character ever steps out of character: the crooked politician never shows a moment of honesty, the phony preacher does not have a wife and family, the ornery newshound does not have a hobby or a past or a pet peeve.
3. Is the book wise? This may well be the shallowest book I have ever read, bar none. Something like GALACTIC PATROL, or CHESSMEN OF MARS, pure heedless adventure, is actually deeper and wiser than this dressed-up preachy-book praising adultery, anarchy and atheism: it is shallower than a shallow book because it pretends to be deep. In real life one might be called upon to act as boldly and thoughtfully as the Gray Lensman or with the unselfconscious chivalry and hardihood as the Warlord of Mars. A simple paragon of honesty and bravery is actually a more profound moral philosophy than a simple disregard of moral philosophy. 

Is it a good Science Fiction book? Yes indeed! I dislike this book intensely, even loathe it, for it deceived me in my youth, and lying to a child is a vile crime. But judging the innate worth of a book is not about whether one like or hates it. This book does the thing that Science Fiction is meant to do: it looks at the Earth through alien eyes, it evokes a sense of wonder, it paints a future different from our present, yet close enough to our present to make cutting comments about it.

As philosophy, the book is trite, and the message is the message of the serpent of Eden: break the laws that have been placed on you, and you shall be like unto a god! This is heady stuff, and it is easy to get intoxicated, and very easy, horribly easy, to ruin your life and the lives of innocent people around you following self-centered and idiotic ideas like the ones painted to seem so attractive here.

But as art for art’s sake, it is a perfectly workmanlike product, even a superior product. Despite certain lopsidedness in the plot pacing, STRANGER is indeed classic SF from the Good Old Days. It has earned its place on the Baen Top Ten list. If this book had a soul that could be sent to hell, I would say it has also earned its place in the Eighth Circle of Dante’s Inferno: for it is a malignant fraud.

1. Timeless? The basic idea is an interesting speculation about the nature of mathematics and free will, and it has interest for us, because we live in a time when everyone from economists to pollsters to Madison Avenue is trying to predict the motions of masses of men with statistical methods. Karl Marx imagined he had fathomed the plan of history as scientifically as Hari Seldon. Myself, I cannot imagine persons three hundred years from now or three hundred years ago contemplating this book, as pertinent to their time then as it is to our time now. The idea of “planning history through science” is parochial to our day and age.

2. Infinitely Re-Readable? Even over the course of the first trilogy, not to mention the second, the ramifications of the premise were exhausted. The idea that men’s actions can be predicted in the aggregate is belied by the main premise of the book, that the mathematician Hari Seldon is able to shape and change history. Later books added a psionic Mule in order to endanger the Seldon Plan, which again belied the premise. The series is best understood as an engineering tale: Seldon builds a machine (his Plan) that from time to time malfunctions, or seems to malfunction, and (1) either the seeming malfunction was already noted and corrected according to the forethought of Seldon, because human nature would not allow for the deviation. This theme is used to brilliant effect during the attacks by General Bell Rose, really the best short story in the whole sequence;  (2) or, in later stories, the malfunction is real and is set right again by the deux ex machina of the Second Foundation.

It took the genius of another author, Donald Kingsbury, in his homage to Foundation, PSYCHOHISTORICAL CRISIS, to ask whether the psychohistorians themselves were subject to these laws of history, and what would happen if the Seldon mathematics became well known to the public they are being used to control. Kingsbury points out the tension between the safety of the planned future and the human need for liberty, and this is a philosophical notion of some interest, which Asimov never raises or notices. Neither Kingsbury nor Asimov explore the notion of two opposing camps attempting to plan history, or how the laws of history would control their attempts. There is not a single anti-Imperialist in his galactic Empire, not even one member of the Foundation with doubts about the Plan. It is just a gadget story, and the Seldon Plan is the gadget.

3. Relevant to the Great Conversation? One idea about the nature of fate and free will is the gimmick of this story, but nothing is really said about it, aside from the premise that human behavior can be predicted mathematically in the aggregate.

The moral ramifications are nowhere addressed: would you kill the baby the mathematics proved would grow up to be Hitler? No? What would you be willing to do to bring about the Second Empire? Why are you loyal to an Imperial you will never see? What if the Plan called for a depression, or, worse, a war to sweep away your beloved home world? 

Let us turn to our next three criteria:

1. Graceful? No. Asimov, like most SF writers of the Golden Age, wrote in the journalistic style. The only lines I can quote from memory out from all of Asimov’s work are His Three Laws Of Robotics.

2. Natural? The Mule is a somewhat memorable character as a lonely superhuman, and Bayta Darell is charming, perhaps the only Asimov character in his whole oeuvre who is sketched in and seems a real person. But compare them to Yago or Anna Karenina.

3. Wise? The only statement made about the human condition is the one almost all Golden Age science fiction makes: Better Living Through Science! The message is that we would all be better off, if an elite of experts (perhaps with psionic powers!) guided mankind through the turmoil of history into a safe and stable society ruled by an Emperor. In terms of a political theory, this is not Locke or Hobbes or even Machiavelli.  It’s the kind of thing college boys might have a late-night conversation about over beer and pizza.

Is it a good Science Fiction book? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Is it a great novel, worthy to last as long as Western Civilization endures, and to be studied with pleasure by each new generation? Is it equal to Tolstoy or Mark Twain? No.

But I am out of time. Perhaps in upcoming days or weeks I can test these other nine on Jim Baen’s top list to see if they make the cut. J.R.R. Tolkien is certainly a contender, and I would say the short stories of Cordwainer Smith are both graceful and deep.  

What is life that we are mortal, and do not live forever? Is it better to live a short and glorious life, or a long and obscure one? The Homer uses Achilles in the ODYSSEY to asks this question. Is there a life beyond this life? So Dante ponders. Why is man mortal? Milton offers an answer.

What would life be like (so a science fiction story might ask) if we could live forever, or had a medicine that revived the dead? A poor science fiction story (PHANTOM EMPIRE starring Gene Autry) might have a resurrection machine merely as a gimmick, to get a hero out of a scrape. A good science fiction story (TITAN by John Varley) would carefully extrapolate the impact on everyday life of the resurrection machinery. Would it be acceptable to kill your cat every night so his yowling did not wake you, provided you resurrected the beloved pet every morning? That is the kind of speculative questions sciencefiction writers extrapolate. The idea seems shocking at first, but granting the premise, maybe it could be.

There is clearly a tension between the two approaches. When you write about the eternal things, it is hard to concentrate on the wonder or terror of the future; pondering the verities of the human condition is at odds with drawing out speculations on the ramification of a counterfactual. Asking what is the meaning of life antithetical to asking what would life be like if pigs could fly?

Has anyone overcome these barriers? Now we move from the abstract to the particular. Let us take a more or less random sample of the better books in SF, and see if they meet the three criteria of being a great book (Timeless, Infinite, Relevant to the 102 Great Ideas) or the three criteria of being great literature (Graceful, Natural, Deep).

First, unbelievable things actually do happen in real life: there are moments of high heroism and deep horror, eerie coincidences and true love. There really are men like Napoleon and George Washington, who change history. Stories are supposed to be about the unusual: anyone who works on a newspaper can tell you that.

Second, the craft of the artist consist of certain tricks and devices he uses to make the unbelievable seem real. This is called verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is the illusion of reality: a thing that is not real, but which seems realistic.

Stephen King writes with masterful craft by using settings and people as one might find in any small town in America; only after the reader is habituated into trusting these descriptions, do odd, and then unearthly elements begin to intrude on the picture.  He is correctly regarded as a fine horror writer, perhaps the finest, because of his mastery of this device of verisimilitude.

There is a famous scene in Homer, when Andromache brings her baby out to say farewell to Hector before that warrior prince issues forth to battle. Astyonax is startled by the plumes on his helm of his father and begins to cry. This is the type of realistic detail suddenly makes the unearthly elements in the epic seem more realistic. When Hector batters down the gate of the Achaian palisade, he hoists a rock so large that “two men, such as men are now, could not have lifted it.” The fact that the baby was startled by his gleaming armor makes Hector seem like a real person; even when he does feats no one now-a-days can do, the feeling of reality is maintained. Instead of shaking their heads, and saying no one could lift up so large a rock, the listeners nod and listen.

Now, along the spectrum of realistic to unrealistic fiction, Speculative Fiction (by which I mean Science Fiction and Fantasy together) occupies the more unrealistic side. Indeed, Speculative readers not only tolerate but demand that a high demand be placed on their imaginations: they want to see life or Mars, or Barsoom, or Middle Earth, or in the Year 2000 or in the Hyperborean Age. We place the point of disbelief very high.

The separation of fantasy from science fiction is merely the difference in the craft of verisimilitude used. Fantasy impersonates the tone and style, the tropes and details of medieval and ancient songs, epics and folktales. Unearthly and unbelievable things can happen in Middle-Earth, provided they seem to happen in the same mood and atmosphere as ORLANDO FURIOSO or LE MORTE D’ARTHUR. If the mood is not broken, the audience will accept the illusion as real.

Science Fiction impersonates science. The science does not need to be real, but it needs to produce a realistic illusion. Time Travel, or Faster-Than-Light drive, are both as fantastical as Santa’s Elves: but, in the communal imagination of SF, they are assumed to be the product of scientific investigation, built in a workshop or lab, produced by the same ingenuity as Robert Fulton or the Wright Brothers.

This point is worth dwelling on. In order to create verisimilitude in THE TIME TRAVELER, the author H.G. Wells has a frame in the first chapter. The scene opens with an unnamed first-person narrator describing a conversation at a dinner party: the idea that time is a dimension that can be crossed like length, breadth, and height are introduced, and a machine for crossing time, similar to a flying machine, comes on stage as a prop. Now the reader is ready to accept the idea of a man who crosses time in a time machine the way a sea-traveler crosses the sea in a steamship. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Be might bring Scrooge into the future to view a prophecy, but this is a supernatural visitation. The Time Traveler’s vehicle is natural, a product of his workshop, no more supernatural than a steam engine. But without the frame of the dinner party, where we meet the Time Traveler, without the initial theoretical discussion, the stress on the readers willing suspension of disbelief would be greater.

This is the unique property of Science Fiction. The readers of Science Fiction are expected to know something about modern science, and they expect that whatever fantastic adventure about to be told them will be framed in terms of some explanation that is plausibly scientific. Whether the science fiction is hard or soft depends on how implausible the scientific explanation is, and how central the story it is.

Science fiction readers expect to be convinced by having a discussion or lecture take place in the text, which has enough real science to make the fake science seem real. These lectures are unknown in other genres.

Tales where the props and settings from science fiction are merely thrown in for flavor, or to produce a background of wonder, are rightly called Space Opera: adventure stories that take place in space, no different, really, than similar tales taking place in remote jungles, pirate-infested seas, golden palaces, or the mountains of Tibet. STAR WARS, for example, is space opera, since the science is there merely for flavor. The same tale could have taken place, almost unchanged, in the fairytale Japan of legend.

There is, by the way, a similar division in fantasy between hard and soft, or high and low. Fantasy that accurately follows the ancient models of the world, now lost, which our ancestors knew, is realistic fantasy (if we can use that term). The language is elevated, the action is mannered. Sword and Sorcery stories follow the themes of ancient epics and folktales. Oriental fantasy follows the model of Arabian Night’s Tales, with their strange vistas, Jinn-haunted palaces, and cruel bejeweled splendors. The ‘Dying Earth’ tales of Jack Vance are a superb example of this opulent oriental flavor, even though they take place in the Far Future rather than the Far East. 

Fantasy where the characters talk and act like middle-class gamers from Southern California, except that they swing swordsand shoot lightning from their fingertips, is a tale where the fantasy settings and props are merely thrown in for flavor. We should call such unrealistic fantasy Elf Opera.   

But the point, the main point, of speculative fiction, both fantasy and science fiction, is that they are both ultramundane. Fantasy is unearthly, and science fiction is extraterrestrial. They deal with things that do not happen in the here-and-now. Either the setting is in another world Beyond the Fields We Know, or something from the Other World or Outer Space has intruded into our comfortable little reality. When something from Beyond intrudes into our little world, the reaction is either terror or awe. All the old SF magazines had titles reflecting this: Thrilling, Wonder, Amazing, and so on. Any definition of Science Fiction or Fantasy that does not point to this central characteristic of unearthliness is defective.

A poem of awkward and trite phrasing, even if touching on some great subject matter, is not Great Art: we have all heard banal hymns or patriotic songs or paeans to Motherhood, that, even though in praise of high and fine things, themselves lack genius.

In written fiction, we can point to certain standards are remarkable execution, even if we cannot exactly define them (for who can define genius?).

• GRACEFUL: Great prose delights the reader with the poetry of the language, which includes memorable passages and phrases. It is both easy to quote and worthy of being quoted. Even in translation, the metaphors and images impress. Shakespeare is the exemplar of this: his work consists not merely of ringing lines of glorious virtuosity, individual lines and phrases are so striking that they have passed into common use, indeed, form the backbone of the English language.
• NATURAL: Great fiction draws from life, and from imaginations larger than life, characters whose vivacity and verisimilitude make them seem alive. There are many dimensions and aspects to such characters: they are not mere mechanisms for advancing the plot, mouthpieces for the author, or simple stereotypes. Once this character is alive in your mind, some real people in your life (perhaps even you) will be seen in a differing light. Homer and Milton are preeminent in this respect: Even the dullest student reading the ILLIAD remembers the wrath of Achilles, or PARADISE LOST, the hollow grandeur of Satan.
• WISE: Great fiction is observant into the human condition. It is the opposite of a juvenile or jejune opinion. The woes and triumphs, the simple pleasures and deep passions of mankind, men the way men actually act, are depicted. The statement the story makes about the human condition, or the questions the story poses, will be a source either of satisfaction or haunting puzzlement for years, for a lifetime. I will list Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Jonathon Swift, Victor Hugo and Mark Twain as masters of this particular aspect of the craft.

I have here paraphrased his words:

• TIMELESS: Great Books should be works that are as much of concern to us today as at the time they were written, even if that was centuries ago. They are thus essentially timeless — always contemporary, and not confined to interests that change from time to time or from place to place.
• INFINITE: The second criterion was their infinite re-readability. Few books are worth reading more than once. A great book is inexhaustibly re-readable. It cannot be fully understood on one, two, or three readings. More is to be found on all subsequent readings. One re-reads a great book with greater pleasure and more insight on each rereading.
• RELEVENT: The third criterion was the relevance of the work to a very large number of great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last twenty-five centuries. The authors of these books take part in the great conversation, reading the works of many of their predecessors, and answering them. In other words, the great books are the books in which the great conversation occurs about the great ideas. It is the set of great ideas that determines the choice of the great books.

Adler is kind enough to list the Great Ideas. There are 102 of them:

Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy and Cosmology, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Equality, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, Love, Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny and Despotism, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, World.

Also worth quoting in full is Alder’s comment on what was excluded from criteria of judgment:

We did not base our selections on an author’s nationality, religion, politics, or field of study; nor on an author’s race or gender. Great books were not chosen to make up quotas of any kind; there was no “affirmative action” in the process.

In the second place, we did not consider the influence exerted by an author or a book on later developments in literature or society. That factor alone did not suffice to merit inclusion. Scholars may point out the extraordinary influence exerted by an author or a book, but if the three criteria stated above were not met, that author or book was not to be chosen. Many of the great books have exerted great influence upon later generations, but that by itself was not the reason for their inclusion. [Adler’s footnote: This negative consideration applies, in my judgment, to Voltaire and his “Candide”. It also applies to the German philosopher Leibniz and his works. Just think of the influence exerted by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin!”]

In the third place, a consideration not operative in the selection process was the truth of an author’s opinions or views, or the truth to be found in a particular work. This point is generally misunderstood; many persons think that we regard the great books as a repository of mankind’s success in its ever-continuing pursuit of the truth. “That is simply not the case”. There is much more error in the great books than there is truth. By anyone’s criteria of what is true or false, the great books will be found to contain some truths, but many more mistakes and errors.

Please keep in mind, this list is tailored both for fiction and nonfiction works, including scientific and philosophical ones. What is involved in literature qua literature adds an additional criterion.

Now, by any standard, WATCHMAN is an impressive comic book, rich with invention, a dramatically original approach to the conventional superhero genre.

Merely trying to list the clever artistic effects would be exhausting: Moore’s use of exact background details, the inclusion of snippets from imaginary books and articles from the fictional world of his invention, the cleverness of having one character telling his tale from outside of time, the sly updating of the Charleston characters (Rorschach riffs The Question, Nite Owl riffs Blue Beetle, and so on). Nothing like it had ever been done before in comic books. It is sui generis. 

But is it the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Is it the Mona Lisa? Is it PARADISE LOST or THE TEMPEST? Here we are not talking about what one man’s particular taste might or might not prefer. I might prefer cotton candy to steak and potatoes: but the fact of the matter is, one is something to get one’s teeth into and chew over; the other disappears on the tongue. One is nutritious and one is not.

We are talking about the great and the shallow things of life. We live in a philistine and egalitarian age, where the passion of the world is to equalize unequal things, and beat high towers flat. As pleasing as this endeavor is to the democratic spirit, it is nonetheless, at its heart, a fraud. There are real towers whose shadow is cast over all the world. There is something to food aside from the taste: there is also the nourishment of the body. Likewise, there is something to literature aside from the taste: there is the nourishment of the mind and the exercise of the faculties. Fun books are for fun. Good books make you think. Great books make you think about the Great Ideas.

Whether your taste runs to thinking about Great Ideas, or whether a particular book agrees or disagrees without your own ideas is a different question.

There no author with whom I disagree more sharply and more deeply on all topics than Karl Marx. I loathe this man as I loathe some devil from Hell. Nonetheless, as a matter of objective fact, independent of my personal opinions and tastes, the master work of this great author, DAS KAPITAL, engages the Great Ideas.

Marx writes about history, the role of mankind, the nature of man’s labor, the nature of society and the evolution of society, the role of free will, the nature of justice, especially social justice, and so on. He happens to be wrong on each and every conclusion he comes to on these topics—this is a point a Marxist would debate with me. But what cannot be debated is that these are the topics he addresses: topics of weight and import.

A man’s conclusions on these topics will change the way he must live his life; it will influence, for good or ill, what he thinks about himself and the world and his place init; it will determine on which side of the wars and struggles of his age he will stand; it will determine to what standard he rallies.    

Nietzsche is a similar diabolic author, one whose works I esteem to be poison to the soul.  Nonetheless, as a matter of objective fact, independent of my personal opinions and tastes, the master work of this great author engages the Great Ideas. He is wrong about what he says about God and Man, Destiny and Will, Power and Morality and the Meaning of Life. But the fact is he is indeed talking about God and Man, Destiny and Will, Power and Morality and the Meaning of Life. He is saying something more significant than “Question Authority.”

What is Alan Moore talking about in his work? WATCHMAN has a number of themes surely possessed of more depth and weight than any other funnybook—which is the faintest praise anyone has ever penned. He is talking about godlike powers and their moral and social implications: what happens when you trust people with power to make the decisions in your life. He is talking about whether the ends justify the means (which is the philosophy of Ozymandias) or whether moral laws are strict and simple, black-and-white (which is the philosophy of Rorschach). There are themes of time and destiny and free will (Doctor Manhattan touches on this). There is a theme that power corrupts (The Comedian). The book poses the question, Who Watches the Watchmen? It asks us to Question Authority.

All good stuff. I have read many a thriller by Tom Clancey or historical novel by Alfred Duggan or detective tale by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Sax Rohmer that do not touch on even half these issues half so thoughtfully. For a genre work, WATCHMEN is deep indeed. In terms of influence, no comic, not even the shocking DARK KNIGHT by Frank Miller, produced a deeper or more lasting change in the comicbook genre.

Again, Moore’s “Question Authority” theme is one I find mildly distasteful: I selected this example precisely because any personal agreement or disagreement needs to be factored out of the equation. Whether I agree or not, Moore is talking about themes that might make a teenager ponder, and even become part of his permanent attitude about life; whereas Marx is talking about ideas that could and did change the world and become part of history.  

But a man might live or die in the revolution trumpeted by Marx: and there are people who will conform their whole lives to the shape of his ideas, and serve them with devotion as one serves a god; or people who would sacrifice all to oppose them in word and deed. What is Alan Moore’s little cautionary tale is that compared to such gigantic significance? Moore’s work does not even have the depth or striking power of NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR by George Orwell. Outside the genre, its influence is nil.          

Rossignol has his defenders, including state Sen. Roy P. Dyson (D), who writes a weekly column. But other county leaders said the paper goes too far launching ad hominem attacks and concocting stories.

As a serious and conscientious journalist, I would have written that sentence as

Rossignol has his defenders, including state Sen. Roy P. Dyson (D), who writes a weekly column. But other county leaders, too yellow to give there names here, make vague accusations of the launching ad hominem attacksand concocting stories, and provoking World War II by his invasion of Poland. They also accused him of eating babies and sending storms and plagues to kill the flocks of innocent shepherds. “He is the Antichrist,” said one source that asked not to be named.

Notice also where his rival sniffs that he wants to see Ken Rossignol go out of business (HAH! good luck with that, jerk! They were predicting the death of that paper back when I was on the staff, fifteen years ago. Yeah, you just do that little thing and drive him out of business with your superior news stories about Heroic Pets. We’ll just have to limp along with the readers who want to read about crime, corruption, drugs and dirt.)

In contrast, Ken wishes him well and welcomes the competition.

I doff my cap to you, sir! It was an honor to serve on your staff!  I almost went to jail for this man, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

If you are a stoical fellow unimpressed with the antics and presumptions of artistes planted on the wrong side of the generation gap, you might even have an idle curiosity to see Harlan Ellison, whom you regard with the same respect one might a dancing bear: as a quaint if ungainly decoration in the landscape of science fiction, not sure why he is famous or even if he should be, but certainly a recognized landmark of unique and eccentric proportions.

After a simply hilarious speech by Connie Willis, up stands a thin, well-groomed fellow of precise mannerism, who speaks in dry and measured tones, with that hint of self-deprecating humor one tends to associate with Jews, fellows who smile under their daily woes both great and small.

The words printed below do not convey the pauses and underlines of stress, the timing, the hint of a smile, which made them so funny, but let your imaginations supply these.

=========================================

… When our son Charles was a little boy, my wife Leslie and I visited Harlan and Susan. Harlan thought Charles would like to see his collection of mint condition toys and games. He opened the doors to his climate-controlled vault and Charlie’s eyes rounded like dinner plates. He rushed in to this, the world’s larges Toys R Us, reached out and said, “Can I…?”

“NO!” barked Harlan, slamming the doors shut.

Our son looked utterly stricken. Leslie leaned over to console him. “Harlan doesn’t share.”

That was Charles’s introduction to his godclient Harlan. But he sends his love to Uncle Harlan and Aunt Susan.

Many of you have had the experience of getting a phone call from Harlan Ellison at an hour that is not consonant with the protocols observed by most persons in the known civilized world. This goes double if you happen to be his agent. Over the twenty-five years that I have represented him, I’ve received phone calls that sounded something like this:

It’s Harlan, I realize it’s Yom Kippur but goddamit, I haven’t received my two copies of the fourth printing of the Mongolian edition of DEATHBIRD STORIES. Do you know a kickass lawyer in Ulan Bator?

Or…

It’s Harlan, I realize there’s an ax murderer loose in your home and the kitchen floor is slippery with gore…

Or…

It’s Harlan, I realize your wife’s in labor…

Harlan again, I realize your wife is fully dilated…

Harlan again, I realize the baby’s head is crowning…

It happens that one Sunday morning as I was enjoying a leisurely breakfast with my wife, the phone rang. “It’s too early for news that someone died,” she said, “but it’s not too early for Harlan.” It was Harlan. “That’s it! I’ve had it! Houghton Mifflin fucked up the proofs of my book and I want to pull it.”

“What did they do to your book, Harlan?”

“They hyphenated a word against my express wishes.”

“There you go again,” I said, “sweating the small stuff.”

“Small stuff! You call a hyphen small stuff?”

“What was the word?”

“Motherfucker.”

“Who? Your editor?”

“No, the word. The word they hyphenated was ‘motherfucker’.”

“Oxford English Dictionary hyphenates it,” I said.

“It’s not funny.”

“Unquestionably, Harlan,” I said, “this crime ranks among the vilest atrocities in all of recorded history. By comparison, the Rape of Nanking was just a schoolboy prank. But I wonder if there might be some less drastic remedy than pulling the book.”

“Absolutely not. I want you to call Austin Olney this morning. I have the private number of his country house.”

Austin Olney was the publisher of Houghton Mifflin in Boston, an elegant, refined Patrician, a Brahmin who might be mistaken for William Cullen Bryant or Ralph Waldo Emerson. I tried to buy a little time. “Harlan, it’s Sunday. Don’t you think he’s in Old North Church talking to God? Or out riding to hounds, or in a duck blind with the governor of Massachusetts? I’ll call him first thing Monday.”

“No, you’ll call him now.”

I considered my options and humoring Harlan was not one of them. But neither was calling Austin Olney at his country house on a Sunday morning to complain about a hyphen in the word motherfucker.

Perhaps it was the hour. Or perhaps it was the suicidal futility of the mission. Whatever it was, I felt a sudden rush of rage engulfing me, and before I could gain control of myself I said, “Harlan, you may be the only certified genius I will ever represent. I have devoted my career to promoting you as one of America’s greatest living authors. That is my mission and my calling. And no one, NO ONE, is going to stand in my way until I have achieved it. Not even you, Harlan. NOT EVEN YOU!”

Whereupon I slammed the phone down.

I began shaking uncontrollably. And an old Russian proverb came into my head: He who sits beside the Czar sits beside death.

I looked up and my wife was standing there, her eyes rounded in dismay. “Richard, what have you done?”

I said, “I think I just fired Harlan Ellison.”

We gazed at one another bleakly. But before we could decide what to do, the phone rang again. I knew it was Harlan. I looked at my wife for guidance. Her gaze said, “Not my problem. Have a nice morning.”

I picked up the phone. “It’s Harlan. Do you really think I’m a genius?”

I laughed so hard I never actually answered Harlan’s question. So here’s my answer. Yes, Harlan, I do think you’re a genius. And though you have not yet been certified, there’s no question in my mind that you are indeed…certifiable.

It has been my great privilege – well, let me rephrase that – it’s been a source of unremitting stress — to serve as your agent for some twenty-five years. Even if I hadn’t reaped obscene profits handling your account…well, maybe I could rephrase that too. In spite of the fact that I have earned a total of $73.42 in commission over the lifetime of our relationship, if I had to do it again, I would do it for nothing. Congratulations from Leslie, Charles and myself for the hard-earned and well-deserved honor that SFWA has bestowed on you.