The Way the Future Blogs

Harlan Ellison, 1969.

Harlan Ellison did not appear from nowhere. When he first began to show up in the sf magazines he had already been writing from an early age — had even had his work appear in as prestigious a magazine as The New Yorker, but had never really found his voice until the beginning of that period in the early ’60’s. That’s when he began to write the astonishing series of pyrotechnical masterpieces sometimes referred to as the “Repent, Harlequin” stories.

More than for most writers, Harlan’s stories and his life seemed both almost part of the same work of art. His home was in the hills overlooking Los Angeles — well, not exactly, in a technical sense, really overlooking it. To overlook the city from Harlan’s front door you would have had to be able to see through some miles of solid rock, because he lived on the far side of the hills.

The house was worth the trip. The name on the door was “Ellison Wonderland.” His writing office would not have shamed a banker, though it centered on nothing more spectacular than a typewriter, and one that was neither computer-based nor even electrified, but powered only by the muscles of Harlan’s ten fingers. His office’s central sound system, he boasted, could deliver any music a visitor requested at the press of a button; and the whole place, like any proper wonderland, had a secret chamber.

And there, in those years of the 1960s, he wrote stories like “‘Repent, Harlequin,&rsqu; Said the Tick-Tock Man,” “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” “A Boy and His Dog,” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin,” racking up a considerable collection of Hugos and Nebulas in the process. (One writer said, “They ought to give him a Hugo every time he writes a story, just for the titles.”)

I was Harlan’s editor for the first publication of some of the best of those stories, and I have to say that it was not an easy job. We were in a state of war for five or six years on end. There was the Battle of the Douchebag, when Harlan fought tenaciously for his right to have one character in a story call another by that epithet. In a large sense, he was sort of in the right; for generally speaking a writer should be entitled to have his story presented as he conceived it. But I was aware that a significant fraction of our magazine’s readers were fairly young boys, of an age where parents, not themselves readers, might pick up a magazine to see what Tom Junior was reading and be shocked to see that word becoming part of their son’s vocabulary. (Remember we’re talking about a time half a century ago.)

Or the Battle of the 4-Color Border, in which Harlan, having seen some colorful graph strips in, I think, Scientific American, wanted similar strips to frame his next story, and didn’t want to accept the judgment that he couldn’t have them unless we took the printing of the text of the magazine off the cheap black and white press they had always been printed on and substituted a budget-busting color press. And additional skirmishes beyond count.

There was no doubt that Harlan was a major sf writer. The only jarring note was that Harlan was dissatisfied with the possession of that pigeonhole, and so his production of sf stories dwindled as he went on to the exploration of other pastures.

The pasture that was most financially rewarding, I think, was a career as professional lecturer. In return for taking a plane to some college town and talking for an hour or two to a couple of thousand college undergraduates he would receive a check that was usually larger than what a short story brought in, and was a lot less trouble. Moreover, he soon hit upon a way of making it more profitable still. He brought along remaindered copies of his backlist books, and when the talk was over sold them, autographed, to members of the audience.

Audiences loved him. At least, most of the members of his audiences did, though for a few people it was not all that pleasurable. Those were people who were the subject of some of his reminiscences. If I had had any doubt this was true — I never did — I would have learned better on one occasion, in New York one evening just before that year’s annual Nebula Awards dinner.

Harlan had come to New York to speak at the dinner, and his publisher’s publicity people had taken advantage of the opportunity to put him on some radio and TV spots to promote Harlan’s latest book, the anthology, Again, Dangerous Visions. One of the programs was Long John Nebel’s all-night talk show, on which I was a regular. John had had some troublesome experiences with West Coast writers not long before, including Terry Southern, the man who wrote all the funny parts in the film Dr. Strangelove, but on six hours of John’s show rarely responded to a question with more than a “Yes,” “No” or “I don’t know, but maybe.”

So John called me up before booking Harlan with a worrisome question, “Can he talk?”

I assured him that the one problem no one had ever had with Harlan was getting him to talk, but John, wanting insurance, asked me to join the show anyhow.

I’ve made many mistakes in my life. That day I made a big one. I said, “Yes.”

When we assembled in the studio and John began to talk he spent a good twenty minutes praising the anthology, though of course he hadn’t read any part of it. Then he turned the mikes over to Harlan, who spent another twenty minutes modestly praising the talents of all the authors in the book, Then John said, “What about you, Fred? What did you think of Again Dangerous Visions?”

That sort of question is not meant to be answered candidly on that sort of program, but I could not make myself join in the previous hymn of worship. What came out of my mouth was something like,, “Well, it’s interesting that Walter Bradbury, the book’s editor at Doubleday, describes it as ‘stories that have been rejected by every editor in the science-fiction field.’ All the same, I think there are some stories there that are really good.”

John, who had been about to lean back in his chair, gave me a quick look and then one at Harlan, whose mouth was already opening for rebuttal. John rapidly returned to the upright position and addressed me. “And why don’t you tell us about some of the stories that impressed you, Fred?” And bloodshed was postponed.

A consideration I had overlooked, however, was that Harlan was to be the keynote speaker at the next evening’s banquet. And I would be sitting at a head table, right under the speaker’s place, in full view of the audience for all of the three-quarters of an hour that Harlan spoke.

It was a memorable evening. There are, however, some memorable evenings that I really would prefer to forget. What’s more, I can prove that some of his assertions were false, as I have, for instance, a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate and the record of my own birth nearly two years later.

Robert C.W. Ettinger

My friend Bob Ettinger deanimated on Saturday, 23 July, after a prolonged period in hospice care. A tub of crushed ice was by his bedside, and the certificate of death and perfusion of his blood vessels with a chilling solution were expedited. Since then he has been in the “cooling box,” to lower his whole-body temperature to liquid-gas cold.

I first encountered Bob half a century ago, when I was editor of the Galaxy group of magazines and he submitted his paper The Prospect of Immortality to me for publication. He had done his homework, and I had to admit that his proposal of freezing on death, and then being kept in ultra-cold conditions, did seem capable of keeping a corpse from deteriorating for long periods.

Moreover, it seem probable that medical science, which had made such great gains in the century just past, would continue to develop, perhaps to the point of defrosting and repairing the damages caused both by the original cause of death and the act of freezing itself. Put them altogether and his idea seemed to offer not a guarantee, but at least a reasonable gambling bet that the idea might possibly work.

So I published Bob’s essay in one of my magazines, then began publicizing it. I was a regular on Long John Nebel’s radio talk show, and he was glad to schedule several shows about Ettinger’s idea. I was doing occasional writing for Playboy, and when I queried them about an article, they loved the idea, which in turn led to a prolonged interview on the then-dominant Johnny Carson show.

Bob was appreciative of that. So were the action groups that began springing up to put Ettinger’s ideas into practice, and as a reward for my activities, one of them offered me a free freeze, which I declined with thanks.

By then Bob no longer needed me to carry the torch for his idea, and further publicity pieces, including a lead article in Esquire entitled “New Hope for the Dead,” Bob wrote himself. We remained friends, and when Bob came to New York or I visited the Detroit area we usually managed to share a meal, once with his uncle, Pee Wee Russell, one of the most famous clarinetists of the Jazz Age.

I should say that one of the major reasons why we remained good friends was his personality. Bob had a great sense of humor. When I told him what Long John called the people in the deep freeze — “corpsicles” — he got a good laugh out of it and began using the term himself. And once, when I’d asked how many people had signed up, he grinned and paraphrased the Bible: “Many are cold, but few are frozen.”

He was always regretful that I wouldn’t sign up, not for the sake of another scalp to hang but because he believed I was giving up on a tangibly real hope. A few months ago, I got a long, friendly letter from him, doing his best to change my mind. I wrote back at once to say that I hadn’t decided the plan wouldn’t work. I agreed that it had at least a non-zero chance of doing as he hoped. But, I said, although I would give almost anything to stay alive and in good physical condition indefinitely, I wasn’t attracted to the idea of being reborn into a society where I had no role and all the things I cared about had disappeared.

He wrote me one more letter, good-naturedly urging me to change my mind. That was the end.

I still think it’s a reasonable gambling bet. If it turns out it works, I hope Bob will be among the first to demonstrate its success, and I wish him well in that future.

 
Related post:
Inventing Cryonics

Walter Schneir

Admit it, you have no idea who Walter Schneir (who died of thyroid cancer at the age of 83 on 11 April) was. I’ll never forget him, though.

In 1965, along with his wife. Miriam, he had published a Doubleday book, Invitation to an Inquest, about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the New York couple who had been tried as spies who had given atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, convicted and executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The book, which argued that the Rosenbergs hadn’t received a fair trial and might well have been innocent of the charges, came to the attention of Long John Nebel, who ran an all-night radio talk show in New York.

He invited the Schneirs to appear on his show, along with Roy Cohn, the former McCarthy aide who had been involved in the Rosenberg prosecution, and me. (Why me? Because I was a pretty good talker and rarely turned John down when he asked … and because I loathed Roy Cohn for what he had done as Senator Joe McCarthy’s pit bull and couldn’t resist the chance to meet him in person. It was that sort of attitude that put me in front of John’s microphones dozens of times when I would have been better advised to stay home and get a good night’s sleep.)

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

After forty-odd years, the only clear memory I have of Cohn is as a very efficient killing machine. He never sat still and he never stopped talking.

The Schneirs had done an admirable job of collecting evidence that the Rosenbergs had not received a fair trial in many ways: The judge allowed the prosecution improper liberties; their defense attorney had no experience in that sort of case; witnesses changed their stories on crucial elements; worst of all, the case against Ethel Rosenberg in particular rested on the unsupported testimony of just one witness, her brother, David Greenglass. (Who much later confessed to writer Sam Roberts that he had given false testimony, as told in Roberts’ book The Brother.)

All those things and more the Schneirs said into Long John’s mikes, but how much the radio audience heard I cannot say. Cohn talked right over them, never stopping, never conceding a point. So a lot of people — everyone from Bertrand Russell and the Pope to Pablo Picasso — thought the Rosenberg trial was unfair? So what? Those people hadn’t been in the courtroom, and the verdict was in.

On the other hand (you might ask), what about me? I had been in that studio all the long night, listening to every word that had been said, and what did I think?

Why, I thought they were not guilty and should have been acquitted. And the other thing I thought was that they should have been shipped off to Moscow on the next plane to spend the rest of their lives there.
 

Sen. Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn

The thing about Julius Rosenberg was that he was a true believer. All the things he said to intimate friends that he thought were private (and that those friends then testified to as prosecution witnesses at the trial) and every defiant thing he had said to the court and to lawyers and reporters when the verdict was in showed it. He thought America was evil and the USSR was the hope of mankind. Given any chance to help them triumph over us, he would have been false to his core beliefs if he hadn’t seized it.

I didn’t actually think he had ever had such a chance, though. I didn’t think he knew enough to be able to steal any useful atomic secrets to betray. I thought he was all talk. And in that I was at least partly wrong.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, a lot of ultra-top-secret KGB documents fell into American hands and some of them do specifically name Julius Rosenberg as an agent of espionage for them. They don’t say that his spying was of any value. They don’t come anywhere close to saying that anything Rosenberg did was of the slightest use to any Russian arms designer. But it does show that, against the odds, Rosenberg did somehow make contact with the Russian spy network, and they took him at least seriously enough to record his availability.

And wonders will never cease.

Chilling out at the Cryonics Institute

It was my practice to come in to the Galaxy office in New York once a week, generally on Thursdays, to deliver edited manuscripts and proof sheets for forwarding to the printer and to pick up the latest batch of submitted manuscripts to read on the way home. On one Thursday in the early 1960s, though, something unusual fell out of the mail sack. It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t exactly a manuscript at all. In its plastic binder, it had more the look of a self-published book, and it had an intriguing title: “Life Extension Through Freezing.”

Because it intrigued me, I read Robert Ettinger’s text right through then and there — skeptically at first, to be sure — and then I sat staring into space for a while because, against all expectations, the document made sense. I played its implications through in my mind, starting with someone dying. It didn’t matter what he was dying of — run over by a truck, cancer of the private parts, suicide by jumping off a bridge, whatever. Dead was dead, and what the cadaver’s nearest and dearest were to do was to get it down to cold.

I’m talking real cold here — not the wimpy temperature of your kitchen freezer where you keep the lamb chops and the broccoli, or even of dry ice, but liquid-gas temperatures, −250 degrees Celsius or colder. At temperatures like that organic material — including human corpses — does not decay. It doesn’t change at all for long, long periods of time.

All right, now the nearest and dearest have got their dearly beloved stiff in the very deep freeze. What has that accomplished for them?

Why, it has given them the indispensable gift of time. Time for the medical profession to identify what specific damage has been done to what specific parts of the body, either by being made dead in the first place or by being frozen itself. And then to repair all that damage, and then to start up once more all the body’s functions of breathing and pulsing and eating and excreting — that is, of being alive. And then, if any of that is beyond medical science’s capacities to do at the time, to get their asses back into their research facilities until they do have it all figured out.

The point, as this Ettinger fellow saw it, is that medical science, which has achieved so many wondrous successes in dealing so many of the harmful events which can take place in the human body, isn’t likely to quit the endeavor very soon. There is, to be sure, no guarantee that the researchers will keep on discovering new therapies indefinitely. But it’s still a pretty good gambling bet, especially if you stop to think of what the alternatives are for that poor, beat-up mortal frame you’ve been carrying around if you do nothing.

Anyway, if Ettinger’s idea got me that interested, I was pretty sure it would do much the same for many of my readers. So I sent this Dr. Ettinger an offer for the right to publish excerpts from his work and sat back to consider what to do next. First to schedule it: that was easy. I decided to put it in my new third magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow, mostly because it was so new that there weren’t going to be any indignant letters from old subscribers complaining that a cherished tradition had been violated.

Copy-editing the manuscript presented no problems; Ettinger had done a thorough job, even going so far as to check out the bulk prices for several kinds of liquid gases. I was confident that, by and large, my readers would have no problem encountering the piece in the magazine. But I wanted more than that. This was the kind of thing that might attract new readers for the magazine, if I only had some way of telling them about it. . . .

Fortunately I did. I had the hundreds of thousands of insomniacs who were addicted to the all-night radio talk show run by Long John Nebel.

 
Related post:

• The Cryonics Institute’s 106th Patient: Robert C.W. Ettinger