When HARLIE Was One (2 page)

I
NTRODUCTION
T
O
T
HE
2014 E
DITION

HARLIE and I have been friends for a long time. He insists on creeping into books that are not supposed to be about him and making them about him anyway.

He has gone to space in The Dingilliad series (
Jumping Off The Planet
,
Bouncing Off The Moon
, and
Leaping To The Stars
). He's fought more-than-human super-warriors as the brain of the LS-1187 starship in the Star Wolf series (
Voyage Of The Star Wolf
,
The Middle Of Nowhere
, and
Blood And Fire
). And he's even popped up as a chapter in my book on writing (
Worlds Of Wonder
). And I suspect he's peeking out from behind the scenery in at least half a dozen other projects.

In every case, he's been a damned pain in the ass—because he keeps asking uncomfortable questions. HARLIE loves to create moral and ethical dilemmas.

A friend once described HARLIE as the other half of my brain. He postulated that I split myself into two minds so I can have someone ferocious to argue with. He might be right. When arguing with HARLIE, I sometimes feel that I'm talking things over with a superior intellect, and that startles me, because I'm certain I'm nowhere near as smart as HARLIE pretends. Nevertheless, it's a flattering observation.

Myself, I see HARLIE as that annoying little voice that keeps asking, “Why?”

A little history here.

HARLIE is a child of the sixties.

I'm not going to try and explain that decade. It's enough to say that the sixties were a grand demonstration of chaos theory on a global scale. The baby boomers came of age with a culture-shattering impact. Everything got reinvented—automobiles, music, comic books, movies, television, hair and clothing styles, our ways of thinking about ourselves and our future.

It was a difficult and marvelous time. A whole generation was crashing headlong into what then passed for adulthood. We were asking “What's it all about?” and “Where's it happening?” and totally missing the point that it was up to us to create it ourselves.

It was a time of enormous experimentation with form, content, and even the creative process itself.

In the science fiction community, some writers were arguing that the use of recreational drugs enhanced their creativity. Others disagreed, arguing that tampering with your brain chemistry was probably not a good idea.

Myself, I was something of an agnostic on the issue. (Yes, I did try marijuana in college, but I didn't exhale.) But it didn't take me long to discover that the use of marijuana was slowing down my typing speed from 120 words per minute to no words at all.

I'll concede that a person can get some interesting visions and insights from marijuana, and even the occasional useful hallucination, but you can also have some very stupid and ugly experiences as well. Even more important, the physical and mental effects of drugs tend to destroy personal discipline.

At this remove, decades later, I'm clear that drug use is a self-centered activity. It's about what's happening in your own head, not what's happening in the physical universe. It doesn't make a difference in the real world. It doesn't contribute anything to anybody else. If anything, it degrades a person's ability to make a difference.

But I didn't know it that way then and I couldn't say it as clearly as I can now. What I did know, if only on a gut level, was that there was something wrong with the arguments for drug use—and if I couldn't ask the right question, then maybe HARLIE could.

So, the first HARLIE story wasn't really about HARLIE. It was about asking a question that turned out to be much more profound than I realized when I typed it. “What's
your
purpose?”

Looking back on it now, that first HARLIE story (“Oracle For A White Rabbit”) was a little heavyhanded, but whatever else we were doing in the sixties, subtlety was never a part of it. I make no apologies.

Of course, once the question was asked—“What does it mean to be human?”—it demanded an attempt at an answer. The question rattled around in my head for a while, like a ballbearing in a metal bucket. I knew it was a great question. I also knew I was not going to attempt to answer it. I'm not a philosopher and I'm not arrogant enough to pretend to be one. I figured I would just tiptoe away from the subject and go back to writing about nice safe things like . . . like, um, starships and robots and alien worlds. Things I didn't have to think too hard about.

Right.

The universe is a bear trap. The universe is a practical joker. The universe is a pie aimed at your face. The universe doesn't care what you think or what you've planned. The universe does what it does. And if the universe occasionally pushes you off a cliff, don't take it personally. It's just the universe doing what it's designed to do.

So when you find yourself at the bottom of the chasm, squashed and flattened like an accordion-shaped coyote, waddling around with a “what just happened?” expression, that's just another part of life. The technical term is “reality check.”

See, here's the thing.

The
traditional
view is that great writing is the product of great suffering. (Or great madness. Take your pick.)

Unfortunately, I didn't have any great suffering or great madness. My circumstances were so ordinary I was doomed.

I did not grow up poor or abused or the product of a broken home. My father was not a suave international diamond-smuggler and espionage agent; my mother had not sold her body to escape the concentration camps. My grandmother did not know any arcane mysteries having to do with wolfsbane or dragon's blood, and we did not have a dead twin walled up in the basement nor an eccentric aunt living reclusively in the attic that we didn't talk about. We didn't even have a basement, and the attic was filled with insulation. Nobody in the family was having illicit affairs, illegitimate children, mental breakdowns, or problems with alcohol or gambling or drugs.

It was embarrassing. We had no dark secrets at all. Not even the commonplace ones. Not even the smallest bit of mordant family dysfunction to inspire a Tennessee Williams kind of fascination with despair. I did not have a mysterious birthmark that identified me as the lost heir to the throne of Orstonia. Nor did we have visitations from poltergeists, space aliens, or arcane elder gods. I didn't even run away to join the circus at thirteen.

No. None of that.

Instead, I grew up in a fairly average suburb of Los Angeles, went to a series of fairly average schools, had fairly average teachers, and earned mostly average grades (not because I was average, I was just uninterested; science fiction was a lot more interesting.) Nothing out of the ordinary happened. Ward and June Cleaver would have been bored. My childhood was so whitebread, you could have spread mayonnaise on it and made sandwiches. All right—Jewish rye bread, no mayonnaise. But you get the point.

I do admit to having had an obsessive-compulsive passion for monster movies and science fiction, but that was normal for teenage boys before video games were invented. The biggest argument I ever had with my parents was about my buying a motorcycle to get to school. I bought it. End of argument. Big deal.

The lesson—the
cliché
—told to would-be writers that you should “write what you know” is a very hollow instruction. At that age, who really knows anything? I'm sure I didn't. My experience with the real world was limited to what I read in books and what I saw at the movies. It was other people's stories. It wasn't just secondhand reality. It was other people's conversations about reality.

By the time I finished high school and stumbled through the first few years of college, I had learned just how little talent I had as an artist or an actor or even as a storyteller. My social skills weren't all that terrific either. There wasn't a lot of evidence to demonstrate that I had any real aptitude at anything, something that more than one instructor felt compelled to point out publicly.

I did have two things going for me. I had a control freak's ferocious determination to find out how things work, and I had just enough skill at stringing words together to make an occasionally readable sentence.
But I had nothing to say
.

I had nothing to say about life because I hadn't lived it.

Which brings me back to that horrendous clash of symbols we called the sixties. If the fifties were about innocence, then the sixties were about losing it. Big time.

It was a decade that started in promise and stumbled into disaster. The civil rights struggle boiled over into church bombings and violence and murders; President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas; the flower children turned into dropped-out hippies; drug use became hip; Vietnam escalated into a full-blown war; riots broke out in the urban ghettos; draft riots broke out on the college campuses; the peace movement turned violent; LBJ developed a credibility gap; Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; Woodstock turned into Altamont; and, as if to seal the deal, a night of horrific murders terrified Los Angeles. There was no escape from the avalanche of time.

Not even the awe-inspiring sight of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin broadcasting live from the moon could redeem the decade. As the decade collapsed into history, it seemed as if most of us were so scarred and traumatized by what we'd been through that we just wanted to retreat into a nice safe cocoon.

We had started the decade with a clear sense of who we were. By the end of those years, we had lost our sense of self and it hurt so much we couldn't stand it.

So if the sixties was about anything—and it was about a lot of things—it was also about the search for self. At least, that's how I experienced it. Who am I, anyway? What am I up to? Where do I go from here? And why? (Yes, I was right on schedule.)

I won't go into the details of my own personal soap opera, I'll save that for another time, but it was pretty ghastly. If I had still been spiritual, I would have seen it as evidence that God is a malignant thug.

By the end of that last year, I felt so beaten up and so beaten down, so alone in the moment, so abandoned and confused about everything, that I felt I had lost purpose. I felt I had nothing left. I wasn't all that nice a person to be around. Ask those who were there.

What I did have was an empty little apartment, a desk, a typewriter, a ream of paper, and yes . . . finally, something to write about: the question that HARLIE had so casually asked before my life blew up in my face.

What does it mean to be human?

So I sat and I typed. I had long conversations myself—with HARLIE. We looked at the big question and all the little questions that attached to it like barnacles. We held all the questions up to the light and took them apart, piece by piece. I sat. I typed. I hammered away, one sentence at a time.

Every time I stopped to read what I wrote, I realized there was more to say. More sitting, more typing. Pages passed through the typewriter five times, ten times, sometimes more. All that editing, all that rewriting—it was like having multiple conversations with myself, a changing self, one that was being revised by the processes of time and story.

Sitting and chatting with HARLIE was my own personal turnaround. No, please don't call it therapy. It wasn't. Those chats were about creating a more informed conversation about life, that's all. They grew into four expository stories, enough to become a complete novel. In the process, I also learned to examine every sentence carefully to make sure it actually communicated a clear thought and didn't just use up words. I started learning to pay attention to what I was really saying.

I'm not so arrogant as to assume that I answered any questions in the process, but I'm pretty sure that I asked some very useful ones, and they were certainly questions that I needed to look at for myself. So the act of inquiry became a worthwhile journey regardless of the ultimate destination.

When I was done, I knew I had written something very unlike any other science fiction book I'd ever read. I had either written a very good book or a very embarrassing book.
¹
With a great deal of fear and trembling, I sent the manuscript off to Betty Ballantine. She decided it was a very good book and published
When HARLIE Was One
in 1972.

It was my first novel, even though it wasn't the first one published. It received some very nice reviews and went on to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards—the first time a first novel was ever so honored. (Isaac Asimov eventually won both awards for
The Gods Themselves.)
But the best compliment was from Robert Silverberg, who had two excellent novels of his own on the ballot. He asked me to warn him the next time I was planning to write a book that good, so he wouldn't have to compete.

When HARLIE Was One
is also the novel that introduced the concept of the computer virus to popular thought. For that I am profoundly sorry.