We are not entitled to our opinions we are entitled to our informed opinions. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion.
Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. I get a lot of mail, as a writer of matters fantastic and as a critic of the field, I get a lot of mail, and they are filled with opinions. You can’t have a character who is an unpleasant woman, you can’t have an unpleasant person who has a deformity.
That is to say, you are not allowed to insult anyone. And they want you to be "politically correct". The Jesse Helms’s of the world, the Phyllis Shlafly’s of the world, the Pat Buchanan’s of the world, the Skinheads of the world, find science fiction very, very, very troubling. Because we deal in allegory, because we deal in the ideas that are not exactly what they are today, but they seem to be about something that we know today, and yet they’re tomorrow’s idea. We may be unhappy, we may be all living like maggots, but we’ll be here." So that means it’s 100% positive.Īrtistic freedom, thus, becomes something that might be a little troublesome. Now that’s very positive, that’s very pragmatic, "We’ll be here tomorrow. If you read a science fiction story, it says, "This will happen tomorrow". That is to say, inherent in the form is, "There will be a tomorrow".
Now in the world of science fiction, writers have to pay attention to what’s going on around them, because science fiction is the only 100% hopeful fiction. People who have forgotten the past, to the extent that nostalgia becomes what they had for breakfast, we have this thing called "political correctness". In addition to having a steadily more illiterate audience every year, I mean, that is to say, people who don’t read books. Harlan Ellison Webderland: Sci-Fi Buzz Archive Harlan Ellison's Watching.
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