Strange Bedfellows

I have been re-reading some of my favorite science fiction writers lately, ones I haven't read since I was a teenager. (but only because I had already read everything they'd written by then.)

To my surprise, the writing of a couple of them sounded way more familiar than I ever expected; not so much the familiarity of an author you have read obsessively so much as the almost genetic intimacy of what you would call a seminal influence. (No pun intended. Probably.)

They are two guys who make strange bedfellows, to say the least: Harlan Ellison and Spider Robinson.

Now, I have always known that if I met Harlan Ellison at a cocktail party, I'd probably wind up throwing a drink in his face. He is the kind of man who would turn me on and piss me off at the same time, and I hate that. He is the picture in the dictionary next to the definition for "cocksure". All the same, I respect the hell out of him.

Back in the 60's, he wrote a column for the Berkeley Barb about television called "The Glass Teat". At least, television was the premise. In the course of writing somewhat sporadically about TV programming at the time, he covered a lot of territory, and digressed prodigiously in the manner of all those whom I consider the best and most effective orators. By the time I was growing up in the late 70's, the columns had been collected into two volumes, "The Glass Teat" and "The Other Glass Teat".

Re-reading those books now, and with further benefit of hindsight, I was seriously impressed by the kind of stuff he said. At the time, and for the times, the content and the way he expressed himself ranged from controversial to almost shocking. He was straightforward about race relations, gender relations (from a perspective which I believe I have mentioned is best described as cocksure), politics, and corporate policy as it affects social engineering. In short, he talked frankly and with very little bullshit about things you weren't supposed to talk about at all; and he only gave a tiny fuck what people thought of him.