[In the following interview, Francavilla and Ellison discuss various aspects of Ellison's work, focusing predominantly on works that have been adapted for film and television.]

Harlan Ellison is a writer who explores, uncovers, and displays the nightmares and dreams that haunt and enchant us all. Usually identified with his science fiction screenplays and speculative fiction, in the late 1960s Ellison was one of the American writers loosely associated with the controversial British “New Wave” authors grouped around New Worlds magazine. These writers generally employed radical stylistic experimentation, taboo subject matter, and innovative narrative structures. In this period, Ellison began turning out his award-winning science fiction screenplays, noteworthy for their meticulous attention to the sort of details—camera angles and movements, cuts and dissolves—that screenwriters have traditionally left to the director's imagination. But both his screenplays and fiction, with their similar neo-expressionist outbursts of emotion and their commitment to addressing social problems, prove quite distinct from the British New Wave writers. In fact, Ellison eschews easy labels like “science fiction” and “speculative fiction,” as too limited for describing his work.

He is the first author to have received four of the Writer's Guild Awards, given out annually for the best teleplay. He has also won three Nebula Awards, eight and one-half Hugo Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for his fiction, and the P.E.N. International “Silver Pen” Award for his essay-columns in the L. A. Weekly. Earlier in his career he wrote television scripts for such series as Burke's Law, The Untouchables, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Star Trek. More recently he has written for Tales from the Darkside and The Twilight Zone; for the latter he also served as creative consultant and penned scripts for his own story “Paladin of the Lost Hour” and for Stephen King's “Gramma.” In November 1985, as he was filming his script “Nackles,” a Christmas story (starring Ed Asner) about bigotry, he quit The Twilight Zone in protest over interference with his directorial debut.

Among Ellison's most famous screenplays are “Memo from Purgatory” (starring James Caan) for Alfred Hitchcock (1964), “Demon with a Glass Hand” (written specifically for Robert Culp) and “Soldier,” both for the Outer Limits series (1964), and “City on the Edge of Forever” for the Star Trek series (1967). The 1975 film by L. Q. Jones, A Boy and His Dog, was adapted from Ellison's 1969 novella. His unfilmed screenplay, I, Robot, was published in 1987 in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. A sampling of Ellison's opinions on television and literature may be found in the volumes The Glass Teat (1969), The Other Glass Teat (1975), Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed (1984), and An Edge in My Voice (1985). His film criticism has been collected in Harlan Ellison's Watching (1988). Among the many collections of his stories are Ellison Wonderland (1962), I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967), Alone Against Tomorrow (1971), Approaching Oblivion (1974), Deathbird Stories (1975), Strange Wine (1978), Shatterday (1980), Stalking the Nightmare (1982), The Essential Ellison (1987, containing his first two published stories), and Angry Candy (1988).

Harlan Ellison's I, Robot screenplay is currently in Hollywood limbo, due to creative and clerical gaffes on the part of a former Warner Bros. executive. Because Warner lost the rights to the underlying Asimov stories, the entire project became a subject of litigation and is now likely consigned to the shelf since rights to the screenplay-for-production remain with Warner Bros. but the script cannot be filmed without an option to the original stories. The script, published in the November, December, and Mid-December 1987 issues of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, will most likely appear as a graphic novel and a hardcover book. Ellison has also republished a 1972 movie script, Harlan Ellison's Movie, as part of The Harlan Ellison Hornbook, his 47th published volume since 1958. He has also recently completed an original feature film titled Cutter's World, originally commissioned by NBC as a project for Roger Corman, but which Ellison has withdrawn for submission as a theatrical feature.

Born in Painesville, Ohio, Ellison now lives in Sherman Oaks, California, in what he calls “Ellison Wonderland,” a house full of sculptures, paintings, curios, toys, over six thousand records, and more than forty thousand books. Though his colorful personal life and controversial political and ethical stands have drawn much attention, Ellison here talks about the themes in his fiction and screenplays, the early reading that influenced him, and the three things he prizes above all else—writing, creating, and imagining. In this interview, conducted several years ago at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, Ellison tells not what it is like to be a writer; he tells what the process of writing is like.

[Joseph Francavilla:] Your writings and media work seem to generate a strong response from people. Why do you think you generate so much passionate love or hate mail?

[Harlan Ellison:] When certain people read someone who seems to be talking directly to them, they are moved to answer. Most of my mail is very positive and very pleasant, very lovely. Occasionally I get an outstanding letter from someone who will perceive something in a story that I wanted perceived that's a little subtle. And then I feel … there's a Yiddish word “kvell,” and I just “kvell” and say, “Ah, wonderful!” It's as if the sun were glowing in your stomach. But the very negative mail is always in some way gratuitously negative. I'm always more curious about the people who write hate letters than the ones who say positive things. And I invariably track them down to respond. I have a very long memory. I used to think I believed in revenge. I don't. I believe in balance—that the universe must balance out.

There is a certain type of balance in a number of your stories. It occurs as a splitting or doubling, which you touch on in your piece “Memoir: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” in Fantastic Lives. Your explanation of this story becomes a paradigm for a number of your works in which a drama is played out between good and evil, represented by the splitting apart of various characters. For instance, in The Outer Limits teleplay, “Demon with a Glass Hand,” Trent is opposed to the humanoid Kyben. In the original teleplay version of “City on the Edge of Forever,” Beckwith seems an opposite to Edith Keeler, and, in a sense, the actions and motivations of Captain Kirk oppose Mr. Spock's. The sacrifice of Ted in “I Have No Mouth” is opposed to the torturing machine AM. And as you've already said in “Memoir,” AM itself is not exterior. It's a representation of that evil within us all, a part of our dual nature.

Yes, that's right. There's one other story that you couldn't know about, where this happens again, and it's been a terrible problem for me. In my screenplay of I, Robot, which took a year to write, the inevitable conclusion of the script revolves around that point. The script begins with the burial of the president of the galaxy, who is patterned on the character Stephen Byerley in the Isaac Asimov story “Evidence” in his I, Robot collection, the one in which a robot looks and acts like a human, and they find out in the end that he's a robot. The burial on some far planet is being telecast all over the galaxy, and the reporter Robert Bratenahl is one of the dozen or so people there. The president of the galaxy chose to be buried there, and he has been reduced to scintillant gas encased in a translucent dome on a little pedestal. At the funeral service are his closest friends: President Bramhall of the Orion Constellation, Dion Fabry of Perseus, Karl Hawkstein of Triangulum, and also a few others—just the top twelve people in the whole galaxy. And with them is this woman.

The reporter has a minicam strapped to his head, and as he's reporting he says, “Could that be … ?” He cuts himself off and he calls in for information and says, “Flash me a picture of Susan Calvin.” It's flashed to him and he says, “Oh, my God! It's Susan Calvin. She hasn't even been seen in twenty-five years.” He follows her and tries to get an interview. She gets into a teleportation pyramid and Pshooo! She's gone with two guards. He is obsessed with finding out about her, who she is and what her relationship was with the president of the galaxy. It becomes Citizen Kane: Who is this woman? Was she really this man's lover? We find out in the end, of course, that he is a robot and she created him. It's the story of Susan Calvin, her life story beginning with “Robbie,” and then “Liar,” and “Runaround,” and a couple of other Asimov stories. Some of them I do by inference, just by taking the point from the story and using it in another way. There is much new material and expansions of everything that Isaac did, truly in an Asimov way with my overtones. It's a wonderful script. It's one of the best things I've ever written.

We've had a lot of trouble with it at Warner Bros., though. They won't do it but they won't release it—they won't give it away because they know it's hot. One of the problems we had was that they said, “Ellison's view of the future is very bleak.” Now, it was not bleak at all; it was very positive with people hopping around from planet to planet on teleportation beams and all that kind of thing. They were objecting to the aspects of the robots that were troublesome. The robots were only functional machines, not Artoo Detoos, and there were some negative elements. And I tried to explain to the people at Warners—and this goes back to the computer AM in “I Have No Mouth”—that the problems with robots are the problems with human beings. Because robots were programmed by human beings, the unconscious flaws in us would inevitably turn up in the robots.

By being projected into them?

Right, but all unconsciously. We are an amalgam of good and evil, of nobility and cowardice, of the trivial and of high art. And these dualities would appear in the film's robots. The same is true for AM, since AM is all-powerful. But AM is basically a child, a malicious, frustrated child. He has enormous power and yet can do nothing. He has great intellect, and he's trapped inside the belly of a planet. There's your balance and splitting off again. The balance and splitting are very much there in my stories. Almost all of my work is involved in some way with the balance between justice and injustice, good and evil, love and … I never make the equation of love and hate. I make the equation of love and disinterest. The opposite of love isn't necessarily hate. I think it's not caring, total disinterest.

What are your feelings about the unconscious element in writing? I know you hardly ever revise and try not to. Do you feel there's a kind of destruction that goes on in the process of revision? A sterilization when things become too conscious?

Sterilization is a good word. I would not have thought of it myself. Yes, there is an antiseptic process, a cleaning up. For me, looking at a Gauguin is infinitely more exciting than looking at a Vermeer. A Vermeer is very studied, very clean, ordered, and brilliant—a work of genius but with less passion, less intensity. You look at sunflowers in a Van Gogh and they burn out your eyes. You realize that in some brilliant way this artist understood what intensity is. You look at the colors and you realize that he really hasn't used any sharp pigments there. What he's done is mute everything else, so that when he does use that bright pigment, it pops out at you. That is a kind of insensate understanding of what one must do to make one's art work.

The idea of improvising the story as you go along often puzzles people. What is the value for you of doing it that way?

Mostly, I suspect, if I knew where I was going in a story, I would bore myself and never finish it. I think it was Robert Frost who said, “Surprise yourself, surprise the reader.” I hate reading a book in which ten pages into the book I know how it's going to end. This is the stock in trade of every television show. In every television drama within the first five minutes, you can see the order, shape, size, length, and denouement of the story—you know exactly where it's going. Now this is comforting the drones who watch TV. This is what they like. They like predictability. They don't want to be startled. They don't want the hero suddenly to be killed. They don't like that because it unnerves them. It makes them think the universe is a random place, and they want it orderly.

I believe that fiction should startle every time. You should be taken somewhere you've never been. You should learn something you did not know. You should receive a perception about yourself, the world, or those around you that you did not have. You should come away with something. And what you're doing is generating your own sense of suspense and weighing that against the reader's. Now many readers, particularly in fantasy, are smart and know all the changes that are going to be rung on them because they've read so many stories. Therefore, I have to do that which has not been done before. … I began [the short story] “Shatterday” and had no idea where it was going. Nor did I know what was going to happen with “I Have No Mouth,” or “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” or “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.” I never know until I'm about halfway through the story, after I've been building up incidents, structure, and character. Eventually, your choices begin to narrow and you say, “Okay, it can only go this way, or this way, or this.” But if you are broad and open enough at the beginning, by the time you've reached midway even the closing down of that channel open to you is still fairly wide. It's wide enough to keep your reader on his toes and off balance. You throw in a little ringer now and then to distract them while you're busy working here on the other side, and they aren't noticing. By the time I come down to about two pages from the end of a story, all of a sudden, out of nowhere—and it happens every time—the music from “Thus Spake Zarathustra” goes “ta-DAHHH!” And on the horizon appears the answer to my problems.

How does it come to you? Does it come as a logical solution, as a scene or vision, or as a verbal statement?

As a vision. It literally comes to me like the vision of the monolith to the ape-men in 2001: A Space Odyssey. You know the scene where the ape-men are looking up at the monolith as it rises above them against the horizon, and there's a kind of aurora glow behind it? That's exactly what happens. Suddenly I'm writing along and I look up, and there's a monolith on the horizon of my mind, and I think, “Oh, God! That's incredible!” I'm knocked out by it. I get the kind of smug pleasure that a kid who can skip a stone across a lake and get four skips out of it suddenly has. It's just a swelling up. I always refer to it as a godlike feeling, but it's not really. It's really a smart aleck's pride: “I'm so pleased that I outwitted me, and I outwitted you, and I outwitted everybody. Oh, God! They're not going to believe this when they get to this point. Oh, God!” And then I look back where I've been, across the terrain of the story, and way at the beginning within the first paragraph where I was totally oblivious to what I was doing is the seed of the whole story. I put it there and I think to myself, “Now how did I know how to do that?” Well, the answer is I knew how to do it because I've been doing it for twenty-seven years as a professional. And that's a matter of working in the craft.

What would you say is the freedom in fantasy writing? Let me preface that by a remark. Many of your fantasies are written in a peculiar way which to a large degree follows what H. G. Wells wrote about in his prefaces to his fantasy work. He says he postulated a single innovation, change, or device, and then worked variations on the innovation without introducing new fantasy material, new magic. His famous statement is: “Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.” Science fiction often works that way and your fantasy stories work that way.

Science fiction doesn't work that way so much, which is why I don't write science fiction anymore. I wrote some of it at the beginning, but I was not very good at it. It's not that I don't like science fiction. Over the last few years I've read a little bit of science fiction. Most of it I don't like. But the reason I don't write science fiction is that I don't write it very well. My mind doesn't function in that way, and I don't understand a lot of science. An old quotation from Chekhov says that if, in Act One of a play you show the pistol hanging on the wall, you had best fire it by the end of Act Two. One of the things I am most conscious of when working on a story is having the reader with me and of not losing the reader by telling too many lies or presenting too many things that are too tough to swallow. I never go for realism; I go for verisimilitude. The worst argument one ever hears from an amateur writer about a bad story is: “Well, but it's true! It happened, you know. It's real. I know a guy like that.” I don't care if he knows five hundred people like that if, as a reader, I don't believe it.

So the question is not a matter of how accurate it is, but of how representative of life it is. The question is: How can I make an audience believe it? Thus, I must not stretch their credulity. It's like a magician working misdirection. I keep them busy over here, while over there I'm manipulating them, putting them where I want them to be. The best example of that is my story “Croatoan.” In “Croatoan” and also in “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans,” I must get the reader to an Impossible, unbelievable place. In “Croatoan” the impossible place to be reached is a sewer under a city, with homunculi riding alligators—for Christ's sake, it's crazy. But where I begin is with a very human and dramatic situation: there's a fight between a man and a woman; she's had an abortion and he has flushed the fetus. Now I have to get that man, physically and logically, from that apartment up there down into a sewer. Now how do you do that? I do it by stages, all very logically. Every step you make them accept leads them one step closer to accepting the step that no one would accept logically if you did it at the beginning.

In fantasy you have things that are impossible. So in fantasy—moreso even than in science fiction, because in science fiction you don't have the fantastic, you have only the extrapolative, things that are at least possible—you must be rigorous in your background. You must be the absolute model of rectitude so that readers trust you. And one of the best ways of doing that is to introduce only one, single fantasy idea, and then take it to its logical extreme. Go as far with it as you want, get as crazy as you want with it, but stay within the very narrow focus of that one idea and the variations played on it. And that's fine because each fantasy idea embodies a secret human dream, a secret human desire, and this is certainly not a limited scope or focus to work in. It is really a very, very wide field in terms of exploring that particular element, whether it's greed, love, the desire to be noticed, responsibility, or guilt, or whatever it is. I suppose what you're doing is a personification of abstract concepts. It's like Greek drama: Here is honor seen as a brave warrior, for instance. In “Shatterday” I'm dealing with responsibility personified as a man split in two. In “Croatoan” it's guilt perceived as a man traveling through a sewer.

It seems that many of the writers you admire, Poe, Kafka, Dickens, Borges, always have that problem of combating the easy explanation for the fantastic which goes like this: the protagonist is crazy, or he's experiencing dreams or delusions. Somehow it seems almost impossible totally to exclude that explanation. I mean, think of a story like “The Metamorphosis” by Kafka. Many readers of that story have the easy explanation in the back of their mind as one of the possible ways of accounting for the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into a gigantic bug. Trying to work against that easy explanation is a problem for a fantasy writer, isn't it?

It's a real problem, and I see it as a real failing on the part of readers. They cannot accept the fantastic, even in allegorical terms. They'd rather say, “Ah, he's crazy,” which is an easy way of getting out of it. So I try to buttress the fantasy element in my stories as much as I can. The story “In the Fourth Year of the War” was very, very hard because what goes on is really crazy. But I wanted it to be that he was not insane, that there really was someone living in his head. It had grown up and was sharing his brain and was making him do these terrible things. All through the story the guy is very calm and rational. If you ever hear me read it, there's none of this, “I'm not crazy, I tell you! I'm not crazy!” The tone of voice is very calm and logical. He says, “Now, look. Let me explain to you. I know it's going to sound like I'm nuts. I'm just telling you the way it is. I'm not crazy. This thing is in my head, for Christ's sake. You gotta believe me. It's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You gotta listen to me, for Christ's sake.” I underplay it and make him seem very reasonable and rational. If I can't get the readers all the way toward accepting what he's saying, at least I've brought them halfway so that an ambivalence is there, and the readers can enjoy the story on almost the terms that I would like to have them enjoy it.

I suppose naive readers, who haven't read a wide variety of works, aren't able to cross-reference things or see that the possibilities of fiction are as wide as they are.

That's one of the ways in which all the crap that's published can be published, get past them, and be bought. You wonder to yourself how John Norman can continue to sell so well. Who buys such dreck? Or how can so many of the recent women writers continue to write these empty, sterile, wish-fulfillment fantasies, some with indications of imagination, but whose quality of writing is alarming?

Let me play devil's advocate. Aren't such works a phase of reading most people pass through? Though I'm not an advocate of, say, Andre Norton, doesn't Andre Norton perhaps represent an early stage for a generation of readers?

I don't know; you could be dead-on. Let me go at it this way. I never went through that phase. I never read Edgar Rice Burroughs until years later. The first adult book I read was Richard Blackmore's Lorna Doone. It's probably a peculiar choice, but one comes to whatever one comes to first. In very rapid order, I read almost all of Sir Walter Scott and then H. Rider Haggard. In fact, the first published piece by me is a five-part serial in the young people's column of the Cleveland News called The Sword of Parmegon. It's a clear swipe from Scott. The second five-part serial, which I think came out a year later, was called Track of the Gloconda, a giant snake adventure set in Africa. And it's a direct ripoff of Haggard. And very quickly, within a year or two, I read almost all of Dickens, Twain, a lot of Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew by Eugene Sue, and a lot of Alexander Sue. I had no friends and I was hungry to learn, so I read and read, spent my days in books. But I read what I was later to learn were “classics.” These were the things I was reading right off the bat, and with the exception of Haggard, I went nowhere near fantasy. I read a lot of pulp magazines, too. I was reading The Shadow and Doc Savage but didn't recognize their relation to fantasy.

How did these compare to the other books you were reading?

They were the same. I saw no distinction. And I perceive the lack of perceiving a distinction in that these were written with childlike innocence. For what they are, The Shadow and Doc Savage books, and The Spider and G-8 and His Battle Aces, were classic examples of their type, absolutely the top of that form. They were perfect, which is why they continue to live on and have a resonance even today. They are elegant trash.

And the same with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories?

Exactly. But you see I didn't know Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. I didn't know Burroughs or Verne. Oddly enough, the only Wells book I read was Tono-Bungay. That's all I knew of Wells. I didn't know he had written all this fantasy stuff. But because I was also buying a lot of comic books and these pulp magazines, I picked up a copy of Startling Stories. I remember this very clearly. The Startling Stories issue had a Hall-of-Fame story, Jack Williamson's “Five Hours to Live.” It was very clearly nothing more than a rewriting of Frank Stockton's “The Lady or the Tiger?” But it blew me away. And it was the first time I read about spaceships, space pirates, etc. Over the next few years I bought an occasional science fiction magazine but never knew it was a science fiction magazine. I mean, the phrase “science fiction” never registered on my consciousness.

By this time I had gotten far enough into Dickens and Poe to tell that there was a big difference between them and the pulp magazines. I also discovered Lovecraft at this point, and in my mind, in fact, I blurred Poe and Lovecraft for a long time. Each author was like an extension of the other. The first Poe story I ever read was “The Gold Bug.” I just loved the logic of it, the unraveling of the puzzle. Then I read “Hop-Frog,” “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” and the poetry. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” I read late. But right along in there someplace I read “The Masque of the Red Death.” Well! My brains exploded! I couldn't believe it!

What was the sort of wonder you found in that story? It's certainly not the wonder of science or technology, of space or of extrapolation and deduction.

I'll tell you exactly what it was. And I have used it countless times, particularly in my television work. I wrote a pilot for a series based on Our Man Flint, and I wrote a variation on “The Masque of the Red Death” in this one respect—the contained universe story. “The Masque of the Red Death” takes place in one building, in one period of time, and nobody can get out.

The premature entombment that runs all throughout Poe's stories.

But I didn't know it was entombment. All I knew was that there was a clock running, a menace stalking these people, and that they couldn't get out.

It's very much like the situation in “I Have No Mouth.” AM is inside the belly of the Earth, and the five people are trapped inside the belly of AM as it tortures them.

Precisely. You know, you're the first person who has made the connection between “The Masque of the Red Death” and “I Have No Mouth.” It's exactly the same situation.

And you often have used time travel via time mirrors or time gateways to strand and isolate characters in a confined place, often in the past. These devices actually function as, or generate, obstacles or barriers which the protagonists try to overcome, as for example, in the teleplays “Demon With a Glass Hand” or “City on the Edge of Forever.”

Also it makes the characters easy to control in a closed-in space. “Demon With a Glass Hand” is an example. It's my regurgitation of being impressed by “The Masque of the Red Death.” Now sometime around 1946, 1947, or 1948, just before my father died, I was reading Lovecraft concurrently with Poe. But very limited Lovecraft because the only book of Lovecraft I could find—since it was virtually the only book of Lovecraft in print—was a reprint, a book called The Best Supernatural Stories of H. P. Lovecraft. It was one of those dollar forty-nine cent hardcover books published by World Publishing Company in 1945. I read “In the Vault” and other stories in there until I hit—and this was the second explosion in my brain—“The Rats in the Walls.” It remains one of my all-time favorite stories. “The Rats in the Walls” was this “descent into hell” kind of story, a situation which again you see in my work over and over. It impressed me enormously. It was the horrible punishment way beyond the slap in the face. You look at an old story of mine like “Blank …” in my book Stalking the Nightmare. In the story a really vile character kidnaps a “driver,” one of those people who uses his or her ESP or psychokinetic power to boost a spaceship through into innerspace. They've got to have the combination of human and ship. This guy has killed people and done all sorts of terrible things, and he kidnaps a female driver from Driver Hall, the Guild Hall on the edge of the spaceport. He gets her on the ship as he's escaping. There's a time warp as the ship is boosted through by the driver. Her last act before she dies is to boost him through into the heart of a nova. He gets boosted through, dies agonizingly in the fires of hell, is snapped back, pops back, dies again and again and again through all of eternity. She's trapped him in a moebius warp.

The same image is in the original script for “City on the Edge of Forever,” where the Beckwith character undergoes the same eternal torment.

Yes. Through all of eternity this guy will forever burn and then come back and then repeat the cycle endlessly.

Like the eternal punishment of Ted by AM in “I Have No Mouth.” This image of the Promethean firebringer who sacrifices himself and who is eternally tormented runs throughout your work.

Yes, Prometheus is an icon for me, a wonderful character. And this idea is also straight out of Poe or Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith. It's the punishment greater than the crime. You see, one of the traditions I reject, and it shows up constantly in horror movies, is this: there'll be a group of kids, some of whom are going to be murdered by whatever monster it is. And you can always tell which ones will be murdered. It's going to be the guy who threw a cigarette butt in the street. It's going to be the girl who kissed on the first date. All of these trivial, really puritanical crimes they've committed, so that they should be punished by having their heads hacked off by a Texas chainsaw. I absolutely reject that—the idea that such good and evil brings such massive retribution. Now it's an easy way out for a writer. If you want the punishment to fit the crime, if you want people to say, “Yes. He deserved it,” then you make the guy kick a kid, steal an ice cream cone, beat up an old lady. So that when he gets it, they'll say, “He deserved it.”

I don't do that. In my universe, and in the universe I write about, there is no way of knowing; it is totally random. You could live an absolutely perfect, clean, and terrific life and die of cancer of the lymph glands. Because that's the way the real world is. Bastards survive, and go on, and rise. On the other hand, a good person can become a victim very easily. And there is no good or bad or right or wrong to it. It is the random chance of the crapshoot called the universe. To portray it as anything other than that imposes an artificial predetermination on the reality of the universe that distances people from an understanding of their own destiny, and from the fact that they control their own destiny, that they literally hold it in their hands. And that, as Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” For example, it is not random that I am a very successful person in what I do. And other writers, some of whom are even better than I—there are a few, he said, with great humility—are not successful. It's because they did not prepare for it. They did not consciously go to the place they wanted to go. Frank Herbert was a success because he had been preparing himself for it. And when the chance fell his way of Dune becoming a big thing, he went with it.

We order our lives; we control our lives. There are many things over which we have no control, but most of them we do. In our daily life we can set up where we want to wind up thirty, forty, or fifty years hence. So I try to do that in my stories and say that these characters are not merely victims of random chance. They are coming to a getting exactly what they have programmed themselves for. Occasionally the random universe does slip them a mickey, but for the most part they determine their lives.