The context for this was, of course, Harry complaining fortissimo about the way his Make Room! Make Room! had been treated en route to becoming the movie Soylent Green, and the point is a good deal less obvious - and less cynical - than it appears. Make Room! Make Room! was about overpopulation and the likelihood of a Malthusian experience, and the point of this has by no means gone away, though we have managed to shuffle it down the road a bit each decade. What the book really said was that we have to change our ways; and for a mass-market audience this was clearly unacceptable. The horror built in to Soylent Green was accordingly not that everyone was going to have to live off soylent (soya beans and lentils are cheap protein, though it turned out the movie scriptwriter didn't know that), but that we were all going to eat each other. Shock, horror, revulsion, dystopia, Room 101, etc. Of course, if people are dead (but not before) you could say there's no real harm done in eating them, and people have done it many times in famines and crises, such as the one Harry envisaged. But - and this is Harry's point - it clearly can't solve anything, because by the time the average human dies h/she has eaten perhaps 40 or 50 tons of mixed foodstuffs, much of it animal product which requires further tons of foodstuffs, and the return of maybe 100 pounds of protein is effectively a zero.

So, cannibalism may or may not be wrong, but one thing you can be dead sure about is, it won't work. Some would say this gets to the heart of the difference between sf and mainstream: the roles of morality and technology are inverted.

There are plenty to say that that means that sf freaks are ipso facto immoral, and I have heard the accusation made several times, usually by shocked academics listening to predictions of the future. It's not true, as indeed one can demonstrate from Harry. Fierce as he is, verbally combative and deeply intolerant of half-wits, I don't think I know anyone kinder-hearted in personal matters. What sets him apart is that he won't (unlike most of us) separate private from public morality. Eating people may or may not be wrong, but shooting people is definitely wrong, and it stays wrong even if you're wearing a uniform. So Harry will not pay for uniforms, and has gone all over the world, at immense cost, to make sure none of his efforts ever go into paying for them.

His loathing of the government, the military, and most of all of military wannabees, comes out obviously in Bill, the Galactic Hero, in the There Won't be War anthology (replying to a well-known wannabee), and in an incident observed by me on the beach at San Diego, by the hotel where Marilyn Monroe starred in Some Like It Hot. Joan, Harry and I were standing on the beach admiring the waves (or something) when a squad of US Marines came trotting along the beach, as they do, going "Hup, two, three, four" and all that. But their drill sergeant had gone off for a pee, or something, and they were for the moment unsupervised. At this point a voice started to bark orders, in the appropriate raspy way, and presumably making some sense to the joggers, for they attempted to obey. In a very short time the group was about turning while right dressing, or some such impossibility, and the brighter members were beginning to look round for the miscreant who had done this to them.

It was, naturally, Harry, but Joan got the choke-chain on him and we dragged him away before trouble ensued. When we were at a safe distance I attempted to remonstrate, viz "you could have got us all killed," but Harry cut this short by snarling:

"I hate those guys!. You know what those guys are? VOLUNTEERS!"

Yes, well ... any one of us could have the misfortune in this century to be conscripted and find ourselves becoming a sergeant and a machine-gun instructor, like Harry, and no blame ensues, or not to us. But volunteering because you like the idea ... What idea? Shooting people you haven't met? Public morality says that's OK, but Harry only has private morality, and that says it's not OK. A lot of veterans think like that - see Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Fussell, Gorge Macdonald Fraser, to name only four off the top of my head. It could be argued that they (and Harry) have hit the major theme of the 20th century - the interaction, again, of morality and technology.

Harry has been pursuing thoughts like this for over forty years now, in fiction, but unlike most, he has carried out the conclusions in real life as well. He's the funniest writer in sf. But you know what? He's the most serious about it all as well.

-- Tom Shippey