Why I Don't Mention Real People Here Very Often

Recently, Nick—the Grand Master of extracting all available details about Doctor Who from the Internet or, in fact, any other available media—brought this to my attention: a blog post from James Moran, writer for Doctor Who and Torchwood.

Now, I was already predisposed to like James Moran, since he wrote “The Fires of Pompeii” for Doctor Who—which was the episode where I really warmed to Catherine Tate as Donna; I’d liked her before, but I really liked her here—and “Sleeper” for Torchwood, which was a gut-wrencher in a series that ended with me weeping uncontrollably in front of my television.

(Seriously, if you are a reader who doesn’t happen to know me, that really isn’t like me.)

(An aside:

NICK: He also wrote a movie called Severance, which is apparently really good if you like your horror bloody and British.
ME: Which I don’t.

I haven’t recovered yet from 28 Days Later, and still have a tendency to shout “They’re running from the infected!” at moments of high tension.

Ahem.)

Anyway, this particular blog post is about Moran’s contact with Harlan Ellison, whom he’d named as the living writer he’d most like to share a pint with in a magazine interview.

The article itself is a lovely invocation of the pleasures and pains of fandom. I’m not familiar with Ellison’s work myself—except in the Pierre Bayard sense that I know where it fits in the cultural library—but I did once, back in the M/C Reviews days, publish a fan’s response to Ellison that reminds me of Moran’s piece.

But then you read down to the comments thread, where one commentator has simply written “Ellison’s always struck me as a bit of an asshole, but this seemed very cool of him.”

If I were the blogger in this case, I think my response would be, “Oh no, no, no no no no no no.”

Except with more words that should probably be spelled out with asterisks in this time slot.

And then Harlan Ellison responds.

Actually, his response is rather marvellous, and the blogger deals with the situation with panache, but the whole situation does illustrate a point that I made before, in my piece on Steven Moffat.

You don’t know who might be reading on the Internet, so why insult them?