The man many thought was too stubborn and angry to die has passed away in his sleep: Harlan Ellison, dead at 84.
Ellison was a tremendously important science fiction writer in his heyday in the 1960s, the infant terrible of the American New Wave. His prose was both razor sharp and packed an emotional urgency pretty much unseen in the field heretofore, the SF counterpart to the “angry young man” briefly fashionable in the literary world. Among his prodigious short fiction output was “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” a story most would place among the genre’s very best, if not the best, and he won Hugos and Nebulas left and right back when they actually meant something.
He had a singular gift for memorable titles, superb taste in enemies, and a penchant for suing people at the drop of a hat (sometimes deserved, sometimes not). He wrote several memorable screenplays, including “Demon With a Glass Hand” for The Outer Limits and “City on the Edge of Forever” for Star Trek, as well as a large number of comic book issues. He was exceptionally smart, extremely charismatic, unusually hotheaded, irascible, opinionated and irreplaceable, and the source of hundreds of stories of his outrageous antics.
The field shall not see his like again.
Below: A few Ellison-related titles from my library. And I’ll actually be listing another recent purchase tomorrow…
Tags: Fantasy, Harlan Ellison, Horror, Obituary, Science Fiction
I disagreed with at least 90% of his political views and how he expressed them, but I loved his writing and loved the man. I mean, he was friends with JERRY POURNELLE for over sixty years, someone of equally great intellect and short temper but otherwise his complete opposite, so how bad could he have really been? Obviously, beneath that shtick of his was a good man with the heart to match his talent.