‘Kicking ass and taking down names
LOS ANGELES Harlan Ellison, the prolific, pugnacious author of A Boy and His Dog and countless other stories that blasted society with their nightmarish, sometimes darkly funny scenarios, has died at age 84
Ellison’s death was confirmed by Bill Schafer, an editor with Subterranean Press, the author’s publisher. A woman who answered the phone at Ellison’s office, who declined to give her name, said he died June 27 in his sleep.
During a career that spanned more than half a century, Ellison wrote some 50 books and more than 1,400 articles, essays, TV scripts and screenplays. Although best known for his science fiction, which garnered nearly a dozen Nebula and Hugo awards, Ellison’s work covered nearly every type of writing, from mysteries to comic books to newspaper columns.
He was known as much for his attitude as his writing — he once described himself as “bellicose.” His targets were anyone or anything that offended him, from TV producers to his own audience. An encounter with Frank Sinatra, when the two faced off while Ellison was shooting pool, is immortalized in Gay Talese’s famous 1966 magazine profile of the singer.
“I goto bed angry and I get up angrier every morning ,” he once said.
“Harlan Ellison: There was no one quite like him in American letters, and never will be,” author Stephen King Tweeted Thursday. “Angry, funny, eloquent, hugely talented. If there’s an afterlife, Harlan is already kicking ass and taking down names.”
Several of Ellison’s works were translated into dozens of languages. One of the best known, A Boy and His Dog, portrays a world devastated by nuclear war and fought over by vicious gangs.
The hero, a young thug whose travelling companion is a mutant, telepathic dog, is lured to an underground community but rebels against its sterility. The novella was the basis for a 1975 movie starring Don Johnson.
Ellison recently expanded the story into a full-length novel, Blood’s A Rover, that Subterranean is publishing this month.
Some of his most popular works were surrealistic fantasies set in grisly worlds run by totalitarians and conformists. Some were comic. Many were shockingly graphic for their time.
He once said he wanted his stories “to grab you by the throat and tear off parts of your body.”
His short story I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream is about the last humans, eternally tortured by a malevolent, godlike computer. It was made into a computer game, with its author providing the machine’s voice.
He edited Dangerous Visions, a seminal 1967 collection of science fiction stories that expanded boundaries with their complex psychology and depictions of sex and violence.
He was born on May 27, 1934, in Cleveland. His youth in nearby Painesville was lonely — he and his sister, Beverly, were among the only Jews in town and were rejected. His loud mouth and small size — as an adult he stood about 5-foot-5 — also made him a target of bullies. He attended Ohio State University but left after punching a professor who said he lacked writing talent.
Ellison was fiercely protective of his work and was not shy about going after those he believed had stolen or tampered with it. He instructed his fifth wife, Susan, to destroy all his notes and unfinished works after his death to avoid having them completed by some “literary grave-robber.”
When a publisher broke a contract by allowing a cigarette ad in one of Ellison’s books, the writer mailed him dozens of bricks and, finally, a ripe, dead gopher.
He received partial credit after suing the producers of the Terminator movies that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, claiming the idea of the killer robot was stolen from his stories.
Throughout his career he maintained a love-hate relationship with the TV and motion picture industry, scripting episodes for such series as The Outer Limits and the original Star Trek. He was also a conceptual consultant for the 1990s popular syndicated science fiction series Babylon 5.
His 1967 Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever, is one of the series’ darkest and most brilliant. A young woman played by Joan Collins is saved from a fatal accident by the starship Enterprise’s time-travelling Dr. McCoy. Later, the ship’s Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock learn they must return to the year 1930 and let her die or history will be changed and Nazi Germany will win the Second World War.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Ellison championed liberal causes including opposition to the Vietnam War. He also wrote frequently scabrous television criticism for the underground newspaper Los Angeles Free Press in a column called The Glass Teat. The collected essays still are used in some college criticism courses.
Ellison also wrote from experience. For his first novel, about 1950s street gangs, he ran for 10 weeks with a Brooklyn gang.
Despite his success — the Los Angeles Times said he should be considered the “20th-century Lewis Carroll” — Ellison sometimes seemed wistful about his own legacy.
His afterword to The Essential Ellison, a 1987 collection of his writings, reads simply: “For a brief time I was here; and for a brief time I mattered.”
He is survived by his wife, Susan.