Harlan Ellison
Pugnacious sci-fi writer who channelled his fury into stories notable for their sulphurous humour
HARLAN ELLISON, who has died aged 84, was one of the most influential of science-fiction writers and astonishingly prolific even by the standards of that genre; to some, however, nothing he wrote was quite as arresting as his own curmudgeonly, pugnacious personality.
One of his best-known works was the novella A Boy and His Dog (1969), the story of a feral teenager, aided by a highly intelligent, telepathic dog, who spends his time scavenging and raping women in the wasted remains of a USA almost wiped out by World War IV. Made into a darkly funny film starring Don Johnson in 1975, its uncompromising subject matter and sulphurous humour were typical of Ellison’s work.
It was rare among Ellison’s writings in exceeding a few thousand words in length. The short story was his métier and he published an estimated 1,500 of them; they reflected the bright flame of his angry personality, an emotional impact that was hard to sustain over greater lengths.
Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung Up Generation (1961), published by an obscure paperback house for whom he was working as an editor, helped make his reputation in Hollywood when it was favourably reviewed by Dorothy Parker in Esquire. Among the best of his other collections were Ellison Wonderland (1962), Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled (1968), Angry Candy (1988) and Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word (2013).
His stories usually boasted striking opening lines (“How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?” begins “When they unscrewed the time capsule, preparatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing”) and the best of them showed a breathtaking, if perverse, imagination.
The title story of the collection I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967) is a science-fiction take on Jean-paul Sartre’s No Exit, featuring a supercomputer that has wiped out all of humanity apart from five people whom it tortures in various ingenious ways. “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman@ is a riff on his own inability to be on time, set in a dystopian future in which everybody has to keep to a strict time schedule and being late is a crime punishable by having a corresponding amount of time docked from one’s lifespan.
Reviewing the collection Shatterday (1982) in The Sunday Telegraph,
Penelope Lively declared that “I am loth to classify these stories as science fiction in case the genre has the same aversion effect on others as it does on me – what they are is a combination of sophistication, linguistic pyrotechnics and sheer joie de vivre that … has one smacking the lips with satisfaction.”
Ellison was just as quick to disclaim the sci-fi label himself. “Call me a science-fiction writer,” he declared on television in the 1990s, “[and] I’ll come to your house and I’ll nail your pet’s head to a coffee table. I’ll hit you so hard your ancestors will die.” He preferred the term “speculative fiction”, developed originally around Michael Moorcock’s British magazine New Worlds.
Ellison edited the anthology
Dangerous Visions (1967), showcasing younger writers working in a more literary vein, as well as science-fiction stalwarts such as Fritz Leiber, Philip K Dick and Philip José Farmer freed from the constraints of the established genre. By the time the sequel, Again
Dangerous Visions, appeared in 1972, its innovations had become genre conventions. The third volume,
Last Dangerous Visions, originally scheduled for 1973, is science fiction’s most notorious unpublished book, as Ellison allowed no publication of the stories he had bought for it.
That position struck many as hypocritical, considering the lengths to which he would go to defend his own authorial rights. Among many lawsuits, he sued the makers of the film The Terminator (1984) for plagiarising some of his stories, obliging them to insert the words “Acknowledgement to the works of Harlan Ellison” at the head of the end credits. In the 1960s he attacked an ABC Television executive, Adrian Samish, for altering a script he wrote for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea – “I tagged him a good one right in the pudding trough and zappo! over he went… windmilling backwards, and fell down, hit the wall” – leaving him with a broken pelvis.
Ever combative, a row he had with Frank Sinatra was immortalised in Gay Talese’s famous essay “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, although they did not come to blows. In 1985 he punched the novelist Charles Platt at the Science Fiction Writers of America awards dinner and in 2006 he groped the breast of the writer Connie Willis on stage at the Hugo Awards.
Nevertheless, the science-fiction community continued to embrace him as one of its favourite sons, not least because he expressed his often barely contained fury so entertainingly. In 2012 he was the subject of a documentary film, Dreams With Sharp Teeth, in which he railed against the exploitation of writers in a rant that went viral. “I’ll sell my soul, but at the highest rates,” he declared. “I don’t take a piss without being paid for it.”
Harlan Jay Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 27 1934, the son of Louis Ellison, variously a singer, dentist and jeweller, and his wife Serita (née Rosenthal). He attributed his bellicose nature to being bullied at school for being Jewish (a rarity in Painesville, Ohio, where he grew up) and small.
He attended Ohio State university but left after 18 months; he later said that he was expelled for punching a creative writing professor who told him he had no talent, and claimed that he subsequently sent the man a copy of every single thing he published. In 1954 he moved to New York and spent several weeks with a street gang researching his first novel Web of the City (also known as Rumble, 1958). He was drafted into the Army for two years from 1957.
After a period of heavy drinking and party-going following his first divorce, he moved to Los Angeles and settled down to write full-time, working on screenplays as well as his stories; his first film credit was the critically panned The Oscar (1966). In 1967 he wrote one of the finest episodes of Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever”, in which Dr Mccoy alters history for the worse when he saves the life of a woman (played by Joan Collins) in 1930s Germany.
His original script won an award from the Writers Guild, but changes made to the story by Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, led to one of many interminable feuds that Ellison pursued throughout his life. The episode appeared under the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird, which he employed when he wished to alert fans to his displeasure with the finished product. He used the Bird pseudonym again for the SF series Starlost, which he co-created.
Ellison’s quick-boil temperament also made a him an entertaining critic. His introductions were often as gripping as the stories themselves, and his television column for the LA Free Press, “The Glass Teat”, was collected in two books.
Ellison won countless awards, including 11 Hugos, five Nebulas and four from the Writers Guild of America. In later years he began collecting his work in online editions, while suffering from depression as his health declined.
Harlan Ellison is survived by his fifth wife, Susan Toth, his earlier marriages having ended in divorce.
Harlan Ellison, born May 27 1934, died June 28 2018