Author Harlan Ellison, at 84, known for his brash attitude

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 humorous scenarios, has died at age 84.

Mr. Ellison’s death was confirmed yesterday to The Associated Press by Bill Schafer, an editor with Subterranean Press, the author’s publisher. A woman who answered the phone at Mr. Ellison’s office, who declined to give her name, said he died Wednesday in his sleep.

During a career that spanned more than half a century, Mr. 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 virtually every type of writing from mysteries to comic books to newspaper columns.

He was known as much for his attitude as his writing — he described himself once as “bellicose.”

“I go to bed angry and I get up angrier every morning,” he once said.

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 traveling 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.