‘Bellicose’ author of ‘Dog’ got partial ‘Terminator’ credit
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 Thursday 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, Mr. 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.” 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 Mr. Ellison was shooting pool, was immortalized in Gay Talese’s famous 1966 magazine profile of the singer.
“I go to 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 on Thursday. “Angry, funny, eloquent, hugely talented. If there’s an afterlife, Harlan is already kicking ass and taking down names.”
One of his best-known works, “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.
Mr. Ellison disliked computers and worked on old manual typewriters, although he denied being anti-technology.
“I hate the uses that technology is put to,” he once said.
Sometimes, for promotional purposes, he would write his stories while seated in bookstore windows.
He was born on May 27, 1934, in Cleveland. His youth in nearby Painesville was lonely — he and his older 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. After he was drafted, he served in the Army and then embarked on a writing career.
Mr. 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.”
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.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Ellison championed opposition to the Vietnam War and other liberal causes.
Mr. Ellison sometimes seemed wistful about his own legacy. His afterword to “The Essential Ellison,” a 1987 collection of his writings, read simply: “For a brief time I was here; and for a brief time I mattered.” He is survived by his wife, Susan.
AP