Sci-fi master Harlan Ellison, 84, dies
Wrote ‘A Boy and His Dog,’ ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’
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.
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 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, 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.” 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, 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.”
Several of Ellison’s works were translated into dozens of languages.
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,” was 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-traveling 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 World War II.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Ellison championed opposition to the Vietnam War and other liberal causes. 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.
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, read simply: “For a brief time I was here; and for a brief time I mattered.”
He is survived by his wife, Susan.