Who would want to be Harlan Ellison now?

Harlan Ellison. Harlan Ellison. Some years ago I bought a collection of his work, but didn’t read it right away. By the time I did read it, he had grabbed Connie Willis’s tit when she was the guest of honor at the Hugo Awards. Thus, when I finally read it, every story ended, for me, in “and then he grabbed Connie Willis’s tit at the Hugo Awards.”

“I Have No Mouth but I Must Grab Connie Willis’s Tit.”

— laurenpburka.

Last week the news broke that Harlan Ellison had left the internet, again. Never comfortable with it in the first place, a fairly innoceous post at Io9 drawing attention to his rare books sale drove him over the edge and off the net for the third or forth time this decade. Since HE rarely ventured outside the confines of his stone age website I doubt few beyond the coterie of dedicated fans assembled there would’ve know or cared he was on the net in the first place.

For somebody who was used to having his spats divide fandom this must be awful, but the sad fact is that Ellison has outlived his own fame. His heyday was before Star Wars when science fiction was still small; his best work is three to four decades old, his new work negligible. Anybody who started reading science fiction or entered fandom since 1990 (or even 1980) need never have encountered him, other than through secondhand stories like in the quote above.

Ellison always had an ego and was capable of backing it up as well, but looking back his knack for self promotion made him seem much important than he really was. Objectively he was a good science fiction writer with at least a dozen or so classic stories to his name, responsible for at least one important anthology (Dangerous Visions), while also having some success as a screenwriter for both television and movies, as well as an accomplished essayist. He has had a career he can be proud of, but so have hundreds of other writers. It’s quite possible to be well read in science fiction and never have touched an Ellison story.

Which is the essential tragedy of being Harlan Ellison in 2010. While he has slowly changed from an angry young man into a cranky old geezer, his fans and detractors aged along with him, while new generations of fans and readers never got to know him other than as some old guy with anger management issues.