Harlan Ellison

Published on June 29, 2018Leave a comment

Really, all you need to know about Harlan Ellison’s legacy is that he trademarked his own name and he’s the guy who did this to Connie Willis:

Harlan Ellison was that guy who used to be an important writer and editor but now was just some old guy with anger management issues (and grabby hands as it turned out) for as long as I’ve been reading science fiction. And I’ve been reading science fiction since at least 1982. As a kid devouring anything about science fiction I could get my hands on back then, mostly from the somewhat out of date local library’s collection, he was omnipresent in books about esseff, not so much as a writer in his own right. A few stories scattered here and there among anthologies, but I’ve never read all that much about him. And what I read of his I sometimes ended up hating.

Ellison’s importance to me, as he seemed to be presented in fanzines and sf history books and such, was as a model for how to be a certain type of fan turned writer, a template for whole generations of baby boom/gen X fans. Well but narrowly read in science fiction and adjacent genres, argumentive, elistis, bit of an asshole and proud of it. Ellison campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, but as it turned out, had a bit of a history with harassing women that didn’t make it into the sf history books or fanzines.

With the news of his death came of course the eulogies, which touched off something that I think Jasmine Gower put it best:

As someone who was only 16 when Harlan Ellison sexually assaulted a colleague on stage at WorldCon, I have only ever known him by that reputation.

It’s very concerning to see my community today celebrating this sexual predator as someone who made our field stronger.

If you’re the same age as me or younger, Ellison always was somebody who had been cutting edge and radical once but now was a sour old coot; even ignorant of his sexual assaults, he came across as an asshole and celebrated for it. But there also a great many fans and writers to whom Ellison was and is still important because they were there when he was in the vanguard of the American New Wave, freeing sf from its self imposed shackles. Then there are people like Tananarive Due, who remembered Ellison for supporting both Octavio Butler and herself. And, as mentioned above, Ellison championed the ERA. In other words, the not at all rare example of a progressive man being awful in private. It’s a mixed legacy indeed, you can’t deny his good parts, but as I said eight years ago already, who would want to be Harlan Ellison now?

Who would want to be Harlan Ellison now?

Published on July 15, 20105 Comments

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.

“Oddly passionless as well, and I don’t think this is entirely because this is a Canadian show”

Published on March 3, 2009

James Nicoll reviews legendary bad sci-fi tv series Starlost.

Ben Bova famously wrote a fictional treatment of the disaster that was this series, Starcrossed, which I keep seeing in local secondhand bookstores. The series itself was based on a Harlan Ellison treatment, but in the end he was so infuriated with the way his ideas were treated, he took his name of it. Here’s what he wrote for Starcrossed‘s cover blurb:

It has been pointed out to me that Ben Bova’s vaguely hilarious novel is roughly patterned on events and characters involved in the short but loathsome existence of a TV series I had the misfortune to create, “The Starlost.” Nonsense! Just because my series had a studio executive as rapacious as a weasel, a producer who was a certified brain damage case, actors who should have been ditch-diggers and money grubbers who should have taken up residence at Dachau … and Bova’s novel has the same … is just lousy coincidence. Clearly it isn’t one-for-one: the writer in Bova’s book, Ron Gabriel, isn’t one-millionth as terrific and sexy as me! You’ll hear from my attorneys in the morning.

Should I get this novel?

Jeffty is five

Published on July 24, 2007

(I wrote this last year and had always intended to come back to it, but I never did, until Nicholas reviewed Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories and reminded me of this again.)

It was Kip’s post on Harlan Ellison and his trademarked name that reminded me of Ellison’s celebrated short story “Jeffty is Five”, which I had also just reread it again, so it was fresh in memory anyway.

I must’ve read “Jeffty is Five” about a dozen times by now; it’s a well anthologised story, winner of both the Nebula and the Hugo award. The first time I read it, some twenty years ago or so, I quite liked it, but over time I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with it.

As the Wikipedia summary puts it, “Jeffty is Five” “tells the story of a boy who never grows past the age of five physically or mentally. The narrator, Jeffty’s friend from the age of five well into adulthood, discovers that Jeffty’s radio plays serial programs no longer produced on radio stations that no longer exist. They are contemporary, all-new shows, however; not re-runs. He can buy comics such as The Shadow and Doc Savage that are, again, all-new although they are no longer being produced. The narrator is privy to this world because of Jeffty’s trust, while the rest of the world (the world that grew as Jeffty did not) is not.”

In the story, trust and nostalgia are inseperatable. The narrator gains access to Jeffty’s golden childhood world because he has Jeffty’s trust and looses it in the climax of the story by inadvertently betraying this trust. At the start of the story the narrator is out in the cold, untrusting world of seventies America, at the end he’s there again, but made even worse by knowing what he has lost.

As a story, it is a powerful dose of nostalgia, a paean to Ellison’s own lost childhood and the wonders it held, even for people who never experienced this time themselves. There’s always been a stubborn streak of nostalgia in science fiction, an awareness of history to which this story appealed; as its long list of awards shows. It also fits well with the general trend for nostalgia of the late seventies —happy Days, anyone?

Now in general, nostalgia is a reactionary emotion, not just a hankering for an idealised past and a denial of the present, but also a denial of possible future improvement. In small doses this is harmless, but when it controls a discourse, it can be a prelude to authoritarianism. Which is why I’m skeptical of nostalgia these days, especially as seductive as it is presented here. Ellison is quite convincing in his genuine love for nineteenforties pop culture, but unfortunately, this love is stuck in the middle of a quite amoral tale. Let me explain what I mean by that.

First, there’s the treatment of Jeffty’s parents, who are depicted without any sympathy for their plight, as dour, soulles, crushed people with no notion what their son can do, or appreciation of him. Both physically and mentally they’re repulsive. They have to be repulsive and unsympathetic for the story to work, to make the real world that much more dismal, but also because if the narrator felt any real sympathy for them, his joy in sharing Jeffty’s world with him could not be so innocent.

Then there’s Jeffty himself, whose condition is treated as not just positive, but as a wonder, something to envy. Again, this needs to be done to make the story work, but if you think about it, would you want him to stay five forever, or would you want him to grow up?

Finally, there’s the narrator’s treatment of Jeffty, which is nothing short of exploitative. In the heart of the story, when he recounts his time with Jeffty, “the happiest time of my life”, it’s all about him listening to new installments of his old favourite radio shows, seeing his favourite movie stars making new movies of his favourite novels, reading his favourite comics and pulps; you get the picture. It’s all about his pleasure in material things, justified through the lens of sickly nostalgia. (His hatred for contemporary America is also rooted in material matters: rock music, cheap candy bars, junkfood.)

This is why, though I loved this story when I first read it years ago, I’ve found it less and less charming everytime I’ve reread it. It’s well written, but it’s wrong.