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Posted on 03/14/2008 8:13:49 PM PDT by EveningStar
When I was about 18, I went to a science-fiction bookstore in Berkeley, Calif., to attend a book signing by Harlan Ellison. I had a couple of well-thumbed paperback collections for Ellison to sign, and was totally unprepared for the long line of fans, many of them bearing 10 or 15 pristinely preserved hardcover books. The college-age woman in front of me had just such a pile, but was carrying something else too. When she got to the front of the line, she cleared her throat and thrust something toward Ellison. "Mr. Ellison, I wrote a story and you're in it," she said. "You're an elf!"
As Erik Nelson, director of "Dreams With Sharp Teeth," a film about Ellison that just premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival, observed when I told him the story, that woman was enough of an Ellison fan to want to include him in her literary universe -- but not enough of one to understand just how little he would be interested. Along with the other people in line, I cringed and cowered, expecting a nuclear outburst. Ellison went on signing her books, lifting his eyes from the page only to declare in a level voice, "I don't want to read your ****ing story."...
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
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In other news Francisco Franco is still dead.
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He’s a moonbat lefty, but I have to give him credit: “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman” is a libertarian classic and deserves a place in the library of every free person.
gee I thought this was a Howard Dean thread.
Ping for reading later.
Have you seen any of the images of him copping a feel of the writer Connie Willis at a Hugo awards? He looks like a wheezy bulldyke overdue for a wheelchair.
When I was young, I read a few of his stories, and liked the “Glass Teat” books. Now that I’m older, he’s highly over-rated.
I heard about this, of course. I thought he was brilliant in literature, but a total freak otherwise.
In my experience, his most intense fans are, not surprisingly, unrepentant 1960s radicals.
You're right about his fans. It's been a long time ago, but I once happened across his web site, and some of the people there are wince-evoking fanbois. You could almost smell their pheromones.
I met him when he gave a talk at a local college. Very voluble and filled with stories about all those ‘damn Hollywood phonies’ who have ripped him off (James Cameron, Gene Roddenberry).
LOL Priceless!
And no matter what the aging Queen says, his Trek script wasn't that great, (yet neither was the final version, for that matter. I've always thought "Forever" was highly over-rated).
I freely admit that back in the days of the Tomorrow show, (from it's debut in '73 up until NBC fubar'ed it with Rona Barrett), Ellison was always one of the best recurring guests.
He’s made a point of NOT reading anything that fans have written and submitted directly to him, simply to be sure that he’s not sued for “stealing” their stories. He’ll return manuscripts unopened.
But you’re right, he can be a jerk. But he’s also a brilliant short story author, and quite possibly one of the greatest editors of short stories of the last few decades. If not for his “Dangerous Visions” anthologies, I would have never heard of (those who have become) some of my favorite authors.
He’s also quite unabashedly hard left. But he can also be brutal to those he normally supports as well. And I don’t think that anyone’s ever written better on the Kitty Genovese murder that Harlan Ellison.
Mark
The few times I've seen him in discussions, he could really be quite a brilliant conversationalist. But he can also be such an ass.
I hadn't seen a recent photo of him in nearly 20 years, when I last saw him in person (1987, at a NYC comic/sci-fi convention) when he kept ranting and raving about "She Hulk." lol. He was great at that convention. But when I saw the photo posted earlier in this thread... Damn! The last 20 years haven't been very good to him.
As I said in an earlier post, I think that he's a good writer, but his real strength is as an editor.
Mark
banglist related.
“Dangerous Visions”
Had some creepy stuff — I’ll give him that.
Probably the creepiest was the short story advocating father/daughter incest — yuck!
Aging Queen? You do know he’s straight right? Anyway he also memorably sued James Cameron for ripping off an Outer Limits episode he wrote for the The Terminator. All home video copies of it end with the credit ‘Inspired by the work of Harlan Ellison’.
I read “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” when I was about 15. It was in a paperback anthology of SF.
It made me kind of sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t put it down. I’d never read anything like it, and it changed me a little.
Ellison is a moonbat, but he is a great writer - some of his stories just haunt you after you read them.
If you can find them, check out his books of TV commentary columns from the 70’s (The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat). mostly hilarious and insightful, if you can stand the moonbatry.
He acts like a Queen, as witnessed by his estrogen seizures when thinking of Spiro Agnew.
Yeah, claims against Cameron were made against “Demon With A Glass Hand” and something else I can’t remember, another Outer Limits episode with Michael Ansara?
Hasn't he been supposedly sitting on a compilation for thirty-odd years now? :)
It wouldn't surprise me... Ellison is sort of like the wine commercial... "We will sell no wine until we feel like it!" LOL
Seriously though, his Dangerous Visions trilogy took forever to be released, but they were eye-opening. The idea being to release anthologies of short stories by both established authors AND relatively new authors in a single book. Had it not been for DV, I probably never would have picked up a book by Piers Anthony or Theodore Sturgeon.
You know, I think that I read DV back around 1980 or 1981, and to this day I remember the story by Piers Anthony, "In the Barn." Quite a disturbing story about an alternate universe.
Mark
The two OL episodes he wrote were that and Soldier. It was the latter which Cameron used as the basis for his script.
The episode with Ansara is “Soldier.”
He is in too much of a hurry to do that right. His ability to dismiss people is unrivaled and for that alone he should be remembered with a statue in front of the local Barnes & Noble. Robin Williams might be in the same league, but Ellison in his prime was untouchable.
I did re-watch both "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand" yesterday. I had not seen either in years and wanted to see how they held up. I found them both to be entertaining, though a wee bit dated. However, "Demon" was not nearly as good as I remembered it to be.
According to the Wikipedia article about Ellison, he didn't sue Cameron until after Cameron mentioned that he had been inspired by Ellison's work. This could indicate that Ellison had not yet seen the movie:
After James Cameron in an interview about his movie The Terminator mentioned that he had been inspired by two episodes ("Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand") of the 1960ies TV series The Outer Limits — both written by Ellison — Ellison sued Cameron. Ellison settled out of court and the film's end credits now include the simple statement: "Acknowledgment to the works of Harlan Ellison." Not all feel this was fair to Cameron and that the original stories bore little resemblance to the Terminator movie. Also, the all powerful, human-hating computer, AM, in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, is somewhat like Skynet in the Terminator series. But other authors have published similar ideas.
It really depends on the situation. In public, Ellison can be incredibly fast tempered and dismissive, and he will NEVER allow someone to submit any sort of a manuscript directly to him. He does this to keep from being accused of stealing ideas for stories. On the other hand, when he's involved in literary work, like writing workshops, I've heard nothing be good things about him. It just depends on the settings.
I believe that another reason that he doesn't suffer fans well in public comes from a story he once told about Robert Heinlein. Heinlein was affected VERY adversely when he learned that Charles Manson "credited" RAH's "Stranger in a Strange Land" with some of the ideas behind how he ran "the family." The story goes that it greatly troubled Heinlein until his death. This is one of the reasons that Ellison dismisses fans so quickly, though sometimes you could see his ego stroked by adulation.
Of course I could be completely wrong now. Those observations were from when I was following Ellison's career and work, which quite frankly, I haven't done in some 20 years.
Mark
Ellison hasn’t been so active in the past 20 years, so his career is pretty well printed and bound. I find Stephen King and Ray Bradbury to be worth listening to, and Ellison’s few gems astonishing but hardly didactic.
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