Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison (born May 27, 1934, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died June 27, 2018, Los Angeles, California) was an American writer of short stories, novels, essays, and television and film scripts. Though he eschewed genre categorization himself, his work was most frequently labeled science fiction.

Ellison briefly attended the Ohio State University and later became a prolific contributor of science fiction, crime and sex fiction, and true confessions to genre magazines. After serving in the U.S. Army (1957–59), he edited Rogue magazine (1959–60) and founded Regency Books press (1960) before becoming a successful television scriptwriter. His first novel, Rumble (1958; later republished as Web of the City), chronicles a young man’s efforts to leave a Brooklyn street gang. Ellison conducted field research to write the book, associating with an actual gang for several months. He documented those experiences in Memos from Purgatory (1961), which was later adapted (1964) as an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His early fiction was collected in such volumes as The Deadly Streets (1958), Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation (1961), Rough Beasts: Seventeen Stories Written Before I Got Up to Speed (2012), Getting in the Wind: More Stories by a Very Young Harlan Ellison (2012), and Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word (2013).

Ellison’s reputation as an important science-fiction writer rests on such short stories as “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965), “A Boy and His Dog” (1969; film 1975), and several others, including those in his collections I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967) and The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969). In his sui generis fictions, Ellison erected alternate (and often bizarre) worlds populated by characters that ranged from telepathic canines to malignant artificial intelligence entities. Ellison’s preoccupation with morality was much in evidence in those tales, despite their bleakly humorous speculations about the consequences of technological advancement and human hubris. As an editor he published several important anthologies. For each of the stories he commissioned for Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), he added a personal introductory essay that reveals as much about himself as it does about the work in question.

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Ellison’s disputatious personality was legendary among science-fiction aficionados. He was as caustic and pugnacious in person as he was on the page—a confrontation with Frank Sinatra is recorded in the famed Esquire profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”; he settled out of court over allegations that James Cameron had plagiarized elements of his work in writing the screenplay for The Terminator (1984); and he once sent a dead gopher to a publisher who violated a clause in his contract. He frequently mocked his own fractious tendencies and misanthropic attitudes, indicating a more-humanist worldview than his ornery disposition might initially have suggested. His flamboyance was on full display in the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, released in 2008 after more than 25 years of filming.

Further collections of Ellison’s work are A Touch of Infinity (1960), Ellison Wonderland (1962), Strange Wine: Fifteen New Stories from the Nightside of the World (1978), Angry Candy (1988), Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods (1975), All the Lies That Are My Life (1989), Slippage: Precariously Poised, Previously Uncollected Stories (1997), and Can and Can’tankerous (2015). Mind Fields (1994) was a collaboration with the artist Jacek Yerka wherein Ellison wrote a story to accompany each of Yerka’s paintings. Ellison’s most-influential short stories and essays were collected in The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective (2001). The novella Mefisto in Onyx (1993) concerns a telepath who enters the mind of a serial killer. Ellison received multiple Hugo and Nebula awards for his short fiction.

His television criticism—liberally interspersed with personal anecdotes—was collected in The Glass Teat (1970) and The Other Glass Teat (1975). Other essays, columns, and personal reminiscences were published as Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed (1984) and The Harlan Ellison Hornbook (1990). Ellison also wrote numerous screenplays and teleplays for series such as Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and Babylon 5.