Harlan Ellison RIP

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Harlan Ellison RIP

Postby KEND on Fri Jun 29, 2018 5:09 pm

One of the greats of sci fi, his novels were dark and insightful

Harlan Ellison dies at 84; acclaimed science fiction writer was known for combative style
By Dennis McLellan
JUN 28, 2018 | 2:05 PM

Harlan Ellison sold his first short story in 1955. (Christer Akerberg/Sweden Christe)
Harlan Ellison, who emerged as a major figure in the New Wave of science fiction writers in the 1960s and became a legend in science fiction and fantasy circles for his award-winning stories and notoriously outspoken and combative persona, died Wednesday night in Los Angeles. He was 84.
Ellison died at home in Sherman Oaks in his sleep, according to Susan Shapiro, his Hollywood agent. His death was unexpected."Ellison was immensely talented, immensely argumentative and immensely controversial, all in equal measure,” said author John Scalzi, one of The Times’ Critics at Large. “Loved or loathed, he was undeniably one of the great figures in science fiction."Since selling his first short story in 1955, the prolific Ellison won multiple awards from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Mystery Writers of America and the Horror Writers Assn.The third most anthologized science fiction writer behind Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Ellison also won four Writers Guild of America Awards, including those for memorable 1960s episodes of the TV series “The Outer Limits” (“Demon with a Glass Hand”) and “Star Trek” (“The City on the Edge of Forever”).His best-known short fiction includes the collections “Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”In 2006, Ellison received the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.“He’s one of the major post-World War II American writers of science fiction,” said Rob Latham, a professor of English and a specialist in science fiction at UC Riverside, which awarded Ellison the university’s Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction in 2011.That same year Ellison was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.“He was very influential in changing the field, making it more open to social issues, to explorations of characters,” Latham, a senior editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies, told The Times. “He’s had an enormous influence on science fiction with his writing, and he’s also been an influential editor.”That included serving as the editor of “Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories,” a 1967 book that Latham said “is probably the most important anthology published in the field in the last 50 years and set an agenda for a new kind of science fiction writing that would be more socially engaged and responsive to the times.”Ellison hated to be labeled a science fiction writer. (“I don’t write about bug-eyed ants or Godzilla!” he once said.) Instead, he preferred terms such as “imaginative fiction” and “contemporary fantasies.”In a 1978 review for the Washington Post of Ellison’s short story collection “Strange Wine,” Joseph McLellan wrote that the “categories are too small—even the catch-all category of science fiction—to describe Harlan Ellison.“Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, one-line comedian, purveyor of pure horror and of black comedy; he is all these and more,” McLellan wrote.As an emerging author in the 1960s, Ellison became known not just for his fiction. He marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, wrote political essays and lectured frequently on college campuses.“He’s one of the most dynamic speakers I’ve ever seen, and he tends to speak out of a sense of outrage,” said Latham. “He was always fighting for a cause. That was something that was clear from his writing and from his persona. He was a battler.Ellison even stood up to a belligerent Frank Sinatra in a verbal exchange over the boots Ellison was wearing in the pool room of the Daisy discotheque in Beverly Hills—an incident captured in Gay Talese’s famous 1966 Esquire magazine story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”His combativeness occasionally led to legal battles. Among his victories: Reaching an out-of-court agreement in which future video versions and cable showings of the 1984 movie “The Terminator” would carry the credit line “Acknowledgment to the works of Harlan Ellison” after he claimed the film drew material from two of his scripts for “The Outer Limits.”Another legal fight ended in 2004 when Ellison and America Online Inc. settled a copyright infringement lawsuit involving examples of his stories posted on the internet without his consent.“He always said, ‘Pay the writer,’” his longtime literary agent Richard Curtis told The Times. “That was his motto.”Ellison was particularly well known for his sometimes colorful dealings and encounters with book editors and TV producers who incurred his ire.He readily acknowledged that he once mailed a dead gopher to a publishing house, and gleefully recounted assaulting his publisher in 1982.“I put him in a hold that I had learned from Bruce Lee. I took him to his knees. Then I duck-walked him back to his door,” Ellison told The Times’ Carolyn Kellogg in 2013. “I picked up a chair and threw it…. It bounced around the room.” The publisher had scrambled behind his desk and was dialing the phone. “I jumped on the desk and ripped the phone out of the wall.” Then he came to his senses and left for a TV appearance.
KEND
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Re: Harlan Ellison RIP

Postby Steve James on Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:04 pm

R.I.P.
"A man is rich when he has time and freewill. How he chooses to invest both will determine the return on his investment."
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Re: Harlan Ellison RIP

Postby Michael on Sat Jun 30, 2018 7:24 am

Thanks for A Dog and His Boy.
Michael

 

Re: Harlan Ellison RIP

Postby KEND on Sun Jul 01, 2018 5:00 pm

Not for those with a weak stomach
KEND
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