Fan Boy Alert: Harlan Ellison!

 I became a Harlan Ellison fan about 40 years ago. Reading Greg Cwik's Beamed from Within: On Harlan Ellison’s “Greatest Hits”, I think he is a fan, too. 

CALLING THE GROUCHY and godly Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) a “science fiction writer,” pegging him as a single-genre scribe, is an inaccurate and constraining description. Granted, he wrote a lot of sci-fi, much of which remains redoubtable, replete with indelible, iniquitous, uproarious images conjured by his acerbic abstractions of language and oddball ideas, enigmas left lingering by the last sentence, taunting with its refusal of simple explanation; this is what he will always be known for. But he was just as deft at fantasy, horror, semirealistic (though still deranged) fiction, essays, and cultural criticism, all insightful, erudite, vulgar, angry, hopeful, exact, and exacting. He even dabbled in television, a medium he often disliked, sometimes fervidly, but which proved profoundly successful for him—his revered Star Trek episode, however much it got changed, does everything an episode of television can do.

Ellison, as irascible as an icon can be, is one of the 20th century’s indispensable writers, as larger-than-life as any of his fantastical conjurings, always imbuing his work with the ardor of a lunatic. He is an English-language heir to Jorge Luis Borges, a man who wields words like weapons to assault reality, to provoke us through discomfort. Tenacious in both terror and tomfoolery, fierce, and funny, Ellison wrote with ardor and a howling soul.

I do not know anyone who read Ellison who is not a fan. He blows your mind with what he writes and how he writes. 

 In 1996, the year he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, Ellison defined his writing for us: “What I write is hyperactive magic realism. I take the received world and I reflect it back through the lens of fantasy, turned slightly so you get a different portrait.” Ellison wrote like a man suffering from perpetual fever hallucinations, his stories governed by an inimitable eerie logic. I don’t want to spoil them for any newcomers, so let’s forgo the plot synopses—which are pretty hard to write anyway—and consider instead the writing. There’s an art-rock musicality to the syntax and rhythm that anticipates the elegiac and energetic lyricism and technological tinkerings of Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s The Idiot (1977), and Bowie and Brian Eno’s Berlin Trilogy (1977–79). “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is both the bastard progeny of Alfred Bester and Robert A. Heinlein and the forebear of William Gibson, whose Sprawl trilogy (1984–88) culls from Ellison’s postmodern brain-melter (in “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman,” Ellison refers to the “communications web”), a work of existential oneira....

Which maybe explains why I took so quickly to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alasdair Gray.

Frankly, he scared me more than Stephen King ever did.

Too bad most of his stuff is out of print.

Read all of Cwik's, and see if you do not start looking for Harlan Ellison's stories. You will find one of the best short story writers, regardless of genre (excepting Alice Munro.)

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