RIP Harlan Ellison 1934-2018

[Bustronaut]

Fuck.

 

I await OSJ's wonderful obituary/eulogy

[Contentious C]

84's a good length of time and a number I almost certainly won't see... but god motherfucking goddamnit. Fuck.

If anyone needs some sort of eulogy, just grab The Essential Ellison, and let it crack open your head. What was poured in will not resemble what comes out on the other side. He's the one dead man who can speak for himself. That's power, and immortality.

[Ace]

If there's an afterlife, I hope one of the first things Harlan does when he gets there is kick Frank Sinatra's ass.

 

After Roddenberry's, of course.

 

[Tromatagon]

I was introduced to him through his segment on Sci Fi Buzz.

 

That segment was THE SHIT you guys.  They just gave him a camera and let him rant.  It was like Andy Rooney but someone who you gave a shit what they thought.

[OSJ]

1 hour ago, Betsy Zeidler said:

Fuck.

 

I await OSJ's wonderful obituary/eulogy

You're going to have to wait a while, I'm crying too hard to write anything. He was more than just a great writer, he was my friend.

[Cliff Hanger]

4 hours ago, Tromatagon said:

I was introduced to him through his segment on Sci Fi Buzz.

 

That segment was THE SHIT you guys.  They just gave him a camera and let him rant.  It was like Andy Rooney but someone who you gave a shit what they thought.

I think I knew his name as a beloved author and TV script writer because he got referenced a lot in Starlog, but that was the first place I ever really knew who he was. After that I watched every week, recorded Tom Snyder anytime he was going to be on it, and asked for "any book by Harlan Ellison" for Christmas.  My mom chose well and got me the first edition of Essential Ellison (I'd love to get the revised version but that shit ain't cheap) which I absolutely devoured.  I hadn't known about his years of TV criticism and non-fiction writing; "From Alabamy, With Hate" has been heavy on my mind the past few months.

[odessasteps]

 

[Curt McGirt]

6 hours ago, Tromatagon said:

I was introduced to him through his segment on Sci Fi Buzz.

 

That segment was THE SHIT you guys.  They just gave him a camera and let him rant.  It was like Andy Rooney but someone who you gave a shit what they thought.

Me too, and I only got to see it visiting my grandma's house cause we didn't get Sci Fi and she did. I was too young to know who he was but Stephen King educated me not long after that in his book Danse Macabre. To say he was fucking brilliant is a massive understatement. RIP

[J.T.]

I am sad for you, John.  I feel like I know Harlan through you as we talked about him a lot.

RIP to one of the true fathers of speculative fiction. 

One of the men that inspired me to read and to dream of better worlds and warned me about the perils of my own life through his wonderful dystopian fables..

You might not agree with his opinions, but you could not deny his craft.

To this day, whenever I encounter a situation that I absolutely hate but have to handle without complaining, the immortal words, "I have no mouth, but I must scream," always run through my brain.

[Contentious C]

Well, the NY Times finally has something up. The real money shot there is referencing the Minnie Mouse story, easily my favorite anecdote. In fact, someone needs to start a band called Minerva's Dwarf Train, just to stick it to the Mouse (metaphorically). Or maybe if I ever do another blog or website, that'll be its name.

[Curt McGirt]

Guess what's all on Youtube? This is the first one

 

[Matt D]

1 hour ago, Contentious C said:

Well, the NY Times finally has something up. The real money shot there is referencing the Minnie Mouse story, easily my favorite anecdote. In fact, someone needs to start a band called Minerva's Dwarf Train, just to stick it to the Mouse (metaphorically). Or maybe if I ever do another blog or website, that'll be its name.

In case anyone hasn't read it:

obviously it's NSFW, but who the fuck cares. That's the point.

http://harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm

[Tromatagon]

3 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Guess what's all on Youtube? This is the first one

 

Curt, you beautiful, beautiful man...

[OSJ]

Okay, Betsy asked, I try to not disappoint:

                Remembering Harlan Ellison

Well my friend, Harlan Ellison died yesterday, but I’m done crying (I think), so I suppose that the thing to do is celebrate his life. 84 is a damn good run and he used those years to touch thousands of people. The sad thing is that many people will remember him for his one-time abrasiveness, when the truth is that he mellowed considerably after marrying Susan and was, in fact, one of the kindest people I've ever known. The things he did behind the scenes to help out younger writers and the genre of fantastic fiction in general aren't nearly as well known as they should be, things like taking the time to design the Stoker Award, championing the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, participating in marches to help ensure that all people are treated equally and with respect. And the smaller things, such as releasing stories that he'd bought for The Last Dangerous Visions in order to make certain that great works were made available to the public. 

In my own experience he was gracious enough to provide me with copies of Bob Leman's story How "Dobbstown was Saved" which we included in Bob's collection, Feesters in the Lake. Richard Wilson's novella "At the Sign of the Boar's Head Nebula" which the author, Harlan, and myself all agreed was the best single piece of fiction that Wilson ever wrote (which covers a lot of ground). The novella appeared in the Dancing Tuatara Press collection The Story Writer & other stories, the second volume of the series John Pelan Presents Classics of Science Fiction and of course it will also appear in the career retrospective, Masters of Science Fiction: Richard Wilson soon to be released by Centipede Press. Both of these deeds were acts of kindness that went above and beyond any reasonable expectation, as Harlan had bought and paid for these works out of pocket and my understanding is that he advanced money more than than once in order to retain rights to publish the stories. This is just the experience of one editor, the list of stories he returned to authors when it became clear that The Last Dangerous Visions was not going to see publication is a long and distinguished one. 

I've been privileged to have known Harlan Ellison for forty-five years, I was a fifteen year-old kid when we met, he was in Seattle as a guest instructor at Clarion West and was at Magazine City signing copies of the new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which featured his classic story "Basilisk". Everything was going splendidly until this one guy showed up with a large paper grocery bag filled with copies of this new issue. 
Harlan got a sort of funny look on his face and remarked "That's quite a few copies you have there."
The man chuckled and said, "Yep, I had to visit every 7-11 and Stop & Go in town to buy up all their copies."
"So you're going to sell these?"
"Yeah, after you sign 'em I should be able to get five bucks apiece for them!" (Cover price was seventy-five cents then).
The look on Harlan's face was a strange one, I wasn't sure why, but I had a feeling that something was going to happen.
"So you bought every copy that you could find, so no one else is able to get one? Do you know what you are? You'e a fucking asshole and I'm not signing a single one of these!" As he upended the bag spilling all of the magazines to the floor.
"Next in line, please!"

Then, as throughout the years Harlan Ellison did not tolerate the venal & greedy anymore than he suffered fools gladly. When I got up to the counter where he was signing I said "Mr Ellison, I was going to get two copies, one for my collection and one to sell, now I'm kinda glad that I just got the one!'
He laughed and said "Two copies would have been just fine." 

From that day on I don't think that I missed a signing in Seattle or a convention on the West Coast that he attended. When I became a "filthy pro" back in 1986, we started getting to know each other fairly well. I'd been publishing for a decade before we had a chance to work together. I had sold Axolotl Press to the folks at Pulphouse and waited out a no-compete agreement before coming back as Silver Salamander Press. I finally got to work with Harlan when I published  Roberta Lannes' wonderful collection, The Mirror of Night. The previous year I had launched the "Darkside series",  which was inspired by the Dangerous Visions books. The idea of the series was to present stories by authors who I believed were the next movers and shakers of the horror genre. So, without Harlan's influence the series simply wouldn't have existed and I remain eternally grateful for the inspiration. 

Of course, there was a time when i was on the receiving end of the famed Ellison temper. It was over the silliest of misunderstandings and all I've been able to piece together after all these years is that something else had him stirred up and he was spoiling for a fight and I was handy. We didn't speak to each other for two years, however, knowing how much he loved the work of Clark Ashton Smith, I thought that inviting him to participate in my C.A.S. tribute volume The Lost Continent: New Tales of Zothique would be a sufficient gesture to mend the fences, but no such luck, I received a letter (now in my permanent collection of ephemera) calling me every name in the book, apparently he was still upset. However, a few short months later I was hanging out in the lobby of the hotel where the Nebula Awards ceremony was to take place. I was chatting with Richard Curttis (who I've worked with extensively regarding the Fritz Leiber estate) and long-time friend Duane Wilkins, (the SF buyer for the University Bookstore, Seattle's largest indy bookstore and just then I saw Harlan approaching, and I wished that I could hide behind one of the chairs or something, as I just knew that he was going to continue the tirade from his letter. I stood up and he nodded to Richard and Duane and then said "John, it's so good to see you, how have you been?" as he gave me a hug. Obviously he was no longer mad about anything and we had a delightful chat (I avoided the topic that had set him off two years earlier.) 

From that point on, our friendship grew and while most of Harlan's work was published by my friend Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press he was always enthusiastic about participating in projects that Jerad and I were doing for Centipede Press. One of our most ambitious projects has been collecting all of the short fiction of R.A. Lafferty, when we designed the series it was decided that each volume would have a guest introduction and that I would ring in with a short afterword, discussing how selections came to be made and suchlike. Obviously, R.A. Lafferty has a great many fans among the authors of fantastic fiction but Harlan was one of his most enthusiastic and leaped at the opportunity to introduce Volume 2 in the series. The one thing I was concerned about was the signature pages, Harlan had confided that he was not feeling well, so I didn't want to put any pressure on him; and after all, the introducer's signature is just a sort of bonus feature, we're selling the author's texts, not autographs or other bells and whistles.

I called Harlan and assured him that whatever amount of books that he could sign would be just fine, (I was figuring he'd sign the 26 lettered copies that exist for contributors and customers with deep pockets. A week later I received the box, as it was now my turn to sign 300 copies. I flipped through the pages, damned if he hadn't signed them all! What a trooper! I remember that action on his part whenever I'm faced with a project that I'm less than enthused about, and as Harlan did, I just bite the bullet and do it. Christ, that man taught me so much and now he's gone and it's fucking awful. His kindnesses were many and I'm not going to list them all here, but one is preserved in my memory forever... Of course I sent him a copy of my first short-story collection (some seventeen years in the making... I'm not exactly prolific when it comes to writing fiction). He liked the book, so I was two for two on my literary heroes liking what I did (Ramsey Campbell being the other, and he was gracious enough to write the introduction.) Anyway, Harlan told me, "Your writing is fine, but there's one problem, you can't come up with story titles if your life depended on it." Being told that you're a fine writer by Harlan Ellison is like being told you're a good baseball player by Steve Trout, but in one sentence I was both elated and slammed back to earth.

I was a little nonplussed at this as I usually give quite a bit of thought to the titles as that's the first thing the reader reads. I mumbled something about "They aren't that bad are they?"

And here's where I got the firm but loving Dutch uncle treatment, he said "Look, you have a story about a guy with a spider tattoo that you called "Spider", obviously the story is going to center around his tattoo. "Mystery of the Worm" has been kicked around for years and no one currently living has any idea what a "Blind Chivvy" is. So here's what you're going to do, I think that one of my strong points is titles that grab the reader's attention; so the next story that you finish, send it to me and I'll come up with a title!" 

Sadly, I was never able to take him up on this offer as I've been pretty non-productive on the fiction side of things the last three years, but just knowing that Harlan Ellison was willing to take the time to read my work and provide titles for my stories is a huge confidence booster even though he's no longer with us, I can see him finishing the last page of one of my stories and the twinkle in his eye as he writes in a far more clever title than anything that I could ever come up with. The depth and weight of this offer of kindness didn't really sink in until later in the day when it struck me that not only is a story's title the first thing that a reader sees, but it is very likely that it's the first thing that the editor sees!

What do we do now that Harlan is gone? I had a friend ask me that last night and my only answer was "Celebrate his life by reading his work and perform a random act of kindness every day."
"What's a random act of kindness?"
"It's simple, do something nice for somebody and don't get caught; seriously though, do something nice for someone and if they find out it was you, it doesn't count! And read your copy of The Essential Ellison" 

By the way, the new (2001)  edition of The Essential Ellison is expanded by some 200 pages over the first edition, making it a hefty tome of some 1200 pages. Every collection of speculative fiction should have a copy, my only quibble with the book is that it should have been five volumes of that size to truly get all of his essential material. There was a gap of around fifteen years between the publication of the 1st edition and the expanded edition and editor Terry Dowling chose wisely and well when it came to new material to include, from essays to my favorite Ellison short story "Jefty is Five", but I want to talk about the inclusion of the transcript of his Guest of Honor speech from Westercon 37, which  is as notable an act of courage as you are ever likely to see. You see, the essay, "Xenogenesis" is about fans interactions with authors, but not the pleasant autograph sessions or afternoon teas, no, this essay dealt with the abominable behavior of certain fans. Harlan stresses three times that he's not talking about all fans, and that 99% of fans may be numbered among the "Good Guys" and the type more or less normal people whom you would expect to see reading the work of noble dreamers who envision the triumph of the human spirit as we travel to the stars and beyond. No, he's speaking of those strange mutants that one sometimes sees at conventions. You see, "xenogenesis" is a phenomenon wherein the offspring do not resemble the parents much at all. These range from those folks who seemingly suffer from Asperger's or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and are just too self-absorbed to realize how offensive they are. These are the folks that harangue panelists in the hopes of becoming the center of attention or through trickery and deception ferret out the room number of a given author show that they can show up and bang on the door at 6:00 in the morning to get books signed. Remember the guy at Magazine City? Yeah, he fits right in with this group... 

What Harlan did, in addition to relating a number of awful things that had happened to him, was to send a questionnaire out to a number of other writers asking if they had similar unpleasant experiences to relate; (in the main this was to dispel any possible argument that Harlan was such a polarizing figure that he brought these unpleasant actions on himself), I'll just state for the record that no matter how polarizing someone might be, the proper responses do not include swiping several thousand dollars worth of rare comics from their home, egging the front door, stealing a valuable wristwatch, and actually threatening physical violence. All of these things and more happened to Harlan, as he related to a crowd that had suddenly grown very silent. He went on to recount other authors' experiences, which ranged from the clueless and insensitive to absolutely horrible, such as the case of the elderly golden age author leaving his eleven year-old grand-daughter in the care of a fan whom he absolutely trusted, as the man had been a frequent visitor and house-guest over the period of a year or so. It wasn't until after the man had left that he discovered his grand-daughter had been molested. 

Then there were the chaps that plotted to hit L. Sprague de Camp in the face with a pie. This peculiar form of literary criticism had its root in de Camp saying some less than complimentary (but absolutely true) things about H.P. Lovecraft in his masterful biography of same. For what it's worth, it's pretty clear that Lovecraft was a racist twit, but the Lovecraft fanboys sure don't like having that pointed out. Anyway, apparently the group of conspirators selected an emissary and armed him with the appropriate baked goods only to be surprised by a pair of athletic fans who make a hobby of MMA and having heard the rumors of this planned activity had appointed themselves Sprague's bodyguards for the weekend. Apparently the emissary approached the stage where de Camp was giving his talk carrying a bag about the right size. One of the cage-fighters/fans loudly asked what was in the bag and the chap turned around and left the room. So at least in this one case awful behavior by a fan was curtailed by other fans, proving that the Good Guys still exist. Harlan's essay chronicles at least a dozen more examples, including the horrible rudeness shown to him at this particular Westercon by some enterprising chap, who having got wind that Harlan had just turned fifty printed up t-shirts reading "50 Short Years of Harlan Ellison", obviously mocking his height. Several fools actually wore these shirts to Harlan's GoH speech, obviously oblivious to how offensive they were being. Harlan touched on this and many other acts of casual cruelty and nastiness shown by fans to writers that that they are supposedly fans of. It took a tremendous amount of courage for him to give this speech to a few hundred people, let alone have it transcribed where thousands of people would read it. Let me digress for just a moment to recount my own experience. Since I developed COPD in 2006, I haven't attended a convention, but prior to that I was usually good for showing up to at least six to eight per year. I've never triggered the sort of emotions that would lead someone to throw a pie at me or anything like that as I've found that it's much easier to be kind than not, though I'm capable of being pretty nasty if the situation calls for it. However, my interactions with fans have always been quite pleasant, especially with the branch of fandom that collects books and/or pulps, for these people, it doesn't matter whether or not I've co-written several books or edited and introduced over 100 volumes, I'm one of them, and in my convention-going days it wasn't at all unusual to find me sitting with a group of fellow collectors talking about Weird Tales or Arkham House until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. The only unpleasant or rather creepy experience that I've ever had was at a World Fantasy Con in Providence R.I., I was sitting in the bar having a Coke when this this young (mid-30s maybe) lady came in and after staring at my name-tag for a few minutes asked in a soft voice, "Aren't you one of the guys that wrote Goon?" Goon, for the uninitiated was Edward Lee and myself seeing just how far we could push the window of "splatterpunk", so it's replete with deviant sex and gore from page one to the ending.  I admitted that yes, I was part of the team that had written Goon and that's when it got weird. "I want you to come up to my room and beat me up and then do things to me like you had in the book..." I'm Irish with the gift of blarney, so I'm too often at a loss for words, however, this time I was so stunned that I really didn't know what to say, I finally mumbled something about needing to call my wife and being on a panel after that and got the hell out of there as fast as I could. An unpleasant or rude fan experience? Well, definitely not rude, she was quite polite about the whole thing. Unpleasant? Now we're getting somewhere, one has to be fairly demented to ask a total stranger to beat them up and then do the sort of activities that are described in detail in the book. Anyway, that's the extent of my weird fan experiences, unfortunately Harlan had saved the most grotesque for last.. Let me preface this by saying that I've known Alan Dean Foster for a long, long time; we aren't close personal friends, but are certainly nodding acquaintances. Let me just state for the record that a kinder, more polite, gentleman does not walk the surface of God's green earth. In a business where he frequently lands in the most cut-throat, competitive portion of the field, (that is to say licensed properties such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Transformers Alien, etc. etc. etc.) you're not going to find anyone with a bad word to say about Alan Dean Foster. All of which makes the following incident even more horrible and inexplicable. Dean was at a convention, (I don't recall which one or where), when he heard a voice behind  him. "Alan Dean Foster?"
He got as far as "Why, yes..." when it happened, the fan had a large drink cup and threw the still warm contents into Dean's face. It was vomit. Harlan let that sink in to the audience, let them contemplate the kind of mentality that would carry their own vomit around in a cup in order to throw it on someone. 

Some people in the audience were sobbing, some of them were the same folks that had tittered and giggled when Harlan related stories of the prank phone calls and the coupon clippers who signed him up for everything from magazines to albums by Boxcar Willie. Some of these people were wearing shirts that proclaimed "50 Short Years of Harlan Ellison". How big a leap was it from a rude and offensive shirt to a cup of warm vomit? Obviously, it was merely a matter of degree, xenogenesis, the unthinkably rude, wantonly cruel and self-centered resembled the noble (if sometimes goofy) members of First Fandom not at all. I submit that it took tremendous courage for Harlan to give this speech, let alone have it transcribed and reprinted several times. What was his purpose in doing so and risking inciting some of these mutants to even further awfulness? 

Well, the asshat with the cup of warm vomit is clearly beyond any sort of redemption and many of this sort (the 6:00 AM  door bangers, the offensive t-short printers, and the magazine buyers with monopolistic tendencies likely lack the empathy for their fellow humans to realize just what jerks they are, but maybe, just maybe, his talk might get someone about to purchase one of those shirts to pause and think, "That might hurt Mr. Ellison's feelings", as they put their wallet away and go on about their business. And maybe the guy that shows up with a shopping cart full of books for autographing by one author, will pause and consider how rude their act is to both the author that they profess to admire and their fellow fans. These people have at least a good chance of getting the message, sadly, those that don't are drawing ever closer to the day when they'll toss a cup of warm vomit.

Yeah, it took an awful lot of courage to risk stirring up a hornets nest in order to get through to those fans who couldn't imagine such horrible behavior as throwing a cup of vomit, but due to a certain level of self-absorption were quite capable of being rude and hurtful without realizing it. But Harlan Ellison thought it worthwhile to hold up a mirror so that they could see just how they were affecting others and that it wasn't too late to turn things around. The biggest lesson he taught me was that no matter how pissed off I get at the foibles of my fellow man, at the end of the day we're a pretty remarkable species that's well-worth giving a chance. For that and so much more, I thank him. Godspeed, Harlan.

[Curt McGirt]

 

[Bustronaut]

That was beautiful John, thank you.

[J.T.]

As eloquent as always, John.  If someone is smart, they'll put that in print.

[OSJ]

46 minutes ago, J.T. said:

As eloquent as always, John.  If someone is smart, they'll put that in print.

Thanks, bro! I actually went through it and corrected all the typos and glitches (had to do so twice, as the first time MSWord ate all of the italics (fuck you Bill Gates!). I actually couldn't believe what I'd done... We've had that conversation about writing 500 words a day no matter what if you want to be a professional writer. That's about a page and a half, double-spaced, 12 point Century italic or something basic like that. Anyway, that's a good minimum that anyone can do. 1000 words a day is a pretty good clip. 2000 is a seriously productive and focused mofo. 3000 and you're entering the realm of pulp writers like Robert E. Howard, Arthur Leo Zagat, Hugh B. Cave and early Joe Lansdale (when Joe started out he figured that he needed to write a story a day to keeps the wolves from the door. As for me, on my best days I'm hitting 1000 words a day, slowed by the fact that I edit as I go, with me, there's no such thing as multiple drafts, what I have when I write "the end" is a ready-to-submit story or essay. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of setting up the payoff, which is the miraculous thing about the eulogy I wrote for Harlan... The thing is 4000 words, written in one day straight from the heart. I don't know how I did that, hell, I'm not capable of doing that...  Before sending the piece to Kirsten Gong-Wong at Locus, I went through it to see if there were any areas of repetition that needed to be cut, amazingly enough, there were not. I guess sometimes we just punch above our weight.

[J.T.]

Harlan's beef against James Cameron over The Terminator was bullshit, but that movie, In Time, was a direct rip from Repent Harlequin, Said The Ticktockman.  He should've gotten money and a screen crediit for that.

[OSJ]

On 7/2/2018 at 8:38 AM, J.T. said:

Harlan's beef against James Cameron over The Terminator was bullshit, but that movie, In Time, was a direct rip from Repent Harlequin, Said The Ticktockman.  He should've gotten money and a screen crediit for that.

Yeah, but Cameron's an asshat, so that's excusable. The exec producers of In Time should have rolled an armored car up his driveway and unloaded big bags of money.