“For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time, I mattered.”
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| Harlan Ellison at the Harlan Ellison Roast. L.A. Press Club July 12, 1986. Los Angeles, California. Photo by Pip R. Lagenta used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. |
Harlan Ellison, author, screenwriter, and grand master of science fiction and fantasy, has passed on June 28th, 2018 at the age of 84. ...
Whether he was shouting love at the heart of the world or screaming because he had no mouth, Harlan Ellison brought noise into not only the field of SFF, but the universe of storytelling itself.
Part runaway, part punk, the education of Harlan Ellison didn’t necessarily predict greatness. He was a dockworker, a gang member, a circus hand, an expelled student, and member of the armed forces all before he was 25 years-old. Crisscrossing from his native Ohio, to New York City, Ellison eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he lived from 1962 until the present day. It was this proximity to Hollywood which involved Ellison in writing for the screen, leading to famous (and infamous) stories sold to the likes of The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
None of these writing jobs happened without notable kerfuffle, and like a science fiction rock-star, Ellison’s dust-ups with the powers-that-be are almost as famous as his writing. Think the movie The Terminator bears some similarity to a few Harlan Ellison short stories? So did he, and successfully sued and settled with James Cameron over the issue. Historically, Ellison disparaged Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry for the way his famous “City On the Edge of Forever” Trek script had been rewritten without his permission. Though, in the last several years, Ellison seemed to ease-up on his vitriol toward Trekkies and gleefully participated in two different adaptations of the story, one as a new audio play for Skyboat Media, and another, new version of his first “City” script, beautifully illustrated by IDW comics.
Read the full obituary: https://www.tor.com/2018/06/28/harlan-ellison-1934-2018-obituary/
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