Harlan Ellison has died. The two most immediately proper ways to celebrate his life would seem to be (a) writing a life-changing story (b) getting into a screaming grudgematch. I didn't sleep enough for the former and I got off Facebook precisely to avoid the latter this afternoon. He was important to me.
I never met him. In high school, I scoured used book stores for the works of three writers: Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison. In hindsight I can tell that I was studying them, who had all made careers of short stories when I was expected even as a teenager to be trying to write novels; at the time I just knew that I loved their language, the precision-detailed pulp poetry that sometimes flew way over the top and I didn't care, because no one else (I had not yet discovered Angela Carter and I was a few years off Tanith Lee) was writing like the way that words piled together in my head. Bradbury for autumn, Sturgeon for the Other, Ellison for pedal-to-the-medal audacity. I watched Babylon 5 (1994–98) in those years and liked to see him credited as conceptual consultant, sometimes as a cameo telepath or an annoying AI. He had the importance of a touchstone, a kind of talisman. Sometimes a cautionary example. Always words.
He was a complicated and divisive person; the stories about him seem to stack pretty cleanly between compassion and harm and his writing could be the same. I read his fiction, his essays, his film criticism, his introductions; they were always for better or worse distinctively him. Some of his stories lost their power for me with the years. Some of them never did. Everyone is talking about Deathbird Stories (1975), but I discovered him with Angry Candy (1988) and "Paladin of the Lost Hour," which he was one hundred percent wrong was done a disservice in the revived 1985 Twilight Zone by the casting of Danny Kaye. Look, there's the grudgematch. I concede only that Hume Cronyn would have been pretty sweet. It's a story about kindness, forgiveness, responsibility, and loss; it may have been wiser than the man who wrote it, but that is often the case with art. I was not surprised to read the news of his death this afternoon, but I am sorry. That is the last of my first teachers gone out of the world.
Gaspar smiled his own certain smile. "No, it's eleven."
—Harlan Ellison, "Paladin of the Lost Hour"
I never met him. In high school, I scoured used book stores for the works of three writers: Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Harlan Ellison. In hindsight I can tell that I was studying them, who had all made careers of short stories when I was expected even as a teenager to be trying to write novels; at the time I just knew that I loved their language, the precision-detailed pulp poetry that sometimes flew way over the top and I didn't care, because no one else (I had not yet discovered Angela Carter and I was a few years off Tanith Lee) was writing like the way that words piled together in my head. Bradbury for autumn, Sturgeon for the Other, Ellison for pedal-to-the-medal audacity. I watched Babylon 5 (1994–98) in those years and liked to see him credited as conceptual consultant, sometimes as a cameo telepath or an annoying AI. He had the importance of a touchstone, a kind of talisman. Sometimes a cautionary example. Always words.
He was a complicated and divisive person; the stories about him seem to stack pretty cleanly between compassion and harm and his writing could be the same. I read his fiction, his essays, his film criticism, his introductions; they were always for better or worse distinctively him. Some of his stories lost their power for me with the years. Some of them never did. Everyone is talking about Deathbird Stories (1975), but I discovered him with Angry Candy (1988) and "Paladin of the Lost Hour," which he was one hundred percent wrong was done a disservice in the revived 1985 Twilight Zone by the casting of Danny Kaye. Look, there's the grudgematch. I concede only that Hume Cronyn would have been pretty sweet. It's a story about kindness, forgiveness, responsibility, and loss; it may have been wiser than the man who wrote it, but that is often the case with art. I was not surprised to read the news of his death this afternoon, but I am sorry. That is the last of my first teachers gone out of the world.
Gaspar smiled his own certain smile. "No, it's eleven."
—Harlan Ellison, "Paladin of the Lost Hour"
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