![]() ![]() ![]() In 1949 Ellison’s father died and he moved with his mother to a residential hotel in Cleveland, where his interest in science fiction pulps led him to co-found a local fan group. Harlan Ellison guest voicing as himself in the Married to the Blob episode of The Simpsons in 2014. Comic books and pulp magazines were a more discernible influence on his earliest stories, written and illustrated for the children’s column of the Cleveland News. ![]() He ended up spending three days in a cell in Kansas City, refusing to give his name. James Otis Kaler’s children’s novel Toby Tyler: Or, Ten Weeks With a Circus inspired him to run away, aged 13, to join a travelling funfair. He was well-read, citing Joseph Conrad and Immanuel Kant as his boyhood favourites. His only achievement at school, he said, was a national award for a story he “shamelessly pilfered” from Karel Čapek’s play RUR. Louis, a former singer, worked as a dentist and then at his brother-in-law’s jewellery store in Painesville, Ohio, where Harlan went to school. ![]() He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Louis and his wife, Serita (nee Rosenthal). He was the subject of a documentary, Dreams With Sharp Teeth (2008), and “played” himself in episodes of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and The Simpsons. Never shy of publicity, he performed a number of stunts over the years, including writing a story a day while sitting in the windows of bookstores in Los Angeles, Boston and Charing Cross Road in London, and writing in a hotel lobby during a convention, and even writing live on radio. After he claimed that James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) bore similarities to his own work, later prints of the film included an “acknowledgment to the works of Harlan Ellison”.Īlthough for many years Ellison was dismissive of computers, he later embraced the power of the internet, publishing books and ebooks through his own website. His screenwriting credits included a notable episode of Star Trek, entitled The City on the Edge of Forever, which was a bone of contention on numerous occasions, from spats between Ellison and the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, to Ellison’s 2009 lawsuit against Paramount/CBS for unpaid royalties from the merchandising of the episode. Ellison invited dozens of authors on the cutting edge of the new wave to contribute to the anthologies Dangerous Visions (1968) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). Ellison’s development as a writer coincided with the growth of SF’s new wave, championed by Michael Moorcock, Ballard and Brian Aldiss in the British magazine New Worlds. He also received Hugos for I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967) and for The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1968). His social concerns were reflected in stories such as “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman (1965), about civil disobedience in a world of rigid conformity, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards. I take the received world and I reflect it back through the lens of fantasy, turned slightly so you get a different portrait.”Įllison was anti-Vietnam, an advocate of gun control and a supporter of human rights organisations. In 1996 he said: “What I write is hyperactive magic realism. He was given lifetime achievement prizes by the World Fantasy awards and the Horror Writers Association, and received the Writers Guild of America award four times. He loathed being branded a “science fiction” author, although a tally of more than 40 awards proved that SF fans held him in high regard. His stories could be whimsical and cruel, playful and painful, sentimental and shocking. The Los Angeles Times described him as “the 20th-century Lewis Carroll” JG Ballard thought he was “an aggressive and restless extrovert who conducts life at a shout and his fiction at a scream” Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, called him “the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water”.Įllison, who has died aged 84, wrote 70 books, some 400 short stories, dozens of TV screenplays and more than 1,000 essays, introductions and columns. To some, Harlan Ellison was the finest short story writer to have emerged from America’s science fiction ghetto in generations. ![]()
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