Harlan Ellison Dead: Sci-Fi Writer Was 84 � Variety

Ahhh...

Actual fan here. He got me into science fiction with the Dangerous Visions anthologies. Dusty old volumes in a college library, I think. Anthropology prof tipped the class to "Repent Harlequin said the Tick Tock Man" and Dangerous Visions is what I found when I went looking for it.

"I have no mouth and I must scream."

Yep, just bought and reread that collection at a yard sale last summer. Used to read a lot of his stuff in the 1970s.

Sad. I haven�t read his stuff in years. Will have to add some of his to my to be read pile. I�m sure there are a few around here.


RIP

The ideas were there but a lot of the time Ellison's prose wasn't. What he needed to be a truly great writer would have been an editor that wasn't scared of him and who would stand up to stop him from getting too bizarre. Read some of his stories again today and too much of them were merely typical to what was being done in the 1960's and 70's - too experimental, too obscure, and too often just too weak to be remembered with undue sentimentality. And a lot of his legend was built more around his belligerence and explosive anger and misusing lawsuits to intimidate people than it was around the quality of his work - I don't see what was specifically different about "Soldier" from the original Outer Limits TV show that separated it from a dozen different military-flavoured time-travel stories from the same time period, or what was so unique about it that it entitled him to nearly sue James Cameron to death over a somewhat similar but still very different story The Terminator.

Like I said, some of the ideas were great but in the end the final quality of the stories wasn't, just like Michael Moorcock with his tendency to go un-necessarily weird and obscure when it wasn't needed. There's a lot of flaws both personally and as a writer there with Ellison that shouldn't be disregarded.

That's actually backwards, he led, the others followed the style. It sold then.
Re-reading it was like Twilight Zone, concepts aged and so re-used they're almost cliche now.