![]() What does a kid make of those insane titles, like “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W”? They weren’t stories which one read by trying to understand an alien species the heroes discovered, or how to suss out a new invention’s implications, but stories I simply couldn’t get at first glance, and needed to read harder just to figure out what was going on. I spent a lot of time reading and not talking with people.Īnd those Ellison stories! They always came at me from bizarre directions. This was back in the 1970s and 80s, dear reader, when being a nerd was akin to being a leper with open sores. When I turned 13 we moved across the country, and I kept reading sf. I prowled the stacks every chance I could, and brought home troves. I was a big science fiction reader, devouring everything the local public library held, from children’s lit to the most challenging adult science fiction. By “kid” I mean from age eight or so onwards. He also edited several very important anthologies.įor me, he’s a writer who opened my mind wide when I was a kid. For some he’s most famous as the author of everyone’s favorite Star Trek episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” For others he’s one character in a Gay Talese essay, an energetic young man who goes toe to toe with Frank Sinatra. He was best known for stories in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but he also wrote mysteries, mainstream fiction, tv scripts, radio plays, essays on all sorts of things including tv, and a computer game. If you don’t recognize the name, and haven’t clicked on the Wikipedia link above, know that Harlan Ellison was an important writer in many venues. So his creative output looms especially large for me right now, just as he died. But since so much of the responses to his death, both celebrations of his life and celebrations of his death have focused on Ellison as a person to interact with (see this MeFi thread for examples of both positive and negative reactions, or Cory Doctorow’s balanced account, or John Scalzi’s obituary), I’d rather talk about him as someone whose work I read, and who meant a lot to me.Īlso, all of my books are in storage now because of the impending move (which is terrible, and I will write about this), so I can’t quickly reach for my Ellison paperbacks, hardcovers, CDs, and comic books. I only have a couple of stories about interacting with him. ![]() He was one of my favorite writers for a long, long time. ![]()
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