arlan Ellison's professional writing career was born in 1955, and coincidentally, so was I. We are the same age, that unparalleled career and I (and I hesitate to admit that at this point, his career is in much better shape than I am). I bring up this bit of synchronicity not to make Harlan feel old, but just to toss out one more possible explanation (I have tossed out many others over the years) for why I feel so closely attached to the man and his oeuvre. While Harlan was in Lester and Evelyn del Rey's kitchen slaving away during that pivotal year of 1955 at "Glowworm"--which critic James Blish once called "the single worst story ever published in the field of science fiction"--I was engaged in a more literal act of creation.
No wonder I feel such a spiritual relationship to the man--as my life was just beginning, the most important part of Harlan's life was also just beginning. In fact, he seemed to be there whenever I entered into a new world. When I first entered the world of SF, he was there, his passionate stories--challenging editors, readers and, with their experiments, sometimes typesetters--scattered among the magazines of the day. The life-affirming passion of his prose was irresistible. It is said that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12. Well, I was 12 when the Ellison-edited Dangerous Visions was released in 1967, attempting to shake up the status quo and show that SF could explore a region where genre traditions had previously feared to tread.
And when I entered the exhilarating and insane world of SF conventions, he was of course one of the most important ingredients. When at age 19 I attended my first World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 in Washington, D.C., Harlan seemed to be the ringmaster, even though he was not the guest of honor (that position was held by Roger Zelanzy). He debuted the not-yet-finished film of A Boy and His Dog, engaged in a duel of insults with Isaac Asimov as they stood on tables at opposite ends of a crowded ballroom, and--unlike most writers--didn't need to be behind a typewriter to entertain.
When, as a teen-ager, I was asked to name my favorite science-fiction authors, I would rattle off what I saw as a holy triumvirate: Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny. As you can see, I considered myself a New-Wave baby. Oh, I loved Heinlein and Asimov at their best, but I knew could never be them. They were not the sort of writer into which the me of those days could grow. On the other hand, these three men pointed the way toward the writer I wanted to be.
Zelazny is, tragically, no longer with us, and Delany has chosen to spend more of his time on essays and autobiography than on his fictions, so it is Harlan who now stands alone as my exemplar of the writing life--not something I could have realized back when I was being born.
Harlan on my mind
All of these thoughts and more crept into my head when I received a review copy of the monumental collection The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective, edited by Terry Dowling, with Richard Delap and Gil Lamont. When this mammoth volume (weighing in at over 1,250 pages) arrived, I sat down with it, thinking I'd read a story or two before passing it on to a reviewer. (And when I say that I read these works, what I really mean is that I re-read them, for I'd read almost all of them before in their original magazine appearances and then collections.) So I started with one of my favorites, "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty." And then I read another, "Jeffty is Five." And then I thought, oh, all right, why not one more, and read "A Boy and His Dog." And then ...
Well, I'm sure that you can imagine where this story is leading. I hopped about in the volume the way one picks at a bowl of mixed nuts, leaping from his essay on taking part in the Freedom March on Montgomery in "From Alabamy, With Hate," to his tale of attempting to give his mother the eulogy she deserved in "My Mother," to "Xenogenesis," his controversial expose on how fannish love turns some readers into little more than stalkers. And then I went back to the fiction again, to "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore," to "Soft Monkey," to--
You get the point. Harlan's prose is addictive enough when encountered in the wild. But when gathered in this gourmet offering, with the finest fruits of a lifetime harvested for my delectation, well, it proved difficult to push myself away from the feast. But I knew I had to, or else I'd never get the chance to tell Science Fiction Weekly readers about this book, a book which, if not already part of an SF fan's library, must be purchased now. And seeing 50 years' worth of words spread out this way, seeing in one glimpse the geography of an entire life, the reasons for this urging are irrefutable.
I once heard it said, in reference to poetry, that the difference between minor and major artists is that a minor artist is someone who's been hit by lightning once in his or her lifetime, while a major artist is lucky enough to have been hit three or four times. Harlan has been hit by lightning so many times that it's a surprise that it is not his hair that stands on end, rather than mine as I read his words. I believe that as time passes, and those who knew him colored by the penumbra of personality fade away, that the stories themselves will last. And I haven't even mentioned the lightning strikes that are "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," or "'Repent, Harlequin,' said the Ticktockman," or "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes," or--
Enough. Harlan's afterword to this volume reads, in total: "For a brief time I was here; and for a brief time I mattered." Harlan has never been a man celebrated for his modesty, but when it comes to his use of the word "brief," I must insist that it is only applicable if we mark the lifetime of stars themselves as brief, for what Harlan has gathered together here for our perusal is far more than merely Essential, as the collection title claims--it is immortal.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. A collection of his short fiction, These Words Are Haunted, has just been published by Wildside Press.
