The most energetic & misunderstood figure in all of speculative fiction
April 28, 2024 1:50 AM Subscribe
For generations of science fiction and fantasy aficionados, saying the name Harlan Ellison is like uttering a dark spell. Ellison’s writing — primarily in short story format — is fantastic and provocative, but his reputation for contentiousness was equally potent, often overshadowing the art itself. And for younger genre fans, the name Harlan Ellison might not mean anything at all. If you’re into science fiction and fantasy and came of age in the new millennium (and his 2014 Simpsons cameo went over your head), there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Ellison. from The Unexpected Resurrection of Harlan Ellison
Possibly the most contentious person on Earth [2018]
Waiting for the Ellison phone call [2014]
He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. [2011]
Possibly the most contentious person on Earth [2018]
Waiting for the Ellison phone call [2014]
He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. [2011]
posted by pracowity at 3:09 AM on April 28 [15 favorites]
My spouse grew up loving Ellison and introduced me to him. I loved his writing, too. The City of the Edge of Forever saga is fascinating and ridiculous and changed Star Trek forever. But the FPP article quickly glances over the time he grabbed the breast of (one of my favorite authors and one of the most Hugo Award winning authors of all time) Connie Willis at the Hugo awards and suggests Ellison came out of that somehow repentant and changed. And that's bullshit. For the record, here is Ellison's actual response to the event.
Unfortunately, the feminist blogosphere has mostly disappeared from the internet, disappearing most of the discussion of this along with it. A few other actual reactions at the time:
MeFi's own John Scalzi
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
scendan on Livejournal
Nicole LeBoeuf
Read Ellison, don't read Ellison, I don't care, but don't pretend that he was repentant or that feminists didn't have a point about how women in SF had been treated for the entire history of the genre, a point that Ellison demonstrated in an awards ceremony recorded on video for posterity, just in case people ever forget.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:07 AM on April 28 [80 favorites]
Unfortunately, the feminist blogosphere has mostly disappeared from the internet, disappearing most of the discussion of this along with it. A few other actual reactions at the time:
MeFi's own John Scalzi
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
scendan on Livejournal
Nicole LeBoeuf
Read Ellison, don't read Ellison, I don't care, but don't pretend that he was repentant or that feminists didn't have a point about how women in SF had been treated for the entire history of the genre, a point that Ellison demonstrated in an awards ceremony recorded on video for posterity, just in case people ever forget.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:07 AM on April 28 [80 favorites]
Lest we forget what a shitshow Metafilter used to be, here's the deleted FPP about that incident. CW: a whole bunch of really unpleasant people being really unpleasant
posted by hydropsyche at 4:11 AM on April 28 [24 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:11 AM on April 28 [24 favorites]
Ellison’s big mistake was living past 1990 or so. He was an Angry Young Man who grew to be a Cranky Old Man. His public persona was just a collection of “bits” and oft-repeated past grievances, and his best writing was behind him. And then there was assaulting Connie Willis on stage.
He was part of the process of shifting SFF from pulp adventure into a more thoughtful direction, and he was a part of a flowering of wild experimentation, but a lot of his work hasn’t aged well, and he “stayed in place” rather than speaking to the concerns of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Which, fair, not all that many writers with such a long career do.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:14 AM on April 28 [15 favorites]
He was part of the process of shifting SFF from pulp adventure into a more thoughtful direction, and he was a part of a flowering of wild experimentation, but a lot of his work hasn’t aged well, and he “stayed in place” rather than speaking to the concerns of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Which, fair, not all that many writers with such a long career do.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:14 AM on April 28 [15 favorites]
Not to mention his loud and continued support of convicted child abuser Ed Kramer.
I read Ellison when I was way too young to be reading Ellison and found it to be horrific and disturbing. The brutality and relentless misogyny in I Have No Mouth is still stuck in my head. Powerful stuff, but it's not enough to excuse the fact that the power in his writing (and in his life) was built on treating the people around him, especially those who have less power, with dehumanising contempt.
He wasn't "misunderstood". I think he made himself understood very well. He was a nasty, abusive, narcissistic man who wrote some decent sci fi. I also doubt he'd want to be resurrected and have his worst moments papered over like this. Let him rot. His writing speaks for itself.
posted by fight or flight at 4:20 AM on April 28 [33 favorites]
I read Ellison when I was way too young to be reading Ellison and found it to be horrific and disturbing. The brutality and relentless misogyny in I Have No Mouth is still stuck in my head. Powerful stuff, but it's not enough to excuse the fact that the power in his writing (and in his life) was built on treating the people around him, especially those who have less power, with dehumanising contempt.
He wasn't "misunderstood". I think he made himself understood very well. He was a nasty, abusive, narcissistic man who wrote some decent sci fi. I also doubt he'd want to be resurrected and have his worst moments papered over like this. Let him rot. His writing speaks for itself.
posted by fight or flight at 4:20 AM on April 28 [33 favorites]
That 2006 thread is fascinating, not because it's particularly unpleasant but because it's full of authors and con attendees interacting in a civil manner. Once social media algorithms hit nobody would ever act that way again.
posted by kingdead at 4:53 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
posted by kingdead at 4:53 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
He sexually assaulted at least one person. I do not want his reputation rehabilitated. There isn't an oubliette deep enough for him.
posted by humbug at 4:56 AM on April 28 [4 favorites]
posted by humbug at 4:56 AM on April 28 [4 favorites]
He reveled in being an asshole. And plenty of people let him get away with it because "it was funny" as long as he was targeting people who weren't them. Fandom has always had its queer and feminist side, but it's always had a dark side too, and it's only been recently that the former has truly begun to outshine the latter.
It sucks to read old threads from this site. I tried to post a warning about a link on the green recently that got deleted (I suppose for "not answering the question"), but I'm truly embarrassed about what new users will think of us based on how this place operated 20 years ago.
posted by rikschell at 5:04 AM on April 28 [9 favorites]
It sucks to read old threads from this site. I tried to post a warning about a link on the green recently that got deleted (I suppose for "not answering the question"), but I'm truly embarrassed about what new users will think of us based on how this place operated 20 years ago.
posted by rikschell at 5:04 AM on April 28 [9 favorites]
Yeah I started reading a compilation of some of his short stories a while back and the opening story was basically just violent rape with some 'deeper meaning' about how that makes you cynical. I'm grateful my ability to recognize this brand of BS has grown over the years. (thank you, metafilter, and lots of people fighting and raising awareness)
posted by ropeladder at 5:12 AM on April 28 [12 favorites]
posted by ropeladder at 5:12 AM on April 28 [12 favorites]
His stories changed the way I understood SF as a kid who started on Asimov and Heinlein. Thinking back, it amazes me that my small suburban town library had such a collection of his work. Pretty sure we read both Dangerous Visions collections, several short story collections, and his Glass Teat essays. Someone in the library staff loved SF... whoever you are we're greatful.
posted by kokaku at 5:18 AM on April 28 [10 favorites]
posted by kokaku at 5:18 AM on April 28 [10 favorites]
I've wondered, since hearing that The Last Dangerous Visions was finally coming out, whether it will be one of those things better left as vaporware...not that the authors and stories themselves don't deserve publishing, but the line-up has apparently changed dramatically, and I don't know how much we need a lot of Ellison's 1970s interstitials? (I pinch myself for saying that...his introductions to stories were often more entertaining than the stories themselves, for teenage-me. But I'm not teenage-me anymore.)
I don't think we've got to crucify everybody for their sins. (We got through the Helen Vendler obituary thread without veering into the Rita Dove controversy, after all.) But Ellison's whole thing was to build the cross and hand you the hammer. If he wasn't making someone mad, he wasn't doing his job. So this resurrection without repentance, without forgiveness, does make some sense. I don't know how much of his work, either original or editorial, still holds up (if only there were a forthcoming book of stories to find out!), but his ability to inspire anger certainly does.
posted by mittens at 5:23 AM on April 28 [6 favorites]
I don't think we've got to crucify everybody for their sins. (We got through the Helen Vendler obituary thread without veering into the Rita Dove controversy, after all.) But Ellison's whole thing was to build the cross and hand you the hammer. If he wasn't making someone mad, he wasn't doing his job. So this resurrection without repentance, without forgiveness, does make some sense. I don't know how much of his work, either original or editorial, still holds up (if only there were a forthcoming book of stories to find out!), but his ability to inspire anger certainly does.
posted by mittens at 5:23 AM on April 28 [6 favorites]
Ellison was, I think, above everything else, a contrarian. He always had to be kicking against something. At best this led to his participation in Civil Rights marches and his loud support of the Equal Rights Amendment. He sometimes championed new writes (apparently including Octavia Butler). Not of that added up to affirmatively supporting anything, and often led to him stubbornly holding bad and even toxic positions.
It occurs to me that a problem with his writing is that he helped bust SFF free of its roots, but we’re 50 years beyond that (at least in written form; media is still like 80% pulp); there’s a limit to how much we need his transgressions — we need our own.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:27 AM on April 28 [13 favorites]
It occurs to me that a problem with his writing is that he helped bust SFF free of its roots, but we’re 50 years beyond that (at least in written form; media is still like 80% pulp); there’s a limit to how much we need his transgressions — we need our own.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:27 AM on April 28 [13 favorites]
He was definitely a writer of contradictions - famously, he mentored Octavia Butler, and his sixties/seventies/eighties essays about feminism, racism and policing are worth looking at if you're trying to get a sense of his concerns.
And if you read sixties science fiction, there's a whole trend of "we are tough and real and deep, which is why we're going to write explicit sexual violence, because the WORLD is violent, man" which didn't start or unfortunately end with Ellison. (Not that dissimilar from Josh Whedon-ish "we're going to critique the sexualization and marginalization of women characters by...sexualizing and marginalizing them, but in a FEMINIST way", just more unpleasant.) So he's certainly not uniquely culpable in that regard.
I do think that the idea of a "resurrection" of Ellison shows why science fiction needs to narrate its history more. You really can't talk about Ellison without talking not just about, eg, Asimov sexually harassing people, or Marion Zimmer Bradley abusing her child, but without talking about the big concerns and dominant tones in SFF that made these writers popular. Ellison's particular brand of misogyny was very, very much part of popular culture too - so many, many, many movies and novels in the sixties and seventies have as their culmination sexualized murders of women, who are used to represent the "civilization" that's holding back the young, truth-seeking hero. Women, families, mothers - just this really rudimentary, "I hate you but you also have power over me and/or I'm sexually conflicted, murder time".
You even see it upside down in James Tiptree - her writing engages with this type of misogyny in ways that I don't think are always politically productive or helpful but in fact just reinscribe it and treat it as eternal.
This stuff is present in lots of science fiction and I think it gets pinned on individual figures because there isn't a really good popular understanding of science fiction as a genre that has a history.
As a result, I think we're apt to see a "resurrection" of Ellison that elides his misogyny or turns it into a subsidiary feature of his general crankiness, which I think is bad. He was "a man of his times", and that's precisely why you can't write out his misogyny - he's not just a lone crank.
posted by Frowner at 5:33 AM on April 28 [52 favorites]
And if you read sixties science fiction, there's a whole trend of "we are tough and real and deep, which is why we're going to write explicit sexual violence, because the WORLD is violent, man" which didn't start or unfortunately end with Ellison. (Not that dissimilar from Josh Whedon-ish "we're going to critique the sexualization and marginalization of women characters by...sexualizing and marginalizing them, but in a FEMINIST way", just more unpleasant.) So he's certainly not uniquely culpable in that regard.
I do think that the idea of a "resurrection" of Ellison shows why science fiction needs to narrate its history more. You really can't talk about Ellison without talking not just about, eg, Asimov sexually harassing people, or Marion Zimmer Bradley abusing her child, but without talking about the big concerns and dominant tones in SFF that made these writers popular. Ellison's particular brand of misogyny was very, very much part of popular culture too - so many, many, many movies and novels in the sixties and seventies have as their culmination sexualized murders of women, who are used to represent the "civilization" that's holding back the young, truth-seeking hero. Women, families, mothers - just this really rudimentary, "I hate you but you also have power over me and/or I'm sexually conflicted, murder time".
You even see it upside down in James Tiptree - her writing engages with this type of misogyny in ways that I don't think are always politically productive or helpful but in fact just reinscribe it and treat it as eternal.
This stuff is present in lots of science fiction and I think it gets pinned on individual figures because there isn't a really good popular understanding of science fiction as a genre that has a history.
As a result, I think we're apt to see a "resurrection" of Ellison that elides his misogyny or turns it into a subsidiary feature of his general crankiness, which I think is bad. He was "a man of his times", and that's precisely why you can't write out his misogyny - he's not just a lone crank.
posted by Frowner at 5:33 AM on April 28 [52 favorites]
If you can divorce the art from the artist, go ahead and enjoy Ellison (The City of the Edge of Forever is the greatest TOS episode) but don't be surprised if others can't, especially those he harmed.
posted by tommasz at 5:50 AM on April 28 [12 favorites]
posted by tommasz at 5:50 AM on April 28 [12 favorites]
He reveled in being an asshole
Great writer, but his legendary reputation for challenging the status quo is greatly oversold. The guy was just an asshole, and his antics hewed far closer to the WWE than social activism.
He did pioneer a few things in his writing, but they’ve been explored much more deeply and thoroughly since then. If you’re interested in the development of science fiction I highly recommend him, but he didn’t “slip through the cracks”; he slipped into history.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:03 AM on April 28 [8 favorites]
Great writer, but his legendary reputation for challenging the status quo is greatly oversold. The guy was just an asshole, and his antics hewed far closer to the WWE than social activism.
He did pioneer a few things in his writing, but they’ve been explored much more deeply and thoroughly since then. If you’re interested in the development of science fiction I highly recommend him, but he didn’t “slip through the cracks”; he slipped into history.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:03 AM on April 28 [8 favorites]
Also that article's description of the Dangerous Visions anthologies is hilarious - highlighting three women writers when these were huge anthologies with hardly any work by women and not noting that there's some weird flip little comment about how great Joanna Russ looks in a bikini. (Which has always struck me as an especially gratuitous remark because while there have certainly been fun-times feminist SF writers would would not particular mind being complimented on their appearance, Russ really seems to have been a very inward, ironic person whose sense of humor didn't run that way at all - very much a take-down remark.)
I was so disappointed in those books when I read them in my teens. Partly because I wasn't quite ready for some of the stories, but partly because a lot of them were just kind of sexist and blah. I can see why they were important books and as a GenX person I feel like I have more patience for sixties/seventies SF than a lot of my younger pals do, but even so.
There were/are so many male writers (and I expect that exactly the same thing is true about white writers and straight writers vis a vis people of color and queer people) who you know had many accomplished women friends and literally knew women as people who were smart and could do things and yet you read their stories and there are no women who are smart and can do things. You read male writers who notably had older female friends or mentors, and the depiction of older women in their work is extremely hateful. It's so clear that for this type of person, the "real" world, the world that everyone knows, is one where women are bubbleheads or harpies or disgusting old bags who never do anything worthwhile, and that's the only world worth writing, even though it isn't the writers' actual lived world at all. "Real" women are sexpots or maternal/invisible or hags; the women the writers actually know aren't "real" at all.
posted by Frowner at 6:17 AM on April 28 [35 favorites]
I was so disappointed in those books when I read them in my teens. Partly because I wasn't quite ready for some of the stories, but partly because a lot of them were just kind of sexist and blah. I can see why they were important books and as a GenX person I feel like I have more patience for sixties/seventies SF than a lot of my younger pals do, but even so.
There were/are so many male writers (and I expect that exactly the same thing is true about white writers and straight writers vis a vis people of color and queer people) who you know had many accomplished women friends and literally knew women as people who were smart and could do things and yet you read their stories and there are no women who are smart and can do things. You read male writers who notably had older female friends or mentors, and the depiction of older women in their work is extremely hateful. It's so clear that for this type of person, the "real" world, the world that everyone knows, is one where women are bubbleheads or harpies or disgusting old bags who never do anything worthwhile, and that's the only world worth writing, even though it isn't the writers' actual lived world at all. "Real" women are sexpots or maternal/invisible or hags; the women the writers actually know aren't "real" at all.
posted by Frowner at 6:17 AM on April 28 [35 favorites]
I've enjoyed some Ellison but I've always found it powerfully disturbing how intense the praise has been historitcally for those boy and his dog stories. The depictions of rape in them are so casual and vivid lol. I'm firmly outside the camp of people who believe that fiction needs to adhere to real world morality or that writing something condones that thing but I know I wouldn't want to know someone who wrote a thing like that. Let alone gush about how good it was.
posted by throwitawayurthegarbageman at 6:23 AM on April 28 [6 favorites]
posted by throwitawayurthegarbageman at 6:23 AM on April 28 [6 favorites]
Ugh. Ellison. Some interesting work no doubt, and he helped one or two people but how many more brilliant young writers did he scare off with his anger, arrogance and misogyny. Nothing pays for that, there is no redemption. Hope he winds up in a hell of his own making.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:39 AM on April 28 [10 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:39 AM on April 28 [10 favorites]
My strongest memory of Harlan Ellison is of a kind of roundtable he did in 2001 with Neil Gaiman and Peter David; the theme of the evening ended up being broadly, "shut up, Harlan, and let the adults talk." One thing that stuck in my mind was the responses all three gave to the question of what they would do if they learned they had six months to live. Gaiman talked about going back through his projects and finding the ones he'd put off but really wanted to finish; David talked about the importance he attached to his family and to spending those last months of life giving them good memories; Ellison talked about which political figures he'd try to kill before getting gunned down by the cops. I mostly agreed with his choices (although, by 2001, Strom Thurmond was a waste of a bullet), but, damn, dude, you don't have to edgelord everything.
posted by jackbishop at 6:47 AM on April 28 [25 favorites]
posted by jackbishop at 6:47 AM on April 28 [25 favorites]
Ellison is one of those people who illustrate the need to be able to separate the artist from their work. Yes, he was quite the asshole. Quite the asshole. But, he also penned some amazing and influential tales (I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream being, perhaps, the quintessential example.)
posted by Thorzdad at 7:09 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 7:09 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
edgelord
That is an excellent description of something he pioneered, that was greatly imitated in the fan community, and has spread virulently over the years. It is as distinctively his legacy as much as anything he wrote.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:23 AM on April 28 [16 favorites]
That is an excellent description of something he pioneered, that was greatly imitated in the fan community, and has spread virulently over the years. It is as distinctively his legacy as much as anything he wrote.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:23 AM on April 28 [16 favorites]
He's one of those figures where some people can say "he's a tremendous asshole, but he creates great art!"—film directors seem to have a lot of these types—and one of the few real positive developments in Western culture of late is people beginning to say "hold up, you know there are a lot of people out there who can create great art and who aren't assholes" and/or "why do we have to accept the asshole along with the art?"
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:23 AM on April 28 [17 favorites]
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:23 AM on April 28 [17 favorites]
I keep thinking about this because I'm really interested in the history of SFF as genre(s) (although I've got to admit that my serious reading on this never recovered from the pandemic).
I used to do a reading group/class (more goals than a reading group, less real work than a class) where we read feminist and left wing SF plus some critical and historical work. My goal was to discuss SFF and sort of evolve a historical understanding; attendees' goals ranged from that to "read fun stuff and eat snacks", so we were sometimes at odds over whether and how much to read of older material, especially key texts that were in various ways not in line with our values.
The thing is, I think Ellison is a really interesting writer and if you're trying to arrive at an overview of Anglophone SF in the 20th century, you should probably read a reasonable amount of his work. But that's different from saying that we should read him cozily and uncritically as just a Great Writer. His work tells you a lot about his time, the culture of SFF, counterculture-adjacent material - it is rich! But just trying to revive him as this terrific writer that people had somehow forgotten is a mistake. I think there are books that can be approached that way - Lud In The Mist, The Folk of the Air - because while of course they too are books of their time and like all texts benefit from a critical reading, they don't carry any of the various kinds of weight that Ellison's work does.
So much depends on why you're reading something. Obviously there's a reasonable amount of "I stumbled on this book/I was stuck at my aunt's and it was in the spare bedroom and it seemed to be interesting" reading, but in general people do pick, especially science fiction fans. I'd say that I definitely read some books whose values I don't share - I even have some favorite books with some frankly bad values (not going to bat for the politics in LOTR, for instance, or the way class is written in Joan Aiken's Dido Twite books). Or the way class is written in Virginia Woolf, for that matter, or gender in Bleak House. I think science fiction fans can handle that stuff, but I also think that it would be weird to discuss Dickens without discussing how he wrote women or how he wrote Jewish characters, etc. And I don't think I'd have my discussion of Dickens from a standpoint of "I really like Bleak House, so I'm going to defend everything Dickens wrote and believed". Some of what he wrote and believed is indefensible!
My feeling is that you can't and shouldn't separate the writer from the work, but that doesn't mean that you need to expunge the work. (Although it also means that if you're like, "no, let's not read that for book group, too misogynist for me thanks", that is reasonable stance to take unless the bookgroup is "A Complete Read Through Of Important New Wave Stories".)
posted by Frowner at 7:47 AM on April 28 [17 favorites]
I used to do a reading group/class (more goals than a reading group, less real work than a class) where we read feminist and left wing SF plus some critical and historical work. My goal was to discuss SFF and sort of evolve a historical understanding; attendees' goals ranged from that to "read fun stuff and eat snacks", so we were sometimes at odds over whether and how much to read of older material, especially key texts that were in various ways not in line with our values.
The thing is, I think Ellison is a really interesting writer and if you're trying to arrive at an overview of Anglophone SF in the 20th century, you should probably read a reasonable amount of his work. But that's different from saying that we should read him cozily and uncritically as just a Great Writer. His work tells you a lot about his time, the culture of SFF, counterculture-adjacent material - it is rich! But just trying to revive him as this terrific writer that people had somehow forgotten is a mistake. I think there are books that can be approached that way - Lud In The Mist, The Folk of the Air - because while of course they too are books of their time and like all texts benefit from a critical reading, they don't carry any of the various kinds of weight that Ellison's work does.
So much depends on why you're reading something. Obviously there's a reasonable amount of "I stumbled on this book/I was stuck at my aunt's and it was in the spare bedroom and it seemed to be interesting" reading, but in general people do pick, especially science fiction fans. I'd say that I definitely read some books whose values I don't share - I even have some favorite books with some frankly bad values (not going to bat for the politics in LOTR, for instance, or the way class is written in Joan Aiken's Dido Twite books). Or the way class is written in Virginia Woolf, for that matter, or gender in Bleak House. I think science fiction fans can handle that stuff, but I also think that it would be weird to discuss Dickens without discussing how he wrote women or how he wrote Jewish characters, etc. And I don't think I'd have my discussion of Dickens from a standpoint of "I really like Bleak House, so I'm going to defend everything Dickens wrote and believed". Some of what he wrote and believed is indefensible!
My feeling is that you can't and shouldn't separate the writer from the work, but that doesn't mean that you need to expunge the work. (Although it also means that if you're like, "no, let's not read that for book group, too misogynist for me thanks", that is reasonable stance to take unless the bookgroup is "A Complete Read Through Of Important New Wave Stories".)
posted by Frowner at 7:47 AM on April 28 [17 favorites]
He was an asshole and that’s totally on him but in many ways his behaviour was a mirror of society as a whole because he was allowed and likely encouraged.
posted by ashbury at 7:48 AM on April 28 [1 favorite]
posted by ashbury at 7:48 AM on April 28 [1 favorite]
Also, I think "being an asshole is cool" was definitely a post-war through 9/11 American value - when I was a teen/twentysomething in the nineties, it was extremely cool to be an asshole. The left, alternative culture, etc all really framed "being an asshole" as the primary way of speaking truth to power. I think this is not entirely wrong and bad - certainly when you think about American Cold War hegemony, you can see how politeness and propriety were mobilized to shut down anything that threatened power, and you can certainly see how heteronormative don't-talk-about-sex-revere-motherhood stuff was in there. There's a way in which being an asshole was a reasonable response to those facets of culture, but of course people don't just turn it off when they're done being an asshole to Ronald Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly, they carry right on being assholes to their moms and girlfriends and comrades, anyone they resent.
In sum, I think that a historical read of Ellison not only situations him in the middle of misogyny and rape culture but also situates him in the middle of far right respectability discourse.
posted by Frowner at 7:52 AM on April 28 [18 favorites]
In sum, I think that a historical read of Ellison not only situations him in the middle of misogyny and rape culture but also situates him in the middle of far right respectability discourse.
posted by Frowner at 7:52 AM on April 28 [18 favorites]
My feeling is that you can't and shouldn't separate the writer from the work, but that doesn't mean that you need to expunge the work.
Yes, especially because when you go far enough back, almost everything that survives is problematic in one way or another.
posted by rikschell at 7:54 AM on April 28 [6 favorites]
Yes, especially because when you go far enough back, almost everything that survives is problematic in one way or another.
posted by rikschell at 7:54 AM on April 28 [6 favorites]
City on the Edge of Forever
I'm in the "... all you zombies" camp for timey-wimey stories, the legacy of this TOS episode is a lot of people who think they have a smart take on the storytelling problem of a causative paradox. Please my fellow zombies, no more.
posted by k3ninho at 7:54 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
I'm in the "... all you zombies" camp for timey-wimey stories, the legacy of this TOS episode is a lot of people who think they have a smart take on the storytelling problem of a causative paradox. Please my fellow zombies, no more.
posted by k3ninho at 7:54 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
I'm of the opinion that Ellison could be either a right bastard or a true friend (or both) at any given time. Usually when his behavior would come up, one of his many supporters would appear with a story about how he was a true friend who'd gone above and beyond to help someone in need. (I also remember a scathing response to Xenogenesis that called out his own bad behaviors, many at that con. Wish I could find it again.)
Getting to Last Dangerous Vision, I'm sad that a lot of the original stories are going to be dropped. I think that a lot were written for the book, so if they don't appear there, they probably are going to be gone for good, unless someone does an anthology of dropped stories. I have the first two anthologies in torn up paperbacks. I doubt that I'll get the 3rd.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:11 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
Getting to Last Dangerous Vision, I'm sad that a lot of the original stories are going to be dropped. I think that a lot were written for the book, so if they don't appear there, they probably are going to be gone for good, unless someone does an anthology of dropped stories. I have the first two anthologies in torn up paperbacks. I doubt that I'll get the 3rd.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:11 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
"hold up, you know there are a lot of people out there who can create great art and who aren't assholes" and/or "why do we have to accept the asshole along with the art?"
Or as I sometimes put it: "How can get the slime off this book?"
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:15 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
Or as I sometimes put it: "How can get the slime off this book?"
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:15 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
The sadistic, omnipotent computer in I Have No Mouth was named AM. Ellison liked to stylize his own name as HE. I don't think this was pure coincidence.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:28 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:28 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
I may have seen that same tour that Gaiman, David and Ellison did in 2001 when it came to MIT. I remember Gaiman and David being really thoughtful, and Ellison being very shouty, insulting and interrupty, to the point where he got booed, which he seemed to exult in. We had come to hear three writers, but Ellison did his level best to ensure that we only heard one. He really, really did not seem to like sharing the stage, and every time anyone reacted positively to anything Gaiman or David said it really seemed to stick in his craw. And while I appreciate what Frowner said about how being an asshole was the way to be counterculture up to 9/11, that wasn't the kind of asshole Ellison was being. (I knew plenty of those kinds of assholes.) It was much more of an "I am going to be the center of attention and I don't care what I have to do to get it!"
I thought much more highly of Ellison going into that event than I did coming out of it, and it definitely has colored my perspective on his work since.
posted by rednikki at 9:04 AM on April 28 [10 favorites]
I thought much more highly of Ellison going into that event than I did coming out of it, and it definitely has colored my perspective on his work since.
posted by rednikki at 9:04 AM on April 28 [10 favorites]
As for his craftsmanship, I hold that in higher esteem than most here. As for him, I pretty much agree with all those who've written in this thread.
I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks about two years back. I asked a friend to bring me something to read. He brought me a Harlan Ellison book. So dark and nihilistic I couldn't handle it. And brilliant.
I think he just plain hated humans.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:04 AM on April 28 [5 favorites]
I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks about two years back. I asked a friend to bring me something to read. He brought me a Harlan Ellison book. So dark and nihilistic I couldn't handle it. And brilliant.
I think he just plain hated humans.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:04 AM on April 28 [5 favorites]
Somewhat related: I was looking to buy Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle for some research I'm doing for something I'm writing. According to Amazon its genre is: romance, science fiction.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:09 AM on April 28 [1 favorite]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:09 AM on April 28 [1 favorite]
I enjoyed reading about the development of the I Have No Mouth CDROM game, but Ellison seems ... exhausting?
posted by credulous at 9:35 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
posted by credulous at 9:35 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
I detested Ellison from the beginning, which for me coincided with his first appearances in the major magazines, and the traction he ended up achieving caused me to lose respect for the genre itself.
posted by jamjam at 10:22 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
posted by jamjam at 10:22 AM on April 28 [2 favorites]
Ellison discourse is so exhausting.
posted by cupcakeninja at 10:31 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
posted by cupcakeninja at 10:31 AM on April 28 [3 favorites]
When D.C. published the "The Night of Thanks, but No Thanks" it immediately became one of the most memorable Batman stories I'd ever encountered, and one I recommended to anybody with an interest in picking up comics. It was one of those handful of issues that really illustrated to me that comics have the potential to be so much more than good guys punching bad guys in the face, and that I wasn't wasting my time with the medium. I think it was only after that issue was published and I was paying attention to his name that I became aware of his Star Trek history. I still didn't know anything about who Harlan Ellison was as a person.
To this day, I don't know a lot about him--I haven't searched out any of his other writing, I haven't gone down Internet rabbit holes reading his biography. But what has come to my attention hasn't been particularly positive (and I lot of it I've probably read on MetaFilter), and I'm far from the kind of person who is an apologist for other people, so I don't recommend that story any more. But I figure I'd mention it here where people can make up their own minds about whether they want to engage with his work or not.
posted by sardonyx at 10:35 AM on April 28 [5 favorites]
To this day, I don't know a lot about him--I haven't searched out any of his other writing, I haven't gone down Internet rabbit holes reading his biography. But what has come to my attention hasn't been particularly positive (and I lot of it I've probably read on MetaFilter), and I'm far from the kind of person who is an apologist for other people, so I don't recommend that story any more. But I figure I'd mention it here where people can make up their own minds about whether they want to engage with his work or not.
posted by sardonyx at 10:35 AM on April 28 [5 favorites]
I'm someone who discovered Harlan *first* as someone who joined a street gang in the 50's New York city and described the life, getting in knife fights where they tied your wrist to the other guy.
That gave a lot of context to the rest of his life/behavior:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memos_from_Purgatory
[snip]
"Book One: The Gang" is devoted to Ellison's ten weeks as a member of a street gang he calls The Barons, in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York considered one of the most dangerous areas of the city in 1954. His goal was to research what became his first novel, Web of the City. Thus Ellison was in regular contact with his literary agent during his time in the Barons.
posted by aleph at 10:58 AM on April 28 [6 favorites]
That gave a lot of context to the rest of his life/behavior:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memos_from_Purgatory
[snip]
"Book One: The Gang" is devoted to Ellison's ten weeks as a member of a street gang he calls The Barons, in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York considered one of the most dangerous areas of the city in 1954. His goal was to research what became his first novel, Web of the City. Thus Ellison was in regular contact with his literary agent during his time in the Barons.
posted by aleph at 10:58 AM on April 28 [6 favorites]
"why do we have to accept the asshole along with the art?"
we don't. Expunge the asshole as you wish, but please don't go expunging the art.
posted by philip-random at 12:00 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
we don't. Expunge the asshole as you wish, but please don't go expunging the art.
posted by philip-random at 12:00 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
We didn't expunge the art, a sick crewman fell through the time portal and changed history so Ellison isn't remembered.
posted by k3ninho at 12:05 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
posted by k3ninho at 12:05 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
works for me
posted by philip-random at 12:10 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 12:10 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
Expunge the asshole as you wish, but please don't go expunging the art.
I don't think we need to hunt down every copy of Ellison's work or erase his name from the history of the genre. But there is a lot of scifi that is better and by better people.
I don't see any reason we need to keep Ellison in a place of honor, or keep recommending his books as classics of the genre. Without the Great Writer mythology, I don't think there is much to recommend him or much to keep people coming back.
Better artists have been forgotten by history and we've managed pretty well.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:26 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
I don't think we need to hunt down every copy of Ellison's work or erase his name from the history of the genre. But there is a lot of scifi that is better and by better people.
I don't see any reason we need to keep Ellison in a place of honor, or keep recommending his books as classics of the genre. Without the Great Writer mythology, I don't think there is much to recommend him or much to keep people coming back.
Better artists have been forgotten by history and we've managed pretty well.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:26 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
Without the Great Writer mythology, I don't think there is much to recommend him or much to keep people coming back.
Counterpoint: without Harlan Ellison around to sabotage Harlan Ellison’s reputation, people may remember that he could be a pretty good writer.
(“Great” would probably be overstating it but he did knock it out of the park a few times)
posted by atoxyl at 12:30 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
Counterpoint: without Harlan Ellison around to sabotage Harlan Ellison’s reputation, people may remember that he could be a pretty good writer.
(“Great” would probably be overstating it but he did knock it out of the park a few times)
posted by atoxyl at 12:30 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
Sorry to be unclear. I meant "Great Writer" to be a parallel to "Great Man". The idea that individual writers were responsible for scifi developing as a genre, rather than being the people who happened to be in a position (with the right connections, skin color, social class, gender, etc) to be published during a larger artistic and cultural moment. Ellison was neither necessary nor sufficient to develop science fiction outside the pulp lens.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:36 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:36 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
I got that, but you were also talking about his actual work, and my evaluation of his actual work is that he wasn’t the top of the heap as a writer in his era, upper middle maybe, but he did produce a few stories that will be anthologized forever, and some lesser known ones that are memorable, too, and there are plenty of folks in SF history who are remembered at that level. He’s very much a relic of that era but again, who in the genre isn’t?
I wasn’t making my point very clear either maybe (or it just wasn’t that great or interesting a point). I just find “what ought we to do about [writer]” conversations a little tiresome in general because what difference do most of our prescriptive opinions about that make in the long run, anyway?
posted by atoxyl at 1:07 PM on April 28 [6 favorites]
I wasn’t making my point very clear either maybe (or it just wasn’t that great or interesting a point). I just find “what ought we to do about [writer]” conversations a little tiresome in general because what difference do most of our prescriptive opinions about that make in the long run, anyway?
posted by atoxyl at 1:07 PM on April 28 [6 favorites]
The best people can make the worst art. The worst people can make the best art. Ignore the artist; pay attention to the art.
posted by pracowity at 1:47 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
posted by pracowity at 1:47 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
I don't think we've got to crucify everybody for their sins.
Have you met MetaFilter?
posted by doctornemo at 2:07 PM on April 28 [13 favorites]
Have you met MetaFilter?
posted by doctornemo at 2:07 PM on April 28 [13 favorites]
One (two) of the books I read of his in high school/college were his books of TV criticism, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. Two things I really remembered from them still stand out as true: first, a really horrific column about beauty pageants for little girls, like barely post-toddler, which was in tune with the criticism of child pageants that we hear today, 50+ years later, and second, his hate-on for the California governor at the time of writing, whom he hated almost as much as President Nixon and VP Agnew: Governor Ronald Reagan.
I agree with most if not all of the criticisms of his behavior and writing, especially as he got older, but those two books have stayed with me. People contain multitudes but some of them contain widely divergent multitudes, like the guy who wrote the criticism of sexualizing and exploiting pre-pubescent girls in pageants and the same guy who groped Connie Ellis.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 2:10 PM on April 28 [9 favorites]
I agree with most if not all of the criticisms of his behavior and writing, especially as he got older, but those two books have stayed with me. People contain multitudes but some of them contain widely divergent multitudes, like the guy who wrote the criticism of sexualizing and exploiting pre-pubescent girls in pageants and the same guy who groped Connie Ellis.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 2:10 PM on April 28 [9 favorites]
Wow. A very consistently anti-Ellison thread, this one.
A lot of my memories of him are personal. As a college student a group of us got him to our campus for a talk, and it was a wild time. We had dinner with him, and he veered rapidly from being rude ("You dress like a science fiction fan!" to one person) to thoughtful and funny. His talk energized an auditorium full of sleepy students and maybe some faculty, staff, and townies.
(One cute bit: for some reason he claimed that a certain hot sauce was too hot for humans to consume. Afterwards, backstage, I asked for the bottle and sipped it without dying. Fun to watch his eyes bug out.)
I spent time with him as a horror con some years later. He was more into the cult of personality, with an entourage and talking about his benevolent impact on society. It was a good session, overall. He did challenge Joe Lansdale to a martian arts fight, I think.
I read the guy when I was in 6th grade. Some bunch of stories that blew the top of my head off. I read more as a teenager, his sf, his mainstream fiction (anyone else know his Elvis novel?), his essays, and his fun introductions to stories in the Dangerous Visions books - and please recall that it was rarely easy to get Ellison's stuff back then. A lot went out of print quickly. (Working at a used bookshop with a big sf section helped)
I reread him now, from time to time, like taking a big heaping of spice. His place in sf genre history... I'm not sure, now, thinking about this thread vs my own experience.
posted by doctornemo at 2:14 PM on April 28 [9 favorites]
A lot of my memories of him are personal. As a college student a group of us got him to our campus for a talk, and it was a wild time. We had dinner with him, and he veered rapidly from being rude ("You dress like a science fiction fan!" to one person) to thoughtful and funny. His talk energized an auditorium full of sleepy students and maybe some faculty, staff, and townies.
(One cute bit: for some reason he claimed that a certain hot sauce was too hot for humans to consume. Afterwards, backstage, I asked for the bottle and sipped it without dying. Fun to watch his eyes bug out.)
I spent time with him as a horror con some years later. He was more into the cult of personality, with an entourage and talking about his benevolent impact on society. It was a good session, overall. He did challenge Joe Lansdale to a martian arts fight, I think.
I read the guy when I was in 6th grade. Some bunch of stories that blew the top of my head off. I read more as a teenager, his sf, his mainstream fiction (anyone else know his Elvis novel?), his essays, and his fun introductions to stories in the Dangerous Visions books - and please recall that it was rarely easy to get Ellison's stuff back then. A lot went out of print quickly. (Working at a used bookshop with a big sf section helped)
I reread him now, from time to time, like taking a big heaping of spice. His place in sf genre history... I'm not sure, now, thinking about this thread vs my own experience.
posted by doctornemo at 2:14 PM on April 28 [9 favorites]
Ellison was embedded in time, both as a writer and a person. The Times, they [were] a changing, and he was a significant actor in his niche.
I read Dangerous Visions in my early to mid-twenties. His editorial comments affected me more than most of the stories. He asked prospective contributors to write under a deadline. The stories reflected his literary bent, which surfed precariously on the New Wave of writers. We were mercifully treated to stories about the individual's response to a "what if" turn of events that didn't involve giant ants or reanimated corpses.
I have a volume of his works containing some more unsettling stories. One of my favorite stories is A Boy and His Dog. I noticed that several MeFites called it out because of its misogynistic content. That's fine. But what I saw was a survival strategy in a post-apocalyptic world. In this case, it was not a cloyed Adam&Eve tale about the survival of our species. It was about the survival of an individual.
The "Boy" ventured into the underworld, leaving his companion on the surface. The prospect of an easy life below ground tempted him, but the easy life turned out to be one where he would be used and cloistered and denied autonomy. He escaped and reunited with his companion. I guess the most disturbing parts of the story are shared by the conditions of the insane society below ground and the chaos of trying to survive above ground. After I finished the story, it finally hit me that feeding the woman to his dog was a horrific act that seemed normal at the time.
Ellison did not write stories like the ones from "The Golden Age" of science fiction. His temperament and vision didn't allow for that nostalgic and shop-worn pap.
I don't have to adore a writer to enjoy their work. If that were the case, I would not have loved Ancient Evenings by Mailer. I also had a volume of the complete works of de Sade. It took me two years to get through it. De Sade was a masterful writer, maybe even a genius, and I would not recommend his work to the faint of heart. Even if you enjoy the works of Stephen King, your constitution will revolt, and your dreams will be infected for years.
Ellison's brand of iconoclasm was right for the times. I can use my rapidly waxing powers of retrospection to appreciate him without trying to fit him into the 50 years that have transpired since he met Asimov at a dinner and remarked that Asimov didn't look as impressive as he was led to believe. (I don't recall Ellison's exact words, though I suspect they were sharper and pithier than mine.)
Finally, I recommend Gardner Dozier's Anthologies (the Year's Best Short Stories) to historians of the genre. I once had the complete collection. If you want a lively romp through Science Fiction as it evolved over perhaps two decades, this is your summer-long bucket list. Maybe it'll last you through Christmas.
posted by mule98J at 2:31 PM on April 28 [5 favorites]
I read Dangerous Visions in my early to mid-twenties. His editorial comments affected me more than most of the stories. He asked prospective contributors to write under a deadline. The stories reflected his literary bent, which surfed precariously on the New Wave of writers. We were mercifully treated to stories about the individual's response to a "what if" turn of events that didn't involve giant ants or reanimated corpses.
I have a volume of his works containing some more unsettling stories. One of my favorite stories is A Boy and His Dog. I noticed that several MeFites called it out because of its misogynistic content. That's fine. But what I saw was a survival strategy in a post-apocalyptic world. In this case, it was not a cloyed Adam&Eve tale about the survival of our species. It was about the survival of an individual.
The "Boy" ventured into the underworld, leaving his companion on the surface. The prospect of an easy life below ground tempted him, but the easy life turned out to be one where he would be used and cloistered and denied autonomy. He escaped and reunited with his companion. I guess the most disturbing parts of the story are shared by the conditions of the insane society below ground and the chaos of trying to survive above ground. After I finished the story, it finally hit me that feeding the woman to his dog was a horrific act that seemed normal at the time.
Ellison did not write stories like the ones from "The Golden Age" of science fiction. His temperament and vision didn't allow for that nostalgic and shop-worn pap.
I don't have to adore a writer to enjoy their work. If that were the case, I would not have loved Ancient Evenings by Mailer. I also had a volume of the complete works of de Sade. It took me two years to get through it. De Sade was a masterful writer, maybe even a genius, and I would not recommend his work to the faint of heart. Even if you enjoy the works of Stephen King, your constitution will revolt, and your dreams will be infected for years.
Ellison's brand of iconoclasm was right for the times. I can use my rapidly waxing powers of retrospection to appreciate him without trying to fit him into the 50 years that have transpired since he met Asimov at a dinner and remarked that Asimov didn't look as impressive as he was led to believe. (I don't recall Ellison's exact words, though I suspect they were sharper and pithier than mine.)
Finally, I recommend Gardner Dozier's Anthologies (the Year's Best Short Stories) to historians of the genre. I once had the complete collection. If you want a lively romp through Science Fiction as it evolved over perhaps two decades, this is your summer-long bucket list. Maybe it'll last you through Christmas.
posted by mule98J at 2:31 PM on April 28 [5 favorites]
I took a moment to hunt out the old story about gabe from penny arcade having an asshole-off with the Great Man and smile, reminiscently.
He was a pretty good writer, all told, and a very big asshole. I don't think there's much to argue about with either.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:44 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
He was a pretty good writer, all told, and a very big asshole. I don't think there's much to argue about with either.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:44 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
I also attended the MIT Q&A he held with Gaiman & Peter David. Ellison may have been in a particularly dyspeptic mood that evening, because the airline lost his luggage, making him miss his heartburn medication.
[My husband happened to have Prilosec with him, which we offered to Mr. Ellison afterwards, and he was most appreciative.]
posted by cheshyre at 3:17 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
[My husband happened to have Prilosec with him, which we offered to Mr. Ellison afterwards, and he was most appreciative.]
posted by cheshyre at 3:17 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
I was never that fond of Ellison, even back in the 90s, because so much of his self-aggrandizing stories were actually him being an asshole, and even physically assaulting people. Just because they are Hollywood people doesn't actually make punching them funny. Also, even then it had been years, maybe decades, since he had produced any really notable work, at least in fiction. Whatever charm there is in an enfant terrible tends to fade fast when they are no longer producing anything artistically interesting.
posted by tavella at 3:18 PM on April 28 [5 favorites]
posted by tavella at 3:18 PM on April 28 [5 favorites]
Lest we forget what a shitshow Metafilter used to be, here's the deleted FPP about that incident. CW: a whole bunch of really unpleasant people being really unpleasant
Wow, that's a lot of misogyny and general asshattery in a very condensed form.
posted by signal at 3:29 PM on April 28 [6 favorites]
Wow, that's a lot of misogyny and general asshattery in a very condensed form.
posted by signal at 3:29 PM on April 28 [6 favorites]
I should add that I love this quote from Ellison:
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:46 PM on April 28 [8 favorites]
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 3:46 PM on April 28 [8 favorites]
The best people can make the worst art. The worst people can make the best art. Ignore the artist; pay attention to the art.
“What’s even the point of being prescriptive about this?” applies in this direction, too. Other people’s relationship with the work of Harlan Ellison isn’t really your business. This “side” has a built-in advantage, anyway, in that the death of the author is always a literal reality in the long run, while the work just might stay in print.
posted by atoxyl at 3:56 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
“What’s even the point of being prescriptive about this?” applies in this direction, too. Other people’s relationship with the work of Harlan Ellison isn’t really your business. This “side” has a built-in advantage, anyway, in that the death of the author is always a literal reality in the long run, while the work just might stay in print.
posted by atoxyl at 3:56 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
There's an article about Stracynzski's rehabilitive work on Elison's reputation in the LA mag that claims Ellison was diagnosed as bi-polar, the implication being this happened subsequent to 2006, and that he responded well to treatment -perhaps leading the the mellowing described in the OP.
nb: I am in no way qualified to say this influenced his unacceptable behaviour.
posted by Sparx at 4:35 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
nb: I am in no way qualified to say this influenced his unacceptable behaviour.
posted by Sparx at 4:35 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
De Sade was a masterful writer, maybe even a genius
He was a xerox machine with someone sitting on the glass.
posted by mittens at 4:39 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
He was a xerox machine with someone sitting on the glass.
posted by mittens at 4:39 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
He did challenge Joe Lansdale to a martian arts fight, I think.In another context I'd be certain that this was a typo.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 5:02 PM on April 28 [19 favorites]
He was a xerox machine with someone sitting on the glass.
we need a new version of l'esprit d'escalier, for posts that sounded better in your head than on the screen
posted by Sebmojo at 5:58 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
we need a new version of l'esprit d'escalier, for posts that sounded better in your head than on the screen
posted by Sebmojo at 5:58 PM on April 28 [2 favorites]
Curiosity did lead me to read some de Sade, and anyone who thinks that is "masterful" or "genius," well, I guess you have a whole lot of amazing literature to discover in the archives of Penthouse Forum. Yikes.
posted by rikschell at 6:08 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 6:08 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
"Energetic" and "misunderstood" is a strange combination of adjectives, in that even if you concede them both you don't actually end with a claim of good writing or good behavior.
posted by praemunire at 7:07 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 7:07 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
I'm someone who discovered Harlan *first* as someone who joined a street gang in the 50's New York city and described the life, getting in knife fights where they tied your wrist to the other guy.
I knew it, Harlan secretly wrote Guys and Dolls
think they have a smart take on the storytelling problem of a causative paradox. Please my fellow zombies, no more.
Captain, Edith Keeler must die or not.
whenever Ellison pops up, I think of rod serling..
"He carried on a mostly one-sided feud with Rod Serling (they both died on June 28th, 43 years apart). Despite referring to Serling as “incapable of writing his way out of a paper bag”, Ellison revamped and revitalized the 80s “Twilight Zone” reboot. Maybe he just figured he could do it better"
uh-huh.
the place: forever. the time forever. we bring you into the shadow world of one Harlan Ellison a man hell bent on his own love of words and love of self, little does he know that the typewriter he just bought has amazing properties properties unlike the paper bag he's trying to write himself into and it brings him into direct contact with the character from one of his stories that was cut by the boss, Alone, he jumps through the gate finding himself on a Hollywood set with a Verdun War veteran who might just be
The angel with the last hand.
posted by clavdivs at 8:00 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
I knew it, Harlan secretly wrote Guys and Dolls
think they have a smart take on the storytelling problem of a causative paradox. Please my fellow zombies, no more.
Captain, Edith Keeler must die or not.
whenever Ellison pops up, I think of rod serling..
"He carried on a mostly one-sided feud with Rod Serling (they both died on June 28th, 43 years apart). Despite referring to Serling as “incapable of writing his way out of a paper bag”, Ellison revamped and revitalized the 80s “Twilight Zone” reboot. Maybe he just figured he could do it better"
uh-huh.
the place: forever. the time forever. we bring you into the shadow world of one Harlan Ellison a man hell bent on his own love of words and love of self, little does he know that the typewriter he just bought has amazing properties properties unlike the paper bag he's trying to write himself into and it brings him into direct contact with the character from one of his stories that was cut by the boss, Alone, he jumps through the gate finding himself on a Hollywood set with a Verdun War veteran who might just be
The angel with the last hand.
posted by clavdivs at 8:00 PM on April 28 [7 favorites]
Wow is that article going hard on historic rehabilitation through very selective editing. You know it’s solid journalism when it ends with an Amazon book link. What nonsense.
posted by q*ben at 9:07 PM on April 28 [5 favorites]
posted by q*ben at 9:07 PM on April 28 [5 favorites]
The best people can make the worst art. The worst people can make the best art. Ignore the artist; pay attention to the art.
Just remember to scrub the slime off of yourself afterwards.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:10 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
Just remember to scrub the slime off of yourself afterwards.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:10 PM on April 28 [4 favorites]
mule98J: Finally, I recommend Gardner Dozier's Anthologies (the Year's Best Short Stories)
Those are/were the best. Haven't found a replacement since he passed away. I'm still thrilled to have gotten an honorable mention in one of his anthologies.
posted by dhruva at 11:17 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
Those are/were the best. Haven't found a replacement since he passed away. I'm still thrilled to have gotten an honorable mention in one of his anthologies.
posted by dhruva at 11:17 PM on April 28 [3 favorites]
Gardner's last name was Dozois, not "Dozier", just for the record (and because it'll be a lot easier to look up his work if you spell it correctly!)
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:14 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:14 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
Also, i don't think you ever have to "scrub the slime off of yourself" when you're reading work by someone who's safely dead, whatever kind of person they were in life. And i think some of his work, Problematic™ as it is, holds up quite well.
Speaking as a feminist and a long-time SFF reader: Harlan was complicated, as a writer and a person. Far less noble than he thought he was; far more noble than his haters thought he was. He was very personally misogynist, and also fought really, really hard for the careers of a lot of women in genre. He was extremely rude to me personally one time (in fairness, it was like day 3 of a very large con and i think he was utterly exhausted, and i was about 20 and probably utterly exhausting), and also he saved at least a couple people from suicide. Some of his work is utterly, viciously cruel and nihilist, and also some of it (i am thinking particularly of "Deathbird" here) demonstrates a deep and inexhaustible well of love for humanity. He groped Connie Willis onstage, which was inexcusable, and also in my 40 years as a ~woman in fandom that is the only story of sexualized misbehavior i've ever heard about him (and i assure you that i've heard quite a few stories of sexualized misbehavior by a vast array of SFF authors.)
You don't have to love him (or his work). You also don't have to hate him (or his work). You can take it, or leave it, and in time he will be remembered as a great author, or he will not—and in any case he is beyond all personal ability to do harm (or good).
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:29 AM on April 29 [19 favorites]
Speaking as a feminist and a long-time SFF reader: Harlan was complicated, as a writer and a person. Far less noble than he thought he was; far more noble than his haters thought he was. He was very personally misogynist, and also fought really, really hard for the careers of a lot of women in genre. He was extremely rude to me personally one time (in fairness, it was like day 3 of a very large con and i think he was utterly exhausted, and i was about 20 and probably utterly exhausting), and also he saved at least a couple people from suicide. Some of his work is utterly, viciously cruel and nihilist, and also some of it (i am thinking particularly of "Deathbird" here) demonstrates a deep and inexhaustible well of love for humanity. He groped Connie Willis onstage, which was inexcusable, and also in my 40 years as a ~woman in fandom that is the only story of sexualized misbehavior i've ever heard about him (and i assure you that i've heard quite a few stories of sexualized misbehavior by a vast array of SFF authors.)
You don't have to love him (or his work). You also don't have to hate him (or his work). You can take it, or leave it, and in time he will be remembered as a great author, or he will not—and in any case he is beyond all personal ability to do harm (or good).
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:29 AM on April 29 [19 favorites]
Fortunately I live in the sci-fi 21st century. As a member of this timeline, I do need to devote any of my time, money or resources on reading an asshole's work or giving him any credit when I have far better people I can do that to instead.
I do get the point of reviewing an asshole's life to ensure I and my children do not attempt to repeat his mistakes, so thank you for the thread and the reminder of it.
posted by Comstar at 3:42 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
I do get the point of reviewing an asshole's life to ensure I and my children do not attempt to repeat his mistakes, so thank you for the thread and the reminder of it.
posted by Comstar at 3:42 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
He groped Connie Willis onstage, which was inexcusable, and also in my 40 years as a ~woman in fandom that is the only story of sexualized misbehavior i've ever heard about him
The important words in that sentence are "heard about".
People are more than the worst things they've done, but no, I will not be giving Harlan Ellison the benefit of the doubt.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:51 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
The important words in that sentence are "heard about".
People are more than the worst things they've done, but no, I will not be giving Harlan Ellison the benefit of the doubt.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:51 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
I avoid The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist whenever I’m in Valetta.
posted by Captaintripps at 4:54 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
posted by Captaintripps at 4:54 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
Also, i don't think you ever have to "scrub the slime off of yourself" when you're reading work by someone who's safely dead
A point on which, I think, reasonable people can disagree.
I’ve found that learning new things about an artist can significantly change the way I interpret their work; OSC’s depiction of soaped up young boys wrestling in hot steamy showers in particular has taken on a new meaning over time. For me, dead or alive, the artist as they were when writing is always an important part of how you understand the work.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:13 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
A point on which, I think, reasonable people can disagree.
I’ve found that learning new things about an artist can significantly change the way I interpret their work; OSC’s depiction of soaped up young boys wrestling in hot steamy showers in particular has taken on a new meaning over time. For me, dead or alive, the artist as they were when writing is always an important part of how you understand the work.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:13 AM on April 29 [5 favorites]
I'm going to start with a link back to a comment that I made in the 2011 thread, which I think still holds up and connects well with this thread. In particular, the part of the above-the-fold quote in the FPP that says "his reputation for contentiousness was equally potent, often overshadowing the art itself" seems to me to be pretty disingenuous, because I think that that was 100% intentional on Ellison's part; to a large, maybe overwhelming degree, Ellison never seemed to trust the art itself to prove its worth--everything had to be framed by the *H*A*R*L*A*N*E*L*L*I*S*O*N*S*H*O*W*. That conflation of the body of work with The Man Who Walked The Earth Like A Living Personality Cult would eventually turn around and bite him on the ass in the worst way, and he ended his days as kind of a running joke, albeit still with his defenders (lots of people liked the "Pay the Writer" thing), but often the subject of anecdotes such as his ridiculously defensive response to the Penny Arcade guys [Dan Olson, Folding Ideas].
And so now JMS--himself no stranger to personality cults and irascible comments--is Ellison's literary executor, and trying to put a spin on Ellison's reputation (and maybe his own; this is the first actually nice thing that I can recall him saying about Star Trek) in promotion of a new collection, and presumably in anticipation of the publication, at long last, of The Last Dangerous Visions. Well, that's his job, I suppose. One thing that may be of interest to people in the context of this discussion is a novella that Ellison wrote back in 1980, “All the Lies That Are My Life”, that--in a testament to the strength of his personality cult at the moment--got nominated for a Hugo despite not being SFF at all; it's about this famous writer, see, and the aftermath of his death, told from the point of view of his literary executor. It's been an age since I read it, and I have no idea if I still have a copy, but my recollection was that it ended with the executor musing that he'd always be overshadowed by the dead writer. The amusing thing about that is that JMS is probably much better known, and arguably much more successful, than Ellison; he crossed over into mainstream success with the script for the movie Changeling, which won Angelina Jolie an Oscar, whereas Ellison is mostly a cult SF figure who once wrote an infamously bad movie called The Oscar.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:26 AM on April 29 [6 favorites]
And so now JMS--himself no stranger to personality cults and irascible comments--is Ellison's literary executor, and trying to put a spin on Ellison's reputation (and maybe his own; this is the first actually nice thing that I can recall him saying about Star Trek) in promotion of a new collection, and presumably in anticipation of the publication, at long last, of The Last Dangerous Visions. Well, that's his job, I suppose. One thing that may be of interest to people in the context of this discussion is a novella that Ellison wrote back in 1980, “All the Lies That Are My Life”, that--in a testament to the strength of his personality cult at the moment--got nominated for a Hugo despite not being SFF at all; it's about this famous writer, see, and the aftermath of his death, told from the point of view of his literary executor. It's been an age since I read it, and I have no idea if I still have a copy, but my recollection was that it ended with the executor musing that he'd always be overshadowed by the dead writer. The amusing thing about that is that JMS is probably much better known, and arguably much more successful, than Ellison; he crossed over into mainstream success with the script for the movie Changeling, which won Angelina Jolie an Oscar, whereas Ellison is mostly a cult SF figure who once wrote an infamously bad movie called The Oscar.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:26 AM on April 29 [6 favorites]
I laugh to think that Ellison would ever be forgotten or overlooked in SF. You would need all his champions to, I dunno, collectively die off in one fell swoop for Harlan Ellison to ever be seen as obscure.
Where I land on Ellison is that yeah, there were some good stories but for me, they are overshadowed by a lot of sexual violence. His legacy is complicated for those folks who love him, but sometimes it has the vibe of "the missing stair." It's very classic "well, HE didn't treat ME this way" or "I never saw him treat X like that" so of course, you will believe your friend that he would never act like that. Especially if your friend is an SF stalwart with influence.
Again, I've read Ellison when I was in my late teens and 20s and I am not sorry for having done so, I just have to no need to promote him to a younger generation when there are better literary role models available.
posted by Kitteh at 8:53 AM on April 29 [6 favorites]
Where I land on Ellison is that yeah, there were some good stories but for me, they are overshadowed by a lot of sexual violence. His legacy is complicated for those folks who love him, but sometimes it has the vibe of "the missing stair." It's very classic "well, HE didn't treat ME this way" or "I never saw him treat X like that" so of course, you will believe your friend that he would never act like that. Especially if your friend is an SF stalwart with influence.
Again, I've read Ellison when I was in my late teens and 20s and I am not sorry for having done so, I just have to no need to promote him to a younger generation when there are better literary role models available.
posted by Kitteh at 8:53 AM on April 29 [6 favorites]
Al Sweigart: The important words in that sentence are "heard about".
Oh, absolutely, and i'm not saying you have to! The thing i was trying to get at, though, is this: while whisper networks are never perfect, i went to my first con when i was a 7-year-old girl so i had a great number of honorary aunties, i was deeply plugged into fandom for many years, and i have definitely got a long internal list of "authors who are alleged serial predators" (as well as "authors who have been sexually creepy to me, personally"). And Harlan wasn't on that list. At all.
He was a gigantic asshole, and a terrible husband to every wife but his last one (Susan was really good for him, by all accounts, and he for her), but aside from the incident with Connie Willis (which was, again, completely reprehensible and gross, as i said repeatedly at the time and am absolutely happy to say now!) i have never, ever heard of him being a sex pest or a predator.
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:11 AM on April 29 [3 favorites]
Oh, absolutely, and i'm not saying you have to! The thing i was trying to get at, though, is this: while whisper networks are never perfect, i went to my first con when i was a 7-year-old girl so i had a great number of honorary aunties, i was deeply plugged into fandom for many years, and i have definitely got a long internal list of "authors who are alleged serial predators" (as well as "authors who have been sexually creepy to me, personally"). And Harlan wasn't on that list. At all.
He was a gigantic asshole, and a terrible husband to every wife but his last one (Susan was really good for him, by all accounts, and he for her), but aside from the incident with Connie Willis (which was, again, completely reprehensible and gross, as i said repeatedly at the time and am absolutely happy to say now!) i have never, ever heard of him being a sex pest or a predator.
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:11 AM on April 29 [3 favorites]
Tell Me No Lies: I’ve found that learning new things about an artist can significantly change the way I interpret their work; OSC’s depiction of soaped up young boys wrestling in hot steamy showers in particular has taken on a new meaning over time. For me, dead or alive, the artist as they were when writing is always an important part of how you understand the work.
Oh, 100% agreed (and specifically agreed on the case of OSC, too!) I just don't feel like i'd describe that as "scrubbing off slime"; to me, that phrase implies that you have been made personally dirty or contaminated by reading someone's work, and i would, i guess, reserve that for having become complicit in someone's misbehavior (even if only to the extent of contributing 30¢ in royalties to some shithead by way of buying their books); i don't think it's really fair to apply to people who simply find value in the work.
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:15 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]
Oh, 100% agreed (and specifically agreed on the case of OSC, too!) I just don't feel like i'd describe that as "scrubbing off slime"; to me, that phrase implies that you have been made personally dirty or contaminated by reading someone's work, and i would, i guess, reserve that for having become complicit in someone's misbehavior (even if only to the extent of contributing 30¢ in royalties to some shithead by way of buying their books); i don't think it's really fair to apply to people who simply find value in the work.
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:15 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]
Was Ellison an asshole? Yes. But he was an asshole I dearly loved reading and still rank him in the realm of the gods.
posted by Oh_Bobloblaw at 9:34 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
posted by Oh_Bobloblaw at 9:34 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
I’ve been reading the reprint of Dangerous Visions and what really strikes me is how much it feels like being harangued by a relentless salesman. Fifty pages of introductions to the book about what an important book it is that changed SF forever and about how Harlan was such a great person. Every story has this lengthy introduction where Harlan tells me what an amazing person it’s author is, and then there’s an afterword where every author explains what about this story made them feel like it was worth putting in this collection of the edgiest stories ever, edited by the biggest edgelord ever. It’s DANGEROUS VISIONS!
And it’s just the milquetoastiest stuff. Taboos may have been broken by the standards of the late sixties but I feel like I’ve read edgier stuff in a collection of Bradbury’s folksy middle American ramblings. I’m 3/4 of the way through it and I feel like the only things that have offended me are how badly Farmer’s story needed more editing, and a super short joke story that uses trans panic as a punchline. I don’t think I’m gonna bother picking up DV2 or DV3 when they come out, I don’t need another novel’s worth of Ellison’s hucksterism.
posted by egypturnash at 9:42 AM on April 29 [7 favorites]
And it’s just the milquetoastiest stuff. Taboos may have been broken by the standards of the late sixties but I feel like I’ve read edgier stuff in a collection of Bradbury’s folksy middle American ramblings. I’m 3/4 of the way through it and I feel like the only things that have offended me are how badly Farmer’s story needed more editing, and a super short joke story that uses trans panic as a punchline. I don’t think I’m gonna bother picking up DV2 or DV3 when they come out, I don’t need another novel’s worth of Ellison’s hucksterism.
posted by egypturnash at 9:42 AM on April 29 [7 favorites]
I just always feel that the way you evaluate someone depends on why you're evaluating them. "I don't want to read work whose politics are distasteful to me written by a guy who was pretty much a misogynist asshole" is a perfectly reasonable standpoint, but so is "I'm interested in the history of the genre and I'm interested in why Ellison's values made him successful and popular in the sixties and seventies, an increasingly annoying outlier in the eighties and nineties and now pretty much universally criticized".
I think it's very reasonable, when you're trying to evaluate an individual person, to hold them to some kind of sorta-absolute standards - by no means everyone in the sixties and seventies was totally bought into misogyny and patriarchy, so Ellison could definitely have chosen to be different. We probably wouldn't say, "Ellison was a bad person in 1975 because he did not have 2020's understanding of gender" or "Ellison was a bad person in 1975 because he did not hew to the universally and perfect values that we, very enlightened, have now today", but it's pretty reasonable to evaluate an individual against a moral rubric.
This isn't the same as trying to understand a person or a work as a reflection of its time. A reflection of its time could mean "a reflection of the feminism of its time" or "a reflection of the misogyny of its time" (or a secret third thing, etc). There's value and interest in trying to understand things this way, because it helps both to understand the past and to understand how the past has turned into the (far from perfect) present.
To me it's worthwhile to try to have a comprehensive sense of the history of 20th century science fiction, not just a "20th century science fiction is a thing where a lot of people were bad people and didn't live up to the standards available to them", because that's not really specific enough - it's pretty much true of everything. It's good enough for saying, "my time is short and precious, I'm not going to read any Harlan Ellison because he was awful and his work was misogynist", but if your time is short and precious and you want to spend it on science fiction history, you're probably going to want to think more about Harlan Ellison and what made him that way.
Obviously it's completely normal to just read science fiction that you like for fun, or to seek out feminist science fiction specifically, or to read science fiction for its changing understanding of environmentalism, etc etc etc - the point isn't that All Very Serious People MUST Study Genre History In This Way. But it's by no means weird to want to consider Ellison's work and persona in context of the genre as a whole.
posted by Frowner at 10:55 AM on April 29 [14 favorites]
I think it's very reasonable, when you're trying to evaluate an individual person, to hold them to some kind of sorta-absolute standards - by no means everyone in the sixties and seventies was totally bought into misogyny and patriarchy, so Ellison could definitely have chosen to be different. We probably wouldn't say, "Ellison was a bad person in 1975 because he did not have 2020's understanding of gender" or "Ellison was a bad person in 1975 because he did not hew to the universally and perfect values that we, very enlightened, have now today", but it's pretty reasonable to evaluate an individual against a moral rubric.
This isn't the same as trying to understand a person or a work as a reflection of its time. A reflection of its time could mean "a reflection of the feminism of its time" or "a reflection of the misogyny of its time" (or a secret third thing, etc). There's value and interest in trying to understand things this way, because it helps both to understand the past and to understand how the past has turned into the (far from perfect) present.
To me it's worthwhile to try to have a comprehensive sense of the history of 20th century science fiction, not just a "20th century science fiction is a thing where a lot of people were bad people and didn't live up to the standards available to them", because that's not really specific enough - it's pretty much true of everything. It's good enough for saying, "my time is short and precious, I'm not going to read any Harlan Ellison because he was awful and his work was misogynist", but if your time is short and precious and you want to spend it on science fiction history, you're probably going to want to think more about Harlan Ellison and what made him that way.
Obviously it's completely normal to just read science fiction that you like for fun, or to seek out feminist science fiction specifically, or to read science fiction for its changing understanding of environmentalism, etc etc etc - the point isn't that All Very Serious People MUST Study Genre History In This Way. But it's by no means weird to want to consider Ellison's work and persona in context of the genre as a whole.
posted by Frowner at 10:55 AM on April 29 [14 favorites]
> So once they stop, I turn to him and I say, “While I’ve got you here I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the Star Wars stuff you wrote.”
Oh my goodness that is just about perfect
posted by bq at 11:50 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
Oh my goodness that is just about perfect
posted by bq at 11:50 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]
i would, i guess, reserve that for having become complicit in someone's misbehavior (even if only to the extent of contributing 30¢ in royalties to some shithead by way of buying their books)
For me that's a separate issue, and honestly not one I think reasonable people can disagree on.
Reading and valuing works by dead problematic authors doesn't leave me feeling morally compromised, just vaguely icky -- reading stories from the perspective of the author means identifying with the author, and it's contact with that slime that leaves me wanting a shower. I don't feel permanently sullied, just in need of a cleansing.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:25 PM on April 29 [5 favorites]
For me that's a separate issue, and honestly not one I think reasonable people can disagree on.
Reading and valuing works by dead problematic authors doesn't leave me feeling morally compromised, just vaguely icky -- reading stories from the perspective of the author means identifying with the author, and it's contact with that slime that leaves me wanting a shower. I don't feel permanently sullied, just in need of a cleansing.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:25 PM on April 29 [5 favorites]
So when people look at the undercurrent of misogyny that runs through a lot of Ellison's work and say, that's just how society was back then, what I hear is, with all his dangerous vision and prodigious creativity, Ellison could not even imagine a society without misogyny.
This angle seems a bit of an oversimplification because surely Ellison was often working in the long tradition of speculative fiction as a framework for commentary on one’s own time. I know I called him “a relic of his era,” which does sound a lot like “a man of his time” so I feel like I should clarify - first, that I’m talking about his writing, he was a notorious asshole in his time for sure, and then that what I mean is that his idea of cutting edge subject matter and cutting edge literary style are both pretty firmly anchored in that time period. So if you want to get something out of his work, that’s a good thing to go in knowing. I think SF is at least as susceptible to becoming dated in this way as other genres, because writing about the future involves extrapolating from premises about the present.
Someone already mentioned that Tiptree’s work has a rather pessimistic tone about gender roles and human nature as well. Tiptree is better at it, though, with a more compelling perspective and greater depth of understanding, which is why she makes it on the short list of the true first rate writers of the era and Ellison doesn’t.
posted by atoxyl at 1:45 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]
This angle seems a bit of an oversimplification because surely Ellison was often working in the long tradition of speculative fiction as a framework for commentary on one’s own time. I know I called him “a relic of his era,” which does sound a lot like “a man of his time” so I feel like I should clarify - first, that I’m talking about his writing, he was a notorious asshole in his time for sure, and then that what I mean is that his idea of cutting edge subject matter and cutting edge literary style are both pretty firmly anchored in that time period. So if you want to get something out of his work, that’s a good thing to go in knowing. I think SF is at least as susceptible to becoming dated in this way as other genres, because writing about the future involves extrapolating from premises about the present.
Someone already mentioned that Tiptree’s work has a rather pessimistic tone about gender roles and human nature as well. Tiptree is better at it, though, with a more compelling perspective and greater depth of understanding, which is why she makes it on the short list of the true first rate writers of the era and Ellison doesn’t.
posted by atoxyl at 1:45 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]
I love this one concerning Dan Simmons.
"Simmons relates the tale in his introduction, noting that Ellison's initial reaction was this (possibly a little tongue in cheek):
"Who is this Simmons?" bellowed Ellison. "Stand up, wave your hand, show yourself, goddamnit. What egomaniacal monstrosity has the fucking gall, the unmitigated hubris to inflict a story of five thousand fucking words on this workshop? Show yourself, Simmons!"
Plot summary:
"The actual story is classic Simmons in its literary allusions, with epigraphs from Ezra Pound's Cantos; the protagonist's father is a Pound scholar with an especial interest in the Cantos (reading from it to his children), and the premise can be seen as deriving from a line in the Cantos as well."
"This is the dead land
this is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star."
-T.S. Eliot, from The Hollow Men
posted by clavdivs at 4:11 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]
"Simmons relates the tale in his introduction, noting that Ellison's initial reaction was this (possibly a little tongue in cheek):
"Who is this Simmons?" bellowed Ellison. "Stand up, wave your hand, show yourself, goddamnit. What egomaniacal monstrosity has the fucking gall, the unmitigated hubris to inflict a story of five thousand fucking words on this workshop? Show yourself, Simmons!"
Plot summary:
"The actual story is classic Simmons in its literary allusions, with epigraphs from Ezra Pound's Cantos; the protagonist's father is a Pound scholar with an especial interest in the Cantos (reading from it to his children), and the premise can be seen as deriving from a line in the Cantos as well."
"This is the dead land
this is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star."
-T.S. Eliot, from The Hollow Men
posted by clavdivs at 4:11 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]
D.C. Fontana interview that sets the tone:
Josh:...what was it like working with Harlan Ellison? “City on the Edge of Forever” is widely considered the best episode of the series, and I know that Harlan was very cantankerous because he wanted it his way.
DC: He turned in the outline, which was approved. He told a story that Gene and I liked. And then it was — We need the script ... We need the script... WE. NEED. THE. SCRIPT. It was one of the last ones we filmed that year. We told him to come into the studio, we would give him an office, just come and write the script. Then we found out that he was taking trips to the set and talking to the actors and not writing the script.
JOSH: Which is why he has all those pictures with the actors!
DC: Yes. We finally had to literally lock him in a room. The first time, he was able to open the window and slide out. So we nailed the windows shut. I’m not kidding. Locked the door, trapping him, and said, “WRITE!” Finally, we got the script."
Boo-ya, had to actually nail them into his office.
posted by clavdivs at 4:27 PM on April 29 [6 favorites]
Josh:...what was it like working with Harlan Ellison? “City on the Edge of Forever” is widely considered the best episode of the series, and I know that Harlan was very cantankerous because he wanted it his way.
DC: He turned in the outline, which was approved. He told a story that Gene and I liked. And then it was — We need the script ... We need the script... WE. NEED. THE. SCRIPT. It was one of the last ones we filmed that year. We told him to come into the studio, we would give him an office, just come and write the script. Then we found out that he was taking trips to the set and talking to the actors and not writing the script.
JOSH: Which is why he has all those pictures with the actors!
DC: Yes. We finally had to literally lock him in a room. The first time, he was able to open the window and slide out. So we nailed the windows shut. I’m not kidding. Locked the door, trapping him, and said, “WRITE!” Finally, we got the script."
Boo-ya, had to actually nail them into his office.
posted by clavdivs at 4:27 PM on April 29 [6 favorites]
I guess that's fair, though I'm not sure the misogyny serves as part of the commentary exactly.
Fair enough in turn, it would certainly be a reach to call him a feminist writer. I suppose I think of him more like (quoting Frowner earlier in the thread)
we're going to write explicit sexual violence [or less than fully sympathetic male narrators with overtly misogynistic attitudes] because the WORLD is violent, man
But it’s also been a long time since I read a lot of it.
posted by atoxyl at 5:43 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]
Fair enough in turn, it would certainly be a reach to call him a feminist writer. I suppose I think of him more like (quoting Frowner earlier in the thread)
we're going to write explicit sexual violence [or less than fully sympathetic male narrators with overtly misogynistic attitudes] because the WORLD is violent, man
But it’s also been a long time since I read a lot of it.
posted by atoxyl at 5:43 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]
I think at his best he was, at least on some level, aware of his own misogyny and turned a critical lens on it in his fiction. "All the Birds Come Home to Roost", for example, is a story that i think of in that light.
(It's similar to how Zelazny's protagonists are all assholes, but in all his best works, the text is aware that they are assholes and that it matters to the people around them.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:52 PM on April 29 [2 favorites]
(It's similar to how Zelazny's protagonists are all assholes, but in all his best works, the text is aware that they are assholes and that it matters to the people around them.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:52 PM on April 29 [2 favorites]
Harlan wasn't trying to win any popularity contests back then, nor now, obviously. Abrasive was always part of his brand.
That conceptual shift in 60s/70s Sci-Fi (there was also New Worlds in England) was a big deal at the time. As a young reader back then it was a shift in consciousness.
That book bitching about the script for the City on the Edge was obtuse, the editing was reasonable, hey "Scotty dealing drugs".
I liked his cameo as a Psi Corps analyst in JMS' Babylon 5.
I wish that The Starlost would have been a big hit, then there would have been hilarious Harlan lawsuits with Heinlein for the concept of Universe. I actually liked Starlost, unlike everyone.
posted by ovvl at 5:55 PM on April 30 [2 favorites]
That conceptual shift in 60s/70s Sci-Fi (there was also New Worlds in England) was a big deal at the time. As a young reader back then it was a shift in consciousness.
That book bitching about the script for the City on the Edge was obtuse, the editing was reasonable, hey "Scotty dealing drugs".
I liked his cameo as a Psi Corps analyst in JMS' Babylon 5.
I wish that The Starlost would have been a big hit, then there would have been hilarious Harlan lawsuits with Heinlein for the concept of Universe. I actually liked Starlost, unlike everyone.
posted by ovvl at 5:55 PM on April 30 [2 favorites]
Some smart people are assholes because they can't step back and accept that some things are for the greater good, and move in that general direction. Too fucking smart for themselves, too full of themselves. A lot of men who achieve some power become sexual predators; it's on men to stop that shit.
Ellison was uniquely brilliant at story titles. ex: The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
posted by theora55 at 6:21 PM on May 1 [3 favorites]
Ellison was uniquely brilliant at story titles. ex: The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
posted by theora55 at 6:21 PM on May 1 [3 favorites]
Unfortunately, the feminist blogosphere has mostly disappeared from the internet,
This is true and it makes me so sad. It was so important. It could be maddening, and it was full of dumb fights, but it was super important. Nothing has replaced it.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 8:08 PM on May 6 [7 favorites]
This is true and it makes me so sad. It was so important. It could be maddening, and it was full of dumb fights, but it was super important. Nothing has replaced it.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 8:08 PM on May 6 [7 favorites]
Crazy late to the discussion, but only because last night my 14 year old messaged me asking if she can get the book “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” She thought it was a novel, so was surprised when I later handed her a copy of Alone Against Tomorrow (itself a surprise since I’d forgotten I had it) and she learned it’s a short story.
I’ll tell her about the Willis incident and his, to put it mildly, checkered past, but I suspect she will still want to read the story. She’s already a veteran of Harry Potter and the Author from Terfkaban. So, I trust she’ll be okay.
posted by house-goblin at 12:43 PM on May 11 [6 favorites]
I’ll tell her about the Willis incident and his, to put it mildly, checkered past, but I suspect she will still want to read the story. She’s already a veteran of Harry Potter and the Author from Terfkaban. So, I trust she’ll be okay.
posted by house-goblin at 12:43 PM on May 11 [6 favorites]
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