Harlan Ellison, a prolific writer who was lauded for his science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction, horror and television scripts, but who had such a penchant for pugnacity that his own book jackets called him “possibly the most contentious person on Earth,” died June 27 at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 84.
His death was announced by his agent, Susan Shapiro. The cause was not disclosed.
Ellison began publishing stories in the 1950s, writing in part to spite a college professor who told him he had no literary talent. He became one of the most popular and influential writers of science fiction of his generation — yet was willing to take a swing at anyone who limited him to the sphere of science fiction.
He preferred the term “speculative fiction” and saw himself as an heir to such writers as Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. Ellison published scores of books and more than 1,500 stories, reviews and essays in a career of exceptional productivity. As a publicity stunt, he once went on a tour of bookstores, composing one short story a day while sitting in a display window.
Several of his stories, including ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman (1965), I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967) and The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1968), are recognized as science fiction classics.
In his finest work, Ellison showed “at times a raging but dignified sense of the pain of the world,” critic John Clute, a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, said in an interview. “He was always uniquely present in his works. You saw him pounding the table and aiming his blows.”
Subtlety was not Ellison’s strong suit. His writing contained a palpable sense of outrage toward injustice, ignorance and moral tawdriness.
“I go to bed angry every night,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, “and I get up angrier every morning.”
Many of his works are set in a bleak dystopian future, in which sinister forces threaten to eradicate independent thinking and enforce a numbing conformity.
“There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface,” he wrote in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. “But we didn’t try to crawl up to see. There was virtually nothing out there; had been nothing that could be considered anything for over a hundred years. Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions.”
Ellison also wrote widely about film and television, and collections of his critical reviews are taught in college journalism courses. He lambasted the films of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for a lack of imaginative depth and for appealing to young viewers “for whom nostalgia is remembering breakfast.”
“Even at his most maddening, as he caroms from subject to subject,” film historian Robert F. Moss wrote in the New York Times in 1989, reviewing the essays collection, Harlan Ellison’s Watching, “Mr. Ellison has some of the spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind. They haven’t invented the subject about which he lacks an opinion.”
For decades, Ellison was in demand in Hollywood as a writer and script doctor. (Only one of his screenplays was made into a film, the forgettable The Oscar from 1966.) He wrote dozens of scripts of TV shows, including The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Burke’s Law, The Outer Limits, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and even The Flying Nun.
He was credited with one of the most memorable episodes of Star Trek, 1967’s The City on the Edge of Forever, in which the interplanetary travelers aboard the Starship Enterprise return to the 1930s with an opportunity to rewrite history.
Several times, Ellison sued Hollywood studios when he thought they had stolen his ideas, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements.
“Everywhere I go I find that writers are treated as if they are invisible, as if they don’t matter,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “In this town, particularly, the writer has a history of being brutalized because it is a town that flies almost entirely on horse pucky and hot air.”