james_nicoll

The only people more irritating than Ellison himself are his devoted fans. I mean, it's one thing to be a dude who wrote some well-regarded stories in the '70s and has used that to elevate his cranky writings ever since; it's another thing to be someone who likes the stories Ellison wrote back in the '70s and wants to use that to elevate their own cranky writing.

I was trying to remember anything of Ellison's from later than the 1970s that I've actually noticed, and coming up empty. Sad to see another person with the same result. He did do some good things at the time. He was also a good performer -- his readings at conventions were quite good, for example.

Yeah... it's not Ellison's behavior that makes me really sad, it's that the person who wrote that article was actually driven by it to write a multi-page rant about how the beloved Harlan was too good for the corruption and filth of Internet humanity, all of which was a dead-serious Harlan Ellison pastiche.

Oh, well, at least it's not one of the Spider Jerusalem wannabes. (It took me a long time to figure out that most of them weren't even imitating Hunter S. Thompson directly.)

Is this the trigger?

I was looking at the site his wikipedia entry says is his site, which does not seem to have been updated recently.

:rolls eyes:

Usual publicity-stunt-thinly-veiled-as-tantrum. In lieu of actual new brilliant work, we have "GOODBYE INTERNETS"

Exactly. Ellison's flouncier than a Civil War petticoat.

Huh. I swear my first thought was that Ellison had died. After all he IS getting rather long in the tooth. But I see it's just a Brain-Eater inspired bout of technophobia. Strange that Ellison will be the equivalent of the old guy who won't leave his unlighted, unheated house because of all of the "electrification devices" on the street outside.

That too was my first thought.

Maybe now he has the time to edit Last Dangerous Visions.

You are a mean, mean man :)

I would care a bit about Ellison if he was, like some of his contemporaries, soldiering along in mostly-obscurity and showing up at conventions as a beloved elder statesman that the younger generation didn't remember.

But his bombastic self-promotion combined with the inexplicable hero-worship of some of his fans puts him in the "jeez, when will they Let GO?" category.

I don't think Ellison has it in him to be Fred Pohl.

He has turned into a sad sad old man. Versus the nasty nasty younger man he was. Can any of you imagine what his response to the various 'fail's that have happened in the last few years? Whether you agree with any of the discussions or not - just broaching these topics would have given dear Mr. Ellison another heart attack.
His writing was so brilliant and sharp in his day but his personality really over shadowed all of that for me when I met him in the 80's.

Can any of you imagine what his response to the various 'fail's that have happened in the last few years? Whether you agree with any of the discussions or not - just broaching these topics would have given dear Mr. Ellison another heart attack.

I seem to recall him being the cause of some of those, in any case.

just broaching these topics would have given dear Mr. Ellison another heart attack

If hearing/reading other people talking about racism or sexism or classism or whatever gives someone a heart attack, I think it's nature's way of telling that person that they need to do something differently.

He's the one who called K. Tempest Bradford an "NWA".

Some people get better with time. If everyone could live to a hale 150, who knows what unlikely saints there might be in later life. Even George Wallace repented.

And then there are the other people.

We used to ponder, back in my grad school days, what would have happened if Wordsworth had died young and Keats lived to be a million? Would we think of Wordsworth as an awesome, sexy young rebel, and Keats as a stuffy, bearded Establishment drone?

I don't think I've ever snarked about Ellison's writing.

I HAVE complained about his behaviour to Connie Willis, and I don't have respect for his ongoing behaviour to the many folks in the community. (And all the people who go on about how Harlan is the most wonderful, kindest man they ever knew....you particular folks remind me of the girlfriend of the inexplicably "popular" high school asshole who claims Bobby can't be a terrible person, he's so nice to her.)

That said, while some of the commenters at Io9 were mildly uncouth, many of them were accurately depicting Ellison's social shenanigans. Given that he's lobbed way worse volleys at folks like Nick and Tempest, I fail to see how he's suddenly coming to the conclusion that the internet has "actualized my worst dread nightmare of web involvement."

I cared about this subject right until I realized that in my distracted state I briefly crossed wires and confused Harlan Ellison with Warren Ellis.

As someone who wasn't around for what seem to be the Great and Golden Days of Ellison's career, I really can't understand what the big deal is with him. Is it something that you had to be there to get? I'm trying to fill in the gaps of all that time I wasn't around for - I have two moving boxes filled mostly with sf mags from ~1947 to today - but there's a LOT of it. A lot of really weird stuff too. I mean, _The Region Between_ in March 1970's _Galaxy_... I tried to get through it, I really did, but it really gave me a "I AM DOING ART, FRAK OFF" vibe.

I look at the record, and I see a man who acts like he's drunk on his own awesomeness; he acts as if he believes that the idea of "soldier from the future is transported to the past" belongs to him and him alone. There are enough writers in the field that I don't see any reason why I should give any attention to one who conducts himself like that.

I think the key to understanding Ellison and his place in science fiction is that a) it once was a much smaller place and b) he has always been good at self promoting.

If you look at his career objectively he's on the level of a Harry Harrison, a fondly remembered writer with some classic stories/novels to his name, some importance as an editor of influential anthologies and in Ellison's case some small part in the maturing of tv/movie science fiction, a footnote in the history of Star Trek on the same level perhaps as James Blish's role.

His true brilliance perhaps lay as much in being able to promote himself as the smartest writer in science fiction, the only one to tell like it is and his readers and fans as being superior beings for being able to spot this, and being able to do this for several decades before people got sick of it. It helped that fandom was only a small (and white male dominated) place and that he could charm the pants of you in person, allegedly.

Ellison's tragedy is that since his heyday in the sixties and seventies he has made too many enemies, while whole generations of fans have been born neither knowning nor caring he exists, coming to sf through computer games, or movies or television or anime or whatever. Why should they care what gramps did forty years ago or why computers are bad and typewriters the one tool real writers use?