Harlan Ellison, thoughts?

[j d worthington]

And I've just spotted a DC graphic novel of Demon with a Glass Hand on ebay, does anyone know if it's any good?

Haven't seen that one, though I know about it. I have, on the other hand, read the companion volume, Night and the Enemy, which collects the other Earth-Kyba stories; and I know that Ellison was quite happily connected to the graphic novel version of Demon, so chances are... yes....

 

[hegg]

Hmm, think I'll make a play for it then. Will report back

And thanks for the tip re: Night and the Enemy, didn't know about that. Very interested in reading more stories about the Kyba.

 

[hegg]

Meant to say, I thoroughly enjoyed Deathbird Stories. Not what I was expecting really (arguable that most of them are horror stories, as opposed to science fiction?) and was really taken aback by some which were particularly gruesome. A really impressive collection that has served as a great introduction to Ellison.

I won the auction for the Demon... graphic novel, should be winging its way to me soon, looking forward to it.

 

[j d worthington]

Meant to say, I thoroughly enjoyed Deathbird Stories. Not what I was expecting really (arguable that most of them are horror stories, as opposed to science fiction?) and was really taken aback by some which were particularly gruesome. A really impressive collection that has served as a great introduction to Ellison.

It wasn't my own introduction to his work -- that was "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", and two others ("I Have No Mouth..." and "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World") in vol. 2 of The Hugo Winners, ed. by Isaac Asimov. (Shortly after that, I got Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, and hooo, boy....) However, Deathbird came along not too long after that, and made one hell of an impression. And incidentally, yes, it can be argued that most of these stories fall into the "horror" category... in fact, it is listed as #73 in Horror: 100 Best Books, ed. by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman....

I won the auction for the Demon... graphic novel, should be winging its way to me soon, looking forward to it.

I look forward to hearing your response....

 

[Fumi]

Fantastic author. A man who wrote whatever haunted him.

 

[dask]

I thought "Deathbird" was a great story. Don't remember much about it but recall thinking it was one of those rare stories that actually lived up to its hype. Unlike, say, "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" which, despite my great expectations, struck me as a thing with no swing.

 

[j d worthington]

I thought "Deathbird" was a great story. Don't remember much about it but recall thinking it was one of those rare stories that actually lived up to its hype. Unlike, say, "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" which, despite my great expectations, struck me as a thing with no swing.

Overall, I definitely like "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs", and feel it has much going for it. Unfortunately, I also feel there are some serious flaws in the tale which keep it from being among his best. As for "The Deathbird"... that one has always been among my favorites, along with (from the same collection) "Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans...", which is in many ways an absolutely brilliant story....

 

[hegg]

So I finally got around to reading the Demon with a Glass Hand graphic novel (adaption by Marshall Rogers), and I loved it. Couple of things that stood out as being different to the Outer Limits episode:

Trent's glass hand is fully 'intact' from the very start, as in, the glass casing of all the fingers is present. It's the metal fingers inside, the 'skeleton', that he's missing and trying to locate. A small change, but it looks a bit nicer, and considering how much he uses his glass hand throughout the early parts of the story, makes his actions a lot more believable (there were a few moments in TOL where I wondered how he managed to do what he was doing with a stump for one hand).

The force bubble that's used to contain the building makes several appearances in the novel (a large floating purple mist), I think it's only ever referred to in TOL. In fact on two occasions Trent interacts with it, once by running into it, and once jumping on top of it and being thrown off!

All in all, loved reading through it, the art is great (cover especially), and it's a really satisfying story. Although maybe calling it a 'novel' is a push, it's quite short, I'd say it's more a comic, but hey.

I've got a copy of Night and the Enemy on its way soon, which I'm pretty excited about.

 

[hegg]

Been pretty busy and it took me a while to get round to reading it, but I just finished Night and the Enemy. It's another graphic novel, a collection of five stories based on various events in the Human/Kyban 200-year war that Ellison tapped into in Demon With a Glass Hand. I really enjoyed it, probably more so because of the art (by Ken Steacy) if I'm brutally honest. The stand-out story for me was Life Hutch - the tale of a soldier unwittingly held hostage in a small supply outpost by a rogue cleaning robot. The rest were enjoyable, but not particularly memorable. As I mentioned though, the artwork throughout is excellent, and I liked that each story had a different art style.

My Ellison binge continues - I found a mint condition set of Sphere-published Dangerous Visions paperbacks, which I'm working my way through. I'd not read them before, which seems silly considering how much praise they get. I'm just about to finish book 1, and it looks like it deserves all the credit! A few incredible stories already, my favourite being Flies by Robert Silverberg. A pretty grim tale, reminded me of some of the darker stories from Ellison's own collections.

 

[neopeius]

Ellison gives me such a mixed bag of feels.

He's a jerk, to many accounts. But no one can deny the guy can really wield a pen. I recently finished his Shatterday collection (I'd previously read several of the stories, over and over, but somehow avoided others). It's brilliant.

It's interesting noting his progress from skinny, obnoxious fanzine contributor to fantasist titan.

 

[Extollager]

Glimpses of a nice guy named Harlan Ellison here:

MaggieThompson.com: Harlan Ellison

 

[j d worthington]

Now, those were nice to see. You so often see stories of the man being outrageous and pugnacious (something he certainly can be when he chooses), but you don't often see this side of the man... which he can also be, and quite frequently is, as well.

A complex person with a stunning talent. My own life would have been immeasurably poorer had I not encountered his work or (on the very few occasions I have had the good fortune to do so) the man himself.

It is interesting that, in the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, Harlan himself makes a comment to the effect that it might have benefited him to be challenged more often on his excesses. As it is, this has become a part of the legend, just as some of his more repugnant opinions have become part of the legend of HPL. In both cases, I think that the work will survive long after the rest becomes anecdotal mythology....

 

[j d worthington]

It seems Harlan has his own YouTube channel. I've looked at several things there, and they vary in quality, but are all amusing, entertaining, or challenging....


One of the listings there is a run of his commentaries for "the SciFi Channel", "Harlan Ellison's Watching". These I've not seen in years, and many of them are very good indeed. For those who are also fans of Isaac Asimov, I highly recommend #11 of the set... and would be very surprised if you don't get a bit of a lump in the throat while watching it....


Harlan Ellison's Watching 11 - YouTube


There is also this, of Harlan reading one of his tales ("Susan") from the wonderful book Mind Fields, featuring the art of Jacek Yerka:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UecDuXHRe0g&list=PLn5mSh00tKGGwiZ0CsZvWAzA0M2xQn8jA


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Fields

 

[w h pugmire esq]

When the Nebulas came to Seattle, and we gather'd in a upper room for social doings, Harlan noticed that I was being ignored by everyone, and so he walked over, shook my hand and chatted for a wee while. He went out of his way to be kind to someone he detected was an Outsider. I shall ever be grateful to him for his sweet and generous kindness.

 

[j d worthington]

Thanks for sharing that, Wilum. One so often hears of how much of a curmudgeon Ellison is, and not that often the other side of the coin... unless one hears from someone who knows him; then things tend to be a bit more balanced. As I've said before, in my very few encounters with the man, he has always been generous and kind. I also know he has done quite a bit to encourage new talent, or talent which has been "outside the box", and done this for several decades.


So, as I say, thanks for sharing that. Whatever his faults, Ellison has been an extremely important part of the sff community, and I doubt we'll ever again see another like him....

 

[Extollager]

Five volumes of Harlan Ellison's scripts:

Brain Movies: The Original Teleplays of Harlan Ellison (Volume 1): Harlan Ellison, Jason Davis, J. Michael Straczynski: 9780983622314: Amazon.com: Books

I'm especially interested in vols. 1 and 3, for his Outer Limits-related efforts.

 

[tinkerdan]

I like his writing, but I'm not impressed with the way he personally presents himself.

I think the best way to get to know him and how he really is; read his essays compiled as the Glass Teat about television. He is a product of that era of which he writes and his cynicism of television helps define the way he is.

And that's probably saying too much.(I really can't afford to be sued.)

 

[j d worthington]

Five volumes of Harlan Ellison's scripts:

Brain Movies: The Original Teleplays of Harlan Ellison (Volume 1): Harlan Ellison, Jason Davis, J. Michael Straczynski: 9780983622314: Amazon.com: Books

I'm especially interested in vols. 1 and 3, for his Outer Limits-related efforts.

I would dearly love to get these... but current finances prohibit. Having read at least a handful of his screenplays, I can say that I find them to be exceptionally interesting; even when they were for established television series, he brought something fresh to them, and certainly used the medium to explore the concerns he addresses in his other writings.


Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, I'll be able to manage.....

 

[neopeius]

When the Nebulas came to Seattle, and we gather'd in a upper room for social doings, Harlan noticed that I was being ignored by everyone, and so he walked over, shook my hand and chatted for a wee while. He went out of his way to be kind to someone he detected was an Outsider. I shall ever be grateful to him for his sweet and generous kindness.

Thanks for that. No one is a caricature. My wife knows several comic book artists who many revile, but since they've been nice to her, she's conflicted.

 

[Emphyricist]

My first experience with Harlan Ellison was "The Deathbird." I found it pretentious and cloying. Since then I've read "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," which unlike most people who read it I found forgettable (though in fairness, it may be a victim of "Seinfeld is Unfunny" syndrome), and "'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," which I quite enjoyed. I don't think I enjoyed Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions as much as many people who've read them, but then I've always had a mixed relationship with New Wave SF.

I've never sought his work out to read further (so I've only read stuff of his that I find in anthologies) in part because I don't find him exceptional, but also in part because by pretty much all accounts he's a thoroughly unpleasant person. He's incredibly lawsuit-happy, and his handling of The Last Dangerous Visions has been appalling. I'm a severe procrastinator myself, so if procrastination were the only issue, I wouldn't care. But it goes far beyond that. He tried to sue NESFA for publishing "Himself in Anachron" (only backing off when it turned out the rights had lapsed, something he should have looked into before suing and something he had no business suing about anyways). Christopher Priest's "The Last Deadloss Visions" and Charles Platt's "The Ellison Appreciation Society," reveal a nasty side of the man which goes far beyond the anthology itself. And I'm sure that he can be nice to people who haven't crossed him, as mentioned above, but to my mind the measure of a person isn't how they treat strangers, but how they treat their friends and enemies, and from all I've read he falls short on the former and severely so on the latter.

So I think Ellison is a decent but overrated writer who got lucky with some good anthologies and screen-writing deals which brought him an undeserved reputation and an overly-inflated ego. And the annoying thing is that it seems to extend to how people talk about him. One of my pet peeves about SF is that a lot of people I know tend towards New Wave stuff (I tend to prefer Golden Age stuff myself), and if I don't mention Harlan Ellison among my favorite SF writers, the assumption is that I must not have read him. People never seem to have "Are you familiar with Harlan Ellison?"; it's always "You should read Harlan Ellison." I have; I just don't find him particularly exceptional, certainly not the the degree that confidence implies.