What's eating Harlan Ellison? Now in his late 70s, science fictions pre-eminent anti-establishment zealot seems to harden with time, his vitriol undiluted by age. Ellison's short stories grow more polemical yearly, his incendiary essays and columns redoubling in coiled fury. Here is a writer rhapsodised by rage. A rhetoricbaiting Chomsky for the blank generation.
Outside a tiny circle of SF diehards, New York born Ellison is chiefly famous for penning a caustic two volume critique of television's role in society. In the The Glass Teat, he savagely deconstructed our servile addiction to the goggle box, predicting, in the doomsayer tones into which he frequently lapses, the rise to dominance of despotic media oligarchies. Ironically TV scripts, especially his lyrical teleplays for the original 1960s Star Trek, comprise much of his most acclaimed output.
Uniquely among major 20thcentury writers, Ellison never produced a novel of note. Perhaps his brusque, jabbing prose ill suited the task. But in the field of short stories (of which he is believed to have composed more than 1,000) his talents were untouchable. An evangelical penman, Ellison turned writing into performance art. He had a penchant for scribbling in bookshop windows, often setting down entire finished works beneath the glare of cameras and the gawps of onlookers.
Echoing the distrust of big government and the mass manipulation of information permeating his non-fiction, Ellison's tales were densely intellectual socio-political tracts. Stories such as "Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman" ( a warning about the dangers of limiting free speech), "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and "Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled" transcended SF's ghetto boundaries, leading the Washington Post to dub him "the 20th-century Lewis Carroll".
A pathological dabbler, Ellison worked as creative consultant on the revived mid1990s Twilight Zone, quitting the show when studio execs vetoed an episode about racism which he was to direct. He took the same job on the labyrinthine space opera Babylon Five, a gig which proved series TV need not be dumb and pandering. He also contributed voiceover work to a multitude of hyper obscure TV oddities.
Aggrieved as ever, Ellison continues to crank out fiction stories and jot occasional opinion pieces for the LA Weekly. Paranoia is a heavily devalued commodity in modern literature, but Harlan's sweltering anger remains a powerful intoxicant.
More on Harlan Ellison at www.islets.net