Topic: Must Read
Among the many good reasons for opposing the late, unlamented Equal Rights Amendment was the fact that Harlan Ellison was for it.
I discovered this historical factoid in the pages of Shatterday, an Ellison short story collection that came out originally in 1980. In various story introductions (he’s one of those writers who feels it necessary to provide authorial guidance to the reader), Ellison makes a point of mentioning that he was in Phoenix or Jersey City or East Overshoe, North Dakota, to speak at an ERA rally. How quaint that seems today, when it’s quite clear that the ERA was superfluous. But it did possess the virtue of making progressives like Harlan Ellison feel, well, virtuous.
If all this makes you think that I don’t like Ellison as a writer, let me correct the record. He wrote a number of stories that I greatly admire, among them “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” perhaps my favorite paranoid fantasy of the computer age, and the iconic “A Boy and His Dog.” The stories in Shatterday don’t quite come up to that level, though several of them are pretty good. But turning the pages of this book got me to thinking about Ellison as a phenomenon, as he undoubtedly was in his prime.
In round numbers, Ellison has produced more than 1,000 short stories, novels, TV and film screenplays, etc. He edited a pair of groundbreaking SF anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, that are still in print. Among his TV credits is the script for “Demon with a Glass Hand,” possibly the best episode of The Outer Limits. Whatever his defects of personality—abrasive, combative, thin-skinned—the man is one hell of a productive writer.
So what kind of a writer is he? Though Ellison published many stories that could fairly be described as science fiction, I think that he’s properly categorized as a contemporary fantasist. His best and most representative work, even when it makes use of SF conventions, presents a series of nightmare visions, not of the future, but of the present. Few of the stories in Shatterday could be described as SF. In this, I think, he bears some resemblance to the late J.G. Ballard—though the latter was a less conventional and more imaginative writer than Ellison.
I think, really, that the ERA thing is the key to understanding Harlan Ellison: He’s a Sixties guy. Like Stephen King, he never quite got over the Age of Aquarius. He allowed the Sixties to date him, and that in turn has dated a good deal of what he wrote. (See, for example, Stalking the Nightmare, a short story collection published in 1982 with a forward by…Stephen King.) And when it comes to politics, he's just plain tiresome, like some elderly Confederate partisan still fighting the Civil War.
But Harlan Ellison has been so prolific that a volume collecting his memorable stories would occupy a good two or three inches of shelf space. That’s not a bad record for any writer, this side of Shakespeare.
