Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

See if you can track down any edition of "The Essential Ellison"

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

Do you have Prime? Some of his best stuff is free for Prime members on kindle.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

Nice story from Mark Evanier about him.
https://www.newsfromme.com/2018/06/3...ellison-story/

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

I have no Ellison and I must dream.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

Was looking for something else, and stumbled upon this nice Ellison remembrance.
https://www.comicmix.com/2018/07/17/...he-told-us-all

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

I used to see Ellison at Star Trek and science fiction conventions back in the '70s. He would do these comic mock debates with Isaac Asimov to packed crowds in massive hotel ballrooms. He was a wild man. They were always complaining about Paramount dragging its feet on producing a Star Trek movie. Ellison would complain about Barry Diller in particular and how Diller rejected Ellison's "blasphemous" ST script.

I recommend Ellison's books of TV reviews from 1968-72: The Glass Teat and The Other Teat. I can't think of anything else that captures the polarization of the era better than those columns (originally done for the L.A. Free Press). Worth reading in light of today's polarization which is a skewed variation of '60s-era polarization, but bit more primal if you ask me.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

"Harlan Ellison's Watching" is probably my favorite collection of film reviews/criticism. If for only introducing me to the movies of Val Lewton alone... dayenu.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

I read "Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tick Tock Man," yesterday (it was the only one of his titles my library had for free kindle check out). I didn't really like it.
Are his other titles similar or is this one stylistically different?

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

Pretty similar.

You might want to give the stories "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream'" "Jeffty is Five," and "Shatterday," a try if you can find them.

I kind if hate to say this, but I think Harlan Ellison is generally oversold to the point where, when someone reads his stories for the first time, their reaction will be That's it? If it wasn't for Ellison's overbearing personality and his singular ability to court controversy, he probably wouldn't be much more than a footnote in the history on genre fiction.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

A bunch of his books are in a good sci-fi ebook sale going on today only.
https://theportalist.com/1000-ebook-sale

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

Not for me.
I don't remember which of his stories I read first, but it may have been "Jeffty is Five." That was a really good short story.
Maybe you're right that the way he promoted himself helped him to be considered more than he was, but I don't think I would consider him to be overrated.
In fact, I would go as far as to say, I can understand why he was so cocky. His style of writing seems so effortless. There's no points, that I've read, where it seems like he's trying to hard or stumbles at certain parts.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

Not everything Ellison wrote was gold for sure, but whose writing is. I grew up scouring used book stores for old Ellison paperbacks, and he was one of the most important authors in shaping my worldview at the time. While his name is pretty well known to classic SF geeks, I hardly think he's oversold. I reread "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" recently and still found it as powerful as the first time. I suspect I'll feel the same when I get around to rereading "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" or something simple like "Blink"

I've certainly come to realize it's easy to buy into Ellison's own hype if you put the man on too high a pedestal as an author. I was never so disappointed as reading his original screenplay treatment of Star Trek's City On the Edge of Forever, or reading about what happened with The Last Dangerous Visions anthology, or his overzealous litigiousness nature which, while in his prerogative, doesn't endear him to fans very much I think.

Still, his books were very important to me so his passing was very sad to me.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

Well, it looks hell has truly frozen over...


I have to say I'm more than a bit skeptical about this project.

TLDV, notoriously, had bloated to over on hundred stories spread across three volumes in excess of 200,000 words each.

That the JMS version of TLDV will only consist of 112,000 words and that he has been soliciting new stories from folks like Neil Gaiman and Corey Doctorow, not to mention holding a contest for an unpublished author to be included, it leads me to wonder just how closely the published product will resemble the one Ellison intended. I think that, over the years, about forty of the stories Ellison bought were pulled by their authors and published elsewhere, so that would still leave about seventy stories and 400,000 words that will be cut down to 112,000 words. And there also those new stories JMS is soliciting. We'll probably only get a handful of the stories that were originally to be included.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

If it leads to reprints of the first volumes I'll be well-pleased.

Re: Harlan Ellison Is Gone
 

It may be shorter, but with JMS at the helm I'm pretty sure it's going to be top level stuff. He and Harlan were close friends, so he knows what Harlan would want and that's been his focus on this project.