There's nothing I can say about Harlan Ellison's life or work or personality that has not already been said. And that was true long before he died. A mercurial presence in the world of speculative fiction (his preferred phrase, he loathed "sci-fi" etc) for decades. Harlan won every award, wrote huge, towering, landmark stories and TV episodes, and was also such a humongous pain in the ass.
But I can tell you my Harlan Ellison story. It's something I don't talk about much.
I first became aware of Harlan's work as a teenager, when my beloved Aunt Donna delivered a bag of books to my house. One of them was STALKING THE NIGHTMARE, which contained an introduction by Stephen King. To read the way King talked about Harlan captivated me. One thing he said, which I'll always remember, was that if he fell ill in a foreign city Harlan was the person he'd pick to be at his side, because he knew Harlan would go unhinged if the doctors didn't get their act together.
I spent the next several years collecting everything I could find that Harlan had ever written. There was a lot. These were the days before Amazon, or even the internet, so I scoured every used bookstore in the Philadelphia region. The only problem I had was figuring out which section they'd stuck him in. Sometimes it was horror, or science fiction, or anthologies, or just plain old literature. Harlan's work was hard to pin down like that. Just like the man himself.
To be honest, Harlan's short stories were never what I loved about him. It was their introductions.
Each story contained a from-the-heart dissertation on what moved him to write it, or what inspired him, or simply what he was pissed off at during the time. Don't get me wrong, some of his short fiction is stunning. I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream is masterful. The screenplay for City on the Edge of Forever leaps off the page. But his introductions, where he was introspective and revealing, lit a spark inside my young mind. He made being a writer sound like a swashbuckling adventure. Where being a writer was the greatest thing you could possibly do with your life. Long before I ever wrote a single story, I knew what I wanted to be.
I met in him at the 1993 Philadelphia Comicfest, the first event of its kind in Philly. It was the only time we ever met in person. I had him sign an entire bag of books, one of which, I later gave to my Aunt Donna as a present.
I was so nervous when I walked up to him, I blurted out, "You're going to read about this someday."
He turned to Susan, his wife, and said, "Get security."
I said, "Wait, I meant, I'm a writer, and I'm going to write about this someday, and be famous enough that you'll read it."
"What have you published?" he asked.
Not a damn thing, was the real answer. I was one year out of high school and didn't want to tell him about my days writing for the Hat Chat school newspaper, or for the underground newspaper I started with a few friends after that. Instead, I hemmed and hawed, and Harlan cut me off. "If I had it to do over again, kid, I'd have been a plumber."
There wasn't time to ask why. I got him to sign my books and left the room. I later attended his Q+A in a huge hall where he spent the entire time fielding questions from people in the audience. He told all his big stories. The one about standing up to Frank Sinatra. The stuff about Star Trek. The mafia goons story.
In person he was loud and boisterous, and jubilant, and he was also mean and cutting to people who asked him questions he didn't like. It was The Harlan Ellison Experience. I walked away from it a little deflated. For years, Harlan had been my personal guru. Telling me to eat the plants of TV producers who wanted you to stick to deadlines, and mail dead animals to your enemies. To do whatever it took to remain true to the written word, and your own creative instincts. But being around him in person, I realized that there's a price to be paid for having such an outsized, uncompromising personality. It makes you sound like kind of an asshole.
In 2011, I used my newfound success as an independent author and publisher to do something crazy. I decided to publish an anthology of every independent author I could find in a book called RESISTANCE FRONT and donate all the money to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
I sold the idea to people by telling them it was similar to Harlan's anthology series, Dangerous Visions. Next thing I knew, word started getting around. I was seeing people write things on message boards about the project, calling it The New Dangerous Visions. This made me quite concerned.
Harlan, you see, was in the habit of suing people. He was not the sort to take the idea of being ripped off kindly and would come after you with a vengeance. So I decided to get in front of it. I went on his message board, Ellison Webderland, and left him a message. I told him all about the project, who I was, what we were doing, and that we were in no way at all using anything remotely related to Dangerous Visions.
Much to my surprise, he replied. He wished me well and gave me a quote to use in the book.
It was huge. But things were just getting started.
Word got around that Harlan was involved in the project (bear in mind, all he'd offered was a quote) and people began harassing the living hell out of him. Out of the blue, I got an email from Harlan saying things had gotten out of control, and the only sensible thing to do was join forces.
I'd use the word shocked or awe-struck to describe what I experienced reading that email, but it wouldn't come close.
Harlan offered to give me a new(ish) version of his short story, Emissary from Hamelin, for the book. The only caveat was that he did not possess an electronic copy of the story, and I would have to re-type on a computer, making sure I got every specific punctuation mark correct, with no exceptions. I would then have to print it out and send it to him for his secretary to review and make sure I hadn't screwed anything up.
He then sent me a contract to allow me to use the story, and in exchange, I had to pay him exactly one dollar.
Best dollar I ever spent.
Something happened that I never expected though. Harlan and I began talking on the phone on a regular basis. It got so routine that I'd see his name show up on my phone and think, "What does he want now?"
Harlan could talk for hours. He talked about writing, he talked about politics, he talked about the people he'd met in his life, he told me personal stories about other famous authors, and gave me his version of events he'd been involved in.
Yes, we talked about the Connie Willis incident.
The most I can tell you is that by 2011 he considered it a closed matter. According to him, amends had been made and the entire thing was a distant, bad memory. I did not, and do not, know enough about the situation and what transpired afterwards, to say otherwise.
Over the course of our conversations, Harlan seemed to be feeding off the excitement surrounding the project. When we'd first started talking, he told me he was very ill and could no longer write. Within a few weeks, he was telling me things that sent my head spinning.
He offered to auction off himself as an editor for a short story that would appear in the book, and he also offered to edit my short story as a way of thanking me for putting it all together.
"You have no idea the amount of money that's worth," he told me.
I believed him.
I wasted no time getting to work. I wrote "Old-Time Lawmen," a short prequel to my GUNS OF SENECA 6 novel and sent it off to him post-haste.
He called me within a few days. "You have no voice," he said. "Your work is plain, bloodless, and has no voice."
He then said, "I rewrote your first page to show you how its done."
Harlan Ellison then read the entire page to me over the phone, stressing where he'd really nailed it and I had not. He signed the page and mailed it to me. To this day, I am the possessor of that one-of-a-kind manuscript.
After that, I went nuts trying to find my voice. I pulled out all the stops and rewrote the entire thing, trying desperately to catapult myself into a higher level of literature than I'd ever attained before. I wanted to show him I could do it. I wanted him to be proud.
He called me again, the day he received the story. I'd been dying to hear from him.
"I can't help you with your writing anymore, so stop bothering me," he said. "I am old and I am sick and I am done being harassed by you."
I was too stunned to do anything more than sputter an apology and tell him how much I appreciated everything he'd done for me.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm a wonderful f**cking human being."
The line disconnected.
The book came out a few months later, and I sent him the copy I was contractually obligated to send. It sold fairly well, but never great. For a .99 cent book, we managed to raise several hundred dollars for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children after expenses.
I later got an email from Harlan's secretary telling me he'd received the book and liked how it looked. I knew that it had been placed in his voluminous archives amongst the hundreds, if not thousands, of other volumes his work has appeared in.
Kind of like my relationship with him, I thought.
I would only talk to Harlan one more time, and I'm glad to say it was a good conversation. I was appearing at the Philly Comic Con to host a panel on Independent Publishing, and I sent him an email offering to distribute any merchandise he wanted to hand out to the fans, if he had anything laying around.
He called me and thanked me for offering. We spoke about his health, and how RESISTANCE FRONT had sold, and for a little while, it was just like old times. He was friendly, and funny, and we parted ways on good terms.
I sent him an email last year to tell him about THE THIEF OF ALL LIGHT. I asked how he was feeling, how Susan was doing, and give him my love.
But mainly, I was answering the question he'd asked me all those years ago.
I'm publishing the first book in a series, in hardback, from the sixth largest publishing house in the world.
That is what I've published, you old coot.
Of course, he never responded. He was sick by then. Truly sick. I doubt he ever got my email.
All that aside, let me give you my final thoughts on Harlan Ellison. Whether you loved him or hated him. Whether you knew him in person, or only through his work, or were one of the many people he offended along the way. Harlan Ellison lived a writer's life. In the way that Hemingway and only a few others have ever done, Harlan embodied his own particular brand of literature and his impact will be felt for all time. For the time he was given to carry The Written Word forward, he did it, and now he has entered the great celestial pantheon of authors who did the same. And right now he is probably pissing them off too.



Bernard Schaffer
Montgomery County, PA
6/29/18