I wanted to write a biography of Harlan Ellison.

This is when I was in my 20s. I had a handful of early-20s-guy approved writers I was borderline obsessed with: Ellison, James Ellroy, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, William Goldman. I had not yet heard the good word of our lord and saviour David Foster Wallace, for whatever reason. But I had my copy of The Essential Ellison, my The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay with its 30,000-word rant against Gene Roddenberry, my printed-off online copies of The Last Deadloss Visions and Bugfuck! I was a huge fan of Ellison's essays and a moderate fan of his short stories. Something about his nonfiction voice was compelling enough to make me reread certain pieces multiple times in a month.

So I wanted to write a biography of Harlan Ellison. But when you're in your twenties you want to do a lot of things.

It's on my mind now for a few reasons. One is that most of my faves have since become pretty well covered, biography-wise:

JAMES ELLROY is the subject of Steven Powell's terrific Love Me Fierce in Danger, published in 2023.^[1]

ALAN MOORE was given the book-length treatment in Lance Parkin's pretty good Magic Words in 2014.

NEIL GAIMAN doesn't have a single comprehensive book-length biography, but if you assembled the various interviews, coffee table books, profiles and exposes of sexual misconduct you could cobble together a decent one from the clippings, like Gaiman once did for Duran Duran.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN died with only Sean Egan's okay biography The Reluctant Storyteller having seen print. An interesting-sounding feature documentary on him funded on Kickstarter but was never released.

There's still a real gap when it comes to Ellison. He announced plans to publish an autobiography in the 21st century but by the time he died, eighteen years in, the closest thing that had seen print was an extended essay, bitter and rambling, shot through with evidence of a departed fastball, included with a reissue of his collection Ellison Wonderland. If somebody today wanted to know who Harlan Ellison the human being was and how, the three most obvious places to send them would be the documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth, Nat Segaloff's biography A Lit Fuse, and J. Michael Straczynski's recent introduction to The Last Dangerous Visions.

Taking them out of order, Dreams is a good introduction to The Harlan Ellison Show, the schtick and the persona that made him a convention-circuit draw for decades. Straczynski's essay gives an interesting and insightful but partial (in both senses) account of Ellison's struggles with mental illness and declining creative powers.

A Lit Fuse is not the worst biography I have ever read, but it probably is the most disappointing. If I was making a case for Harlan Ellison as a figure of interest I'd describe him as a Depression-era kid, a street brawler turned SF writer turned screenwriter and critic, a leading light of the New Wave both as author and anthologist, an inveterate teller of tall tales, a central part of several creative scenes but also a real starfucker and name-dropper^[2], part Hemingway, part Mr Toad of Toad Hall. Segaloff's book presents him more as just a two-fisted media personality and doesn't often enough resist the impulse to print the legend. Robert Silverberg shows up in the addendum to the second edition to point out that no, Harlan almost certainly didn't launch himself at the ABC standards and practices guy and break the guy's pelvis while working on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in the 1960s^[3], a story the first edition just entered into the documentary record.

You can take this, if you like, as sour grapes from someone who didn't write a Harlan Ellison biography to someone who did, but I can't imagine anybody finishing the book and feeling it had done its subject justice. Ellison was at the least a complex, ambiguous figure. He was involved in some substantive creative disputes, plus some pretty blinkered ones and some that were outright shenanigans. He deserves an account that gives him intelligent scrutiny, not one that allows him to remain a cartoon.

Two decades have passed since I first had the desire to write a biography of Harlan Ellison. Do I still want to do it? I certainly don't want to write one of Neil Gaiman, and I feel sorry if there's anyone out there who put effort into doing that. Imagine spending years working on a book about someone you think of as just morally ambiguous and turning up evidence that they're an abuser and rapist.

It also would not be the same project now. Time only runs one way. A lot of Ellison's social and professional circles are no longer with us. His wife Susan died not too long after he did. Peter David, who started an organisation called the Friends of Ellison, passed away recently. Robin Williams, who could have got up on stage and done 90 minutes of Harlan Ellison material, is gone. Others of his associates opted to do what Mark Evanier did, keep their distance from him towards the end of his life after one too many ugly scenes.

It's astonishing how quickly it goes. Ellison won his last competitive Nebula in 2011. Less than fifteen years later, how many people read his work with awe, or affection, or at all?

Maybe some. Maybe a few real fanatics, like I was. Maybe if J. Michael Straczynski follows through on his plans to turn Ellison's Sherman Oaks home into a museum, in a few years there will be people browsing the archive and making notes and sharing what they find before the kudzu crawls over and buries the man and his era forever.

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1. Among other revelations, it reveals that Ellroy and Harlan Ellison once attended a dinner party together at their mutual editor's house. They hated each other's guts. ↩︎

2. I couldn't help noticing that despite nearly coming to blows during their one encounter, Ellison lists James Ellroy in the acknowledgements of his subsequent collection Angry Candy, as one of nearly 60 people "all in this with me." ↩︎

3. If you look around online you can find a version where "Ellison had to be held back" from attacking the BS&P guy - that, I can believe. ↩︎