Writing to Harlan Ellison

My correspondence with a literary hero

I believe the first book I read by Harlan Ellison was his short story collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Besides being one of the great titles, the story remains a fascinating capsule of humanity at its best and worst. It follows the tortures of a small group of insane and terrible people damned to live within the confines of AM, a giant Cold War supercomputer gone sentient. AM despises its former masters with a hate so vitriolic that it has annihilated the planet and kept only five human survivors as its playthings, all of whom are losing their minds as they seek any escape, even death. It may not resonate as deeply as it once did, but as a child of the ’80s who was kept up nights by a senile President picking fights with inscrutable nuclear enemies, its palpable sense of dread was quite affecting.¹

That’s just one of Mr. Ellison’s tales. It inspired The Terminator, so it is perhaps his most famous, other than a beloved episode of Star Trek. He was a true master of the short story, and I read everything by him I could get my hands on. Deathbird Stories is a favorite of mine (and Neil Gaiman) where Harlan plunges into myth and religion. He’s run the gamut, but his tales all have one thing in common: a powerful moral foundation and deeply emotional underpinning. While pigeonholed as a science fiction writer, he preferred the term speculative fiction. He’s written magic realism, hard science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and fable, such as “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” which is one of the most reprinted stories in the English language. He wrote that in six hours, in a single draft, on a manual typewriter. For a time, he would sit in the window of a bookshop all day and write stories, like a living diorama.

A quote by AM from “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” ©Harlan Ellison.

Energetic and opinionated, he became infamous among science fiction fans as ill-tempered. I did not find him so. I drove to Long Island in a ’65 Mustang with leaky brake lines to meet him at a convention at Stony Brook college in the early ‘90s, and I found the fans more irritating and aggressive than he was. To me, he just seemed like a confident man who didn’t take any shit. And people who define themselves by their fandom do not like that.²

It bemuses me when people expect someone to take shit. Now I know that it’s called a “parasocial relationship,” when fans expect creators to show obeisance. Harlan was a gentleman until he was was heckled on stage about his height; I imagine some came merely to heckle, to watch the show and eat the popcorn. What struck me most that he was a champion of others’ work more than his own. Dan Simmons was there promoting Summer of Night, and Harlan found a copy of Simmons’s first novel, Song of Kali, and read the excellent opening paragraph aloud, to share how powerful it was. He was a champion of many writers in his classes, such as Octavia E. Butler, but that doesn’t mean he was a saint.

I only met him only once, but he was quite gracious at the book signing table and signed every thing I purchased, even if I didn’t even ask for it to be signed. And he signed my copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which still graces my “show off” bookshelf, in the highest position. You can read Wikipedia for his transgressions.

One of his transgressions was that he made it very clear that he didn’t want your damn fan letters. They were a distraction from writing. Like many prolific writers, he was driven. Whatever his voluminous pagecount was, it was never enough. And like a stage star who says they never read reviews, he may have excoriated fan letter writing, but he was compelled to interrupt his day to read them.

I’ve never been good at taking no for an answer. I was adrift as a young man and seeking a father figure, which gave me a habit of contacting writers and celebrities I admired, in my search for a good male role model. I called Harlan’s house, once, and sat tongue tied until he hung up. I’m not proud of that. He would get revenge years later when he called me during a game of Dungeons & Dragons, to go over the contract for Protectors 2: Heroes, and left me gobsmacked in front of my friends as he opened with “Hey, kiddo!” and talked rapid fire.

Despite knowing that he didn’t want people writing him, I wrote him. In one of his stories, he quotes Gerald Kersh, a writer he admired greatly. I remembered the quote, but not the source. Before the internet, I would have had to go to public library, used bookstores, and plumb my own collection, skimming every Harlan Ellison story until I found the quote, and hope that he footnoted the origin. I used that as an excuse to write him a letter. And lo and behold, he answered, and chewed me out for busting his balls with my request. You can read the letter below:

I listened to “Unca Harlan” as he called himself in his eighties, and read a bunch of Gerald Kersh. I began with Nightshade and Damnations, the collection Harlan edited. Then I found he excellent novel set in a London slum, Fowler’s End, with its brilliant use of the vernacular; Night and the City, made into a famous boxing noir, and remade with Robert De Niro; and delightful pulp mystery and science fiction collection, Men Without Bones. I recommend them all. Kersh writes like a dream. He’s a writer’s writer. Clever stories, and a style so effortless it inspires awe and envy. He lacks the raw emotional power of Harlan’s best work, but he is one of the best writers of the last century, and at Valancourt Books, you can take a bite of the heart of his best work. Including one that I wrote the foreword to, Clock Without Hands.

The letter has taken on a life of its own. I shared it on my blog in the ‘90s (with our addresses rubbed out) and one of the viral sites picked it up. Shaun Usher of the excellent Letters of Note asked if he could use it, and showcased it. Shaun contacted me after he spoke with Mr. Ellison on the phone to get permission, and Harlan said I was an idiot for not selling it on eBay, because of the 200 or so letters he receives every week, mine remains one of the few he’s ever responded to. I wish I’d kept a copy of my ask, no doubt scrawled in my stout lazy cursive, or more likely printed on the daisy wheel printer I had. I don’t recall if I begged or beseeched, or merely kissed ass. It felt good to be remembered. I lay the blame on my Plucky surname, but my head was a whirlwind of formless, aimless energy back then and I’m sure I wrote a few lines that would defy explanation today.

The letter made the rounds enough that James D. Jenkins, the editor of Valancourt Books—a press which specializes in reviving forgotten classics by LGBTQ writers, mass market horror such as the Paperbacks from Hell made famous by Grady Hendrix, and other weird fiction delights—reached out and asked if I’d like to write the forward to a Gerald Kersh collection he was republishing. How could I say no? I read the stories in a few sittings, as I’d never known the novellas within, and wrote a foreword that told how I’d written Harlan. (You can buy a copy from the Valancourt website.)

I’m pretty certain Harlan was yanking my twig about only replying to a few letters, as a few years after I wrote him, I introduced his work to an eccentric old lady friend I knew from delivering medicine at the drug store, because she was a voracious reader and. She wrote Harlan and asked if was a curmudgeon, and replied no, he was an ‘irascible sonofabitch.’ Like Harlan, good Mary has merged with the infinite, and browses the library of the great beyond.)

When I was putting together Protectors 2: Heroes, I reached out to Harlan by email through his wife Susan, and asked if he would let me reprint a story. I was expecting a letter or an email, but instead I got a call! I honestly can’t remember if I brought up the letter. “Hey, remember that jerk kid who wrote you?” isn’t a good opener. But we talked for a while, and he was quite pleasant, and despite being in his early eighties, had enough energy to power a small city. He let me reprint his story “Croatoan” for Protectors 2, and holding with his mantra to “Pay the Writer,” I paid him an honorarium of ten dollars, which he then donated to charity.

I still remember his handshake, from thirty-odd years ago; he had small, strong, workman’s hands that suited a dockworker. He hammered out thousands of words with them, and no one has written like him since.

1. So it was prescient again in 2016 and may be again soon.

2. It is my opinion that all fandoms can become toxic.