Part of me thought Harlan Ellison would never die because of his fierce intelligence and sheer combative orneriness.
Like most folks who matured mostly in the 80's, my first encounter with Harlan Ellison's work was the Rodenberry-ized version of Star Trek:The Original Series "The City On The Edge of Forever." An episode so key to most Star Trek fans but despised by Harlan for the liberties taken with the original script. Even so, I felt a richness of plot and heart in this episode which was rare in the 80's rerun and first run landscape.
It must have left people completely gobsmacked in the original April 6, 1967 airdate!
Then I "formally" got introduced to Harlan Ellison when I took Doctor Frank McConnell's Science Fiction Literature class at UC Santa Barbara and got into Harlan Ellison's ground breaking short story anthology, "Dangerous Visions" which brought this new wave of more graphic, more explicit, more virile science-fiction literature out from pulp-style obscurity.
Hard to believe.
Though it is cliche to say this but I can definitely point at this particular college class as mind-expanding.
Of course I know he won't pass fully from this world because he is survived by his volumes of work for us to immerse ourselves in and to have our brains spread wide open through sheer word power.
source (here)
Great tribute and nice link to Dr. McConnell as well - a duel tribute, I would say. And let's not forget MC's Shakespeare class as well! Thank you for posting!
ReplyDelete