Groping Connie Willis in full view of the world. Demon with a brass neck.
HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT. I'll wait for you.
*
Disclosure.
I never read Ellison's fiction. Given his mistreatment of Connie Willis, I am unlikely to purchase his books. It's improbable that I'll return to Asimov's material, given Isaac's groping days at conventions.
In an attempt to avoid compiling a blog post that's just going to turn into a long and tiresome list of sci-fi gropers whose books I've never read/will never read again, I'll stick with this non-obituary format instead.
Ellison.
If he read my fiction, he kept quiet about it. (He never read my fiction. I have a doctor's note to prove it. Jekyll is the fellow's name. More on him, anon.)
The closest I came to reading Ellison's fiction was inside the pages of The Rocketeer, by Dave Stevens. Harlan wrote a grumpy introduction, as required under Montana law. Much of his grumpiness stemmed from the loss of everything.
You know the drill...
Old Farts misbehaved and misremembered how things never used to be. Young pups don't know they are born and won't live to be old pups. The knowledge-base is gone...
Except.
We can all ask Doctor Google about that shit now. It is possible to locate this unfindable forgotten stuff that Ellison wanted to keep to himself. Well, 13% of it.
I was bemused to find Ellison haunting the internet. He railed against so much that he was paid royalties by train companies. True, he made me laugh out loud.
He came on the interwebs to inform us, in all seriousness, how to pronounce Jekyll.
Just like that.
And, just like that, not being Scottish, Hurling Elision mangled the name Jekyll. I seem to be having some difficulty pronouncing Harlan's monicker.
The author's name, Robert Louis Stevenson, was rattled out rather quickly by Harlan on this video clip. Therein lies another pronunciation problem.
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson. When written in full, and read out loud, there's less temptation to hurl elision at the audience. To omit Balfour is to allow Louis and Stevenson to merge, altering the sound of the author's name.
LouisStevenson.
We know from Stevenson's writing that his name is pronounced Lewis.
Jekyll is pronounced tae rhyme wi' meikle. You might write that as meekill, to give a better idea of what to say.
Onywey...
Much of my knowledge is pre-Google. With a writerly mind, I had to uncover random weirdness on my own by catching that late-night never-repeated TV show, listening to half a radio documentary, scribbling notes as I devoured data...
Dead magazines surfaced in out-of-the-way places. Books practically fell into my lap at a convenient time. (Thank you, Mary Shelley.)
This is how things were, in the used-to-be. The beforeness of now.
Ellison was the sort of guy who'd grump his way through a conversation expecting to be the only guy in the room old enough or old enough and in the right place at the right time to remember whatever the hell he decided to talk about.
Any young pup who knew a scrap of detail about the subject under discussion? That pup would be seized on as a space-time anomaly. How the hell do you know about that?! Feigned admiration from the old warhorse.
Derision followed, of course. Scorn for the 99% of the audience not lucky enough to have been around back in the day, deprived of the Old Fart status that allowed all this misremembering of how things never quite were.
I used to think about that sort of nonsense when dropping arcane references into my fiction. Because I had that pre-Google writerly mind. Same as Ellison. Not as dusty or Old Farty.
But we walked the same long fucking road back in the day when you couldn't point-and-fucking-click your way from A to a very distant B.
Here's a deleted scene from one of the Terminator movies.
The
Harlan Ellison fights back, and there's a legal settlement.
I'm struggling to maintain the thread, here. That's no bad thing. Onywey, Hurling Elision made me laugh at his ability to correct the world's view of...Doacturrr Jeekl.
We can hire Doctor Google to scan Harlan's world-view and see him speak about Old Fartery. I no longer concern myself with arcane references in my fiction, as e-books have the capacity to hand those references to you on a digital silver platter.
Words are linked to articles. The missing knowledge-base? We carved an electronic chainsaw through the all-encroaching jungle of time, and there's the once-lost analogue city awaiting the first digital tour-bus.
That stuff was digitised around us. As we grow older and grumpier, it's easier just to click from A to B.
I think Ellison was simply grumpy at having to be Ellison. That here, in our electronic wasteland, was some suspect short-cut for writers who wouldn't have to walk in his shoes.
Well I walked in similar boots, and I am here to tell the young pups in the audience...for fuck's sake point-and-click. You'll save the shoe-leather for when it is needed.
Even younger pups must search engine the shit out of point-and-click to discover what a mouse was.
There'll be a lot written about Ellison on his demise. Much praise. Some condemnation. I always knew the name, yet never sought out his work. The more I learned, the less-inclined I grew to chase down the guy's stories.
Being an imaginative writer, a prolific writer, an influential writer, does not excuse being a groper.
Ever. The end.
You can cure cancer and murder someone. Doesn't mean I have to like you for curing cancer.
So, yes, you'll unearth anecdotes about Ellison's championing of women. And you'll hear that he had a heart of gold under that gruff exterior...
Who was he? Good question. What will he be remembered for?
Groping Connie Willis in full view of the world. Demon with a brass neck.
If you missed it or skipped it, HERE'S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT.
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