When worlds collide...

Let me give you a little background. I am, unabashedly, a huge Harlan Ellison fan. I love his writing, everything from the ostensibly misogynist A Boy and his Dog to his enormous body of work as an essayist. His prose just leaps off the page - it's got an energy and flow that few writers can aspire to, even when you are reading an ancient riff on a long-cancelled TV show like "The Mod Squad". If you'd like some examples, check these out. His SF/Fantasy work is universally thought-provoking and can be a little tough to digest - the closest analog to it that I've found is Neil Gaiman.

He's led an incredible life - I'll spare you the details, but if ever there's somebody who has "walked the walk", it's Ellison (OK, maybe just a few details: ran away from home, served in the army, joined a street gang to do research for a book, lived in LA during the 60s when southern california didn't suck, marched in the civil rights demonstrations in the South, walked the picket line with his fellow writers during the Writer's Strike in the 70s, married and divorced several times and lived to tell the tale, etc).

I found out that he was going to be at the Foolscap convention, across the pond in Bellevue, and I was sorely tempted to attend. The things that stopped me were:

1. I didn't quite "get" Foolscap. It's not a typical convention, apparently, but I didn't know what it was, and I couldn't tell exactly what was going on there and whether it's really a good use of my time.
   
2. I'm really leery about meeting artists in person, so I was pretty ambivalent anyway.
   
3. I'm an idiot, and forgot about it. Sort of.
   

The thing is that there's a big dividing line between the work and the artist that I'm really reticent to cross. Reports on Ellison portray him as either a tireless, principled crusader for justice, or a short, petulant, elitist asshole, with very little middle ground. It's fair to say that he doesn't "suffer fools gladly" and that it ain't too hard to find yourself in the "fool" category. I really didn't want to have to reconcile Ellison the auteur with Ellison, the wrinkly old man with a bad attitude (and, frankly, it's enough that he has provided us with his work - he's under no obligation to have to shuck and jive on stage and be my buddy as well).

Anyhow, what got me thinking about this was reading about the Penny Arcade guys' run-in with Ellison. Now, I've met Mike and Jerry before (I helped Mike fix his arcade game, and his wife baked us some very tasty cookies as I recall), and they are both what I would call "nice guys". While they come off as kind of brash on their website, in real life they're like any other smart-ass nerds you might know -- smart, funny, but basically harmless.

And yet, it pains me to hear them rip on "that old coot Harlen Ellison (sic)". Lord knows that Ellison doesn't need me or anyone else to stand up for him, but the guy is a bonafide literary giant. Mike can joke about Ellison "writing Star Wars novels", but the fact is, as the editor of Dangerous Visions 1/2, Ellison is more responsible than nearly anyone else in the industry for making Science Fiction into a legitimate literary genre (not to mention his contributions to the graphic novel genre). Without people like Ellison, science fiction would be all Star Wars novels today.

And as fond as I am of Mike and Jerry, no, they haven't earned the goddamn right to rip on Ellison. Maybe when they've lived another 40 years, and have put their ass on the line multiple times for something more important than making jokes about video games, they'll have the gravitas to criticize anything the man has done.

Ellison once wrote that for the young, "nostalgia is what they had for breakfast". It's all too true. And I guess nihilism loses its charm at some point, too.