Harlan Ellison’s Already Immortal . . . But Let’s Make Certain

I discovered Harlan Ellison in the spring of 1975, I think, after the publication of his coldest, harshest collection before or since, Deathbird Stories. The tales were startling, vivid, often violent and profane. The writer clearly did not want you to look up from one of his tales and say, “that was a nice story”; he hoped to make you fearful, enraged, or energized to get up and do something!

Ellison’s writing was a sharp rap upside the head. Since that first volume, I’ve read just about everything he’s put between the covers of a book -- paper or cloth -- and collected copies of nearly all of them as well.

Now Jason Davis is proposing a mammoth effort to preserve all of Ellison’s unpublished and uncollected work. Davis is a comparatively young fan who became an editor and publisher and has overseen the release of new anthologies as well as lesser-known Ellison works over the past five years (including unshot screenplays and television episodes, and early pulp fiction from magazines such as Trapped, Tightrope!, Guilty Detective Story Magazine, Famous Western magazine, and True Men Stories).

Simply put, Davis will digitize the master’s files, which are almost entirely paper and mimeographed copies since Ellison ALWAYS composes on an Olympia manual typewriter (as you can see above, where he was finishing his story about Prometheus, “On the Slab,” at the Commodore Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., back in January 1981), plus the tons of magazines that printed his early stories in the 1950s and 1960s, so everything that has never appeared in book form before can now do so, and definitive copies of Ellison classics can be easily reprinted when publishers want them.

Davis calls this undertaking the Harlan Ellison Books Preservation Project (or the Edgeworks Abbey Archive). In order to get it properly launched, he’s created a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to crowd-fund it. I’ve pledged to support the thing, and I’m urging you to do so as well. There’s barely a week left in the campaign, but the proposal is more than 80 percent funded, so it just needs a little more help from people like you.

Here’s the Kickstarter website.

If the name Harlan Ellison is not immediately familiar, perhaps you might recall the most celebrated episode of the original Star Trek series, titled “City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Kirk, Spock, and McCoy travel through time to Depression-era New York City. Kirk falls in love with a woman who runs a care mission (played by Joan Collins), and has to choose between her and the future as he has known it; in other words, he has to let her die in a truck crash so everything he has known and loved before he met her in the past can dependably come to exist.

Although the episode as Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry shot it is not exactly what Ellison plotted, Harlan wrote the script. The Writers Guild of America presented Ellison with its award for Best Episodic Drama on Television for his original teleplay (not what was actually shot as the 28th episode of Star Trek) and the show also won a Hugo Award.

You might have run across a 1975 cult sci-fi B-movie called “A Boy and His Dog,” in which a young, rifle-packing kid makes his way across a blasted, post-apocalyptic landscape in partnership with his telepathic mutt. He also finds his way into the “DownUnders”: sunken pockets of society in nuclear shelters where small communities try to preserve a simpler, safer, but tightly monitored (think 1950s) civilization. Vic, the young rover, was played by a then-unknown actor, Don Johnson, who was still nine years away from “Miami Vice.” This movie was based on an Ellison novella by the same name. (That’s the cream of my Ellison collection above).

You might have run across such astounding short stories as “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” … or “The Deathbird” … or “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” … or “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” (inspired by the more-or-less true urban legend of the slaying of Kitty Genovese) … or his Jack-the-Ripper-in-the-future tale, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” … or “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” … or “Paladin of the Lost Hour” (made into a segment of the new Twilight Zone series in 1985, which featured one of Danny Kaye’s final performances) … or “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (later made into a video game with Harlan’s voice as the power-mad computer that took over the world) in a collection here or there.

Over the years I’ve seen Harlan Ellison read and speak live a number of times (at right, that’s me and him at the Lake Oswego [OR] Arts Festival in June 2001), had him autograph dozens of his books for my collection, interviewed him (briefly) over the phone, and eventually got to do a little work for him -- proofreading and copyediting a couple of his books. So I kinda know the guy and he knows me.

Even readers who have an acquaintance with the Ellison oeuvre above may not be aware that over the past 50 years he has also written sharp, pungent nonfiction -- from book, film, and television reviews to poignant personal essays; features about bands like Three Dog Night and portraits of stars like Steve McQueen. An excellent introduction is the thin omnibus titled Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed. Other collections include The Glass Teat (two volumes of TV criticism), An Edge In My Voice, The Harlan Ellison Hornbook, and Harlan Ellison’s Watching, a collection of his film reviews.

Incidentally, he has also done some acting (from the Cleveland Play House theater in his youth to guest appearances on Babylon 5 and The Simpsons) and plenty of voice work (recordings of his own and other people’s books for Alternate World Recordings, Dove Audio, and Audible.com -- see selection to the left). In 2008, the documentary “Dreams With Sharp Teeth” profiled Ellison, with appearances by his friends Robin Williams and Neil Gaiman.

If you know who he is, you’ll want to support this project. Even if you don’t, check out the link and consider tossing in a few dollars. It’s a VERY worthy literary cause, because it will help keep his startling legacy alive and readily available for decades to come.