I remember the first Harlan Ellison story I read. It was "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" which appeared in Volume 2 of the Isaac Asimov edited The Hugo Winners. I'd come for the Asimov and the Simak and the Anderson, but it was this "new fellow" Ellison who stopped me in my tracks. I'd never seen anything like him before. And as I read on in The Hugo Winners Volume 2, I was surprised to encounter Ellison again... "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"...and again..." The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World. " Well, he'd had me at Ticktockman...so by the time I'd finished Beast, I was totally his bitch.
That was in 1972, I think. I was 15 years old, and I read a lot of science fiction. Especially Asimov and Bradbury and Simak. But I got most of my books from The Baltimore County Public Library, and in those pre-internet days it wasn't all that easy to find books that weren't seeded on the beaten path. I was a member of The Science Fiction Book Club...which is how I got the Hugo Winners books...but I know that my first Asimov did not come courtesy of them. I do have a memory of finding From the Land of Fear on the bookstands at a drugstore (The Copper Kettle...which was also one of my primary sources for comic books), so that might well have been my first book.
Alas, I went through a period in the 90s when I sold off a lot of my books, and many of my Ellisons (I had acquired lots by then--for one thing, because Pyramid Books did a reprint series and put out eleven titles)...maybe even all of them...went, including that copy of From the Land of Fear. Just now I went to check my bookshelf, sure that I had re-acquired this title only to discover that not only had I not done that, but that I had only 3 of the 11 Pyramid publications...and even though some of the other 8 I had found in different editions, I was missing several completely.
Sigh.
ANYway...over the years (since those lean 90s), I have re-acquired a number of Harlan Ellsion books. It grated me when he began to release super-expensive paperback collections of his earlier stories
--Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word goes for $50 new, and not much less used...and there are at least a dozen of these volumes--so I only bought a couple of Must Haves there...but I continued to follow Harlan and when a new new book came out, I bought it...even the execrable Li'l Harlan and His Sidekick Carl the Comet in Danger Land.
But Harlan was a little off the beaten path in the past decade or two, so I didn't find out that he had died until almost three months after the fact.
I miss him. He was such a vital and important force in my life in my high school years, in my army years, in my living alone in Baltimore years. He was angry and eloquent, and I was the former and longed to be the latter. His syntax and diction invaded my own writing. I remember sending a story entitled 'Scream My Brain!' the Policeman Cried as Pigs Flowed Mucously Through the Streets" (I got a form rejection back with a single handwritten word: Who? Not sure what that meant. J'Accuse? Snide? Dunno.) to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction when I was still in high school. I sent another story to them years (at least five) later (entitled "The World and All There Is That's In It") and when the editor sent back a nice handwritten rejection note, I immediately submitted another story and in my cover letter said something like, "I wanted to have another try after receiving your encouragement, and wanted to do it before the wine had been left open too long and the memory gone flat," which was an allusion to a story by Harlan. And Harlan introduced me to a whole slew of writers I later came to love via his Dangerous Visions anthologies: Bernard Wolfe and James Sallis and Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon and J. G. Ballard and John Brunner and Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delaney and Ursula K. Le Guin and Gene Wolfe and Ray Nelson and Barry Malzberg and James Sallis and James Tiptree, Jr. and Richard Lupoff (whose "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" infected me for a very very long time, especially evident in the second novel I wrote (during my senior year in high school), The Lone Cry of a Wolf.
Yep. Harlan had a profound effect on my reading and writing life. He was a cantankerous, violent, and sometimes nasty son of a gun, but I loved him.
And still do, of course.
And I always will.
P.S. You can (and should) check out the superb documentary, Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008), which is available via Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Harlan-Ellison-Dreams-Sharp-Teeth/dp/B002TZS87G/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1537445874&sr=1-2&keywords=harlan+ellison). I've also just now discovered that someone has posted the 1966 movie The Oscar, which Harlan (1) had a hand in writing and (2) was absolutely livid about what had been done to and with his script. I think I'm going to have to go watch that right now. Sorry, Harlan. It's the OCD.
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