Harlan Ellison

Harlan Jay Ellison (Cleveland, 1934 – Los Angeles, 2018) was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy and one of the most visible figures of the New Wave movement. Over his career he published more than 1,700 works, including short stories, novels, screenplays and essays, and he became as known for his sharp, combative public persona as for his prose.

Born into a Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio, he grew up amid antisemitism and bullying, and by his own account he ran away from home several times. He attended Ohio State University from 1951 until his expulsion in 1953. He later told the story of being expelled after a clash with a professor who disparaged science fiction, though a biography by Weil and Wolfe points to a very poor academic record, so his version should be taken with caution. He moved to New York in 1955, where he shared a boarding house with Robert Silverberg, and served in the U.S. Army from 1957 to 1959. During that service he wrote his first novel, Web of the City, published in 1958. He later worked as an editor in Chicago and in 1962 settled in California, where he began selling scripts to television series such as The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone and Star Trek.

His style mixes dark humor, distrust of authority and a steady interest in individual freedom and the cruelty of systems. Stories such as I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman explore those themes in bleak or unsettling settings. As editor of Dangerous Visions (1967), he gathered writers who wanted to break with genre conventions, a book Isaac Asimov saw as a second revolution in science fiction. His legacy extends beyond print: A Boy and His Dog inspired elements of the Fallout series, and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream became a 1995 video game in which he voiced the computer AM. He won multiple Hugo, Nebula and Edgar awards, and his reputation remains debated, partly because he cultivated a self-mythologizing persona full of anecdotes that are hard to verify.