To some, Harlan Ellison was the finest short story writer to have emerged from America’s science fiction ghetto in generations. The Los Angeles Times described him as “the 20th-century Lewis Carroll”; JG Ballard thought he was “an aggressive and restless extrovert who conducts life at a shout and his fiction at a scream”; Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, called him “the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water”.
Ellison, who has died aged 84, wrote 70 books, some 400 short stories, dozens of TV screenplays and more than 1,000 essays, introductions and columns. His stories could be whimsical and cruel, playful and painful, sentimental and shocking. He loathed being branded a “science fiction” author, although a tally of more than 40 awards proved that SF fans held him in high regard. He was given lifetime achievement prizes by the World Fantasy awards and the Horror Writers Association, and received the Writers Guild of America award four times. In 1996 he said: “What I write is hyperactive magic realism. I take the received world and I reflect it back through the lens of fantasy, turned slightly so you get a different portrait.”
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