I didn’t think I’d watch the entire story tonight but Harlan made it hard for me to pause. Thanks for sharing this. The “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” story is still a terrific story, it’s nice to get Harlan’s angle on it.
His widow, Susan, passed awaythis month. She was only 60. I was charmed the one time I saw her, mentioned upthread, where Harlan would be lecturing, have a brain fart, and would shout “Susan!” for her to supply the missing data for his anecdote. She was like a Janet in the Good Place.
Joe Straczynski, who serves as Harlan and Susan’s executor, posted a lengthy list on Facebook of what he’s been up to while securing Ellison’s literary legacy. For one thing, The Last Dangerous Visions anthology, which must be forty or fifty years late, will finally be coming out. Otherwise:
It’s been a while since I’ve done an update on the progress of all things related to the Harlan and Susan Ellison Foundation, and most of it was in bits and pieces, so I figured I’d do a quick round-up of all the major news thus far.
The first stage of improvements/repairs to the house has been completed in preparation for becoming a Memorial Library. This includes: structural repairs for leaks and other issues, installation of a state-of-the-art security system with cameras and a bunch of other wonderfulnesses, building a new back wall and reinforcing the property to keep the house from sliding downhill, and landscaping to create an area looking out over the valley for talks and other events. Stage Two will include repairing/renovating the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, making other large repairs, putting in safety measures for folks visiting the library, and setting up audio and video systems to run during visits.
This and other work for the Foundation, can now be paid for by funds earned by the recent Heritage Auction, which total approximately one million dollars. This ensures that the Foundation will be solvent and viable well into the foreseeable future.
Even before this, back when I first came on as Executor, we informed Sharon, Harlan’s assistant for nearly 40 years. who was crucial to Susan coping with his passing, and is now helping with the Foundation and looking after the house, that she would continue to receive her full salary in perpetuity for the rest of her life.
The Harlan and Susan Ellison Foundation is now a certified nonprofit corporation, which ensures that the company will be run according to all the state, local and federal rules and regulations governing such nonprofits long after I’ve gone to dust.
Several of Harlan’s properties are now in active development for TV and film. More on this as and when I can discuss it.
In order to build up to the release of The Last Dangerous Visions as a major publishing Event, Blackstone Publishing will be releasing all of the DV books in sequence, starting with the original DV in Fall ’23, Again Dangerous Visions Spring 24, and TLDV Fall ’24.
A major publisher (holding off on the name pending a formal announcement by the company) recently won the rights to publish Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits in a fierce auction between several companies. The book presents 17 of Harlan’s most famous, award-winning stories that span his career. It will be published as a mass-market paperback, audio, kindle, and a collector’s edition illustrated hardcover, setting the stage for a deal to reprint all of Harlan’s prior collections.
Best of all, the book will be distributed through the company’s Classics line, which puts it in the same historical category as books by Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, and other authors who have earned a place in American literature. This means it have a significant presence in bookstores, libraries and universities, will be covered by the mainstream press, and that it will be given the critical attention his work deserves.
That’s it for the moment, but there is much, much more to come….
They met when jms was a young struggling writer long before B5. He looked up Harlan in the phone book and called him for writing advice. Harlan’s advice: “Stop writing shit! Then you’ll start selling.” Their friendship grew from there.
I don’t know if Harlan wrote any particular episodes all by himself. He did come up with some key ideas that were incorporated into the show like the Shadow planet-killing death cloud, and cameoed on camera as a Psi Cop and on mic as a wacky AI, and had a story credit for a fifth season episode.
I’ve known Harlan’s been dead all this time, because that aching hole left in my heart, right next to the one left by George Carlin.
I’m so glad JMS went to bat for Ellison like this. Harlan may not have been the greatest of people, and I believe that sometimes he was too good at tooting his own horn, but the man could fucking write.Even his early stuff like Spiders’ Kiss was just good.
I saw a little extra colour added to this story on social media earlier, by the guy fulfilling Marvel’s side of the deal.
Part of the settlement was that Harlan got one of everything Marvel produced for the rest of his life.
And that didn’t just mean one of every comic or GN, no. One of every poster, catalogue, sell sheet, everything. If Marvel made travel alarm clocks as a giveaway for freelancers, Harlan got one of those, too.
And Harlan paid attention.
And while I was working in Marvel Direct Sales, if Harlan felt he’d been shortchanged on his settlement, I was the guy he called. And I’d have to hunt down a copy of whatever he hadn’t been sent and ship it to him.
He was never angry in the calls — never angry at me, at least; the people who got the quiz answer wrong were another story. But Marvel had made a deal with him, and he was going to get every. single. drop of blood. that he’d been promised.
Harlan would probably have gotten more stuff done if he didn’t spend so much time paying attention to pointless shit like whether he had a full set of 1988 Marvel Order Forms. But if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been Harlan.
Besides getting some anthologies published this year (a greatest hits of HE, a republishing of “Dangerous Visions” and “Again, Dangerous Visions”, and the long-awaited “The Last Dangerous Visions”), he dropped this bit of biographical note.
Unknown to most of his fans and critics, Ellison was suffering from an undiagnosed mental condition. What had once been an unusually prolific career as a writer of books and TV scripts slowed to a crawl by the ’90s. The missing Dangerous Visions book was only one example of that. There was also some erratic, alarming behavior, including an incident at the 2006 Hugo Awards where Ellison groped the breast of writer Connie Willis onstage and on-camera.
At Straczynski’s urging, Ellison finally went to a doctor and found out he was bipolar and suffering from clinical depression — a diagnosis that remained little known outside his inner circle.
Does this excuse Harlan’s late-in-life offensive behavior? Maybe? Does this remind anyone else of the time when Babylon 5 leading man Michael O’Hare confided in his own mental health struggles/erratic and sometimes offensive behavior to Joe, and Joe got that other friend help and kept their secret until long after their death, when he publicly broke their news?
I already have “The Essential Ellison” and the first two “Dangerous Visions”, but I am looking forward to the last one finally coming out.
If you didn’t think Harlan Ellison had mental health issues, you probably weren’t following his exploits very carefully OR reading the fiction. I hope a diagnosis helped him find some peace. Bipolar is a bitch.
One of my best friends from college designed the game version of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream with Harlan. He worked really closely with him and he really enjoyed the collaboration.
After they shipped the game, he sent Harlan a Christmas card.
Harlan returned it unopened with “I’m Jewish” scrawled on the envelope.
I wonder if he kept that? I need to ask him. I certainly would have. Way cooler than a lame autograph.
