And now we turn to a complex subject: the writer Harlan Ellison. He was a volatile, controversial figure during his lifetime, and continues to be after his death. His literary executor, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, is intent upon seeing to it that Ellison’s works do not disappear from the view of the reading public, and Greatest Hits is one of his first attempts to reintroduce the late author’s short stories to a new audience that may not have ever heard of him.

I’ve certainly heard of him. I first discovered Ellison while taking a class in science fiction as literature at the University of Santa Clara in the early 1970s, in the waning years of the Bay Area hippie revolution, where I was, in fact, spending more time smoking pot and taking psychedelics than studying. When I got to Ellison’s story, though, in the anthology that was the course textbook, my life changed. I had never read anything like the short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” (More on this story later.) Before I had finished it, I decided that I had to become a writer; no other occupation in the world would suit me.

And so I began to write and also to read a lot more science fiction stories. However, I didn’t make much progress, even after I moved back to Seattle, until another encounter with Ellison led me to Clarion West. I read in the newspaper one summer that Ellison was going to give a reading on the University of Washington campus. I’ve never encountered any writer that can read their works like Ellison. At that time he read his new story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” (More on this story later too.) I also found out that he was teaching at a six-week live-in writer’s workshop, and the next summer I enrolled. Thus Harlan Ellison, along with five other well-known science fiction and fantasy writers and editors, became my mentor. At the time he had already published the groundbreaking anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, and he was searching for material for The Last Dangerous Visions. All of us students, of course, dreamed of writing a story good enough for him to purchase for it.

In short, for years Ellison, or Harlan, as he insisted his students should call him, was one of my favorite writers, and I read a lot of his work – everything I could get my hands on. Since then I’ve reread some of his stories. I remember, for instance, finding his collection Deathbird Stories in an English-language library when I was living in Thessaloniki, Greece. Shortly after I moved back to the States, I found a reasonably-priced used copy of his door-stopper of a book The Essential Ellison on Amazon, which gave me another chance to reread some of my favorites.

Now, with this volume, I have a further opportunity to reacquaint myself with Ellison’s masterful short stories. And herein are some of his very best. In his introduction, Straczynski primarily addresses readers that might not have ever heard of Ellison, and that’s okay. But I am aware that many other readers like myself who grew up reading Ellison, even though they are familiar with the stories, are eager to obtain copies of this book.

There are three introductions. The first, by Straczynski, as I said, seeks to offer a glimpse of the complex man behind the words. The introduction that impressed me most, though, is the one by Cassandra Khaw, who writes of using pain as fuel for the creative process. There is certainly a lot of violence and pain in Ellison’s stories. However, there is much beauty too. For sheer power, visceral intensity, and precision and poetry of language, his best stories are hard to beat. And this selection certainly contains some of his best.

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The collection kicks off in high gear with one of Ellison’s most popular stories, “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman.” The harlequin of the title is a rebellious man out of step with time in a hyper-organized future. The story is told in a hip, seemingly lighthearted, unorthodox style that was wildly unconventional at the time; the middle comes first, then the beginning, and then the story concludes. Ellison prefaces it with a long quote from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” Incidentally, this story introduced me to the works of Thoreau, whose writings subsequently had a profound effect on my life.

(To be continued)

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