The Americans do not need symposia; they have Harlan Ellison, not a one-man band but a symphony orchestra, complete with a thousand violins, shofar, and ordinance. I find it difficult to speak temperately about him. On one hand he is responsible for Dangerous Visions, and its successors, anthologies as cardinal as New Signatures or des Imagistes; on the other hand—a smaller, nipping and less important hand, like a crab's left claw—he exhibits all that is hateful about SF: the biographical and autobiographical logorrhoea, the cute titles, the steamy, cosy, encounter-group confessional tone, the intrusively private acknowledgments, the blurbs and afterwords. When I have read a good story I like to rest and smoke a fag; I do not want a writer rushing over and asking if the earth moved….
Harlan Ellison has his own visions, some of a fine, universal menace, some dangerous only to the writer…. [The best thing in] Approaching Oblivion is another story of fascism with an American face, but the other stories are less uniformly minatory. There is one about new Orpheus—can anyone write about jazz without sickliness?—an involved and embarrassing Yiddish joke, and an introduction that takes it all back to being rejected by a gang of playground antisemites. Ellison has done a lot to drag SF out of the ghetto, but is building high, broken-glass-topped walls around his new Jerusalem. (p. 26)
Eric Korn, in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1977; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), January 14, 1977.
This is a free excerpt of 251 words. There are 255 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Ellison, Harlan 1934–: Critical Essay by Eric Korn Access Pass.
