Many Trekkers place “City on the Edge of Forever” with the best episodes of the original Star Trek series. Screenwriter, Harlan Ellison, only shrugs. In a documentary on the novelist-storywriter-essayist, HarlanEllison: Dream with Sharp Teeth, he complains that Gene Rodenberry executed his ideas poorly. And he kvetches about the idiots he worked with in Hollywood, especially directors whose “vision” was about as clear as a foggy night on the North Sea. And he kvetches about almost everything.
Not without reason, director Erik Nelson reveals. Gregarious yet angry, and with an outsize ego that protects him like a ring of snarling gargoyles, Ellison, by his own account, grew up as one of the only Jewish kids in an anti-Semitic Ohio town. He was an outsider in grade school, and when he grew up, he remained an outsider in a society whose values were cheap and hypocritical. A prolific pulp writer in the 1950s, in the ‘60s he became a swashbuckling fellow traveler of the Counterculture, which he regarded as breaking with the mindless conformity infecting the world. He was sharp and pointed as Hunter S. Thompson, minus the drinking and drugs. Ellison confronted the world with bilious sobriety.
Citing Edgar Allan Poe as his greatest influence, Ellison’s confrontational imaginative fiction and essays seek to awaken readers from their stupefied plod across the surface of everyday reality. He believed television (“the glass teat” he called it) deadened the imagination and promoted passive consumption. In one scene from Dreams with Sharp Teeth, Ellison is walking across an LA street railing at drivers on cell phones. He has reason to think he is sharing the world with the living dead, people who have abdicated a portion of their humanity through negligent sloth and self-indulgent greed.
Ellison enjoys the select company of a few people whom he has influenced, especially the fantasy-graphic novelist Neil Gaiman. Mostly, he despises contemporary writing. Of Tom Clancy, he remarks, “things that live in Petri dishes can become a writer.” He scoffs at the sci-fi fandom that became a forum for his work, calling it “an extended family of wimps, flakes and oddballs.” He sued arrogant Hollywood mogul James Cameron for stealing the idea for the Terminator, and won, and challenges any fool who posts his work online without paying him. “If you put your hand in my pocket, I’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,” he warns. And he’s drawn blood in curt many times.
As for the Utopian vista of bloggers and “citizen journalists,” he says: “No, schmuck, you’re not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to an informed opinion.” Keep snarling, Harlan.
