Born: May 27, 1934

Died: June 28, 2018

Harlan Ellison, who has died aged 84, was one of the great science fiction – or, more correctly, speculative fiction – writers of the 20th century, a character who was famously as combative as he was prolific. His works numbered in the region of 1800, including novels, short stories, television scripts, magazine essays and critical articles.

He was much lauded with awards, winning eight Hugo and four Nebula awards for science fiction, five Bram Stoker awards for horror and two Edgar awards for mystery, as well as a Silver Pen for Journalism by International PEN. He was also nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2009 spoken word reading of an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.

It's impossible to fully encapsulate the breadth of work which Ellison completed, although perhaps his most celebrated single piece of work is the 1967 episode of Star Trek entitled ‘The City at the Edge of Forever’, which was written while he was a jobbing Hollywood screenwriter for film and television (his other credits at the time included The Man from UNCLE, the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the 1966 feature film The Oscar, and in the 1990s he was a creative consultant on the cult show Babylon 5).

A poignant and mysterious time travel episode which guest-starred Joan Collins, ‘City at the Edge…’ is regularly named by fans as the best episode of Star Trek’s original 1960s run, at the time winning both a Writer’s Guild of America award and a Hugo Award. Yet Ellison, famously contrary, criticised the rewrites which were undertaken on the script after he handed it in and later sued Paramount television for a share of merchandising and other income on the episode. A settlement was reached.

Ellison and lawsuits went together, as anyone who followed his career knew, whether he was issuing them or on the receiving end. He sued the production companies behind films which he claimed had adapted his ideas, including James Cameron’s The Terminator; the internet service provider AOL, when some of his stories were published online without his permission; and the comic publisher Fantagraphics, in relation to one of their books’ depiction of an earlier lawsuit where Ellison had been jointly sued by comic writer Michael Fleisher for calling him “bugf**k” and other unflattering terms in an interview.

Yet Ellison wasn’t a nuisance litigator, rather someone who strongly believed in both his freedom of speech and his right to recognition for his written work. This reflected his commitment to justice in other areas of his life; in his youth he joined the march from Selma to Montgomery organised by Martin Luther King Jr, and some of his most well-known stories carried similar themes.

‘”Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’ (1965) was set in a dystopian future where people’s time is literally not their own and being late is a crime, and ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ imagines another future where an AI supercomputer wages war on what’s left of humanity. A Boy and His Dog explored love and friendship in a post-apocalyptic world, and was adapted into an unsuccessful, Don Johnson-starring movie in 1974.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934, to a Jewish family, Ellison had numerous itinerant jobs in his teens and was expelled from Ohio State University, reputedly for hitting a lecturer who criticised his writing. He began to sell stories in the early 1950s, and had written and published his first novel while in military service between 1957 and 1959. Married five times, he was with his fifth wife, Susan Toth, from 1986 until his death in 2018, having suffered a heart attack in 1994 and a stroke in 2014. “I would just rather be called a writer,” he told Salon in 2013, “which is a great blue-collar way of describing the day-by-day pulling-the-plough work that a writer does. I'm a storyteller… (if they call me one) when I go, I'm satisfied with that.”