[ExI] Harlan Ellison
spike at rainier66.com
spike at rainier66.com
Sun Jul 8 19:39:16 UTC 2018
-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of
Keith Henson
>>..."Keith, are you there, me lad? Was Ellison among your many friends?"
spike
>...No. We moved in different circles.
>...I met him once, at the 1978 WorldCon. Harlan surprised me by knowing
who I was.
>...Keith
_______________________________________________
Keith in the circles in which you move and many concentric circles, most
know who you are.
I gave up SciFi in my misspent youth after having had my mind opened by
Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and others. Ellison was back there but
wasn't one of my biggest influences. I did like that Star Trek episode
however, and it really brought home to me the advantage of writing for a
character set which has already been developed. In any SciFi or other
fiction, the job of character development is almost overhead: it takes a lot
of verbiage just to set the stage, to prepare to tell the story.
When Star Trek came along, all that was done, so it became an excellent
vehicle to tell SciFi stories. It allowed the writer to get right to the
point: Spock was already the caricature scientist, Kirk was already the
horndog, etc.
Star Trek was cranking out 30 episodes a year, which led to the situation
which caused Roddenberry and Ellison to hate each other. A mistake was
made, the guy trying to crank out an episode a week on a tight budget chose
to patch it, the temperamental artist wanted to start over and do it right.
That narrative puts a new light on things, since most of the press has been
what an ass Ellison was. Now I hafta see both points of view, recognize
Roddenberry had to do what he had to do (since he was running a business in
a sense) and Ellison shouldn't write for television.
spike
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