A great deal of the most passionate and inventive and imaginative writing in the genre was done during the ’60s and early ’70s. Some of the best was done by Harlan. Much of the rest was done by people who were inspired or angered by Harlan’s furious calls to glory. Whether you agreed or disagreed, you could not ignore the fires that were burning. Old visions were being vaporized. New ones were being forged. There was a lot of heat and fury—but there was a lot of illumination as well. It was an exciting time to be a writer; it was a great time to be learning one’s craft—because there were so many options to explore.

Curiously, this was also the moment in time when Star Trek began to assert its influence on the genre. In one respect at least, that influence has been a pernicious one: the allure of catching some of Star Trek’s fame and glory and wealth has caused too many good writers to lower not only their standards, but their goals as well. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed.

I suspect that only a small part of Harlan’s disdain for Star Trek is the result of his own experience with the steamroller of lies that follows in its wake; the larger part must surely come from realizing that Star Trek is also a series of broken promises and missed opportunities to expand the range of what is possible in the genre.

You see, Harlan Ellison is a writer.

I’m going to have to explain this.

I’m only a storyteller. Harlan Ellison is a writer.

I tell stories for a living. I write about people who have problems and what they do to solve those problems and what they learn in the process. I try to make the people and the situations interesting and understandable. I try to keep the language as clear as possible because I’m terrified of looking silly in print. Only occasionally do I succumb to temptation and try to get my prose airborne—usually, the next morning, my head hurts and I’m embarrassed by the stylistic excesses committed to paper.

But Harlan Ellison is a writer. And that’s a whole other kind of critter than a mere storyteller.