Harlan Ellison

As well as acting as sf advisor on important sf series like Babylon 5, and writing memorable episodes of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, Harlan Ellison had a distinguished career in science fiction and fantasy both as editor and as short story writer. His two anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions--a projected third has never appeared--were crucial to the American New Wave by providing a market in which it was possible to say things about sex and politics, and in ways that varied from stylised fabulism to the radically deranged, that could not be said in the SF magazines of the 1960s. His own idiosyncratic short stories were true to the same aesthetic values as his editing--absolute emotional honesty conveyed by any means necessary. Some of them deal with stock sf themes like the mad computer that tortures throughout eternity the last survivors of humanity--'I have no mouth and I must scream'--or dystopia--'Repent, Harlequin, said the Ticktock Man'; other dramatize philosophical themes like the Death of God--'Deathbird'; while others engage semi-confessionally with the dilemmas of the contemporary male writer--'All the Lies that are My Life.'