Harlan Ellison is dead.
Harlan has been a lifelong inspiration and will continue to be. When I was reading science fiction voraciously in the mid-seventies, Russ Souchek and I were sharing a rented home in Seward, Nebraska and trading recommendations. Ellison's 'Dangerous Visions' was a must-read compilation.
Ellison regularly showed up on late-night television talk shows promoting the return of Star Trek and himself. The interview that stuck in my head was one in which he talked about exchanging stories with other authors that were only as long as could fit on a postcard. I fell in love with the idea - my first exposure to micro-fiction.
In the early eighties, when Peter Karp, Howard Koster and I were creating the Computer Graphics Cafe (maybe the grand-father of all meet-ups), we experimented with copy art in the form of a self-published magazine for and about the state of the coming digital age.
There we published single 'page' and small footprint fiction and opinion pieces. The Silicon Daze, too, was a very early art magazine featuring bite-sized fiction in the spirit of Harlan Ellison's vision.
I won't miss him. He's stuck in my head. I hope is journey out is as fascinating as ours was taking his in.
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