Ellison may have a reputation as someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly, and he may have sued Trek owners CBS over royalties from his "City On The Edge Of Forever" episode from the original TV series (and written that the show "can turn your brains to purée of bat guano"), but it's his admiration for JJ Abrams that would make working on the next Trek movie an attractive proposition:

I would jump at the chance to work with the inordinately-talented J.J. Abrams on a new Star Trek film... Where the downside to getting topside of the radar of J.J. Abrams? This guy ain't Roddenberry. He's a writer I respect, whose work has frequently blown the lid off my box of supriseability. But then again, he already knows that. It isn't as if I'd kept my admiration chained in the darkest cell of the basement of Bedlam.

He suggested reworking his original pitch for the original Trek movie, but added that "[i]f the very smart Abrams didn't want to go that way, I would be wide-open to rethinking such a film from the git-go."

But before you reject this public offer as misguided or an unusual publicity stunt, consider the potential of an Ellison/Abrams/Kurtzman/Orci/Lindelof collaboration on a new Star Trek. One of the criticisms leveled at the new movie was that it lacked the intellectual element of the original series, replaced with special effects and action; wouldn't Ellison be able to bring some of that [back] to the table? "City" is one of the most famous Trek episodes, and not just for the controversy surrounding it, after all (Yes, we know that it was heavily rewritten; that's why we're suggesting an Ellison/Abrams/Kurtzman/Orci/Lindelof collaboration, and not just Ellison writing solo). Bringing Ellison into the Trek writers braintrust, even just in initial stages - with, of course, appropriate credit and compensation to avoid lawsuits down the road - could be a winning proposition for Abrams and company: It would potentially add a new element to the story, make a public display of reaching out to the old guard to appease old school fans still upset about the reboot and, if nothing else, get some great publicity for the movie no matter the outcome. Surprisingly, we're kind of all for it. Someone get Paramount on the phone!

Way before the advent of comic books or paperback novels, our geeky forebears got their fill of escapist exploits from those descendants of the penny dreadful, the cheaply printed, but oh so delectable pulp magazines. Starting with Argosy in 1896 and peaking in the 20s and 30s, the pulps or dime novels were a fecund morass which nurtured the genres of Science Fiction, Westerns, Crime Drama, Historical Romance, Mystery, and Horror as well as the Science Heroes that developed into the Superheroes we see conquering the box-offices of today.

I was born at least a generation and a half too late too experience the pulps when they came out, but they do figure in my memories as a very young reader. Visiting my Great-Aunt Vicky and Great-Uncle Bob at their used bookstore in Maine I would beg to spend the night in the attic. With a flickering Coleman lantern I'd wile away the hours devouring Pogo comics, the Heinlein juveniles, and the adventures of none other than The Shadow. My favorite lullaby was a pair of pearl-handled .45s blazing into the night. Even now Lamont Cranston/Kent Allard's terrifying laughter echoes through my fondest memories. But I digress, constantly.

This anthology of all previously unpublished work tears out of the gate with Joe Lansdale's "The Crawling Sky" The Reverend Jebediah Mercer from the novel Dead in the West is once again Hell-bent for leather hunting down eldritch horror in the East Texas badlands. Here the Rev gives an accounting for himself:

I am on a mission from God. I do not like it, but it is my mission. I'm a hunter of the dark and a giver of the light. I'm the hammer and the anvil. The bone and the sinew. The sword and the gun. God's man who sets things right. Or at least as right as God sees them. Me and him, we do not always agree. And let me tell you, he is not the God of Jesus, he is the God of David, and the angry city killers and man killers and animal killers of the Old Testament. He constantly jealous and angry and if there is any plan to all this, I have yet to see it.
...It is my lot in life to destroy evil. There is more evil than there is me, I might add.

Oh. Yeah.
How's that for a cover letter? Try reciting that over a few belts of whiskey at your local watering hole in your best approximation of a Nacogdoches drawl. The results can be quite efficacious. I need more Rev. Mercer stories.

The Weird West feel is also strong in "Quiet Bullets" by Christopher Golden, but owing more to Rod Serling or Ray Bradbury than H.P. Lovecraft. Golden takes us back to those simple innocent times of being ten years old and all the fear and confusion that entails mixed with the cozy chills a really good ghost story can deliver. The creepiness continues as we discover something terribly wrong with William F. Nonaln's "Perfect Nanny" and pull back the lid of what we think we know in Cherie Priest's "Catastrophe Box". Ms. Priest was inspired by a case of real-life psychic researcher Harry Price (1881-1948) but her conclusion goes way past mere table-rapping at séances or wimpy cold spots.

The wild times to be found in the pulps didn't have to rely on fantastic elements. Plenty of gritty two-fisted tales were inspired the the greed and savagery to be found in the all too real mean streets. "A Gunfight" is David J. Schow's homage to Donald Westlake, a breathless blow by bloody blow report of a hardened criminal's desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of the Mob. FPS games are rarely this exciting. Tim Truman, the artist who collaborated with Lansdale on the infamous Jonah Hex comic books in the late 90s and did the cover illustration for Son of Retro Pulp Tales also has a story here. Turning away from the rotten core of the Big Apple, "Pretty Green Eyes" is a piece of hard-boiled nastiness of moonshiners and corrupt strike-breakers in the old West Virginia backwoods of Truman's own family history. Although this is his first published all-prose fiction, no one familiar with his work will be surprised to find he hits every crime pulp note square in the jaw. "Border Town" also draws from it's author's roots. James Grady presents a snowbound Montana train station in 1938 with a woman on the run and rat-bastard Nazi spies.

Speaking of fascist monsters, we veer back towards the bizarre for Matt Venne's "The Brown Bomber and the Nazi Werewolves of the S.S.". I'll just let the over-the-top title speak for itself adding only that the final paragraph was surprisingly stirring. Plunging even deeper into the lurid ridiculous potential of pulp are "The Forgotten Kingdom" "The Lizard Men of Blood River" by Mike Resnick and Stephen Mertz respectively. Both these adventures of Lost Cities and Nearly Nekkid Native Princesses have tongue thrust full through cheek. Resnick's hysterical pun-spewing rogue, the Right Reverend Lucifer Jones was probably the class clown at the same seminary Reverend Mercer went to. It seems in this day and age we can't take the Great White Hunters or Jungle Explorers seriously any more — somehow I feel Shia LaBeouf is all to blame. I wonder if a serious reinterpretation of Allan Quatermain or the like can still be done. Maybe he's as off-limits as another favorite of mine, the sinister Fu Manchu. It seems a shame really.

There's only one story here with Rocketships and Bug-Eyed Monsters and that's this one humble offering from Harlan Ellison. Yeah, you read that right, Harlan Muthafuckin' Ellison!. If his story intro is to be believed, "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" was originally penned in 1991 for a Bantam Books project that never saw the light of day. It's a wild take on the old fairy tale set in a seedy Mars colony with exploited native labor and an ancient artifact men and martians would kill for. A dark reflection of 1940s cosmic dreams that would not be out of place along side some of the "New" Space Opera of today. But what it really reminded me was the kick-ass thrills I got when I first read Deathbird Stories. This is pure balls out Ellison. I don't know if I'd want to be stuck in an elevator with him, but he writes a damn good story.

With four or five the stories being quite excellent and great fun to be had all the way through, Son of Retro Pulp Tales is way ahead of the curve and a mighty satisfying read. I wish Subterranean would come out with more affordable trade paperback editions, but that's just how they roll. In every one of these stories you sense the pure glee the writers had in shaping these cheap thrills from their own fond memories. This has the sense of wonder, adventure, and just plain fun that should never go out of style.

Son of Retro Pulp Tales will be available any day now directly from Subterranean Press,
or from the Usual Clowns.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the agents of Shadowskeedeeboomboom as Chris Hsiang. He has the power to cloud his own mind and as yet lacks a boon companion. What a surprise.

Note: Most of the stories below are anecdotal at best, and based on rumor and urban legends. Where possible, we've provided actual documentation.

L. Ron Hubbard's "start a religion" bar bet:

This one is commonly dismissed as a myth... but it's also like kudzu on the Internet. Supposedly, L. Ron Hubbard bet Robert Heinlein that he could make a ton of money by starting a fake religion. (In one version, Heinlein bet that his own invention, non-monogamy, would be more successful.) Or maybe Hubbard made the bet with Philip K. Dick. Or Arthur C. Clarke. Or George Orwell. Or John W. Campbell. No, wait - it was Ray Bradbury.

The Lewis-Tolkien time-travel wager:

Legend has it, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had a bet, that they would each try writing in a new genre, to stretch both of their writing styles. Writes Bruce L. Edwards in his book C.S. Lewis:

A simple flip of a coin determined that Lewis would try his hand at a space-travel story and Tolkien would try time-travel.

As a result, Lewis wrote the space trilogy: Out Of The Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Tolkien, on the other hand, wrote in a 1968 letter that his effort "ran dry." Writes Edwards:

Tolkien's typical method of composition led to a not surprising end: his initial attempt to write a tale of time-travel became overly complicated and burdened with detail and it was eventually left as an unfinished work. He called it The Lost Road and it was a tale of a present day English father and son who, through the son's visions and dreams, are able to travel back [through] time to meet another father and son, similar to them, who are living at the time in Middle-earth's history when the star-shaped island of Númenor is destroyed.

The Númenor tale wound up as part of Tolkien's The Silmarillion, but he never finished the actual time-travel story. So yes, Lewis won the bet.

The unnamed SF writer who wrote an intentionally bad book:

Rumors abound that a famous science fiction writer bet that he could write an intentionally terrible book and it would be a hit, because the public's taste was so bad. And indeed, the book in question was a huge hit. (This wager is supposedly mentioned in the foreword to Spider Robinson's Callahan Chronicles, but not the name of the author.)

Asimov's impossible isotope:

The Internet has lots of unsubstantiated reports about Isaac Asimov's trans-universal novel The Gods Themselves. Either Asimov wrote it in response to a dare, to write a novel "about an impossible isotope of iron." Or he wrote in response to people saying he couldn't write about aliens or sex, which is sort of like a bet. There's also the famous Asimov-Clarke treaty, where Asimov agreed to call Clarke the best science fiction writer, as long as Clarke called Asimov the best science writer.

Update: reader Jacob Kaufman says Asimov actually wrote the novella that became part of The Gods Themselves in response to Robert Silverberg saying that science fiction should be about the human dimension, not "Plutonium 186," picking a science-fictional term at random. Asimov laughed, because there's no such thing as Plutonium-186, and there can't be in this universe. But then he became intrigued and decided to write about a universe in which Plutonium-186 existed, and came into this universe as a free (but unstable) source of energy. (More details on that here.) And Asimov didn't write the book in response to people saying he never wrote about aliens or sex, but he did include those elements in the middle section, for that reason. Thanks, Jacob!

Michael Crichton's Beowulf wager:

The Jurassic Park author wrote one of his best novels, Eaters Of The Dead, in response to a wager that he couldn't write a version of the Beowulf saga and make it relevant to a modern audience. The resulting book is presented as a lost manuscript written by an Islamic envoy kidnapped by Vikings in 932.

Harlan Ellison's jazz record wager:

In 1960, Harlan Ellison was already a major up-and-coming science fiction writer, but he fancied himself a jazz expert as well. One day, he got into an argument with jazz columnist Ted White over whether a 1939 Mildred Lewis album featured backing music by John Kirby or John Lewis. Ellison was so sure of himself, he bet his entire record collection - and if he lost, he'd only collect one record from White's collection. In the end, Ellison settled the bet... at gunpoint. You can read the whole account in White's famous essay "The Bet."

James P. Hogan's win and loss:

Libertarian science fiction author James Hogan is a betting man. First, according to his own website, he wrote his first novel on a bet with a coworker that he couldn't write an SF novel and get it published. (He won five pounds that time.) But also, according to this other site, Hogan also bet that his novel, Inherit The Stars, would be better than the Arthur C. Clarke story that provided the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I'm guessing he lost that one.)

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

As an influence:

Nichelle Nichols decided to quit playing Lt. Uhura at the end of the first season of Star Trek, because she felt the role wasn't stretching her as an actor, and she wanted to return to the theater. But then she met a Star Trek fan at an NAACP event: Dr. King, who asked her to reconsider because of her character's tremendous visibility. Here she is talking about it:

Ammonite author Nichola Griffith says that MLK's marches and speeches coincided with a new wave of science fiction that asked readers to identify with "the Other." For example, John Wyndham's The Crysalids is told from the point of view of a mutant.

Author Harlan Ellison marched with Dr. King from Montgomery to Selma. So did Sulu actor George Takei.

Robert J. Sawyer quotes MLK in several of his books. He has one fictional president quote the "I Have A Dream" speech, and has his characters discuss "the content of his character" in another story. One of his novels begins with a quote from MLK: "Though the arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice."

George Romero finished his zombie epic Night Of The Living Dead, which has an African American hero, just as MLK was assassinated. And that shaped how people viewed his film, Romero explains:

We cast an African-American actor because he was the best actor from among our friends. And when we finished the film, literally as we were driving it to New York in the trunk of a car, that was the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. So the movie became a reflection of the times. There's a certain anger in the movie already, but a lot of why that film gets applause is because Wayne is a black guy. In the script, his race is never mentioned. In my mind, when I wrote that initial scene, he was a white guy. And he would've been shot by the police even if he was a white guy. But because he happened to be an African-American, that made it much stronger, particularly after the assassination. We shouldn't take all the credit for that. A lot of it was an accident.

Fictionalized representations:

The fictional character most frequently compared to MLK is, of course, Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men, a mutant organization that includes a school for gifted and talented mutants. Xavier wants mutants to live in peace among the normal humans, and assimilate as much as possible— in contrast to the mutant villain Magneto, who's usually compared with Malcolm X. The first X-movie makes this comparison more explicit, by having Magneto utter the words "by any means necessary."

But Professor X isn't the only MLK surrogate out there. Paul Fenster, the African American civil rights leader in Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, is frequently described as representing the recently assassinated MLK. He's described as a "colored man up from the South, some civil rights, militant-type person." And the chaos that envelops the midwestern town of Bellona, cut off from the rest of the world, is reminiscent of the riots that struck after King's assassination.

John Barnes' novel Earth Made Of Glass takes place on a planet torn by racial hatred. The only hope is a prophet named Ix, who's portrayed as a Martin Luther King archetype.

DC Comics' black superhero Amazing Man didn't manage to save MLK from an assassin's bullet, but he was a responsible for apprehending shooter James Earl Ray afterwards, in the DC version of events.

In the story "The Space Traders" by Derrick Bell (which later became an episode of the HBO miniseries Cosmic Slop) aliens arrive on Earth on Jan. 1, 2000. They make a simple offer to the United States: we'll give you untold wealth, clean energy, and substances that will clean up your environment. All we want in return is your African American population. After much debate, the U.S. accepts, and hands over all of its African Americans — in chains — on MLK day:

The last Martin Luther King holiday the nation would ever observe dawned on an extraordinary sight. In the night, the Space Traders had drawn their strange ships right up to the beaches and discharged their cargoes of gold, minerals, and machinery, leaving vast empty holds. Crowded on the beaches were inductees, some twenty million silent black men, women, and children, including babes in arms. As the sun rose, the Space Traders directed them, first, to strip off all but a single undergarment; then, to line up; and finally, to enter those holds which yawned in the morning light like Milton's "darkness visible."

The Star Trek anthology Strange New Worlds IV includes a story about the psychiatrist who treated Benny Russell, Captain Benjamin Sisko's 1950s science fiction writer alter ego. (Sisko had a hallucination/vision that he was a 1950s SF writer. Sort of.) In the story, the doctor hears of the assassination of Dr. King, and thinks about his former patient and his stories of a post-racism future Starfleet for the first time in years.

In Roger Corman's batty 1970 film Gas, Or It became Necessary To Destroy The World In Order To Save It, aka GAS-S-S, an experimental nerve gas kills everyone in the world over the age of 25. At the end, all the characters are running around, and people wearing masks of JFK, MLK, Che Guevara and Alfred E. Neuman show up.

Aliens and time travelers:

In Christopher Pike's young-adult Remember Me book series, a woman named Shari Ann Cooper dies, but her spirit winds up in another dimension. She visits demonic aliens on Mars and then goes inside a black hole and nearly gets atomized. But she finds out she's supposed to return to Earth in the body of a living person, as a Wanderer. And it turns out Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both alien-possessed Wanderers as well.

In the children's TV series A.J.'s Time Travelers, A.J. Malloy travels through time in a ship called the KYROS. In one episode, he decides to celebrate Martin Luther King day by traveling back to witness the famous "I Have A Dream" speech first-hand. But in a (no doubt hilarious) mishap, he sets the coordinates wrong and arrives too early. Instead, A.J. meets King as a teenager, and uses his "time telescope" to share with him a vision of the future, inspiring him to fight to end segregation in America.

Around the same time, a children's book came out called Time Trap: Martin Luther King. Two school rivals are forced to work together on a report about the 1960s, but then they become trapped in that time period together. (And, I'm just guessing here, Martin Luther King explains to them why they should work together.)

In alternate history:

Commenter Grey_Area points out that Harry Turtledove features MLK in many of his alternate histories. In particular, The Two Georges — cowritten with Richard Dreyfuss of all people — features an alternate America where the Revolutionary War never happened. Sir Martin Luther King is governor general of the North American Union, and Richard Nixon is a used car dealer.

Writer Brent Adrian maintains a list of ideas that you can use to start a science fiction story, if you're in need of inspiration. One of his suggestions: an alternate history tale that takes place in a world where the first MLK assassination attempt succeeded. In 1958, a woman stabbed Dr. King in the neck, and he nearly choked on his own blood. If she'd succeeded, who would have replaced MLK in the civil rights movement? Would anyone have been able to?

What if MLK had attended the 1956 Dartmouth workshop on artificial intelligence? That's the question this research paper by Will Fitzgerald at Kalamazoo College asks. Would A.I. research be more humanistic, and possibly more self-aware? He quotes MLK, right before his death, talking about the "technological revolution" of "automation and cybernation," and lamenting its failure to advance human rights.

Perhaps most famously, an episode of Aaron McGruder's cartoon version of The Boondocks took place in an alternate history where the assassin's bullet didn't kill Dr. King. Instead, he merely went into a coma, and woke up 40 years later. He's ill-prepared for this new world of shock jocks, hip hop and Fox News, and especially taken aback by what's happened to African American culture in his absence. It culminates in this scene, which caused angry protests and which you should probably not watch at work with the speakers turned up:

[YouTube] (Via SF Signal)

In 1994, Ellison, inspired by Yerka’s work collaborated with the painter on Mind Fields. Yerka created 34 paintings for the book, and Ellison wrote a short piece of fiction for each painting, latching onto images or themes he saw in them. The piece above, entitled “Fever,” inspired a story which begins:

Icarus did not die in the fall.

What his father, Daedalus, never saw was this:

Icarus fell toward the Aegean Sea; fell through clouds; through billos and canopies and flotillas of clouds; and was lost to the sight of his father. The wings melted and fell away. They were carried on the stratospheric currents, miles away from the drop point at which Icarus had vanished through the cloud foam. When Daedalus banked and swooped and did his air-search, he found the pinions floating in the Sea. But he did not find his son, because Icarus had come down miles away.

[Yerka Land via Zuzu Fan]

Since we will soon have to abandon this country and relocate to New New York, it's only appropriate that Harlan Ellison's disastrous foray into television in 1973, The Starlost, was released on DVD this week. A Canadian series with big ideas and little in the way of any idea on how to execute them, the show came from an idea by Harlan Ellison, who related the disastrous transport of his idea to television in his classic essay, "Somehow, I Don't Think We're In Kansas, Toto." As you can see, it didn't go that well:

In the hands of the inept, the untalented, the venal, and the corrupt, The Starlost became a veritable Mt. Everest of cow flop, and, though I climbed that mountain, somehow I never lost sight of the dream, never lost the sense of smell, and when it got so rank I could stand it no longer, I descended hand-over-hand from the northern massif, leaving behind $93,000, the corrupters, and the eviscerated remains of my dream.

Producer Robert Kline wanted Ellison to do The Fugitive in space, but Ellison preferred to come up with his own idea. The basic gist was that a bunch of people leave Earth on an ark as it is being destroyed. The population of the ship is sealed off in biospheres and develops new societies over the next 500 years and forgets all about Earth. That's where the "drama" of the show starts.

Ellison was in the middle of a writer's strike when Kline demanded ideas for artwork, because they needed to advertise the series:

It has always been one of the imponderables of the television industry to me, how the time is always now, when three days earlier no one had even heard of the idea.

But I gave him some words and to my horror, saw the ad a week later: it showed a huge bullet-shaped thing I guess Kline thought was a spaceship, being smacked by a meteorite, a great hole being torn in the skin of the bullet, revealing many levels of living space within...all of them drawn the wrong direction. I covered my eyes.

g" width="171" height="246" class="right" />The Writers' Guild was still on strike, and Ellison wouldn't craft the show's backstory, despite being threatened multiple times by the producers. Ellison even tracked down a scab writer they hired and convinced him to stop writing! Since they needed Canadian writers for the show, and at the time there weren't many Canadian SF writers, Kline asked Ellison if he would simply train a group of young writers who'd never written episodic drama or science fiction. By the time the show was in production, it featured a simple title card with Ellison's pen name:

CREATED BY CORDWAINER BIRD

Ellison's constructive iinvolvement over the rest of the production was minimal, as sets were constructed for storylines that hadn't been written. Starring Keir Dullea, the final product is truly a clusterfrick on a level rarely seen in the genre. This is part of the first episode, which is titled "Voyage of Discovery":

To be fair, it was Ellison who proposed shooting the series on tape instead of film, making the final product look something like a high school theater production. Still, he can't be held responsible for this disaster - the bulk of the blame has to go to the producers (left). And it's not all bad - we got a great Ellison essay out of it, one that appears in the show's author-approved novelization, Phoenix Without Ashes.

This isn't our favorite Ellison story. That honor goes to what happened when he went to work at Disney:

A few hours after arriving for his first day of work at Disney Studios, Ellison and several fellow writers headed off to the studio commissary for lunch. Once there, Ellison jokingly suggested they "do a Disney porn flick" and proceeded to act out the parts while imitating the voices of several animated Disney characters. Unbeknownst to him, Roy Disney and the other studio heads were sitting adjacent to his table. Ellison claims that he returned to his office to find a pink slip on his desk and the name on his parking space whited out.

Here's a bonus Harlan Ellison interview from 1976, three years after the debacle:

Images from the web's only destination for The Starlost.

The film features people like Robin Williams and Neil Gaiman talking about the impact Harlan has had on the world of writing, and there's a great amount of attention to the idea of writing as a real job where you have to roll up your sleeves and dive in,. And we see that work. Even at 73 years old, he still sits down at a manual typewriter and pounds out a daily living. While Ellison claims not to be rich, he does live in a spectacular house he calls The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars on 200 acres in the San Fernando Valley, so he ain't suffering.

However, the film doesn't touch on many of the controversies surrounding him, barely mentioning two of his many lawsuits, the fact that he was fired from Disney on his first day on the job, or the controversial boob-grabbing during the World Science Fiction Convention two years ago. In fact, the hardest line of questioning comes from Robin Williams at the beginning of the film, who runs through a laundry list asking Harlan if some of the things he is credited with doing are true or not.

There's no question about the impact of Harlan's writing, and the sheer firehose pressure of material he's been able to output over his lifetime, but we would have liked to see a more objective look at the man that didn't attempt to just hero-worship him for an hour and a half. It's a decent look at his current life and lifestyle, but it breezes over his early days as a writer. You may come away feeling like you've just gotten a better look at the "Harlan Ellison" that he presents to the world, almost like an act he puts on for others. Is there a real Harlan Ellison behind this guy? The film sure doesn't let us know.

We also attended the "A Conversation With Harlan Ellison" panel earlier in the week, which was mostly a chance for people to watch Harry Knowles from Ain't It Cool News attempt to interview Ellison. Eventually things got interesting when Ellison started ranting. While he was mostly all bark and no bite, he did leave us with a lot of choice quotes which we've compiled below. Fortunately he didn't break anyone's pelvis, although he did bleed all over himself at one point.

He spent a good amount of time talking about the William Friedkin film Sorcerer, which is one of his favorites. In fact, he's written an entire book of movie criticism called Harlan Ellison's Watching, which compiles 25 years of his film writing.

When asked if he enjoyed the documentary, he said "Well, I thought to myself 'That's a weird funny old guy that I'd like to be friends with!'"

He also noted, "I've only been an asshole to assholes!"

When Harry Knowles confessed he was one of those kids who loved Star Wars back in the 70s (which Ellison hated), Ellison said "I didn't hate people like that, I just didn't want to be around them!"

He loves the Coen Brothers, but hated the movie Fargo, which he said was "Deifying morons."

Once at a book signing when a woman asked for a special favor, he said no and she refused to buy the book. He told her "I'd make more money if I killed you and sold your body parts!"

He said screenwriter Ron Bass was "a whore among whores."

When asked who were the top five public figures he currently hated, he said "George Bush and Dick Cheney (they count as one), the head of ABC Programming, Jerry Falwell, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly.

However, later he said "Who do I hate? What time is it?"

One of his favorite works for film or tv is the Outer Limits episode "Demon With A Glass Hand."

He says that he has a "great fucking life" and is glad that he owns his own house, has a ton of books and music, and has a great wife. Plus, "They just made a fuckin' movie about me, so I can't be that goddamn obscure!"

Harlan hopped down off the stage at one point to show off a book he was selling at the panel, and when he went back to the stage he tripped and fell onto his knees, and then did a "BIlly Barty impression" (according to Harlan) as he walked on his knees back to his chair. However, one of his knees started bleeding and when someone from the audience offered a band-aid, Harry remarked on how amazing it was that he had a band-aid on hand. Harlan said, "No Harry, amazing would be if he had a yak." Touché.

• The Marshalls were stuck in a place that existed outside or normal space and time. During their stay in the Land of the Lost, they encountered a Confederate soldier, found the bones and diary of a soldier from the Revolutionary soldier, a glider pilot from the future, the weird invisible, telepathic alien named The Zarn, and Holly even met a future version of herself.
• There were Pylons scattered around the Land (hatches, anyone?) that were larger on the inside than the outside (TARDIS, anyone?). Their sole purpose was to house these funky crystal matrix chessboard tables which did everything from control the weather to open time doorways. Sadly, the Marshalls never really figured out how to work them right.
• The Sleestaks had a Library of Skulls, which contained the sentient skulls of their ancestors, who could still speak and dispense knowledge, despite being just a skull. They could also predict the future, show visions, and annoy the hell out of people who just wanted a straight answer. Plus they ran things for the Sleestaks and told them what to do. Kind of like that mysterious Jacob ghost/spirit/whatever the hell thing on Lost.
• If you screwed up a Pylon or it started malfunctioning, these bizarre flying shapes would appear in the sky and flash the colors that you'd need to arrange on the matrix table in order to fix things. Rick Marshall dubbed them Skylons, and they appeared to be some form of automated repair units with limited artificial intelligence. Black smoke monster, anyone? Bueller?
• The Sleestaks were descendants of the Altrusians, an alien race who lived a thousand years before the Sleestaks. They were shorter than them, had an extra digit on each hand, and had limited psionic abilities. Plus they weren't nearly as creepy.
• The Land of the Lost existed inside its own closed universe. The Marshalls once tried to take the river out of the land, but found that it looped around and put them back right where they started. In another episode, Holly descended into a pit on a rope, and found herself dangling upside down over the Land. Just like the Hotel California and the island on Lost, you can check in, but you can never leave.
• David Gerrold's backstory for the series explains that the Altrusians actually built the Land as a way-station intended to let travelers cross between various places. The time doorways are gateways which allow users to cross into the Land on their way to their destination. The reason that travel through the time doorways is unpredictable, at best, is that the Land has fallen into disrepair in the time since it was built.
• While the Sleestaks might have been scary as hell, they only had three of those rubber suits, so they couldn't have more than that on the screen at the same time. The producers had to rely on the miracle of editing whenever they wanted it to seem like a Sleestak army was on your ass. Fairly ironic because the Library of Skulls says that the Sleestak number about 7,000.
• The furry Pakunis on the show actually had their own language, created by Professor Victoria A. Fromkin from UCLA, who also created the vampire language for Blade. Keep in mind, this was a Saturday morning kids show that had its own invented language. Not too shabby.
• Sleestaks were played by UCLA basketball players, because they were tall enough to fit the suits. Future Detroit Pistons star Bill Laimbeer famously played a Sleestak for awhile.
• Harlan Ellison submitted a treatment for a Land of the Lost script, but it was never produced. However, you can read a copy of it here.
• David Gerrold who wrote "The Trouble With Tribbles" episode of Star Trek and science fiction writer Larry Niven of Ringworld fame were both writers on the series. Gerrold even served as story editor.
• The intelligent and friendly Sleestak named Enik first appeared in a script written by Walter Koenig of Star Trek fame, and was supposed to be named Eneg. This was a tribute to Gene Roddenberry, since it was his name spelled backwards, but the producers nixed it.
• In order for something to leave the Land of the Lost, something of equal mass had to enter. The show used this in both clever and idiotic ways. At the end of Season One, the Enik explains to them that they can leave, but in doing so they also cause the event that brings them into the Land of the Lost in the first place, so they're stuck inside a repeating loop forever. They did this in case the show didn't get picked up after its first year, but then they never explained how they broke the loop in Season Two. That's the fairly clever way.

  The dumb way was in that the actor who played Rick Marshall left the show after Season Two, so in Season Three an earthquake accidentally knocks him into a time doorway (it was actually one of the producers seen from behind and wearing a wig) and he vanishes. However, moments later the Marshall's Uncle Jack (Rick's brother) appears. Seems like he's been looking for them since they vanished. How very convenient.

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• If reading this has made you want to go back and rewatch this entire series, or maybe see it for the first time (like it did for me), you can pick up all three seasons in a DVD box set for fairly cheap. Just don't blame us when you get sucked in.

Image by The UncredibleSkulk

Ellison wrote the classic Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" along with many other classic works of speculative fiction. He was also an early booster of Doctor Who in the United States, and wrote a classic introduction to the 1970s Who novels when they came stateside.

Dreams with Sharp Teeth screened in May of last year in Los Angeles, although apparently that print was a "work in progress" and they'll be showing the full version in Austin at SXSW. We'll be there — will you?

Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary about Harlan Ellison [Quiet Earth]

Arthur C. Clarke has three long-awaited books on the list, including the intriguingly titled Mars Brat. But the king of announced-but-not-released novels is Jerry Pournelle, who has a whopping six books on the list including the Spartan Hegemony. To be fair, three of those are collaborations with Larry Niven, who's also keeping us waiting for the collaborator-free Ghost Ships. Harlan Ellison has two books on the list, but does anybody really care about him any more?

The Most Eagerly Awaited And Long Overdue SF Books [SF Signal]

Harlan Ellison, who wrote the classic Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever", has been reading the emerging spoilers and got a little hot under the collar. He claims to own the Guardian along with other character and plot details from that episode, and is definitely no stranger to suing in order to enforce copyrights. Given the fact that Ellison wasn't happy with the way Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and others rewrote this same episode, he'll now be fighting with J.j. Abrams over the same thing, so it may never be resolved. He wasn't kidding when he put 'forever' in that title.

Harlan Ellison Stinking Mad About New Trek Rumors [SyFy Portal]

Famous names: Harlan Ellison, Don Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Jason Robards

Crunchy goodness: 4

Sights you'll never unsee: Semen. Extracting. Machine.

Life lesson: Take it from David Berkowitz: always listen to the dog.

Deadliest spoiler: She was a girl of impeccable taste.

Review at BadMovies.org