I am going to admit I’m not much of a Harlan Ellison fan. He’s much too literary for my tastes. I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I like space opera, sword-and-sorcery, and other forms of adventure fantasy; told in a straightforward way and quickly paced. That’s not what Ellison writes. This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the man. I have found his observations on Hollywood very entertaining and informative. I admire his work as an editor on the Dangerous Visions and Medea anthologies. I’ve read his work in comic book form many times. I’ve even read some of his stuff over the years, such as “The Chocolate Alphabet,” twenty-six flash fiction pieces he wrote while sitting in a store window. (The one I liked best was “D is for Dick,” where he described Philip K Dick as a strange creature that lives in a hole writing masterpieces that nobody appreciates.) Ellison is often ahead of the curve. And he’s feisty. Who else but Ellison would go to a national Star Trek convention and begin a speech by saying Doctor Who was the greatest SF show ever made? That takes kahunas, brother. Giant brass ones. And Ellison has them. All this aside, I don’t read his fiction much.
Which is my loss, because if I had ever finished reading The Deathbird Stories (1975) I would have come to “Delusion For a Dragonslayer.” I had no idea that Ellison even noticed sword-and-sorcery in the 1960s. The only time I had ever heard him refer to the Big Three of Weird Tales (Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith) was when he selected Clark Ashton Smith’s “The City of the Singing Flame” as a story that inspired him to be a writer. This surprised me because I thought his influences would all be non-fantasy authors like Ray Bradbury or Ted Sturgeon.
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2016/11/harlan-ellison-and-sword-sorcery-guest.html
