“You have picked a difficult subject for a biography.” – Robert Silverberg

Love him or hate him, Harlan Ellison was one of the most prolific and awarded writers of all time and influenced many who came after him, myself included. To quote one of Harlan’s closest friends, writer Josh Olson (A History of Violence), “Harlan is the guy who made me want to become a writer.” Same here, Mr. Olson. 

I found A Lit Fuse to be a wonderful companion piece to much of what I’d already known about Harlan from interviews, articles, his Sci-Fi Buzz segments, YouTube videos, and Erik Nelson’s excellent documentary, Dreams with Sharp Teeth.

There were events and experiences in Harlan’s life that author Nat Segaloff glosses over and for which details can be found elsewhere (such as in the aforementioned sources). Then there are other aspects that are more thoroughly explored in Harlan’s personal and professional lives such as the making of A Boy and His Dog, his experiences on the 1980s Twilight Zone series, writing the screenplay for I, Robot based on Isaac Asimov’s novels, the Dangerous Visions anthologies, his disastrous marriages before Susan, and the illnesses that slowed him down later in life. 

If Harlan Ellison is a difficult subject for a biography, that might be partly due to his reputation as a quarrelsome and cantankerous firebrand, but it’s also because Harlan’s life was replete with so many amazing experiences that it’s nigh impossible to encapsulate all of them into anything shorter than a tome or a multi-volume series. Nevertheless, Segaloff does an admirable job of presenting the human being behind the legend.