Harlan Ellison’s Star Trek teleplay, The City on the Edge of Forever, has been surrounded by controversy since the airing of an “eviscerated” version which was subsequently voted the most beloved episode in the history of the series. The original version is now available with an expanded introduction by Ellison. In its original form, The City on the Edge of Forever won the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for best teleplay. As aired, it won the 1967 Hugo Award.

The City on the Edge of Forever is, at its most basic, a poignant love story. Ellison takes the reader on a breathtaking trip through space and time, from the future all the way back to 1930s America. In this harrowing journey, Kirk and Spock race to apprehend a renegade criminal and restore the order of the universe. It is here that Kirk faces his ultimate dilemma: a choice between the universe – or his one true love.

This E-Reads edition makes available Ellison’s astonishing teleplay as he intended it to be aired. The author’s prefatory essay (expanded by 15,000 words from the limited edition) reveals the details of what Ellison describes as a “fatally inept treatment” of his creative work. Our publication of this work is enhanced by magazine clippings, production notes and letters that can be viewed at full resolution by linking to this dedicated page.

Read The City on the Edge of Forever and decide for yourself whether Harlan Ellison was unjustly edited, unjustly accused, and unjustly treated.

Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled by Harlan Ellison

Perhaps America’s most destructive contribution to 20th century living has been that damaged product called plastic romance. It twists and savages us. After a lifetime of lies about what love is supposed to be, are you finally angry and depressed enough to be part of a “recall” on that shabby, mildewed merchandise?

If so, join the remarkable Harlan Ellison as he dissects the soul and body of love in Our Time. In 16 scalpel-sharp stories that range from the legalized whorehouses of Nevada to the steaming lynch towns of Georgia, from the abortion mills of Tijuana to the sound stages of Hollywood, the writer whom Oui magazine charmingly named “the perpetually angry young punk of the bizarre” rips the Saran-Wrap off love and hate and sin and twittering passion—to disclose the raw meat beneath. Here are sixteen poisoned arrows from fantasy’s most improbable Cupid in which he presents a world of hearts & flowers guaranteed to revise your thinking about where love is found and how it looks.

Asked “What would you say to a book lover who has never read science fiction to persuade them to try the genre?” Orson Scott Card recommended five must-have, must-read works. One of them is Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, which with Again, Dangerous Visions Card describes as “two of the greatest original anthologies ever created in any genre.”

Here is the passage from The Browser’s Interview with Orson Scott Card referring to Dangerous Visions.

Your fourth choice is an anthology of stories edited by Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions. So in my last two books I’m cheating a little, by giving you collections that provide you with the best possible entry into science fiction. These are, in fact, the books that gave me my doorway into the field – they are books that I loved. Harlan Ellison is one of the giants of the sci-fi field. Like Bradbury, his work is mostly short stories, and from masterpieces like “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream” Ellison became the heart of the new wave. But it is in his role as the creator of anthologies that I recommend him here. He came up with the idea of a collection of stories that could not be published in the somewhat rule-bound magazines of the day. He found a publisher and the writers responded to his call. The result was Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, two of the greatest original anthologies ever created in any genre. anthology was so successful, influential and widely read that today, any magazine would be proud to publish any of these stories. This collection remade the field. One of the best things about a Harlan Ellison anthology or collection is reading his introductory essays. Ellison puts on no disguises, and he shuns the notion of anonymity or even aesthetic distance. His essays are personal, entertaining, smart. As much as the stories, they will shape your thinking about science fiction, then and now.

Both anthologies and 29 more works by the greatest fantasist of our time, can be found on Ellison’s author page.

Introduction to Slippage by Harlan Ellison

The Fault In My Lines

Where to open the fissure: the earthquake or the heart attack?

The earthquake. It is officially listed as a 6.8-magnitude temblor by the U.S. Geological Survey’s geophysicists at the Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado.

The Northridge, California “thruster.” It hit at precisely, exactly, 4:31 a.m. on Monday the
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17th of January 1994. It had been a pretty lousy year through the 16th, and 1993 hadn’t been too cuddly, either. Let us not even talk about ’92.

But as rusty as those first sixteen days of the new year had been, they were nothing but sunny days on the beaches of Ibiza by comparison to 4:31 in the dead black morning of January 17th.

First, there was the sound of it. Oh, yeah, trust me on this: first, you hear it coming. You don’t know that’s what the hell you’re hearing, but you catch the sound of it hurtling toward you before your bones and back teeth pick it up.

Let me try to tell you what it sounds like.

Because just the sound of it can scare your hair white, (Mine started to fall out in the months following.)

The unimaginative say it sounds like a train coming toward you. Bullshit. Nothing like a train. I used to ride the freights, like a bindlestiff, when I was a kid. Trains have a decent sound to them. A good sound. Tough, but willing to accommodate you. This damned thruster had absolutely nothing in common with a train. Then there are those whose best analogy is, “It was a deep rumbling noise.” Yer ass. A deep rumbling noise is what you get out of your stomach when you’ve had too many baby-backs and hot links. A cranky bear makes a deep rumbling sound. The radiator. The water pipes trying to carry the load. Krusty the Klown makes a deep rumbling noise. I’ll tell you precisely what that muther sounded like:

Ever see one of those Japanese samurai movies featuring the masterless ronin who travels around with his baby son in a wooden cart that rolls on big wooden wheels? The Lone Wolf and Cub films? What they call the “baby cart” series?

Okay, then: are you familiar with “corduroy roads”? They were common and plentiful in this country up until about forty years ago. Mostly, you could find them in backwoods or rural areas, where dirt roads were still in use, macadam hadn’t made its inroads, superhighways were distant myths, and country roads were used for hauling heavy loads. So, to make them capable of supporting the weight of a tractor pulling a backhoe, or a fully loaded hay wagon, logs were laid transversely, producing a kind of ribbed look–something like those speed bumps in parking lots that make you slow down–and the buried logs gave the dirt road the topographical surface of the cotten cloth we call corduroy.

When you drove down such a road, there was a metronomic bump-bump-bump sound. I’m trying to be specific here, trying to describe the indescribable. Explain the color red to someone blind from birth.

What it sounded like was this: a gigantic wooden-wheeled baby cart, as big as a mountain, bump-bump-bumping down a corduroy road. Underneath you. Deep underneath you.

I was awake at that hour. I was upstairs here in my office, working. On the second floor of the office wing I designed and had built some years ago. Walls floor-to-ceiling filled with reference and non-fiction books I might need when working, arranged alphabetically by subject. Several thousand books, mostly hardcovers. And an open central atrium that looks down on the first floor of the office wing. And my desk and typewriter over here next to the French doors that give onto the balcony and a view of the San Bernardino Mountains thirty-seven miles away across the San Fernando Valley. My office looks out due north toward those mountains.

At 4:31 in the morning, the thruster zazzed laterally across the Valley floor, west to south, reached the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains (at the top of which my home sits)…and had nowhere to go but up.

(Pause. Know-nothings who live in parts of the country where they endure sub-zero weather, tornados, floods, killing pollution, drought, blight, sand storms, provincial bigotry, ultraconservative censorship, hurricanes or Jesse Helms, have been known to remark, “How can anyone bear living in Southern California with all those earthquakes? They must be really stupid not to flee the state!”

(And go where?

(It’s the same everywhichplace these days, folks. New Orleans or Pittsburgh; Kankakee or Kansas; Eugene, Oregon or Oklahoma City. If the twister don’t get you, the rabid militia will.

(L.A. is okay. I like it here. But I’m no dope. Long before the thruster, I had hired both seismic engineers and structural experts, as well as soil analysts, to tell me how safe I was here on the crest of the North Benedict Canyon slope. Core drilling had been done, and I was heartened to learn that the house sat solidly, a mere five feet above bedrock. Of even more salutary note was the advisement that not only was the house secure just five feet above bedrock, but the seam ran north-south, in line with the house. Meaning: not even the worst of the “rolling” temblors we knew so well in Southern California could trouble me overmuch. If the rolling came, it would not affect the solid cut under me. I was sanguine. And when the Landers quake hit a few years ago, I barely felt it, despite all the serious damage done in other nearby areas. I was sanguine. “The only way you’re going to be in any trouble,” said an engineer from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena–a reader of my work who had offered to bring in some ground-testing equipment as a favor–”any trouble at all, is if the whole damned mountain collapses.” I was sanguine.)

The fault line came diagonally across the Valley, got to the base of the mountains, had nowhere to go…so it went up.

The house was lifted with a 4g thrust. It takes only 6 gravs to throw a rocket to the moon.

I heard it coming, and I bolted from my typing chair, and got across the office to the deco stairwell before the first wave hit. The house, and everything in it, went straight up. I was lifted off my feet and thrown across the stairwell, crashing face-first against the south wall of the second-floor landing. The right side of my face smashed into a framed photo of the blind Borges in Baltimore in 1983, sitting at the foot of the memorial to Edgar Allan Poe, running his fingers over the bronze commemorative plaque, paying homage, one great fantasist to another. I hit it so hard it shattered the glass and broke the frame.

Then I was thrown sidewise, as the second wave struck. Thrown left down the winding deco staircase–everything now in pitch darkness–all electricity had gone out across the city–and bent double over the pony wall, cracking my forehead on the leading edge of a Lucite shelf holding pewter figurines of The Ten Greatest Inventions of History.

And then the main torque hit.

I was picked up and thrown forward, never touching the final flight of steps from the lower landing to the first floor. I was picked up and flipped heels-over-head to land flat on my back, missing the edge of the pool table by perhaps two inches. If I had been two inches to the right, it would have blasted open my skull; nothing less than a human omelette.

But before I could rise, off the wall to my left, a heavy painting slightly larger than 3′x3′ wrenched itself off its hanger, and crashed down on me.

(Pause: charming little ironies of near-death experiences. The painting is a surreal rendering of a large stone mausoleum with ominous faces perceivable in the walls. It sits on a hill under a dark blue, threatening sky. Carved into the lintel of the building is the legend 6000 SA MO BL. The painting is called “Six thousand, same old bull.” The irony is that 6000 SA MO BL is an abbreviation for 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, the location of the cemetery crypt and mausoleum in Los Angeles where, among others, Al Jolson is buried. The painting weighs a ton. Well, that’s figuratively speaking. It’s heavy, because it has a double pane of glass on it–the second pane having stars painted on the inside surface, thus giving a very deep-dimensional look to the already eerie landscape–and when 6000 SA MO BL ripped loose, it plummeted and hit me full in the face, breaking my nose, blacking both my eyes, ripping open gashes in my face.) Knocking me unconscious.

Not for long, I guess. It was dark, the earth was still growling, I was woozy–maybe a concussion already, I don’t know–and even if there had been light, I couldn’t have seen anything. Too much blood in my eyes.

I started to pull myself to my feet, using the edge of the pool table, when the next wave struck; and this time it threw every book on the upper level out of the bookcases, hurled them over the railing, and down on me in the open space below the atrium. I was struck by hundreds of reference books, knocked to my knees, and then clobbered unconscious for the second time.

Everything after that, for two years, was recovery, rebuilding, and lamenting the loss of art and possessions I’d spent a lifetime gathering. No need to dwell on it, I’ve conveyed the part that’s pertinent to this book. So now we can move on to the heart attack.65

Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories
by Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison celebrates four decades of writing and publishes his seventieth book with this critically acclaimed, wildly imaginative and outrageously creative collection. The award-winning novella “Mefisto in Onyx” is the centerpiece of this brilliant collection which also includes screenplays, an Introduction by the author, interspersed segments of autobiographical narrative and such provocatively titled entries as “The Man Who Rowed Columbus Ashore,” “Anywhere But Here, With Anybody But You,” “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich,” “Chatting With Anubis,” “The Dragon on the Bookshelf,” (written in collaboration with Robert Silverberg) “The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams,” “Pulling Hard Time,” and “Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral.”

Read Ellison’s provocative introduction here.

Haven’t had your fill of Ellison’s books?  See a complete listing of over 30 E-Reads titles here.

Harlan Ellison is not just a Grand Master of science fiction but a grand master of litigation. And If New Regency Productions’ lawyers are smart they’ll check his track record in the courtroom before rejecting out of hand his claim that their client ripped off what is possibly Ellison’s most famous short story.

The soon-to-be-released movie In Time, featuring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfreid, has many elements in common with Ellison’s 1965 Nebula and Hugo Award winning short story “Repent, Harlequin!” Said The Ticktockman.  Ellison wants to stop the movie before it’s released.

If you think There goes Harlan Ellison again, you might want to read the particulars of his claim. They’re pretty convincing.

If you haven’t read the story in question you’ll find it in  Paingod and Other Delusions, one of thirty Harlan Ellison works published by E-Reads. Robert Heinlein said, “This book is raw corn liquor–-you should serve a whiskbroom with each shot so the customer can brush the sawdust off after he gets up from the floor.”

Read the account of Ellison’s action in Harlan Ellison Says In Time Rips Off One of His Stories

Richard Curtis

Slippage, a collection of what Harlan Ellison calls “precariously poised” stories, is available for the first time in e-book format. It was previously published by Houghton Mifflin and, if you prefer it in printed format, E-Reads makes it available to you on paper, too.

This critically acclaimed, wildly imaginative and outrageously creative collection is Ellison’s seventieth (E-Reads has more than thirty of them). The award-winning novella “Mefisto in Onyx” is the centerpiece of the collection which also includes screenplays, an introduction by the author, interspersed segments of autobiographical narrative and such provocatively titled entries as “The Man Who Rowed Columbus Ashore,” “Anywhere But Here, With Anybody But You,” “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich,” “Chatting With Anubis,” “The Dragon on the Bookshelf, “The Dreams a Nightmare Dreams,” “Pulling Hard Time,” and “Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral.”

Add Slippage to your collection of Ellison’s works, and visit his author page to make sure you haven’t missed any.

The idea guy in Poughkeepsie

Harlan Ellison does not suffer fools gladly. In fact he doesn’t suffer them at all. He particularly has no patience for fans who want to know where he gets his ideas from. His answer?

Poughkeepsie.

There is, he confides in conspiratorial tones to wide-eyed autograph-seekers, this guy in Poughkeepsie who, for a fee, furnishes Ellison with ideas for stories. If the fan seems particularly gullible Ellison will write down an address in exchange for a pledge of complete secrecy.

Although most “civilians” are not as credulous as Ellison’s fans, the process by which authors find inspiration for stories is shrouded in mystery. It may therefore come as a surprise that the last thing professional writers need is ideas and that most of them have enough to last a lifetime.

They may need time, yes. They may need money. They may need peace and quiet. They certainly need love. But the one thing professional writers have more than enough of is ideas.

To learn about the true – and mysterious – process by authors get their ideas (besides Poughkeepsie), click here.

Richard Curtis

The Department of Justice, the FBI, a consortium of comic book publishers, and Florida law firm Katten Muchen Rosenman has shut down pirate website www.Htmlcomics.com.

The operation, said the law firm’s press release, is “believed to have been the largest, best-known and most easily accessible website of its kind, producing rampant copyright infringement on a daily basis and depriving artists and publishers of hard-earned and much-needed revenue. By April 2010, the website claimed to have an average of 1.6 million visits per day and more than 6,630,021 pages of comic books offered for unrestricted viewing. Ridding the Internet of such a large source of pirated content is a major victory for the comic industry and the publishing industry in general.”

Not officially named in the action is author Harlan Ellison, a righteous and relentless pursuer of pirates whose action against AOL resulted in an important settlement.  Ellison’s  properties were among those purloined, according to the author, and the footprints leading to Htmlcomics’ door bear the spoor of Ellison and his “Flying Blue Monkey Squadron”, friends and wellwishers who keep an “eye on the street” and may have assisted the FBI in locating the superperp.

The press release in full is reprinted below, or you can click on it here.

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May 5, 2010
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LOS ANGELES – Comic book pirating website www.htmlcomics.com has been shut down and all of its servers confiscated, following an FBI search based on a warrant alleging criminal copyright infringement. The FBI investigation was performed in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice, a consortium of comic publishers and their legal counsel, a team of Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP attorneys specializing in the areas of intellectual property, publishing and comics, as well as local counsel in Miami.

Prior to the combined efforts of the consortium and the authorities, Htmlcomics was believed to have been the largest, best-known and most easily accessible website of its kind, producing rampant copyright infringement on a daily basis and depriving artists and publishers of hard-earned and much-needed revenue. By April 2010, the website claimed to have an average of 1.6 million visits per day and more than 6,630,021 pages of comic books offered for unrestricted viewing. Ridding the Internet of such a large source of pirated content is a major victory for the comic industry and the publishing industry in general.

Htmlcomics creator Gregory Hart, 47, acquired pirated copies of more than 5,700 series of comics spanning every major comic publisher in the United States, and made them available for public viewing on his site. The comics could be viewed from cover to cover and page by page and the infringing copies were reproduced on Hart’s servers and publicly displayed without authorization. Titles available included Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, The Simpsons, Futurama, Avengers, Incredible Hulk, Wolverine, Dilbert, Peanuts, Catwoman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Hellboy, Star Wars, 300, Predator, The Mask, Iron Man and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among thousands of others.

The FBI’s Tampa Field Office headed the investigation leading to the warrant. The consortium of publishers cooperating with law enforcement include Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Bongo Comics, Archie Comics, Conan Properties Int’l LLC, Mirage Studios Inc., and United Media.

Katten has one of the nation’s premier, full-service entertainment and media practices, providing comprehensive domestic and international representation in the entertainment industry. The firm’s entertainment and media attorneys consider themselves partners with clients from concept to completion. When litigation becomes necessary, the practice represents its clients aggressively and effectively, in matters involving intellectual property issues, contractual and business tort disputes and distribution rights issues, among others. Katten also provides representation to entrepreneurs in business and personal matters. The firm’s entertainment attorneys pride themselves on providing cutting-edge, creative solutions to complicated problems.
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• He’s ripped off hundreds of books.
• He can rip yours off in five minutes. It’s so easy even a caveman can do it.
• He painstakingly proofreads the books he steals.
• He has ethical and moral standards. And a conscience…of sorts.
• Though piracy’s toll is in the billions of dollars, he thinks the crime is overrated.
• But he admits it’s a crime.

That’s a thumbnail profile of a book pirate. I’ve condensed it from an astounding interview with one conducted by C. Max Magee on his website “The Millions”.

After pondering the phenomenon of book piracy, a crime estimated to drain over $3 billion annually from legitimate copyright owners, Magee decided the best way to understand it was to ask a practitioner. “Who are the people downloading these books? How are they doing it and where is it happening? And, perhaps most critical for the publishing industry, why are people deciding to download books and why now? I decided to find out. After a few hours of searching – stalled by a number dead links and password protected sites – I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk.”

The perpetrator’s handle is “The Real Caterpillar” and, as is so often the case, he is far from a noble Robin Hood. “He lives in the Midwest,” writes Magee, “he’s in his mid-30s and is a computer programmer by trade. By some measures, he’s the publishing industry’s ideal customer, an avid reader who buys dozens of books a year and enthusiastically recommends his favorites to friends. But he’s also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he’s downloaded thousands.”

Here are a few revelations in his own words:

• I generally only upload content that I have scanned, with some exceptions. I have been out of the book scene for a while, concentrating on rare and out of print movies instead of books because it is much easier to rip a movie from VHS or DVD than to scan and proof a book
• I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may
• Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale
• In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing…however, I feel the impact of e-piracy is overrated, at least in terms of ebooks
• I’ve spent anywhere from 5 to 40 hours proofing the OCR output

And, finally: “In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers.”

Two persons mentioned by Caterpillar as having been stolen from are Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison. Both have published privacy or anti-piracy statements on their websites. You may read Helprin’s here but it says in part: “You agree to comply with all copyright laws worldwide in your use of this site and to prevent any unauthorized copying of the materials.” Ellison’s is an all-caps fist-shaking no-prisoners Jeremiad which you may read in its entirety here. Here’s a taste:

A HOST OF SELF-SERVING INDIVIDUALS SEEM TO THINK THAT THEY CAN ALLOW THE DISSEMINATION OF WRITERS’ WORK ON THE INTERNET WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION, AND WITHOUT PAYMENT, UNDER THE BANNER OF “FAIR USE” OR THE IDIOT SLOGAN “INFORMATION MUST BE FREE.” A WRITER’S WORK IS NOT INFORMATION: IT IS OUR CREATIVE PROPERTY, OUR LIVELIHOOD AND OUR FAMILIES’ ANNUITY. WHY SHOULD ANY ARTIST, OF ANY KIND, CONTINUE CREATING NEW WORK, EKING OUT AN EXISTENCE IN PURSUIT OF A CAREER, FOLLOWING THE MUSE, WHEN LITTLE INTERNET THIEVES, RODENTS WITHOUT ETHIC OR UNDERSTANDING, STEAL AND STEAL AND STEAL, CONVENIENCING THEMSELVES AND “SCREW THE AUTHOR”? WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT IS THE DEATH OF THE PROFESSIONAL WRITER!

Caterpillar laughs at them. “One thing that will definitely not change anyone’s mind or inspire them to stop,” he says, “are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison – attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time.”

For the full flavor of Magee’s interview read Confessions of a Book Pirate in its entirety here.

We are Harlan Ellison’s literary agents. Our e-book company is publisher of some thirty of his books. Though we cannot express ourselves as colorfully as he, we support his position completely. His work and property, the work and property of countless other authors, our own labor and investment and that of all legitimate, reputable publishers worldwide are being stolen. Those who file-share copyrighted books are receiving stolen property. We ask those who take and those who receive to consider whether there is any difference between having your literary property robbed and your purse stolen. For one victim’s answer, read Are Pirate-site Downloaders Better Than Muggers, Pickpockets and Shoplifters? This Victim Doesn’t Think So.

Richard Curtis