Harlan Ellison: The Road ripped off A Boy and his Dog

In a WSJ interview on the subject of old typewriters, science fiction legend Harlan Ellison conspicuosly works in a claim that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is ripped off from A Boy and his Dog.

A friend said "oh gee, you should sell it, they sold Cormac McCarthy's typewriter." And I said, "yeah, Cormac McCarthy who ripped off my story "A Boy and His Dog" to do "The Road." I said how much did they get $20?" And he said "they got $220,000 because they gave it to charity and I said "that's nice."

Clearly a joke, right?Jason Sanford explains why it might not be a joke for McCarthy or the producers of the motion picture based on his novel. Ellison famously sued the producers of The Terminator over the use of ideas also present in his stories, which earned a payoff and director James Cameron's description of him as a "parasite who can kiss my ass."

The key point all authors and creators should remember is ideas are not protected by copyright. As the U.S. copyright office states, "Copyright does not protect ideas, concepts, systems, or methods of doing something. You may express your ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in your description, but be aware that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in your written or artistic work." Plagiarism is a serious charge and I wish Ellison wouldn't throw the term around like it is nothing. Simply because an author has written on an idea Ellison once wrote about does not equal theft.

The problem, practically speaking, is that it's often cheaper to pay someone off than defend yourself in court. This creates a huge incentive to litigate that goes from Ellison-style cantankerousness all the way up to the RIAA's industrial-scale shakedown racket. Sanford notes the WSJ's own reference to Ellison's infamous lawsuit is vague: "he penned Soldier, which James Cameron drew from for The Terminator." He sees in this the pernicious effects of abusing copyright law. It doesn't just tax culture, but rewrites the history of creative inspiration to the advantage of litigators. Still, Ellison's actually done the world a favor here. I love his work, and like many SF readers feel vindication in the modern appreciation of his literary merits. But his new comparison finally cleared something up for me: just how differently a good writer and a great one express similar ideas.

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cubicblackpig

Until such time as Ellison commences litigation I don’t think we can fault him for a bit of abrasive trashtalk (particularly against a talentless charlatan like McCarthy). As commenters have already pointed out, the suit against Cameron was hardly frivolous, on Cameron’s own admission.
Lucifer

newsflash, the bible borrows/lifts heavily from pre-existing contemporary myths. Stories of messiahs who walk on water and bring the dead back to life and heal the sick have been around long before JC’s epic hit. Who cares. There’s truly nothing new under the sun, save another turd laid fresh today.
ubarch

Personally, I thought both The Road and Blood Meridian were amazing novels. McCarthy’s prose is fantastic in both. The Road is memorable because of just how bleak and disturbing it is… The main characters act in believable and rational ways, but in the end there is just no more food, everyone knows it, and the conclusion is inevitable. Blood Meridian is worth reading if anything because the Judge character is probably one of the most evil characters in literature. The whole book is like a painting of the Judge, and how unearthly and terrifying he is.

Seriously, they’re great books. Not uplifting, funny, or lighthearted, but really top notch writing.

I saw the movie version of A Boy and His Dog. It was OK I guess.
- WizarDru
  
  Just curious, WHY is there no more food? I was under the impression that McCarthy never actually explains anything about his apocalypse. Does he actually go into any detail? It would be real frustrating/annoying to me to read if he doesn’t. It’s one thing to say, ‘no one knew what started it’ and another to have a book/movie where it’s never elaborated on and the author clearly didn’t think much about the effects of it.
  
  Also, I realize not every book is going to be escapism, but I’m having a hard time understanding why I want a read a book where the entire world doesn’t just die, it dies SLOWLY.
  - ubarch
    
    No, he doesn’t explicitly say why or how the apocalypse happened. There is some cursory text that involves the main character hearing things and seeing red lights in the distance, which some people interpreted as distant nuclear explosions, but nothing beyond that.
    
    If you want the hard SF, with the energy of the author put into building sophisticated worlds on interesting premises, then The Road isn’t your book. The world is beautifully described, but it isn’t complicated and the focus is almost entirely on the characters.
    
    If I might make a suggestion… If you like a harder sort of sci-fi that maintains sophisticated world-building and also strong character development, you may enjoy Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun” (which is actually a teratology). The world is thoroughly explained, but in a cryptic, indirect sort of fashion that makes for very dense enjoyable reading.
  - slamorte
    
    WizarDru, why there is no more food is never explained. As far as we can tell the characters never know why, either. They are trying to get by in a world that no longer makes sense, and perhaps never did make any sense.
    
    Mad Max and The Road Warrior are other examples of a post-apocolyptic world where the apocalypse is never explained, and again this is part of what makes them great. For the characters involved, how they got there doesn’t matter. Surviving does. And then comes Beyond Thunderdome where Hollywood hand-feeds us some pre-chewed plot dumbed down so we can understand it, they explain the apocalypse (“War is bad! Bad war!”), and the greatness of the series is destroyed.
    - penguinchris
      
      The first two Mad Max films don’t exactly give you the whole story, but they definitely give you *something*. In the first, you can see that for the most part it seems like a normal, if deteriorating, society. It reminds one of On The Beach, which has been mentioned here already – there may be terrible things happening elsewhere, but in Mad Max most people are going on as if nothing’s happening. These are clearly hardy outback types who will go on no matter what. It’s hard to say whether or not the gangs are a symptom of society’s collapse (as they clearly are in Road Warrior) or if they were already there ahead of time. Probably a bit of both – they do of course attack a gasoline truck, so clearly gasoline is already priced high enough to be worthy of extremely dangerous attacks as in the film.
      
      The opening of Road Warrior is a brief recap of Mad Max, as well as some background about how things shifted to the total post-apocalyptic world of Road Warrior from the relatively sane world of Mad Max. It resulted from lack of oil, the ensuing wars, and ultimately the total collapse of society. I don’t remember for sure but I think nuclear annihilation of major cities was implied. I think we can say for sure that the coastal paradise the good guys travel towards in the end doesn’t exist, though there are probably larger settlements ala Fallout (or, yes, Beyond Thunderdome).
    - knoxblox
      
      “They” say the lost kids in Beyond Thunderdome were a tribute to Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker, another wonderful post-apocalyptic fantasy.
      
      “I” say it’s an insult.
      - Dave H
        
        Actually the lost children were a rip-off of Peter Pan.
      - knoxblox
        
        I don’t see so much influence from Peter Pan as simply a candy-coated gloss-over to appeal to the Hollywood audience and bring the franchise down to a PG-13. However, I do see some strong references to the dark vision of Riddley Walker that had to be tamed down a bit.
        
        There was no Walker in Peter Pan, nor an apocalypse (i.e. the 1 Big 1), nor references to Bad Time, lost technology, or past language that had been corrupted by folk etymologies (all present in Riddley Walker).
        
        Even so, Riddley Walker has a similar premise to Canticle for Leibowitz, being set in a post-apocalyptic world, and shares common traits with many other sci-fi classics that came before it, as well as influencing many others that came after. You don’t see Hoban getting all sue-happy about it, though, as Ellison seems to be.
Ceronomus

Actually, he sued AOL/Time Warner for refusing to comply with his DMCA take down request. The resulting legal battle was VERY expensive and was a real drain on his finances.

In the end, he won, but that was more a battle of principle than of financial gain.
Anonymous

Here’s the thing I don’t think any of the commentators are considering: Writers are the low man on any totem pole of TV/Movie production. They really don’t make much money, and they work super hard, and they get very little recognition. Joe Straczynski (Oscar nominated screenwriter) points out in his book on the subject that your average Hollywood writer makes less than your average Hollywood plumber, with far more aggravation and far less certain employment. And they get called in to do a jillion other things, unpaid. He had to rewrite “City on the Edge of Forever” a dozen times for free, and then had someone else take the glory for it. He rewrote his episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea twenty-six times, all for free.

Harlan’s litigious nature is NOT about him being a jerk, or anything like that, it’s all all all about protecting writer’s own rights in Hollywood, where they’re generally ignored and trod upon. Because if someone doesn’t do this kind of thing, then the writers continue to get taken advantage of, get shafted, and people like Cameron make a hundred million dollars ripping off a script that Harlan got – I’m guessing – four or five grand for.

Is that fair? Is that just? Is that American? You do something creative, you work hard at it, and then someone just takes it from you? I don’t think so. It’s not like there was a massive cash payoff when he won that case, the primary victory was a screen credit.

Harlan’s not randomly suing people, he’s standing up for himself – and by extension, for the financial rights of all writers. Somehow defending yourself makes you a bad guy? When did that happen? Did I miss a memo or something?
Derek C. F. Pegritz

Oh, for the Other Gods’ sake, Harlan, SHUT UP ALREADY. I’m so sick of hearing him whine and cry about how everyone on Earth has ripped him off in one form or another. Just to spite the old coont I’m gonna write a story called “I Have No Mouth And I Must Bitch” in which a guy named Arlen Hellson one day wakes up with no mouth and goes mad because no one will pay attention to him anymore.
- Anonymous
  
  sounds like a book i read by kilgore trout. accept he finds out it was done by aliens to prevent him from being infected by the snark virus which kills by infecting the tongues of humans. hi ho!
Anonymous

Would it be just to feel that everyone who can sue MPAA and RIAA members should?
Anonymous

Sorry, Harlan. I like you generally, but you’re not even close on this one.
Sorcerer Mickey

Yes, clearly a joke, and the punchline to the joke is:
“Hello, Little Joke!”
sterling

I guess I am going to have to read “A Boy and His Dog” now. “The Road” was a fantastic novel. As a father it made me ache. The movie was okay…
Anonymous

Harlan Ellison can serve as a warning to Angry Young Men as to what will happen to them if they don’t evolve.

They become bitter old cranks.

Also? I’m floored he didn’t state that Christopher Marlowe stole his ideas.
hbl

This is pretty much the same reason that The Winklevosses didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, but still walked away with $65mil and are back asking for more.
Philboyd Studge

Ellison is pretty cheeky for a guy who wrote for children’s TV. He’s like Lou Reed…one good work, and the rest is drivel.
Cruxx

And here I was the whole time thinking The Road was a ripoff of survival-horror video games and zombie movies, with a Hallmark card ending.
Anonymous

Wow, did any of you guys actually read the WSJ interview? Because it sounds nothing like what Sanford wrote to me. God, I’ve found Ellison annoying before, but Sanford’s thing just reads like a hit piece to me.

The WSJ blog is just about how Ellison’s selling this part of his past because he’s old and sick. Ellison himself is the one talking about how 19-year-olds don’t realize how old some “original” ideas are. His criticism of McCarthy is a throw-away in the middle of a sentence. He’s not saying McCarthy should be sued, he’s pointing out more reusing of an idea.

The Sanford article does a really poor job of talking about the Cameron thing too, as other people have pointed out above. I get that BoingBoing has an axe to grind about copyright, and Ellison’s clearly always enjoyed burning bridges, but I think you and Sanford are being unfair to him here.
Anonymous

>Well, that’s a weird thing. The anthologies are, in fact, available at Amazon in paperback form <

From used book sellers. Come on guys, he’s out of print. Sure you can find him in e-books or whatever. Point is, who’s looking: not new readers, just old ones. When they go, it all goes.
- kromelizard
  
  In print status is a weird thing these days, with the advent of printers specializing in pumping out low volume orders on demand. A number of his collections are still published by major houses but it looks like Harlan Ellison has discovered the world of print on demand publishing and has decided to stop waiting on one of the major houses to get around to doing a reprint and opted to let someone just plug him into Lightning Source. They may be kinda chintzy, but make no mistake, you can get basically every book he’s ever published at any bookstore inside of a week.
- catgrin
  
  Forced to step in late again #101. 2009 was the first year that ebooks outsold print books on Amazon, so it would seem that “new” readers ARE buying, and the fact that a book is in print solely on-demand or as an ebook does not really directly reflect its popularity.
  
  I actually had a related discussion with George R.R. Martin at last year’s Lepricon. Many of his short stories are no longer in print, but there is still a call for them, and he has been working, first with on-demand publishing, to make them more readily available without aggressively diminishing the face value of the original printed materials.
  
  See, the problem with forever printing something in the same format is the diminished value of that physical item as accessibility increases. So, for books that are from the 50s and 60 and were small release then to be made widely available, it has an impact on the collect-ability of the author’s original prints. Ebooks actual help to resolve this as you can make the document available without going to press. Combine that with the outlay cost of printing and shipping and it’s no surprise that these books are in ebook format only.
  - kromelizard
    
    Print on demand inherently means low demand. If a book were high demand the publisher would do the smart thing and pay the much, much lower price of running off 50,000 copies ahead of time.
    - catgrin
      
      You’re way oversimplifying for a few reasons.
      
      First thing. Not sure if you work with print costs. I do. Publishers don’t see a slow demand as any demand as much as they used to. That’s because paper, shipping and housing books has all rapidly gotten more expensive while their prices rise slowly. Most books in any fiction format from a major publisher now see one hardbound edition, followed by supporting softcovers. Many books only stay in print for a total of 3 to 5 years. Most anthologies only get one printing.
      
      Sci-fi is traditionally considered to be a “low demand” area in all forms of media. In books, most sci-fi is lucky to make it through two or three printings max. Go back, and take a look at your favorite books from sci-fi authors NOT listed among the grouping of Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and Dick. See if any of the things you read in the 60s or 70s or 80s are still in print if they’re not from those few authors that managed to crossover into personal fame, television and movies.
      
      There’s one thing you’ve completely overlooked, and I haven’t bothered to state outright. A lot of the books you’re talking about (which were written in the 50s, 60s, and 70s) aren’t owned by publishing companies, which share risks and investments, they’re owned by the authors. For example, George R.R. Martin, one of today’s most popular fantasy authors has sci-fi short stories (from the 70s before he wrote A Song of Fire and Ice) that are out of print. He intends to keep them that way EXCEPT on demand. He owns the rights, and no publisher will be bringing them back no matter what the volume of general demand is. It isn’t simply a question of supply and demand. It’s also a question of initial risk of investment by an individual and the choice to distribute intellectual property.
      - kromelizard
        
        I’m not unfamiliar with any of this. The fact remains that per unit print on demand is more expensive and when major publishers take a title to print on demand status there is either as much as a doubling in cost or it is offered on a nonreturnable basis.
      - catgrin
        
        My point is that you seem to feel that authors would choose if given an option to always work with a major publisher and always print in large volume. This isn’t so.
        
        The books that are in question here are owned outright by the authors. They are no longer in an obligated contract to print with a publisher. It’s up to them to decide whether or not they’ll choose to go to print and if so, whether or not to take on a partner in the process.
        
        In this, they – the authors – have to weight cost and benefit. The cost of going to a publisher is that the publisher may demand extended publishing rights and percent cost for some time, and if their risk is high (as you state will be on a less desirable book to a large market) they may want too high a percentage to benefit the author in the deal.
        
        So the author has three other choices, self-print, print-on-demand, or ebook. If the author chooses to self-print, it will likely be a smaller run than the publisher could manage, and the author may not have distributing contacts for it (unless using online resources such as Amazon). Print-on-demand reduces the availability of the books, but also reduces the risk of the print run, storage and distribution fees. So doing so may actually help the author. Finally, if an author has a very rare book, or has very little money, an ebook allows him to get the book back into print without press costs and make it widely available without reducing its rarity.
        
        They can do all this without ever involving a major publishing house – which in the in end, is really in the business of promoting new authors, not printing books. Publishers aren’t necessary to print a book.
      - kromelizard
        
        You seem to be having a conversation that I am not. I am not speaking about a specific set of books or about authors, who might decide they don’t even really want to be published anymore and want to go fuck off to Kathmandu to teach the locals parcheesi. I am talking about the economics of making print books available to major distribution channels and in the world of putting physical books in the hands of people print on demand is used for vanity publication, cheapo facsimiles of public domain books, and particularly slow selling backlist because the per unit cost makes it a bad choice for anything more popular. George R.R. Martin might be a hugely famous best selling author, but nobody’s short story anthologies sell all that well and only a bare handful of sci-fi authors have anthologies that sell well enough to remain continuously in print.
      - catgrin
        
        Wow. You certainly wouldn’t have a friend in Cory Doctorow. He (oh so egotistically, according to your attitude) decided to self-publish With a Little Help. It is unavailable on amazon.com, but can be downloaded for free or purchased in various formats, digitally, low-cost paperback, or a high-end art hard bound on his site. This is his newest book, not something that is struggling to stay on the shelves because everyone’s already bought it. Yeah, the art book’s expensive and “to order” but that doesn’t reflect on the overall desire of the author or the book.
        
        Get with the program. I am not talking about extinct authors. I mentioned older books and authors purely because they are the ones who were in print through a publisher but are no longer under contract to them, and have regained full rights to their material. Now more and more new authors are discovering that they can print independent of a publishing house to begin with. They aren’t automatically heading to one to start a career. What I am talking about here is the needlessness of a promoter when you are a good self-promoter. (It’s the same thing that’s happening in the music industry.) Why would an author choose use a publisher and deal with them if they could successfully print for themselves? After all, desktop publishing has gotten ridiculously easy, and small presses are readily available. Besides that, with such venues as group sites, blogs and podcasts, new authors have places other than libraries and bookstores to get read/heard. They can, and do, build their own audiences.
        
        Which brings me back to “why not print 10,000,000 books?” With multiple formats of “book” available, it makes no sense for an author to invest all their funds in mass printing. It makes much more sense for them to print on demand or run limited press. (Seriously, do you have any idea how expensive paper is?) Here’s an example: Just yesterday I received my copy of Cursed Pirate Girl, an independently published graphic novel funded through Kickstarter, and a project backed by such people as Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess and Mike Mignola. Why would such a well-received project not work with a publisher? Simple, time. The artist wanted the time to do the full, clean illustrations that he was known for, entirely by hand (no computer-aided illustrations or shading), and he was working in a victorian style. No comic publisher is willing to give anyone that much time to complete a book, so the creators self-published, and they did so very, very successfully. By the way, my “special edition” cost me $20, just as much as it would have in a comic shop for any equivalent graphic novel by Marvel or DC. The project was purely designed to allow the creators to run a good printing, with enough books left over to take to conventions and further advertise. In effect, all the books that were ordered through Kickstarter were printed “on-demand” and the remaining books from the press run would then be considered “self-printed” on a low run from an independent press. Printing is a balancing act, and if you choose to work independently, you have to be very careful in estimating your overage.
        
        That’s not all. Mass stockpiling of printed material is nothing more than a waste of money and trees, and a lot of authors recognize that. To you “on-demand” printing may mean that something isn’t a NYT hit at the time, but it’s not directly correlatable to an item’s total lack of desirability. As more people choose to buy ebooks over printed material, and physical book stores are being reduced both in number and scale, it may be that small presses and “on-demand” publishing become the only way to get an “official” hard copy of some books. I think your attitude toward the “on demand” book and your need for a “major publisher” to be involved with an author are what really ought to become extinct.
      - kromelizard
        
        You keep having a conversation about things I haven’t said. Print on demand produces low quality items at high individual unit cost and only makes economic sense for items that sell in volumes too low to justify warehouse space. Most books simply go out print, in the world of literature the only sure way a title ever becomes evergreen is use in an academic setting. The increased cost or nonreturnable status needed to keep a POD book from being a loser makes them fairly unattractive option.
        
        I haven’t ever seen a print on demand art or heavily illustrated book, and I’m not sure why you bring it up? But I guarantee you illustrated items coming out of Lightning Source look like hot garbage.
        
        I also don’t know why you’re construing some hostility on my part to small press and self-publishing? I’m just giving you the frank analysis of a professional bookseller. They don’t sell a lot of books. I have a deep reservoir of love and affection for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turle comics, but Mirage Publishing didn’t exactly move a lot of units. When I say POD is for vanity publication, cheapo facsimile editions, and weak selling backlist (or academic titles, which are increasingly offered as POD) I am only telling you what I see in the catalog when I do my ordering. I am not saying interesting things don’t come out of small press publishing, my store picked up Ryan North’s Machine of Death the second it became available and well before it found it’s way into Ingram’s warehouses.
        
        The fact is, printing and promoting high demand items yourself is stupid unless you dig on working like a longshoreman and really groove on doing some accounts receivable, or actually want to be a publisher. Digital items make this different, but we were not talking about the publishing business you think will exist in ten years but the one that exists right now. And right now going straight to print on demand and pure digital publication is still the choice of very minor sellers.
ryan873

The Road is not science fiction. It is a fable.

This father read The Road and wept at the end. I thought that the message was so important that I let my 10- and 11-year old sons both read the novel and watch the film. It has led to so many important conversations about our duty to do what is right, because the world is full of people who won’t make that choice.

To me, The Road goes further toward answering one of humanity’s most essential questions than any other piece of literature or legislation ever has. That question is, Why should one do the right thing when there is no reason left to do so? It’s that choice, that decision to carry the fire, even when it is doomed to go out, which makes us human.

Only a father whose heart begins and ends for his child could have written The Road. And only a parent can truly understand what The Road means. To mention A Boy and His Dog and The Road in the same sentence is quixotic and absurd.
- mja
  
  “…only a parent can truly understand what The Road means.”
  
  This is kind of offensive, if only because you just spent the rest of your post saying that The Road means it’s important to do the right thing even when there is no reason but that it is the right thing. I guess one cannot be truly moral until one has had children.
  
  More generally, in response to the rest of the thread: for my part, the film and reviews of it have made me want to read at least Blood Meridian, Oprah recommendation notwithstanding. Her recommendations are a mixed bag. She recommended Beloved long after those who love literature first heard of it, but also recommends stuff like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or somesuch. No lover of literature would be disdainful of someone who gets people who would not typically read Morrison to pick up her work.
  - Anonymous
    
    Why is that offensive? Because he’s saying that until you’ve personally experienced (x event) you may not be able to fully understand (book about x event)?
    
    If the topic of the novel were, say, motherhood, or life as a soldier, or falling in love, or getting old, would you have the same objection? Aren’t there some experiences that are so unique that to be understood, they have to be experienced, not just imagined?
    
    Full disclosure – I read The Road three months after my first son was born, and was shocked at how upsetting it was (like, weeping on the futon at 3am-level upset). If I had read it a year earlier I would probably have been more impressed by the prose & the terrifying intensity of their journey.
    
    Reading it as a new dad, I was floored by how, despite the father’s constant vigilance & unstoppable will to protect his son, in the end he’s beaten; the world wins, and the child is left alone, fresh meat for the catamites*.
    
    * Good word, that.
    - Michael Smith
      
      I read The Road three months after my first son was born, and was shocked at how upsetting it was
      
      Yeah I am a parent and I haven’t seen the movie for that reason.
    - mja
      
      “To me, The Road goes further toward answering one of humanity’s most essential questions than any other piece of literature or legislation ever has. That question is, Why should one do the right thing when there is no reason left to do so? It’s that choice, that decision to carry the fire, even when it is doomed to go out, which makes us human.”
      
      “And only a parent can truly understand what The Road means.”
      
      You’re not writing about parenting being a unique experience here. You’re writing about parenting giving unique moral insight. It’s right there, spelled out very plainly. I just think that’s bullshit. Did you spontaneously develop the belief that one should do what is right for its own sake only as a result of having a child? Or are you claiming that having a child makes it more obvious, more compelling, or what?
      
      How about this: I won’t ask you why it took becoming a father for you to become truly moral if you don’t imply that I can’t be until I become a mother?
      - Donald Petersen
        
        How about this: I won’t ask you why it took becoming a father for you to become truly moral if you don’t imply that I can’t be until I become a mother?
        
        I gotta say, Anonymous… she got ya there.
- Anonymous
  
  Adopt me, please. Go back in time and adopt me.
  
  Your kids will kick ass, I believe.
- silus
  
  I agree completely – curious to know how it affected your boys at that age?
Jack

In my experience with the guy, he’s been a prickly but generous-hearted guy who has zero tolerance for feeling like somebody’s taking unfair advantage, either of him or of others less able or willing to defend themselves. I remember he coordinated a charitable roundup of donations from other writers to help out with Robert Bloch’s medical bills when Bloch was dying of cancer, but you don’t hear that side of him often mentioned.

Fair enough assessment. But the thing is past him, are there any other well known writers who assert basic writers rights?

Also, Yamara:

So the correct way for creators to handle this is always to insist that they have never heard of Harlan Ellison.

Odd wording on this so not too clear what you are trying to say, but I will say this: Thanks to the Internet writers have tons of more options to assert rights and â€œoutâ€ those who would trample on their rights. Someone rips off your work? Just tweet about it. Maybe link to a blog post providing evidence of the infraction.

But my problem with Ellison is while he is intensely generous, itâ€™s so mixed with his self-centered behavior you donâ€™t know which what youâ€™re standing most of the time.

My solution to this for any new writer? Stop trying to beg for patronage from major publishers and use the web. Cory Doctorow is 100% right in the way he approaches his work; I used to be critical of it before but fully appreciate it now. The tech is in writers hands to assert their voice freely and without strings: Go for it!
mk11

I find One Man and His Dog much funnier than either.
Anonymous

Wouldn’t Ellison have just as much a case against Pennington Ward and Cartoon Network over ‘Adventure Time’? A boy and the dog he talks to, wandering about a post-apocalyptic world, filled (in part) with characters made of candy, who could ostensibly be eaten… that would be the perfect suit to seal his place as the biggest assface in science fiction.
brillow

Harlan has always been a litigious ass.
Bruce Arthurs

Oh, foo. If you wanted a book with a lot more similarities to THE ROAD than Ellison’s story, try FALSE DAWN by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
Anonymous

for me THE ROAD lost all credibility when the kid tasted the soda. I have seen a young adult who has never experienced carbonation do so for the first time, it was a striking experience, yet in the movie it was kinda lame. The movie was unimaginative, boring, unrealistic and preposterous. Why in the hell does anyone care if they are eaten AFTER they are dead? It’s the dying that bugs people. and logically, humans hunting other malnourished humans for sustainable food is an unrealistic concept, where were they all getting vitamin C and D?
- Neon Tooth
  
  #71
  
  How’s business at the Android’s Dungeon?
Anonymous

I don’t know who’s right here, but Cormac McCarthy is a bizarre sort of phenomenon in pop culture. Why he has more prestige in this forum than Octavia Butler, who wrote a much better version of “The Road” in her novel, “Parable of the Sower,” is beyond me. He does pretentious things with punctuation and made it onto Oprah’s Favorite Things shelf, but the crossover success of his work is unusual. There’s art in his writing, but some of the condemnations of Ellison here are so sad. I don’t agree with writers who care more about credit than the betterment of the medium. I agree even less with mocking giants like Ellison because he’s old enough to feel umbrage when other writers don’t acknowledge they’re standing on the shoulders of those who came before, intentionally or not.
- Anonymous
  
  you are too level-headed, intelligent and informed to comment here.
  also, you ripped off my comment
- slamorte
  
  I don’t think The Road and The Parable of the Sower are all that similar.
  
  Parable is about community from the get-go, from the failing cul-de-sac and the failing America it represents, to the fellowship of the northbound trekkers, and finally their arrival in Humboldt County, CA, and starting a commune. It’s also a story about maintaining your vision of some greater goal despite your adversity. It’s an excellent story.
  
  The Road is about… what? It’s hard to say. The novel is as bleak as boiled down to the bone as a cannibal’s next-day leftovers. It’s about morality in the face of certain destruction. It’s what happens when there are no more dreams, when survival at almost any cost in appealing… and yet “almost any cost” still draws a line. It’s far more of a primal and realistic story.
Anonymous

Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury have both become cranky old guys who have lost their once prodigious mojo and have nothing better to do than whine about how their unique genius is being ripped off by anyone who writes anything remotely similar or in any degree referring to their works.

Bradbury’s whingefest about the title “Farenheit 9/11″ was particularly rich coming from (one of) the author(s) of “I Sing The Body Electric” not to mention “The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Silver Apples of the Moon” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes”.
elmlish

I may be in a minority, but I always thought the ending of The Road had a rather ambiguously happy ending. For all we knew, the people that came to save the boy were just playing nice so as to eat him later…
Chris Tucker

Oh, Harlan. Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s Eve?

Check out the Scooby Doo section on Cartoon Network.

Harlan has been reduced to guest starring in an episode of Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated.

You’ll be surprised to find out he plays an egotistical, sarcastic, insensitive little prick who hates his fans.
kdwall

Harlan’s alleged claim that Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is a rip-off of “A Boy and His Dog”, was apparently a joke extracted from a much longer dialogue and sort of lost in translation. I was back at that WSJ article today to show a friend the picture of Harlan’s first typewriter (the news is out that this David Silver fellow DID sell it, by the way), and I see the interviewer recently left a clarification in the comments section. You really need to go see it. Harlan was completely misinterpreted.
Anonymous

Nobody reads Harlan Ellison anymore, except a few die-hard fans on his website. They made a movie about him a few years ago and it went straight to DVD, it never got into the theaters.

A lot of people talk about what a great writer he is but who knows what they are basing this on, other than a handful of short stories from decades ago that they remember reading as kids. He’s always been more personality than artist. I think Cormac McCarthy is safe on this one.
dougr650

Harlan Ellison may be the most overrated sci-fi writer of all time. The first story of his I read seemed novel and inventive until I read a few more and realized that his “style” is really just that of a self-absorbed middle-schooler with a taste for cutesy titles and overblown logorrhea. Shame that he’s turned his marginal talents solely to self-promotion and legal trolling. He can’t go away fast enough.
- Hools Verne
  
  Thank god I’m not the only one who thinks that, besides being an odious sniveling and disgusting excuse for a human being, Ellison can’t write for shit with those hams he tries to pass off as fists.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    Ellison can’t write for shit with those hams he tries to pass off as fists.
    
    Now, now. We get that you dislike the guy. But “can’t write for shit”? Eight and a half Hugo Awards, three Nebulas, five Stokers, two Edgars, the Silver Pen for Journalism, four WGA awards, even a couple of Grammy nominations. And heaps more accolades, including Lifetime Achievement World Fantasy Award, Grand Master Nebula, and a Lifetime Achievement Bram Stoker Award.
    
    He might not be your first choice for a bridge partner, and his prose may not be to your taste, but I’d hazard a guess that the consensus within the genre is that Harlan Ellison can, in fact, write for shit.
Anonymous

I have to admit, though, I’ve not read either, and merely tried to watch the Don Johnson 1975 A Boy And His Dog. Don’t try to watch it sober. Just don’t. It won’t make much sense either way, but will be more enjoyable if one is well and truly sloshed or baked. Nothing made in the 70s should be watched sober, come to that.
Tdawwg

Having begun with “ripping off” Faulkner, and graduating to stealing from the truly great–Melville and Isaiah, for starters–in Blood Meridian, McCarthy has much better taste, and far greater erudition, than to go hunting in Ellison’s arid badlands.
- Anonymous
  
  Nice.
- Jonathan Badger
  
  “A Boy and His Dog” (book and movie) is 1000x better that sappy weepfest “The Road” beloved by Oprah (pretty much an ANTI-recommendation, imho). ABaHD pretty much started the genera of post-apocalyptic humor which lead to the Fallout series, among other benefits to society.
  - Anonymous
    
    That “imho” kills me.
  - Tdawwg
    
    For McCarthy cognoscenti, The Road stands as the distillation of his life’s work, a haunting, simple parable of love and humanity at the end of days. A sappy weepfest it was not. If you disagree, find me a better scene in all of Ellison than when the dad finds the sextant aboard the rusted boat. I doubt you can. :D
    - DonCarlitos
      
      A poorly-written “…sad weepy fest” it totally was. By owning to the obvious rip-off, McCarthy simple distances himself from the smell. If this is SciFi, well, you know…
    - legweak
      
      I totally agree with you here. The story is a metaphor for the challenge to bring up a child – like most children, an inherently innocent and genuinely good child – safely and successfully in our very challenged society. If you think this is an easy thing to do, you’re not a parent.
      
      The Road is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
    - Jonathan Badger
      
      I’d say the “Downunder” scenes in “A Boy and His Dog” in which a society supposedly based on “the real traditional America” turns out to be horrific are pretty darned nifty. Especially now when politicians are seriously claiming that social progress needs to be turned back.
    - Anonymous
      
      actually I have to agree with the poster above in saying The Road was a terrible book. Derivative, mawkish, manipulative, boring, and poorly stylized. But that’s just my opinion.
      
      Oh and also, I don’t know why anyone is defending James Cameron; he may make popular, crappy movies (apart from t2), but he’s also one of the biggest douchebags on the planet.
      
      oh wait, don’t sue me, that’s just a joke.
  - speedreeder
    
    Mr. Badger, if you have a knee-jerk anti reaction to Oprah’s book list you A. don’t know what she actually recommends, B. don’t know squat about literature. While not everything she recommends is stellar, she’s actually picked some great books over the years. Unless you’re of those people who thinks Carson McCullers and William Faulkner are trash or something.
    - Jonathan Badger
      
      I think it is a little different to compare Oprah’s recommendations of classic literature (not that they are particularly adventurous classic selections, being largely confined to things like Anna Karenina and The Tale of Two Cities which most people read in high school, rather than truly challenging things like Finnegans Wake), with her recommendations of modern literature, which tend to be rather low-end middlebrow. It’s no honor to be picked; one senses that Franzen was actually somewhat dismayed by his “Freedom” being selected.
  - Anonymous
    
    It’s a shame that McCarthy’s work wasn’t enough like Fallout to seem legitimate to you. You’re right though, the end of the world of the world as we know it just doesn’t seem palatable without some irreverent humour thrown in.
    And don’t even get me started on Oprah’s Book Club, obviously all trashy new age rubbish, yeah? Faulkner, Tolstoy, Franzen, Marquez? Who are these hacks, anyway?
    
    Also, Ryan873: I agree, there was a reason he called his characters simply ‘man’ and ‘boy’, they represent an archetypal parent and child, and the apocalyptic setting represents a hostile world, taken to it’s furthest extreme. There was no need to elaborate on the characters or the back story any more than he did, and in my experience it’s people with children of their own who understand and appreciate this book the most, but not exclusively.
    If you seriously had a problem with the lack of character development and back story, or lack of humour, it’s safe to say you missed the point completely.
- Anonymous
  
  How come no one ever noticed that The Beach was a TOTAL rip off of Lord of the Flies?
Sean Bonner

The Road was such a piece of crap. If you are going to claim someone ripped you off, at least find something that turned out good. There’s nothing flattering about saying someone stole your dumb idea and turned it into a boring book/movie.
grimc

Pfft. ‘A Boy And His Dog’ is just a ripoff of ‘On The Beach’. All Ellison did was replace the Navy captain and his submarine wandering a post-nuclear world with a kid and his pet.
- 5ynic
  
  beat me to it grimc.
  I think On the Beach is a better story than either, too.
Anonymous

Yeah, well, Ellison ripped off Asimov. There, I said it.
Michael Smith

I am seeing a trend where writers from the current generation take ideas from previous generations and sell them to a broader market.

For me “The Road” is a ripoff from a whole lot of post holocaust SF stories from the early nuclear era, from 1950 to 1980 or so. They include The Postman, Free Flight, A Canticle for Liebowitz, etc.

The “Time Travellers Wife” is pretty clearly copied from “There Will be Time” by Poul Anderson and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Its pretty much a merge of those two stories, in fact.

I am glad that these stories get made into film eventually, but I wish more credit could be given to the writers who originated the ideas.
- catgrin
  
  I agree that the trend exists, I think it may be in part due to the fact that what was sci-fi in the 50s-80s is in some cases now common place. (Just look at your computer, cell phone, and electric car.) At their best, the hybridized stories are being retold not as futuristic possibles, but as near future fables of what lies lurking, so the stories have a totally different tone.
  
  It’s my hope that that writers who are doing this are for the most part doing so unconsciously. They grew up readers, consumed all those wonderful stories and then those worlds became the foundations for the ones they built themselves. There’s a great version of that idea in the television show Red Dwarf. A race of cat-people build an entire religion based on stories told to their sole ancestor by a human, “Lister” – who to them became known as “Cloister, the Stupid.” This sort of “game of operator” can mix and match into really wonderful and unique ideas, it’s the rehashing and outright theft of the old ones that’s just not okay.
Anonymous

The Road is not even close to ABAHD …which was a very good story and an ok movie. The Road was a horrible piece of crap with virtually no similarlity in plot or in the feel of the movie.
Anonymous

Ideas are not protected, you are correct.

The reason that Ellison’s suit was successful was because Cameron blatantly admitted that the story was stolen from Ellison in two different interviews.
Jack

Well, I admire Harlan Ellisonâ€™s work. But he really edges on the territory of being an ambulance chaser in cases like this. And he won a judgement against James Cameron when Cameron said the following:
And soon after this initial meeting, Ellison says his complaint received more support. â€œAbout a week after my attorney contacted Hemdale, I got a call from the editor of Starlog magazine. ….It turned out Cameron had given an interview to Starlog and, after I began inquiring at Hemdale, [The Terminator producer Gale Anne] Hurd sent Starlog a legal demand to see the interview.â€ According to Ellison, Gale Anne Hurd then modified Starlog’s article on The Terminator. She omitted a quote from Cameron in the article that read, â€œ’Oh, I took a couple of ‘Outer Limits’ segments.’â€ The reason that the Starlog editor had contacted Ellison was to provide him with the original version of the article, the one without Gale Anne Hurd’s editing. Said Ellison, â€œAt this point we went to Hemdale and to Orion and we said, ‘I’m afraid we got him with the smoking gun. Now do you want to do something about this or do you want us to whip your ass in open court? We’d be perfectly happy to do it either way.’â€ Between the account of Tracy Torme and the Starlog interview, the attorneys for Hemdale and Orion quickly realized that they wanted no part of a lawsuit, by Ellison’s accounts. â€œThey took one look at this shit and their attorneys said, ‘Settle.’â€

Also, to my knowledge Harlan Ellisonâ€™s claims towards author rights really begin and end with him. Has he ever defended or spoken on behalf of any other written ever? I canâ€™t recall that happening ever.

If heâ€™s true to the concept of improving writers rights he should use his â€œheftâ€ to help others and make plagiarism a more public cause. If he canâ€™t do that, Iâ€™d truly appreciate it if he shuts his trap already. Because heâ€™s starting to sound like the Thomas Edison of sci-fi concepts.
- Donald Petersen
  
  Also, to my knowledge Harlan Ellisonâ€™s claims towards author rights really begin and end with him. Has he ever defended or spoken on behalf of any other written ever? I canâ€™t recall that happening ever.
  
  Well, he has been known to speak loudest when he feels his own toes are being trampled on, but I’ve always gotten the impression that he genuinely wants to speak on behalf of the trodden toes of writers everywhere. Here’s what he said three years ago about the compromise that ended the last WGA strike. It’s true that he’s bent outta shape because the terms of the settlement don’t benefit him as well as he thought they should, but the then-73-year-old Ellison wasn’t just marching around carrying a sign to line his own wallet. I really don’t think he aimed that bilious broadside at the Guild just because he sensed the Studios’ fingers in his own pocket. Those are the words of a brokenhearted fighter wondering why so many of his colleagues sold themselves out for so little.
  
  In my experience with the guy, he’s been a prickly but generous-hearted guy who has zero tolerance for feeling like somebody’s taking unfair advantage, either of him or of others less able or willing to defend themselves. I remember he coordinated a charitable roundup of donations from other writers to help out with Robert Bloch’s medical bills when Bloch was dying of cancer, but you don’t hear that side of him often mentioned.
- WizarDru
  
  “Has he ever defended or spoken on behalf of any other written ever? I canâ€™t recall that happening ever.”
  
  Well, certainly some writers believe he’s on their side. Is Ellison crass, oft-times unlikable and certainly less than diplomatic? Without question, Ellison can be an incredible asshole when he chooses to be. But many of the lawsuits he’s undertaken have been on principle and not earned him large settlements…but they have potentially set precedents for other writers to benefit from. Of course, he’s also sued when people (even former allies) say bad things about him in books. As I said, he can be an incredible asshole.
  
  But the impression I get is he also tries to take principled stands…even if he’s the only one to do so and if it’s a colossal waste of time. Which may be why he’s had four heart attacks, too.
- Yamara
  
  So the correct way for creators to handle this is always to insist that they have never heard of Harlan Ellison.
- Roxysteve
  
  I’m afraid you are seriously out of your league when you question Ellison’s commitment to people’s rights.
  
  Ellison walked front and center on the Freedom Marches, where not lawyers, but people with large wooden clubs waited to contest his right to do so. He could have sat comfortable at home and watched it on TV from afar as so many did, but then as at other times, he acted out of a sense of outraged decency. Yes he can be a complete a-hole, but over the years he has earned the right and you can always walk away from him if he offends you.
  
  As for Cameron: If he is such a massive talent, how come he has to steal other people’s ideas? What Cameron seems to have done with “Terminator” is like what I, a talentless non-sculptor, do with my lead soldiers: Kitbash other people’s efforts into something that will trick the eye into thinking it is something new.
  
  Instead of crying and wringing his hands over the injustice of being caught red-handed, Cameron would be better served learning the lesson and paying up-front for the stuff he cannot come up with on his own. Isn’t a strong anti-piracy stance close to the Hollywood Heart?
  
  Just my opinion, of course.
tonesfrommars

I’m always puzzled when people read “The Road” and then conclude that McCarthy is “…a talentless charlatan” as above. Read Blood Meridian and then talk to me. The fact that a literary giant can write a book like the road without needing to show off his command of the language (ie. in layman’s terms) is outstanding and is evidence of a deeper devotion to the message and artistry of that book.

Even as an aside from Harlan, it’s a shame that he can’t celebrate another great writer and a truly great book.
ScottTFrazer

I really enjoyed Harlan Ellison’s Star Wars novels.

(reference: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/9/26/ )
- extra88
  
  I came here looking for the Penny Arcade story. It’s the first time I encountered a story about him. It’s funny that the caption that works for every New Yorker cartoon also works for every tale about Ellison.
Anonymous

The last thing I read by Ellison was the Glass Teat.
Boba Fett Diop

I always thought The Road ripped off The Mouse and His Child.
Anonymous

My favorite Ellison work is his NES classic “A Boy and his Blob.” I didn’t even know he made video games!
Rider

The two have almost nothing in common.
jeffguevin

The reflexive dismissal of Oprah’s recommendations as anti-recommendations is, for me, an anti-anti-recommendation.
- Jonathan Badger
  
  Fair enough. Have a good time reading such gems as “The Secret” and “A Million Little Pieces”….
  - Anonymous
    
    And Middlesex? Should we not read that too? To completely dismiss a book because a talkshow host has recommended is foolish.
  - bwaterhouse
    
    And Great Expectations, Middlesex, Night, The Sound and the Fury, East of Eden and Anna Karenina. The majority of the books Oprah has recommended are inarguably great. And The Secret is not actually among them.
Jason Sanford

Since I wrote the essay linked from the top of this page, obviously I have concerns about Ellison’s claims of others ripping off his works. But that said, it is impossible to imagine science fiction or American literature without Harlan Ellison.

His collection “Essential Ellison: a 50 Year Retrospective” is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the power short stories can have on the imagination. His groundbreaking anthologies “Dangerous Visions” and “Again, Dangerous Visions” revolutionized science fiction. Many of his short story collections are still in print decades after they first came out, a fact few other living authors can come close to claiming.

So while it is fair to criticize Ellison for his public statements and persona, his fiction is a different thing altogether. Whether you like his writing or not, people will still be reading his stories long after those of us commenting on this affair are deader than dust.
xunker

This is nothing new; the aged among us will remember that Ellison sued AOL in 2000 for carrying a USENET newsgroup that, at one time, had also been used to share unauthorized digital copies of his work.
hiawatha999

@ Jonathan Badger
Try reading McCarthy’s early works without ranches and horses. Many are just people wandering with or without purpose in nameless environments. This is how he writes! There need be no setting or research beyond whatever dialect he has the characters speaking in.
It’s not avoiding “nerdy” stuff, just not necessary to his STYLE.
I’ve read a lot of SF over the years…this is a novel set in the near future after a calamity. Like most SF, this is all too close to potential reality…but certainly no Oryx and Crake! We are but a few hops and steps away from The Road…
cmuwriter

Regardless of who is right in this matter, does it irk anyone else that the Father and Son didn’t stay in the food bunker in the book? I could find no reason for him not to stay in there as long as possible.
- legweak
  
  It’s metaphorical. We’re never as safe as we want to be, and are always chasing after the better, safer thing.
- GuyInMilwaukee
  
  I understood not staying IN the bunker if they thought it was being watched. Living underground with only one exit out is never a good idea, but why not stay close hidden and use up the supplies? I think there was more that they could have taken with them.
- Punishingwombat
  
  A lot of people bring up this point, it’s a good one. Many think that Father knew he was going to die, with all his coughing and such, and wanted to get the Boy to the coast while he was still able to do so.
- Anonymous
  
  Leaving the bunker made me so angry at the dad. I knew he was woop woop crazy at that point. The road became more important than his son’s safety.
GuyInMilwaukee

If McCarthy had written The Road with any semblance of humor I would say Ellison had a case. All I remember is a yawn… a grey oppressive yawn. Nothing wrong with that if that’s your goal.
Anonymous

I just had this horrible vision of what might have happened had Ellison decided Watchmen was ripped off from something he’d done…

…HARLAN ELLISON VS ALAN MOORE STEEL CAGE MATCH!!!!
Dr. Pasolini

“Iâ€™m speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They will rape him [the boy]. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wonâ€™t face it. Youâ€™d rather wait for it to happen. But I canâ€™t. I canâ€™t. . . . She watched him across the small flame. We used to talk about death, she said. We donâ€™t anymore. Why is that?
I donâ€™t know.
Itâ€™s because itâ€™s here. Thereâ€™s nothing left to talk about.
I wouldnâ€™t leave you.
I donâ€™t care. Itâ€™s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. Iâ€™ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
Death is not a lover.
Oh yes he is.”

Deathless prose indeed.
- Tdawwg
  
  Eh, taken out of context anything can seem silly. The parts with the wife are probably not the best parts of the book. What deathless prose have you written lately?
  
  @cmuwriter: the dad mentions at least once that the supply room is a kind of a trap, in that they’re tempted to stay and might become lax, unguarded, and they are underground in a bunker with one door that can easily be blocked or covered over. Hence the nice dilemma they’re in.
  
  @JonathanBadger, I guess I’ll have to reread ABaHD and check that part out.
- Anonymous
  
  “Deathless”? I would use the term, “bloodless.”
Anonymous

>Many of his short story collections are still in print decades after they first came out<

No, they aren’t. Sorry. Neither are any of the books you mentioned, as influential they may have been at the time. Required reading for budding science fiction writers, perhaps…but the market has spoken.
- catgrin
  
  Sorry #87, but I have to agree with #93, and here’s the proof.
  
  Not only his anthologies, but also several of Ellison’s short story collections have been made available in eBook format for Nook. I found this out when I went to buy Dangerous Visions last year. Here’s the link: http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?store=EBOOK&WRD=ellison+harlan&box=ellison%20harlan&pos=-1&ugrp=1
  
  Since readers are replacing bookstores, isn’t this the published format you should be looking for a current book-in-demand in?
- Anonymous
  
  Anon @ 87 wrote:Anon
  
  “>Many of his short story collections are still in print decades after they first came out
  
  No, they aren’t. Sorry. Neither are any of the books you mentioned, as influential they may have been at the time. Required reading for budding science fiction writers, perhaps…but the market has spoken.”
  
  Actually, essentially all of Ellison’s major short stories are still in print. Try “The Essential Ellison: a 50 year retrospective.” Just one example, of course, about two seconds of Googling are required to find others.
  The market has spoken, just not in the way that you think.
  - Halloween Jack
    
    I don’t think that you quite understand what “in print” means; the Essential Ellison series was published by Morpheus International, which if my own googling is correct has morphed (so to speak) into a fantasy fine art dealership. Amazon simply has access to a few remaining copies of the series, which remain available well after they went out of print. Much of Ellison’s work is available only via print-on-demand, the poor man’s vanity press. At a time when the classic works of Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and Dick remain in print, Ellison can’t find a single real publisher willing to work with him.
    - kromelizard
      
      It may not be out of print (meaning the publisher indicates that they will discontinue carrying it and starting the clock on when they’ll stop accepting overstock returns, pretty much sounding the death knell for the few remaining copies on store shelves) but it looks to be out of stock at the publisher. I wouldn’t put money on its being reprinted considering how rocky the book business is these days and how weak the sales on his books are.
- Donald Petersen
  
  No, they aren’t. Sorry.
  
  Well, that’s a weird thing. The anthologies are, in fact, available at Amazon in paperback form (and some of them even in Kindle format, which I seem to remember Ellison regarding with horror, but I could be wrong), but published by E-Reads, which describes itself thus:
  
  “…a trail-blazing reprinter of out-of-print genre and general fiction and nonfiction by leading authors.”
  
  So I don’t know if that makes them genuinely OOP or not. Seems not, if you can order a fresh new paperback printed last year from Amazon. And apparently there was sufficient demand for them to make Kindle editions.
  
  Kinda amazed, however, that Amazon’s selling a new paperback copy of the OOP Essential Ellison for $163.69. I wonder if my copy is still in Fine condition? ;^)
Anonymous

So now we finally know what Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions are…
Anonymous

Most everyone perhaps borrows from “The Cat In The Hat” I think.
Punishingwombat

Well, I’ve read Soldier, and it’s awfully similar to the Terminator, I think Ellison had a case there. With The Road and A Boy and His Dog, I’ve read those two and, other than the setting, they have very little in common. They are as similar as Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game. Ellison suing McCarthy would be like Heinlein suing Card, because they are both set in space.
- bob d
  
  I don’t think Ellison even remotely had a case with Terminator. I’ve seen the Outer Limits episodes in question, “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand” many times. Although there are similar ideas in those scripts to Terminator, the specific elements it had in common with Soldier were the ideas that a far future war has devastated the Earth and a pair of combatants travel back in time to the present. The problem is, a couple similar ideas, heck even a couple identical ideas don’t alone constitute plagiarism, and plagiarism doesn’t constitute a copyright violation. Since the same text or even rough story outline wasn’t being used from Ellison’s work, there really wasn’t any rational basis for a lawsuit.
- mccrum
  
  True that. From the time traveling soldier who wants only to stop the oncoming battle to the use of “Skynet,” Terminator took a lot from Soldier. And I love Ellison’s work and believe in a lot of his fights to defend his rights, but I think he’s really stretching on this one.
Anonymous

“The problem, practically speaking, is that it’s often cheaper to pay someone off than defend yourself in court.” I don’t understand this… if ideas can’t be copywritten than how can anyone bring you to court in the first place? Wouldn’t the case be thrown out the window automatically?
Anonymous

Grampa Simpson: Well everything’s stolen nowadays. Why the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached.
Funky16Corners

Ellison is one of my heroes but this makes me wonder if he’s actually read ‘The Road’.
Cameron – a big a hack as they come – deserved to be sued for lifting from Ellison.
Ellison’s motivation, or whether or not his concern about literary theft extends to other authors is irrelevant. He was stolen from, he sued, he collected.
Rob Beschizza

You can sue someone for anything. Even getting to the point of filing a motion to dismiss can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Lawyers are expensive and even terrible lawsuits can prevail if you do without them — defending yourself is only free if your time is worthless and you are well acquainted with the law.
- Halloween Jack
  
  That’s what a lot of knee-jerk Ellison defenders don’t really understand. The Terminator franchise is worth quite a lot of money, even if the last two movies didn’t do as well as the first two. Especially if he didn’t ask for a lot of money, a lot of people are willing to settle, which Ellison’s lawyers almost inevitably spin into a victory for him.
John Napsterista

This is what happens when someone chooses to fade away instead of burn out.
MollyMaguire

I have read The Road, but it must have been a long time ago because I don’t remember the boy being telepathic and I can’t recall the character he must have eaten in the end.
Rob Beschizza

The upshot of all that is that litigators can file what are called SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits against public participation. The point is that they know they won’t prevail, but that the target lacks the financial means or willpower to defend themselves in court. The intention is to get a quick juicy settlement — money, the removal of a critical blog post, whatever they want.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  Doesn’t Ellison live in SF? I thought CA has the anti-SLAPP statute.
  - Rob Beschizza
    
    We are in CA and winning our lawsuit on the first motion using that exact statute cost us tens of thousands of dollars.
Lobster

I liked The Road a heck of a lot better (except for its sappy and unbelievable ending), so fine by me.
Lester

My favorite review of The Road is that from Spider Robinson’s podcast:

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/podcast.html

Scroll down to the 1/11/08 episode. I don’t agree with it entirely, but I dig that whole take on the “slumming in SciFi” aspect he lends to it. As literature, I thought The Road had a lot to offer. As a story, particularly a science fiction novel, it was pretty crap. The characters (aside from the father) were two dimensional and their actions were all poorly thought-out.

And yes, I think the apocalypse generally falls under Science Fiction.
- Brett Myers
  
  I’m pretty sure the apocalypse falls under fantasy.
Daemon

He’s a good writer, but still an asshole.
tomrigid

I think both Ellison and McCarthy are fantastic. If Ellison really thinks McCarthy imitated him to create The Road, I’m sure he’s quite flattered on the inside. This is a non-story, though it’s a good excuse to discuss two couldn’t-be-more-different authors.
Anonymous

I think this post is irresponsible in that it misrepresents Ellison’s intentions in making the remark. To me, it doesn’t seem as if he “conspicuously works in a claim that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is ripped off from A Boy and his Dog.” And he never says he’s going to actually sue anyone. Rather, it seemed as if the interviewer kept badgering him for a connection between the sale of his typewriter and McCarthy’s and Ellison made a sarcastic, off-the-cuff reply, as is his m.o.

Is the Road a rip-off of Ellison’s work? No, I don’t think so. But, at the same time, it’s got to rankle a lot of SF writers when so-called literary writers gain praise and lucrative movie deals by recycling decades-old SF tropes, e.g., wanderers in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
MadRat

That’s Ellison being Ellison, isn’t it? He’s a great writer but he’s got a pretty nasty reputation.

As far as “Soldier” being the inspiration for “The Terminator”, let me introduce you to an author named Philip K. Dick. About 10 years before “Soldier”, Dick wrote a story called “Second Variety” about a post apocalyptic world were humans had built androids as weapons of war that eventually became indistinguishable from actual humans. The humans lost control of the androids, who with the help of a central computer, became self replicating, produced more efficient designs and killed nearly every last human. The main android in the story was built to look like a soldier. Sound like The Terminator?

The story is worth reading (free, online and legal, just click the download tab: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32032 ) but if you can’t handle reading a short story, there’s a plot summery on Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety ).
patrick_bateman

Point of order, a ‘SLAPP suit’ is a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” – emphasis on the “against public participation”. It’s a suit brought by the rich and powerful to stop the public participating in a democratic or community dialogue or process.

E.g. Farmer Brown wants to complain to a government authority or the local paper about Monsanto’s GM crops ruining his organic farming business so Monsanto brings a trumped up defamation claim to shut him down, or sues him for ‘stealing’ their intellectual property, with the goal of forcing him to (a) go bankrupt or (b) cut a settlement deal where he has to withdraw his complaint.

A SLAPP suit is NOT any frivolous lawsuit brought by Person A against Person B. Depending upon your jurisdiction these can be remedied in a number of ways including summary dismissal, severe costs orders against the party bringing the suit, and complaints leading to professional consequences for any lawyers involved.
- catgrin
  
  Thank you for the further clarification. My involvement with SLAPPs is due to a family member being on the receiving end, not due to legal training. I stepped in mainly because I didn’t want the other statement to be left as it was.
Anonymous

I think Cormac McCarthy should sue John Hillcoat, Joe Penhall, and Dimension Films. Maybe Harlan would take the case.
Anonymous

Ellison sued Cameron because Cameron bragged in interviews he used two Outer Limits episodes for Terminator. I’ve seen Demon With A Glass Hand and Soldier many times and the truth is, Terminator is similar enough. Soldier uses the phrase Skynet. Hurd’s trying to censor Cameron’s tape recorded interview was a smoking gun in itself.
semiotix

Unfortunately, Cameron’s right with his “parasite” crack except for one thing: Ellison’s one of the last of the penny-a-line, pulp-magazine generation, and he probably genuinely doesn’t understand that the rest of the literary world plays by different (and more sensible) rules. You don’t just get to pee on “post-apocalyptic robots and/or telepathic insects, plus anything set on Mars” and then claim those things as your personal intellectual property forevermore.

Which must really rankle Ellison in this particular case, who got a lot more famous than he did rich (and still was never all that famous). He wrote what, a thousand stories and scripts? And then Cormac McCarthy makes ten thousand times what he did for their stories which both involve two figures wandering around the post-apocalyptic landscape, never mind that one story features a peaceful father and son, and the other features a rapist teenager and a telepathic dog… and totally different things happen to them. So this might be one time where Ellison’s not just pretending to be cantankerous, spiteful asshole for the attention.
Anonymous

Oh, for crying out loud! Ellison loves to hear the sound of his own kvetching. If he really though he had been ripped off, he’d be doing more than dropping bitchy asides in unrelated articles. Grow up, shorty.
Saint Fnordius

Harlan Ellison lost me a long time ago, ever since he traded writing stories for being The Guy With A Chip On His Shoulderâ„¢. It’s become so bad it’s really more self-parody than Orson Scott Card’s homophobia.

Well, to use Harlan’s own vernacular, fuck that vitriolic little pissant. If I decide to read his writings again, I will do it the same way I read Orson Scott Card: I’ll borrow from the library, or buy used. Ain’t no way in Hell I’m feeding this twisted little ball of hatred another cent.
patrick_bateman

Also – I am amused by sci fi nerds slamming “The Road” for its lack of detailed sci fi underpinnings. Plainly McCarthy sought to write about a highly personal situation of total desolation and hopelessness and chose to do so in a (semi-)plausible fashion via a near future apocalypse setting, but to look for details about what caused the apocalypse, why there is no food etc is to entirely miss the point of the novel.

On top of which he does give plenty of clues that what has happened is nuclear in nature. There are massive fires at the start of the event in question, water and air is poisoned, the world is getting colder all the time, cities have been hit hardest, there is evidence of extreme heat (molten glass IIRC), there is grey ash blowing about all over the place, and of course the father appears to have come down with cancer since the event – all of which is consistent with an unexpected nuclear war and resulting nuclear winter.

As for the no food thing, is it really so hard to imagine? Let’s say that there has been a major nuclear war a couple of years ago, and most animals die or can no longer breed and all crops die. How long do you think a western country’s food supplies would last?

And as to the “why didn’t they stay where the food was” question, several reasons: it was getting colder all the time and they were heading for the coast in the hopes of finding a warmer climate, the father knew he was dying, and to stay in one place was extremely risky.
- Jonathan Badger
  
  Funny thing though — when McCarthy writes about horses and ranchers in his other books, it sounds like he actually knows something about the subject, and that adds a lot. It is annoying that when someone like McCarthy or Atwood writes what is an SF novel (and yes, “The Road” and “Oryx and Crake” *are* SF novels despite being written by “serious” authors), that they can’t be bothered to do the basic research and background setting that they do for their other novels. All that “nerdy” stuff is beneath them, I guess.
JimmerSD

Yeah, just like Vanilla Sky was a rip off of UBIK.
- grizlybexar
  
  technically, Vanilla Sky was an American remake of the Spanish film Open Your Eyes (Abre los Ojos), which shares the dream state/wake state confusion of UBIK.
Anony Mouse

“Repent, Harlanquin!”, Said the Boydogman.
knoxblox

Hmm. I don’t remember the boy having telepathic powers or either of them stumbling across a pseudo-utopian society. It’s a road story, which is a basic archetypal concept in literature (i.e. the hero’s journey).

Harlan, to borrow from Ecclesiastes, “there’s nothing new under the sun”. All authors draw from the same (ink)well, though the descriptions may be different.

Good luck suing most of the authors that ever lived.
W. James Au

We really need a new kind of lawsuit for filing frivolous lawsuits.
- bardfinn
  
  I think they’re called SLAPPs.
  - catgrin
    
    Just like W. James Au, you could be joking, who knows?!
    
    Ah well, SLAPPs are not used to remove frivolous lawsuits. They themselves ARE frivolous lawsuits. They’re really designed to stop people from speaking out in public (yes, negatively, but not untruthfully). Many states have anti-SLAPP laws because they can be used to prevent people from performing in government, the media, etc. by acting as a harassment camoflauged as legal process.
    
    Most judges, as soon as they recognized a suit as a SLAPP, would throw it out as frivolous. Mainly this is because SLAPPS are designed to try to block freedom of speech. Not all of them get stopped though, and the point of a SLAPP isn’t to win the case. People sneak them in under other claims (like they say someone’s “lying” about them), but really it’s just a way to use the courts to buy time.
- catgrin
  
  Not sure if you’re joking… can’t tell anymore, but for those who don’t know – you and your lawyer can most definitely be held accountable for filing a frivolous lawsuit!
  
  If you have representation, legally the responsibility against filing frivolous lawsuits is held by the lawyer or group representing you. This is because they are acting as certified experts under the Bar Association, and so if they are willing to pursue a frivolous case, they can be sanctioned (written up or fined) or even held in contempt of court.
  If you choose to go it alone, and try to sue someone without legal counsel, you take on that mantel, and so you can be held in contempt of court and be fined or even imprisoned for wasting the court’s time.
  
  bardfinn’s response was not correct. I’m responding here and writing a quick reply to him because SLAPPs aren’t a way to control frivolous suits.
hiawatha999

If one reads, as all writers do, they unconsciously intake ideas from elsewhere. That’s life! Plagiarism needs to be direct and easily proven, ie: the smoking gun of Cameron alluded to before. Cameron rips from everywhere…Avatar from At Play In The Fields Of The Lord as another example. Which he admits.
The idea of comparing relative strengths of writers is silly…particularly Ellison and McCarthy. Ellison is a plot-driven writer that made his mark but is relatively forgotten now…probably spurring these suits. Give him his due…a very successful writer. And lucky for him, a couple of his books will stand the test of time. McCarthy is a different animal. He’s at a level very few achieve. Fame has been a secondary goal for him (a total recluse) as he has worked since the 60′s stylistically on a path that virtually no others have taken. His prose is both spare and florid, combined in almost mystical ways. His novels all reek of desolation and sorrow while somehow drawing the reader in to see the beauty walking alongside the horror. There are personal quests being played out in all. The Road is just an extension of his writings of the last 50 years, but pared down to emerge as his simplest novel, even easier to read than No Country For Old Men. As an aside, Blood Meridian, while often quoted, is probably his least successful novel, a psychedelic bloodbath that is suited to a movie deal these days. Read everything else to really understand this author’s power though!
To imply that a novelist like McCarthy would even consider plagiarizing an idea is just, well, plain silly.
- Anonymous
  
  @hiawatha999: and of course, Dances with Wolves came out a year before the movie At Play In The Fields Of The Lord…and of course, there’s prior art to both. There are post-apocalyptic stories which pre-date Ellison’s efforts. And let’s not forget, he worked as a creative consultant on Babylon 5, which borrowed so heavily from the sci-fi greats that it was occasionally painful to watch (and to be fair, Star Trek did the same. THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!)
Tatsuma

What I find most uncanny about ABAHD is the way it prophesied the existence of places like Branson,MO.
catgrin

This’ll be my last reply. If you feel the need to have the last word, go ahead and reply. I will read it, but I won’t respond, as this has gone on far too long.

In comment #113, you referred to, “running off 50,000 copies ahead of time” as a cost benefit, and in your last comment stated, “Print on demand produces low quality items at high individual unit cost and only makes economic sense for items that sell in volumes too low to justify warehouse space.” You’re still ignoring the author that opts to work without a publisher and so has no warehouse space provided to them. Remember, a publisher isn’t housing a title, it’s housing the entire catalogue. There’s a huge discount for them because of catalogue volume, and greatly reduced risk because some titles should always sell. The author meanwhile must pay for housing just the title that’s being printed. Not only that, but he has to pay up front for the printing, housing and shipping of those copies. That creates a terrific difference in the economic justification necessary for the author to house his book. The author takes a terrific financial risk if he chooses to run too high a print volume. Any delay in sales lowers his returns. Fewer items housed equals lower risk and more lead time for sales. It’s simple cost benefit and risk analysis. In addition to advertisement, the risk and cost of self printing is why authors have worked with publishers for so long. The thing is, printing has gotten faster and less expensive, and people have learned how to self-promote. Some authors are opting to work with small press or no press, simply because they now can.

I brought up the examples (Doctorow and Kickstarter) in direct response to your snarky comment #124, “about authors, who might decide they don’t even really want to be published anymore and want to go fuck off to Kathmandu to teach the locals parcheesi.” You seemed to believe that only out-of-date semi-retired authors were choosing to use print on demand. I was simply giving two current examples of active authors under the age of 50 who are choosing to self promote and self print. I used the Kickstarter example to show you how a hybrid of small press and print on demand can really benefit an author by providing him with an accurate gauge of known and expected sales, thus reducing his risk in publication.

I did not construe hostility on your part. I try very hard not to assume what others’ emotions are, especially without the aid of their facial expressions which can be 60% of correct interpretation of emotion. I just stated that your attitudes are out of date.

Based on your statements, “on-demand” books are either “cheap” and “chintzy” or “too expensive.” I provided you with a $20 example of a carefully-produced appx. 100pg book that I received as an on demand the day before. It’s cleanly printed and bound on medium weight coated stock. I’m totally satisfied with my purchase. I propose that that only way that regularly well-produced on demand books will be made available is if bookstores and readers require them. You have the right to satisfaction. Contact the author or author’s representatives if the printer they are using is unsatisfactory. If you’re not, how are they supposed to know? Have you contacted any of the authors you’ve been unhappy with an on-demand book from? As a seller, I would think you’d feel a responsibility to do so.

I also responded to your insistence to involve a “major publisher” in any book’s production. You seem to only think in terms of how things work financially if a publishing house is involved. Unfortunately, when no publisher is there, the rules are totally different. According to you, “printing and promoting high demand items yourself is stupid,” but some people are just hiring on friends or family to do the promoting and using small third party presses. The biggest problem with this is initial cash flow, thus low print runs. A lot of small business, producing all kinds of suddenly high demand items (t-shirts, posters, etc.) end up having to do production runs faster than they think they’ll need to just to keep up at times. That’s just how a small business works. They need to sell some to make some more to sell some to make some more to… you get it. People who self publish are in effect their own small business, and they operate on that business model.

Signed, A Print Designer
PattyCake

I like reading Ellison when he’s writing. Not when he’s writing about writing, or writing about himself.
Rob Knop

Harlan Ellison is quite remarkable… he’s sort of a Renaissance Ass. He’s found so many different was to be disagreeable and unpleasant.

Re: being able to sue anybody for anything, civil law (at least in the USA) is a serious problem because of this. It’s become a tool for those with means to push around those without means. It’s very distressing.