Don't Forget Harlan Ellison, Wikipedia!

Last night when I got home from class I told my husband and my brother about how I had written a blog post about the Mad Max series. Big mistake. My husband doesn’t like the movies and my brother likes to be annoying. The conversation devolved into a debate on whether or not the series qualifies as science fiction. While the first movie is certainly debatable as dystopian fiction doesn’t need to be science fiction, the following three take place in a post-apocalypse world. I consider most things like that to be science fiction, or at the very least to be their own specific subgenre of science fiction. I understand that subgenre categorization can be a rather iffy and subjective thing though. That doesn’t mean I handled my brother’s purposefully obnoxious criticisms like the mature adult I so often try to be. Instead I headed straight to the internet to get support for myself and crush him. I needed facts and obviously that meant going on Wikipedia.

Once I got myself to the apocalypse and post-apocalypse fiction page my opinion was validated. However, in my scrolling through the information I noticed something that didn’t sit right. The article lists examples of the various types of apocalypses and the fiction that is set in them. Under the section for war there was a (glaring!) omission. Harlan Ellison’s short story turned movie turned graphic novel A Boy and His Dog was nowhere to be seen. Plenty of other Ellison works can be found listed for other types of apocalypses. His work is notable for taking place in this sort of setting and he’s perhaps most noted for the lawsuit he waged against James Cameron over The Terminator and his issues while working as a writer for the Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever.

Tsk, tsk, Wikipedia.

I love Harlan Ellison. Even if you don’t like his writing just read about the man’s life (maybe even on Wikipedia!). He’s totally nuts and he’s done so many bizarre things. He worked as a nitroglycerine truck driver at one point. Who even knew that was a thing? He’s certainly not as a famous as someone like Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov but he’s a very important writer in science fiction canon. I think people don’t know about him as much because his personality winds up eclipsing his works and he just sort of gets relegated to the position of “that weirdo that likes to sue people”. His fiction is award-winning though and A Boy and His Dog is one of my favorite films. I actually saw the movie first before I had any idea who Harlan Ellison was (it was on instant Netflix) and it made me pursue his writing more. So, for me, leaving him out of the Wikipedia entry is a mistake that needed to be corrected. Not the type of person to sit around and let others edit on my behalf I went for it.

Here's how it read before:

Damnation Alley is a 1967 science fiction novella by Roger Zelazny, which he expanded into a novel in 1969. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 1977.

In 2003, children's novelist Jeanne DuPrau released The City of Ember, which was the first of four books in a post-apocalyptic series for young adults. A film adaption, City of Ember, has since been made starring Bill Murray and Saoirse Ronan.

Here it is with my little addition:

Damnation Alley is a 1967 science fiction novella by Roger Zelazny, which he expanded into a novel in 1969. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 1977.

Harlan Ellison’s short story A Boy and His Dog takes place in a world desolated by the nuclear warfare in World War III. It was adapted into a film of the same name as well as a companion graphic novel titled Vic and Blood.

In 2003, children's novelist Jeanne DuPrau released The City of Ember, which was the first of four books in a post-apocalyptic series for young adults. A film adaption, City of Ember, has since been made starring Bill Murray and Saoirse Ronan.

I highly recommend both the film and the short story though I can’t say about the graphic novel as I haven’t read it yet. Well, I guess I should say I recommend those things if you don’t mind dark sarcasm, a brutal world, and an unsympathetic main character. But, I mean, there’s a dog and that’s kind of the whole reason I first watched the movie. The dog is pretty cool. He’s a psychic. If you decide to watch the movie I think it’s still on instant Netflix. Tell me what you think!