RIP Harlan Ellison

[Jim Eshelman]

Harlan Ellison, a brilliant creative power who thrived in the era I adored science fiction most, died in his sleep last night, here in Los Angeles. Len Wein's widow broke the news on behalf of Susan Ellison.

I can confirm his usually stated birth data (May 27, 1934, 2:20 PM, Cleveland, OH) because he was briefly my client. (I'm unclear if he ever knew that. Someone close to him was literally my client, but I spent more than a little time on Harlan's chart.) I was always a little puzzled at the depth of what spilled from him creatively, given the chart - It described his personal life well enough, it showed his esthetic sense of story composition and placed him a little on the outskirts of most people's world, but never that far out.

And most especially, I remember couldn't figure out at first why this Taurus-Libra with Jupiter rising and a close Mercury-Venus sextile was such an aff. (That's not exactly a criticism. It just came with the package of this man who stood on the precipice of reality.) I finally realized where it came from when I relocated his chart to Hollywood and found his Mars-Saturn square quite close to the angles. This also produced a foreground mundane Sun-Neptune square, only 0°28' wide, which made all the sense in the world. (He came here at age 28.)

His final SLR June 24 had Neptune at MC and Saturn exactly setting, opposite Sun.

In any case, I will raise a glass of a 9-year-old Cabernet Pfeffer to him tonight (strangely suitable: an elegant, outlier wine with a startling edge of pepper you can't escape). I thank him for the Wonderland.

[Jupiter Sets at Dawn]

That's too bad. LIked his work a lot. I was introduced to it by a cousin who runs a sci-fi/comic bookstore. She used to always get pawed by him and his group of minions at conventions, and was carried off a couple of times. Never more than that but she kicks pretty hard.