It's bad form to celebrate when someone dies

But I am not about to let that stop me.

Seriously, if I'm ever feeling sad in the future, and you need to cheer me up, you can just remind me that Harlan Ellison is dead. I know there were a lot of things that made the world worse yesterday, but there was also one thing that made it better - the loss of one notable hateful self-centered shithead.

I first encountered Harlan when he was trying to destroy the free internet. That's not hyperbole; in 2000 he sued under the DMCA trying to hold AOL responsible for the fact that some of his fiction had been posted to Usenet. Not even to AOL - they had a Usenet mirror, so some of Harlan's fiction was on their servers, and he was on he warpath.

And not just against every unmoderated internet service, though that certainly was ridiculous enough. Harlan decided it was a good plan to go up against me too. I was twenty-one and the editor and publisher of what was, at that time, a brand new kind of science fiction magazine. I was buying stories from authors and publishing them on the internet for free.

That sure doesn't seem like a negative now, but at the time Harlan was infuriated. He was convinced that we were ruining the lives of authors forever by convincing people that they could get stories without having to pay for them. He sent out a ridiculous all-caps screed, which included this bit:

LOOK, THIS IS YOUR FIGHT, TOO. IF THAT DEMENTED, SELF-SERVING MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE WORD “INFORMATION” PREVAILS, AND EVERY ZERO-ETHIC TOT WHO WANTS EVERYTHING FOR NOTHING, WHO EXISTS IN A TIME WHERE E-COMMERCE HUSTLERS HAVE CONVINCED HIM/HER THAT THEY’RE ENTITLED TO EVERYTHING FOR NOTHING PREVAILS, AND THEY ARE PERMITTED TO BELIEVE INFORMATION MUST BE FREE, WITH NO DIFFERENTIATION MADE BETWEEN RAW DATA AND THE CREATIVE PROPERTIES THAT PROVIDE ALL ARTISTS OF ANY KIND WITH AN ANNUITY, TO ALLOW THEM TO CONTINUE CREATING NEW WORK, THEN WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT IS THE EGREGIOUS INEVITABILITY OF NO ONE BUT AMATEURS GETTING THEIR WORK EXPOSED, WHILE THOSE WHO PRODUCE THE BULK OF ALL PROFESSIONAL-LEVEL ART FIND THEY CANNOT MAKE A DECENT LIVING.

Harlan always had a talent for ridiculously overblown language, and he did a lot of damage to science fiction purely by the influence his sentences had on younger writers. But even for him that was a lot. And of course the "your nasty uncle who doesn't understand to use lower case" thing was even bigger then than it is now that a lot of your nasty uncles are really Russian bots who write pretty well.

It was nice to be young, idealistic, working to support my community and bring them into a new era, and have this old dude come round calling me ZERO-ETHIC TOT and E-COMMERCE HUSTLER. At the time I was immensely angry and responded accordingly; these days I kind of want those made up as buttons, badges of service.

Because I won, pretty handily, in the long term. Harlan lost his lawsuit, as you can tell because any of us are allowed to be here writing what we want without it being reviewed by an ISP. Paid-for print short science fiction is almost completely dead, and free online fiction is by far the dominant paradigm as far as short fiction goes. Along with that there are more markets, and more professional markets, than at any time in history. Even though I'm not there anymore, there are other people out there following and building on an economic model I invented. Short science fiction authors are doing better now than they have in decades, and more professional-level art is being made in our corner of the field than ever before.

Harlan, meanwhile, went on to spend the last decades of his life proving to everyone else what he was really like. In 2006 he sexually assaulted another author during the Hugo Awards ceremony, which essentially ended his social reputation in the field. He continued to sue anyone and everyone for talking about the horrible things that he did, and for making anything that might have been anywhere close to his stories.

There are still a lot of people who, for whatever reason, see Harlan's fiction as worthwhile. I was never one of them. I am just glad he's gone, and I get to dance on his grave.