Wonderful biography, could not put it down. I was a fan from my first Harlan book and loved to watch him on talk shows. What was even better about reading this particular biography was the names dropped of his friends, acquaintances, work mates etc. were all people I particularly liked, people whose work and lives I follow in the media. This biography did not disappoint.
( )

Wonderful book about a wonderful writer! ( )

Two coincidences influenced my reading of this book. The first is that Harlan Ellison died about three weeks before I began reading it, making me aware of how little I'd read of his work (the only complete book being the I, Robot screenplay). The second is that a week before I began it, I was perusing the archives of the Science Fiction Research Association Newsletter, where I found this comment by Bob Collins in a 1988 issue: "In the case of especially prickly authors like Harlan, the price of an 'authorized' critical biography may well be the total compromise of the critic's integrity." Now, A Lit Fuse specifically disavows being critical or a biography; it's more like an autobiography, as Segaloff primarily strings together a number of interviews he's done with Ellison into a narrative of sorts, and doesn't really do a lot to render other perspectives on Ellison, or have any kind of objective stance. Segaloff is clearly a big admirer of Ellison, and his faults are usually rendered in an admiring way, too. Which is fine, I guess, but this book as a result, this is definitely more a book for the Ellison devotee than the general sf fan. All that said (and there's many more quibbles one could make; I thought the depiction of the incident where Ellison allegedly grabbed Connie Willis's breast was particularly poor), I was still pretty much entertained throughout. Ellison knows how to tell a story, and even if many of them aren't true, or put him in an inaccurately flattering light, I enjoyed reading the book. It's not a great book, and possibly not even a good one, but it is interesting enough.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3028475.html

(Review of extract supplied to Hugo voters)

Ellison is of course a hugely important figure in the history of sf, but this biography really tells it very much from his point of view. And he is really very capable of being a cantankerous asshole; his own account of how he sabotaged his mother's funeral, for instance, is painful reading, especially as Segaloff is desperately trying to make us sympathise with him. (Segaloff also feels the need to explain to us in a footnote that the word "teat" is "the vulgarism for breast".) I think we would have learned more from a more objective and critical approach, even though it might have risked infuriating the subject of the book. ( )