Thread by @jbwhelan

Something I would like to point our about Bob Silverberg that may have been lost in all this. 1/

Silverberg was great friends with Harlan Ellison throughout their adult lives and professional careers. They got on famously. 2/

Speaking of famously, one of the things Harlan was famous for was being a vengeful, vicious sonofabitch to anybody he thought had crossed him. 3/

Harlan bragged about mailing a dead woodchuck third class to an editor he hated.

"The smell was described as...indescribable," he crowed about it in print. 4/

Harlan on con panels was vicious to people he thought were idiots. He was also vicious about people behind their backs. 5/

More to the point, Harlan's entire career as a writer was a gigantic middle finger to people who said he would *never accomplish everything as a writer.* 6/

This is not even an exaggeration. Harlan had a teacher disparage him and a story he'd written, and told him he would never write anything worthwhile. 7/

Harlan sent a copy of every magazine, book, and publication his stories were published in, up until the man died. 8/

Harlan's foreword to the revised & expanded edition of "The Essential Ellison" is basically a semi-paranoid screed about how his enemies have been gunning for him all his life--using a phony letter someone wrote to Writer's Digest in his name as "proof." 9/

His message to them? "I'm still here, muddafuggas." As if it was more important to spite them than it was to write stories--and at this point in Harlan's career that wasn't far from the truth, sadly. 10/

Harlan also used his many, many awards as a club to beat people over the head with--notably his WGA award for the original "City on the Edge of Forever" teleplay. 11/

But also his numerous and sundry Hugos, Nebulas, Writer's Guild awards, and so on and so on and scooby dooby doo. (Somebody once said that Harlan probably hung on to every gold star he ever got in kindergarten.) 12/

Harlan used his awards in defense of his talent--which was fine and good--but he also used them as a weapon to enforce his own arrogance, unprofessional behavior, and his sense of superiority over other mortals. Sometimes it was even earned. 13/

But most of the time, watching from outside especially for generations after mine that hadn't grown up with Harlan's purposefully antic dispositions, it just sort of made him look like a jackoff. 14/

But interestingly, Bob Silverberg never once in anybody's hearing called his lifelong friend's behavior vulgar. 15/

Harlan's long laundry list of those who had (sometimes in his imagination, sometimes in reality) done things to deserve his ire, and his obsessive cataloging of those offenses? 16/

No big deal to Bob Silverberg, apparently. 17/

But when Nora Jemisin joyfully and quite rightly calls her well-deserved Hugo a big middle finger to the individual who called her an ignorant half-savage?

THAT'S vulgar. Apparently.

If you're Bob Silverberg. 18/

Harlan Ellison's uncountable petty, retributive actions against individuals his entire adult life?

Not so much,

Again, if you're Bob Silverberg. 19/

I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what the difference is here.

And fuck you, too. 20/20

Addendum: I feel I must add that unlike Silverberg I have read Nora Jemisin's work, and she more than deserves the accolades and awards.

Amazing how so many SF/F authors and fans are afraid of the future.