Unsent

I’ve been writing fiction for almost as long as I’ve known how to write, and I’ve had most of the same ambitions most writers do. Since I work mostly in Science Fiction and Fantasy, I’ve dreamed about winning the genre’s Triple Crown: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Campbell. If you care, you already know what they’re for. But as a young man I took a degree in English Literature, and thus also dreamed about being the writer who would take the genre mainstream, and win the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. In all honesty, though, what I really wanted to do was write a letter…

Dear Mr. Ellison,

As a long-time reader, I’m well aware of your feelings about fan letters, and fans in general, so I will keep this brief. As I’m sure you recall, in 1986 you traveled to Riverside, California, to accept the J. Lloyd Eaton Award for your achievements as an editor. While there, you were kind enough to put up with the sycophantic babblings of a truly graceless undergraduate admirer.

Needless to say, perhaps, that young man was me.

I was one of the only people present without either a doctorate or at least the beginnings of one, and when the awards dinner started I had no one to eat dinner with. I was looking for an out-of-the-way spot where no one would notice me when you entered with your party and asked if I would like to join you.

As Alan Dean Foster has written of a similar invitation, “Did I? Are bears Catholic?”

It was about half way through dinner when you stopped in mid-story and asked me if I was enjoying myself. I was probably grinning like an idiot at the time, but I certainly didn’t care. When I assured you that I was indeed, you smiled kindly, and replied “You’re a good kid, Max. You’ve got a good soul.” Then, without missing a beat, you went back to telling us a story about something that happened at a con event in New York several years earlier. I was laughing so hard by the end that I almost fell out of my chair.

Coming, as it did, more than two years after the fan atrocities you described in Xenogenesis, this was a remarkable act of kindness that has stayed with me over the years since. I have met a number of my literal and literary heroes in my travels, and entirely too many of them have eventually proven to have feet of clay. It remains an honor to have met someone just as brilliant, abrasive, combative, and irascible as his reputation would suggest, who is also kind, generous, and patient. A great spirit, if you will.

Enclosed please find a copy of my first novel. Ellison’s law may state that “90% of everything is crap,” but if you get the chance, I hope you will enjoy the 10% that (hopefully) makes up for the rest.

Sincerely,

Max P. Belin

As of today, this is one ambition I will have to abandon. Although I did meet Harlan again on two later occasions (and he remembered me from Riverside both times!), I still have not managed to publish a novel, and I never wanted to just send him a fan letter. I don’t send fan letters, and he didn’t read them, and for many of the same reasons. But it seemed to me as though telling the story, even if it is just a tiny moment in his story (an hour or so in 84 years of an eventful life), would probably mean more than anything else I could do on the occasion of his passing…

Here's to you, Harlan. Wherever you are...