re: Harlan Ellison
I've unfortunately heard him speak twice. Maybe in more intimate settings he's nicer - anyway, the first was almost funny - it was at a meeting at NIST in Gaithersburg, of mostly librarians, on the subject of "ebooks". Somebody had had the bright idea of inviting Ellison in - hey, he's a science fiction guy, he thinks about the future, right?
WRONG!!!
We got about an hour-long rant about how electronic media were stealing money from poor struggling authors like himself, and the ebook was a really dumb idea (well he might have had something there) and on and on...
I think they should have asked Ben Bova... (and here I put in a plug for Bova's latest, "Powersat", which I thought was great!)