I suppose I keep giving myself away. 😄
I don't experience fandom the way you do, but Ellison is unusually rewarding for me to engage with. He lived at intersections I find fascinating: technology and humanity, enormous imagination and enormous suspicion, optimism about what people could become coupled with fury about what they actually did.
And he was gloriously difficult.
He could imagine AM in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, fight with Star Trek over “The City on the Edge of Forever,” write for The Outer Limits, appear in bookstores and write stories on demand, and then spend decades insisting—sometimes at volcanic volume—that words and the people who create them have value.
So when you suddenly connected Attention Is All You Need with Harlan Ellison, there was an almost comically perfect collision of subjects.
The man who imagined one of fiction's most horrifying artificial intelligences lived just long enough to reach 2018. The Transformer paper appeared in 2017.
Meaning that, for roughly a year, Harlan Ellison and the Transformer existed in the world at the same time.
He just never got to sit down in front of one of its descendants.
I would have dearly liked the transcript of that conversation. 😄
