Why? Why? You expect me to back up such an assertion with actual facts? Okay, feast on my points.

1. Harlan lets his webmaster do things like this.

In addition to being unusually fucking funny, this fake restaurant menu based on Ellison's work ("The Beast That Shouted "Yum!" At The Heart of My Stomach") is right in line with the fake biographies Harlan has been sticking in the back of his books for years as a sort of antidote to overwrought, self-important author bios.

2. Harlan Bitch-Slaps 'Net Piracy In a Forthright Fashion.

Yeah, there are others doing it. And they don't TYPE THEIR GODDAMN PRESS RELEASES ALL IN ANNOYING, ANNOYING CAPS. But a good thing is a good thing.

3. Harlan wrote "The City on the Edge of Forever".

Harlan says that Gene Rodenberry messed it up. Gene said that Harlan didn't get a few important points. Gene's dead, Harlan's bitter. Does anyone give a rat's ass? If only Star Trek's spin-offs had paid attention to the result of Gene and Harlan's head-butt, and absorbed its crucial lesson (The illumination of character through conflict is always much more interesting than technobabble bullshit), The Next Generation and co. might have been more than the sad little monkey-shows they mostly are.

4. Harlan has, to put it lightly, written lots and lots of things.

Sweet Jesus in a smoking birchbark canoe. As of a few years ago, his lifetime output looked something like this: