Apropos of the day, Harlan Ellison has sounded a bugle call summoning all within hearing to join him in demanding that Norman Spinrad be selected a SFWA Grandmaster. Ellison wrote in his online forum:

HARLAN ELLISON
– Tuesday, November 11 2014 11:37:26

TODAY WE LAUNCH THE ALL-OUT “NORMAN” INVASION !!!!!!!!!!

Pay heed! This one’s egregiously overdue, needs to be corrected… & is IMPORTANT!

NORMAN SPINRAD

must must must MUST MUST

be given the SFWA GRANDMASTER AWARD

THIS YEAR!!!!!!!!!!

I urge you, I implore you, join with me in launching a ferocious, all-fronts assault on the laggardly SFWA apparat that has allowed this brilliant sf visionary to wait in excess of 50 years to get his contemporaries’ due. NORMAN SPINRAD wrote

Bug Jack Barron
The Iron Dream
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde
Passing Through The Flame
Little Heroes
Songs From The Stars
The Men In The Jungle
Pictures at 11
No Direction Home
Journals of the Plague Years
Vampire Junkies
The Solarians
Fragments of America
Agent of Chaos
Riding The Torch
The Star-Spangled Future
A World Between
The Mind Game
The Void Captain’s Tale
Other Americas
Deus X

and…as the brilliant novelist, biographer, and savant, PAUL Di FILIPPO advised us yesterday in a widely-posted Locus review of Norman’s latest [novel] Osama The Gun, it is shameful that even though duds such as I have been accorded Grandmaster Laureate status — while I went on tv and had to lobby like a braying mule for Grandmaster Awards to be accorded Philip Jose Farmer, AE van Vogt (I was successful), Robert Sheckley and Kate Wilhelm (I was not), my voice has been shamefully absent TILL NOW, in support of

NORMAN SPINRAD AS IMMEDIATE SFWA GRANDMASTER!

I ask that you put aside for just one day, your usual tweets, blasts, replies, fill-in replies, facebook trivia, yelps, hoots, whatever…and go to every Infobahn contact you possess — SFWA threads, previous Grandmasters, Worldcon members, writer of all sorts, friends and e.contacts, past presidents or officials of SFWA (or the secret Sanhedrin assembling the list of “potential nominees” and initiate a Petition to be signed by Grandmaster Laureates — you may, with my permission put me on that list — and start it viral today.

Let Paul Di Filippo know. Let Norman (who has e.mail and Facebook pages or somesuch), who is in Paris now, with Dona, let HIM know this is fulminating. Tell Buzz Dixon to spread it. Alert Jerry Pournelle and David Gerrold and Robin Wayne Bailey and Robert Silverberg and anyone else you might think even tangentially useful.

Go thee hence, in d’name’a de Lawd, do this noble deed!!!

Yr. Pal, Harlan

(Who herewith grants permission to post the foregoing, intact, far and wide and usefully.)

Although his broadside refers to Paul Di Filippo’s review of Osama the Gun appearing “yesterday” it was actually posted October 9 — the same day Ellison had his stroke. That suggests to me Harlan may have had this draft in the works just before he was hospitalized.