Pip R. Lagenta from San Mateo, San Mateo · CC BY 2.0

Ellison wrote more than 1,700 short stories, screenplays, and essays across a famously combative career in speculative fiction, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Edgar Awards along the way. He wrote "The City on the Edge of Forever," widely regarded as one of the best episodes of the original Star Trek, and his short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" became a landmark of dystopian science fiction. As editor of the anthology Dangerous Visions, he helped define the New Wave movement that pushed science fiction toward darker, more literary territory.