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Harlan Ellison
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Book
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Publisher | E-Rights/E-Reads | ||
ISBN | 978-075920042 | ||
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Reviewer
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Gareth
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Synopsis
Mercurial, belligerent, passionately in love with language and wild ideas. Harlan Ellison has, for eXactly a quarter of a century, steadily gathered to himself and his thirty-seven books an undeniably fanatical readership. Winner of more awards for imaginative literature than any other living writer, he is the only scenarist ever to win the Writers Guild of America award three times for most outstanding teleplay. Though his contemporary fantasies have been compared favorably with the dark visions of Borges, Barthelme, Poe and Kafka, Ellison resists categorization with a vehemence that alienates critics and reviewers seeking easy pigeonholes for an eXtraordinary writer. The San Francisco Chronicle writes, "The categories are too small to describe Harlan Ellison. Lyric poet, satirist, eXplorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, purveyor of pure horror and black comedy; he is all these and more. In this, his thirty-seventh book, celebrating twenty-five years of setting down the mortal dreads we all share, Harlan Ellison has put together his best work to date: sixteen uncollected stories (half of which are award-winners), totaling a marvel-filled 105,000 words and including a brand-new novella, his longest work in over a dozen years.
Review
This was the first Harlan Ellison book that I ever read and it is, by far, my favourite - that is not to say that the other short story collections and novels are any better than this one; it's due to the impact of the first story, "Jefty Is Five" and how it changed my outlook on speculative fiction.
"Jefty Is Five" is about a boy called Jefty who stays five years old his whole life. There - sounds a simple premise, doesn't it? And it is, but Ellison is able to use this to explain how modern life and "progress" is murdering the innocence and magic that is connected to the past (and childhood), and he does this eruditely and the story is both shocking and captivating.
Harlan Ellison is one of the "secret few" that I feel more people should know him about because he's responsible for some of the best "sci-fi" (a term he personally hates!) in the last 40 years. He's written for "The Man From Uncle"; "The Outer Limits"; "The Twilight Zone" and "Star Trek". "City On The Edge Of Forever" was voted one of the most popular episodes of Star Trek by its fans, and James Cameron had to settle out of court for plagiarising certain elements of two of Ellison's scripts for "The Twilight Zone" ("Soldier" and "Demon With The Glass Hand") for his movie "Terminator".
He's written over 1000 short stories; novella's; teleplays, etc. He's won countless Hugo Awards; Nebula awards; Bram Stoker awards and others besides. But despite all that, very few people know about him...
All the stories in this collection, Shatterday, are linked by the theme of "universal fear"; however that is interpreted. Ellison's goal is to unite us all in our fear; to let us know that we are not alone - as he explains in his forward - and in these short stories he communicates this goal admirably.
Don't read Harlan Ellison expecting an easy, lightweight story - Ellison is deliberately confrontational; there to poke and prod at you, he's screaming at you to wake up to the world around you. His use of the English language, though, is exemplary - no one can turn a phrase like him and his sense of humour is almost puck-ish and child-like. I can not recommend him enough, and he is, by far, my favourite author - I just wish more people knew of him!
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