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Shatterday
A revolutionary classic from one of science fiction's most highly regarded authors, this collection of 16 brilliant stories remains as scathing and influential today as it was when it was first published more than 20 years ago. These category-defying stories combine science fiction, horror, and fantasy with ironic humor, sardonic social criticism, and intense self-revelation. From "Jeffty is Five," the tragedy of an innocent child wrenched out of an idyllic past, to humanity's encounter with dangerously seductive aliens in "How's the Night Life on Cissalda?" and "Shatterday," the dark allegory of an identity-stealing doppelgänger replacing his inferior twin, this incendiary collection re-establishes its legendary author's place at the cutting edge of the short story form.
Jeffty is five --
How's the night life on Cissalda? --
Flop sweat --
Would you do it for a penny? / written in collaboration with Haskell Barkin --
The man who was heavily into revenge --
Shoppe keeper --
All the lies that are my life --
Django --
Count the clock that tells the time --
In the fourth year of the war --
Alive and well and on a friendless voyage --
All the birds come home to roost --
Opium --
The other eye of Polyphemus --
The executioner of the malformed children --
Shatterday
332 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
211 people are currently reading
2963 people want to read
About the author
Harlan Ellison
1,082 books2,817 followersHarlan Jay Ellison (1934-2018) was a prolific American writer of short stories, novellas, teleplays, essays, and criticism.
His literary and television work has received many awards. He wrote for the original series of both The Outer Limits and Star Trek as well as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; edited the multiple-award-winning short story anthology series Dangerous Visions; and served as creative consultant/writer to the science fiction TV series The New Twilight Zone and Babylon 5.
Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog".
His literary and television work has received many awards. He wrote for the original series of both The Outer Limits and Star Trek as well as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; edited the multiple-award-winning short story anthology series Dangerous Visions; and served as creative consultant/writer to the science fiction TV series The New Twilight Zone and Babylon 5.
Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog".
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January 16, 2016
The Voice From the Edge Vol. 5: Shatterday & Other Stories: Dark, powerful, and ironic stories that stay with you
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
This is the final installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. It’s been quite a ride, and it’s hard to dispute that Ellison is a superb storyteller who can take an idea and run with it in the most original and twisted way, frequently delving into the dark and cruel side of human nature, but also celebrating moments of nobility and pathos along the way. His voice is powerful, unique, and very charismatic, so hearing him narrate his own work is a treat.
Like Vol. 4, not all the stories in Vol. 5 are narrated by Ellison himself. Fortunately the supporting cast are very skilled, and the stories really lend themselves to narration, so I didn’t have a problem with that. And again he throws in anecdotes about his life and writing that illuminate his creative process. This entire series can be listened to multiple times; it’s that good.
This collection has a large number of award winners and nominees (he has a lot to choose from). The tone of most of them is quite dark, and they demand careful listening for full effect. The good thing about short stories is that it’s not a big time investment to re-listen to the ones you really like. In this case most of the stories are from his most experimental period in the 1960s and 1970s. While not as difficult as stories like “The Deathbird” in Vol. 4, I did have to give two careful listens to “Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans,” but it was well worth the time. Below are my favorites from this collection:
“Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” (1966; Hugo nominee): What if you could live as you always imagined yourself in dreams? Let’s say a 6-foot 3-inch chiseled Nordic warrior steering a ship on rough seas on route to fighting a fearsome dragon to save a beautiful damsel in distress. Ellison explores this male wish fulfillment fantasy by a meek 41-year old accountant who takes a detour on his way to work one morning. The descriptive passages are vivid and dramatic, and the story’s conclusion is anything but wish fulfillment. Very well done.
“Shatterday” (1975; Nebula nominee): Ellison once again tackles the old chestnut of what you would do if you met yourself, and turns it on its head. Here a successful ad executive with a wealthy but shallow existence calls home one night only to discover… himself answering the phone. The two selves insist they are the real one, and as they examine their lives they discover they have not been a very nice for a long time. As always, Ellison leaves the denouement in suspense until the end, and it is a satisfying one that pulls no punches.
“Basilisk” (1972; Hugo & Locus winner; Nebula nominee): I was waiting for an Ellison story about the Vietnam War, which dominated social debate during his most creative writing period. Well, “Basilisk” doesn’t disappoint. A soldier on patrol in Vietnam steps on a punji stick booby trap and wakes up in captivity, having lost his eyesight. He is repeatedly tortured until he spills all the information he knows. But one day when pushed to the edge he discovers that he has the power to destroy his enemies in terrifying ways. He is rescued and brought back to the US, but when he returns home he is viewed as a traitor to his country. His family has been driven out of town and his fiancée has married the town jock. When he confronts them, things quickly spiral out of control. It’s a very powerful allegory of what US soldiers experienced both in Vietnam and after returning home.
“Shattered Like a Glass Goblin” (1968; Nebula nominee): This is a trippy story about a man who comes back from Army basic training to reconnect with his fiancée. He discovers she has shacked up in a large drug-house on a hill. The inhabitants of the house, including his fiancée, spend all their time high on various substances. He is the only normal one among them and serves as their connection to the outside world. However, when his fiancée convinces him to partake of their drug cornucopia, things get very weird and phantasmagoric. This is clearly a horror story about the dangers of the drug culture prevalent at the time.
“Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W” (1974; Hugo & Locus winner): This is probably one of the most original stories in the collection, and certainly scores points for most creative and unwieldy short story title of all time. It’s a gonzo version of Fantastic Voyage, in which a man pleas for the opportunity to be shrunk to the microscopic level so he can enter his own body in order to find the geographical location of his own soul. Not content with that, his intent is to discover his soul so he can die in peace. After going through the process he begins to explore his body in an Odysseus-type voyage of rough seas until he finds the island where his soul is stored. I needed to listen to this twice to grasp the details, but it’s a very interesting and affecting story.
“All the Lies That Are My Life” (1980; Hugo nominee): This is the longest piece in the collection, a highly autobiographical novella about a highly successful writer (sometimes of science fiction) who is brash, arrogant, brilliant, popular with the ladies, and frequently a jerk. Then there is his less successful writer friend with whom he has a love-hate friendship. When the writer dies in a spectacular high-speed highway accident involving road-rage and Latino thugs, it’s revealed at the funeral that he has left his final will and testament on video. Everyone is then subjected to a long invective-filled rant about his worthless sister, followed by props to the friends he approved of.
This is about as self-indulgent a story as every was penned, even by the king of self-absorption, Harlan Ellison. And yet he is such a larger-than-life personality that I think it’s fair to conduct an analysis of his life in fictional form like this, a retrospective of his life and legacy while still living. Who wouldn’t want to control the image people hold of your life? It’s certainly quintessential Ellison, full of self-deprecation, oversharing, self-aggrandizing, and heaps of chutzpah. But because he is a natural storyteller, it’s definitely worth a listen.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
This is the final installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. It’s been quite a ride, and it’s hard to dispute that Ellison is a superb storyteller who can take an idea and run with it in the most original and twisted way, frequently delving into the dark and cruel side of human nature, but also celebrating moments of nobility and pathos along the way. His voice is powerful, unique, and very charismatic, so hearing him narrate his own work is a treat.
Like Vol. 4, not all the stories in Vol. 5 are narrated by Ellison himself. Fortunately the supporting cast are very skilled, and the stories really lend themselves to narration, so I didn’t have a problem with that. And again he throws in anecdotes about his life and writing that illuminate his creative process. This entire series can be listened to multiple times; it’s that good.
This collection has a large number of award winners and nominees (he has a lot to choose from). The tone of most of them is quite dark, and they demand careful listening for full effect. The good thing about short stories is that it’s not a big time investment to re-listen to the ones you really like. In this case most of the stories are from his most experimental period in the 1960s and 1970s. While not as difficult as stories like “The Deathbird” in Vol. 4, I did have to give two careful listens to “Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans,” but it was well worth the time. Below are my favorites from this collection:
“Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” (1966; Hugo nominee): What if you could live as you always imagined yourself in dreams? Let’s say a 6-foot 3-inch chiseled Nordic warrior steering a ship on rough seas on route to fighting a fearsome dragon to save a beautiful damsel in distress. Ellison explores this male wish fulfillment fantasy by a meek 41-year old accountant who takes a detour on his way to work one morning. The descriptive passages are vivid and dramatic, and the story’s conclusion is anything but wish fulfillment. Very well done.
“Shatterday” (1975; Nebula nominee): Ellison once again tackles the old chestnut of what you would do if you met yourself, and turns it on its head. Here a successful ad executive with a wealthy but shallow existence calls home one night only to discover… himself answering the phone. The two selves insist they are the real one, and as they examine their lives they discover they have not been a very nice for a long time. As always, Ellison leaves the denouement in suspense until the end, and it is a satisfying one that pulls no punches.
“Basilisk” (1972; Hugo & Locus winner; Nebula nominee): I was waiting for an Ellison story about the Vietnam War, which dominated social debate during his most creative writing period. Well, “Basilisk” doesn’t disappoint. A soldier on patrol in Vietnam steps on a punji stick booby trap and wakes up in captivity, having lost his eyesight. He is repeatedly tortured until he spills all the information he knows. But one day when pushed to the edge he discovers that he has the power to destroy his enemies in terrifying ways. He is rescued and brought back to the US, but when he returns home he is viewed as a traitor to his country. His family has been driven out of town and his fiancée has married the town jock. When he confronts them, things quickly spiral out of control. It’s a very powerful allegory of what US soldiers experienced both in Vietnam and after returning home.
“Shattered Like a Glass Goblin” (1968; Nebula nominee): This is a trippy story about a man who comes back from Army basic training to reconnect with his fiancée. He discovers she has shacked up in a large drug-house on a hill. The inhabitants of the house, including his fiancée, spend all their time high on various substances. He is the only normal one among them and serves as their connection to the outside world. However, when his fiancée convinces him to partake of their drug cornucopia, things get very weird and phantasmagoric. This is clearly a horror story about the dangers of the drug culture prevalent at the time.
“Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W” (1974; Hugo & Locus winner): This is probably one of the most original stories in the collection, and certainly scores points for most creative and unwieldy short story title of all time. It’s a gonzo version of Fantastic Voyage, in which a man pleas for the opportunity to be shrunk to the microscopic level so he can enter his own body in order to find the geographical location of his own soul. Not content with that, his intent is to discover his soul so he can die in peace. After going through the process he begins to explore his body in an Odysseus-type voyage of rough seas until he finds the island where his soul is stored. I needed to listen to this twice to grasp the details, but it’s a very interesting and affecting story.
“All the Lies That Are My Life” (1980; Hugo nominee): This is the longest piece in the collection, a highly autobiographical novella about a highly successful writer (sometimes of science fiction) who is brash, arrogant, brilliant, popular with the ladies, and frequently a jerk. Then there is his less successful writer friend with whom he has a love-hate friendship. When the writer dies in a spectacular high-speed highway accident involving road-rage and Latino thugs, it’s revealed at the funeral that he has left his final will and testament on video. Everyone is then subjected to a long invective-filled rant about his worthless sister, followed by props to the friends he approved of.
This is about as self-indulgent a story as every was penned, even by the king of self-absorption, Harlan Ellison. And yet he is such a larger-than-life personality that I think it’s fair to conduct an analysis of his life in fictional form like this, a retrospective of his life and legacy while still living. Who wouldn’t want to control the image people hold of your life? It’s certainly quintessential Ellison, full of self-deprecation, oversharing, self-aggrandizing, and heaps of chutzpah. But because he is a natural storyteller, it’s definitely worth a listen.
June 28, 2011
I go back and forth about Harlan Ellison, as he has reached near mythical status as a writer, public figure and all around crazy bastard.
When he writes just sci-fi/fantasy stuff, it can be quite clever and entertaining, full of mad ideas, allegory and cool imagery. The kind of stuff that would make for a really good episode of the 'Outer Limits'.
When he writes about 'The real world' it comes across, nine times out of ten, as wildly self-indulgent drivel. Full of anger, literary and emotional patting himself on the back, and the kind of knuckle headed attitudes about women that you only find in college age guys and older guys that are working on their third marriage.
I read a ton of Ellison in college and think that might be the problem. Harlan is a young man's writer. Despite his years he sees the world and presents us with a world that is full of that anger, I got the game figured out and above mentioned knuckle headedness about women that I mentioned earlier.
Unlike other writers, Harlan's stuff isn't timeless, it's quite dated, somewhat by his need to name drop and do clever bits of product placement, because Harlan is very much a product of his times and he is locked in a perpetual angry young man mode.
It's part of his charm, but it also makes me what to slap him.
The straight sci-fi holds up the best: 'How's the nightlife...?' is funny and adolsecent twist on alien invasion stories, 'Executioner of malformed children' was interesting with a rough twist at the end, 'Flop Sweat' could creep out Stephen King and 'Jeffy is five' deserves being called a classic.
There's the stuff in the middle, that's a great idea that doesn't seem to go anywhere. 'Shoppe Keeper' is a great idea, that feels pointless and makes you wish a different writer had written it. 'The man that was heavily into revenge' tells us a vaguely interesting story, that doesn't match its title and 'In the forth year' is creepy, but feels a bit pointless.
Then we have the bad 'All the lies' is so self-indulgent it makes you want to look away as Harlan is busy having sex with himself and 'Would you do it for a penny' is a weak joke stretched out in short story drag.
Which would work if it was funny.
and to add to the rough spots, Harlan has written intros to all the stories, because he wants to take a rare opportunity to talk about himself. So, every story gets an extra spoonful of 'I'm just so damned swell and clever'.
Everyone should read some Ellison, because, at his best he does live up to his own press, but also, everyone should be warned about Ellison, because he is as bad as the rumors would have you believe.
When he writes just sci-fi/fantasy stuff, it can be quite clever and entertaining, full of mad ideas, allegory and cool imagery. The kind of stuff that would make for a really good episode of the 'Outer Limits'.
When he writes about 'The real world' it comes across, nine times out of ten, as wildly self-indulgent drivel. Full of anger, literary and emotional patting himself on the back, and the kind of knuckle headed attitudes about women that you only find in college age guys and older guys that are working on their third marriage.
I read a ton of Ellison in college and think that might be the problem. Harlan is a young man's writer. Despite his years he sees the world and presents us with a world that is full of that anger, I got the game figured out and above mentioned knuckle headedness about women that I mentioned earlier.
Unlike other writers, Harlan's stuff isn't timeless, it's quite dated, somewhat by his need to name drop and do clever bits of product placement, because Harlan is very much a product of his times and he is locked in a perpetual angry young man mode.
It's part of his charm, but it also makes me what to slap him.
The straight sci-fi holds up the best: 'How's the nightlife...?' is funny and adolsecent twist on alien invasion stories, 'Executioner of malformed children' was interesting with a rough twist at the end, 'Flop Sweat' could creep out Stephen King and 'Jeffy is five' deserves being called a classic.
There's the stuff in the middle, that's a great idea that doesn't seem to go anywhere. 'Shoppe Keeper' is a great idea, that feels pointless and makes you wish a different writer had written it. 'The man that was heavily into revenge' tells us a vaguely interesting story, that doesn't match its title and 'In the forth year' is creepy, but feels a bit pointless.
Then we have the bad 'All the lies' is so self-indulgent it makes you want to look away as Harlan is busy having sex with himself and 'Would you do it for a penny' is a weak joke stretched out in short story drag.
Which would work if it was funny.
and to add to the rough spots, Harlan has written intros to all the stories, because he wants to take a rare opportunity to talk about himself. So, every story gets an extra spoonful of 'I'm just so damned swell and clever'.
Everyone should read some Ellison, because, at his best he does live up to his own press, but also, everyone should be warned about Ellison, because he is as bad as the rumors would have you believe.
January 20, 2018
Brutto, sporco e cattivo
“Ogni anno tengo un considerevole numero di conferenze universitarie. Aiuta a sbarcare il lunario, in modo da non dover scrivere mai più per la televisione (…) E spesso dico qualcosa della condizione umana che mi sembra perfettamente ragionevole e appropriato, perché so che condividiamo gli stessi pensieri. Inevitabilmente, qualche cialtrone tra il pubblico tenta di mettermi alla gogna con la sconvolgente accusa: ‘L’ha detto solo per scioccarci!’.
La mia risposta è sempre la stessa:
‘Ci puoi scommettere, faccia da cavolo. Certo che l’ho detto per scioccarvi (o scritto per scioccarvi). Non so come vedete voi la mia missione di scrittore, ma per me non significa essere tenuto a riconfermare i vostri miti consolidati e i vostri pregiudizi provinciali. Il mio lavoro non è cullarvi con una falsa sensazione di bontà. Questa meravigliosa e terribile occupazione che consiste nel ricreare il mondo in un altro modo, ogni volta nuovo e straniero, è un atto di guerriglia rivoluzionaria. Smuovo le acque. Vi do fastidio. Vi faccio colare il naso e lacrimare gli occhi. Consumo la mia vita e chilometri di materiale viscerale in una gloriosa e dolorosa serie di raid notturni contro l’autocompiacimento. Il mio destino è svegliarmi con rabbia ogni mattina, e andarmene a dormire alla sera ancor più arrabbiato. Tutto questo per cercare l’unica verità che sta al centro di ogni pagina di narrativa mai scritta: siamo tutti nella stessa pelle… ma per il tempo che ci vuole a leggere questi racconti ho solo la bocca. Davanti a voi sta un bambino che non è mai cresciuto, e non sa che è socialmente inaccettabile chiedere, ‘Chi ha scorreggiato?’.”
Questo scriveva Ellison nella Prefazione di Idrogeno e idiozia (1980). Adesso ha più di ottant'anni ed è sempre lui: sarcastico, misantropo, rabbioso, aggressivo, iconoclasta, fuori dagli schemi, dotato di grande, grandissima fantasia. Da oltre cinquant’anni scrive solo racconti di fantascienza (?), ha ricevuto una infinità di premi, ma in Italia continua ad essere poco tradotto e pubblicato; per di più, quel poco che c’è è ormai introvabile, così per leggere questi racconti ho dovuto ricorrere al prestito bibliotecario.
Quella di Ellison è una fantascienza molto particolare, in cui le ansie, le paure, i timori che vengono rappresentati non derivano da minacce aliene o da catastrofi apocalittiche, ecc., ma sono l’esito di una ricerca negli spazi oscuri dell'inconscio individuale e collettivo, quegli spazi in cui ci possiamo (facilmente) riconoscere.
Grazie a Mirco che mi ha fatto scoprire questo scrittore geniale.
“Chiamatemi come vi pare. E’ un problema vostro, amici, non mio. Anarchico, libertino, stronzo, mostro, piromane, pedofilo, assassino, amante della musica caramellosa di Lawrence Welk... le cose più spaventose che voi o io possiamo pensare. Cosa volete che me ne freghi? Resto sempre io quello che è in grado di scrivere questi racconti.
E nessuno ha mai detto che Dostoevskij era un modello di virtù, ma penso che si sia ampiamente guadagnato il paradiso scrivendo L'idiota.”
Se anche voi vi siete chiesti chi sia Lawrence Welk, eccolo in tutta la sua caramellosità
https://youtu.be/53vhx6cPVfY
“Ogni anno tengo un considerevole numero di conferenze universitarie. Aiuta a sbarcare il lunario, in modo da non dover scrivere mai più per la televisione (…) E spesso dico qualcosa della condizione umana che mi sembra perfettamente ragionevole e appropriato, perché so che condividiamo gli stessi pensieri. Inevitabilmente, qualche cialtrone tra il pubblico tenta di mettermi alla gogna con la sconvolgente accusa: ‘L’ha detto solo per scioccarci!’.
La mia risposta è sempre la stessa:
‘Ci puoi scommettere, faccia da cavolo. Certo che l’ho detto per scioccarvi (o scritto per scioccarvi). Non so come vedete voi la mia missione di scrittore, ma per me non significa essere tenuto a riconfermare i vostri miti consolidati e i vostri pregiudizi provinciali. Il mio lavoro non è cullarvi con una falsa sensazione di bontà. Questa meravigliosa e terribile occupazione che consiste nel ricreare il mondo in un altro modo, ogni volta nuovo e straniero, è un atto di guerriglia rivoluzionaria. Smuovo le acque. Vi do fastidio. Vi faccio colare il naso e lacrimare gli occhi. Consumo la mia vita e chilometri di materiale viscerale in una gloriosa e dolorosa serie di raid notturni contro l’autocompiacimento. Il mio destino è svegliarmi con rabbia ogni mattina, e andarmene a dormire alla sera ancor più arrabbiato. Tutto questo per cercare l’unica verità che sta al centro di ogni pagina di narrativa mai scritta: siamo tutti nella stessa pelle… ma per il tempo che ci vuole a leggere questi racconti ho solo la bocca. Davanti a voi sta un bambino che non è mai cresciuto, e non sa che è socialmente inaccettabile chiedere, ‘Chi ha scorreggiato?’.”
Questo scriveva Ellison nella Prefazione di Idrogeno e idiozia (1980). Adesso ha più di ottant'anni ed è sempre lui: sarcastico, misantropo, rabbioso, aggressivo, iconoclasta, fuori dagli schemi, dotato di grande, grandissima fantasia. Da oltre cinquant’anni scrive solo racconti di fantascienza (?), ha ricevuto una infinità di premi, ma in Italia continua ad essere poco tradotto e pubblicato; per di più, quel poco che c’è è ormai introvabile, così per leggere questi racconti ho dovuto ricorrere al prestito bibliotecario.
Quella di Ellison è una fantascienza molto particolare, in cui le ansie, le paure, i timori che vengono rappresentati non derivano da minacce aliene o da catastrofi apocalittiche, ecc., ma sono l’esito di una ricerca negli spazi oscuri dell'inconscio individuale e collettivo, quegli spazi in cui ci possiamo (facilmente) riconoscere.
Grazie a Mirco che mi ha fatto scoprire questo scrittore geniale.
“Chiamatemi come vi pare. E’ un problema vostro, amici, non mio. Anarchico, libertino, stronzo, mostro, piromane, pedofilo, assassino, amante della musica caramellosa di Lawrence Welk... le cose più spaventose che voi o io possiamo pensare. Cosa volete che me ne freghi? Resto sempre io quello che è in grado di scrivere questi racconti.
E nessuno ha mai detto che Dostoevskij era un modello di virtù, ma penso che si sia ampiamente guadagnato il paradiso scrivendo L'idiota.”
Se anche voi vi siete chiesti chi sia Lawrence Welk, eccolo in tutta la sua caramellosità
https://youtu.be/53vhx6cPVfY
January 23, 2022
Thin gruel.
I came to Shatterday on the back of Ellison's stellar reputation, and left with my hopes and illusions dispelled. Having heard him described as a visceral and painfully honest genre-disregarding examiner of the darkest recesses of the human condition, I was expecting something like William Burroughs on steroids (instead of heroin). What I found was something more like a 1970s Neil Gaiman, if Neil Gaiman were a jackass, rather than charming.
If Ellison's ideas were spectacular, I could live with his smug, relentlessly self-promoting, sexist and arrogant tone. But the stories in Shatterday are, for the most part, mundane and sentimental. In a profoundly vulgar, Californian-confessional style, Ellison observes that: some people regret mistakes from their childhoods. Some people miss the innocence of their youths. Some people worry about having wasted their lives. Some people don't like their relatives. It's all gobsmackingly obvious and banal. While the prose is good, it's not poetic, just very technically efficient. And frankly, when you've got this little to say, who cares about prose style anyway?
I understand that Ellison was considered ground-breaking in his time. What's harder to understand is why. When I compare him to the best of his contemporaries: Le Guin, Ballard, Bester et al, the emotional and intellectual range is very limited indeed.
I came to Shatterday on the back of Ellison's stellar reputation, and left with my hopes and illusions dispelled. Having heard him described as a visceral and painfully honest genre-disregarding examiner of the darkest recesses of the human condition, I was expecting something like William Burroughs on steroids (instead of heroin). What I found was something more like a 1970s Neil Gaiman, if Neil Gaiman were a jackass, rather than charming.
If Ellison's ideas were spectacular, I could live with his smug, relentlessly self-promoting, sexist and arrogant tone. But the stories in Shatterday are, for the most part, mundane and sentimental. In a profoundly vulgar, Californian-confessional style, Ellison observes that: some people regret mistakes from their childhoods. Some people miss the innocence of their youths. Some people worry about having wasted their lives. Some people don't like their relatives. It's all gobsmackingly obvious and banal. While the prose is good, it's not poetic, just very technically efficient. And frankly, when you've got this little to say, who cares about prose style anyway?
I understand that Ellison was considered ground-breaking in his time. What's harder to understand is why. When I compare him to the best of his contemporaries: Le Guin, Ballard, Bester et al, the emotional and intellectual range is very limited indeed.
September 20, 2023
Voices From The Edge Vol 5 audio version which contains different stories from the original and includes some excellent narration from the author.
Beautiful stuff with all the rage and pathos and humor of great literature but pulpy, psychedelic, edged with an urban grit. Sometimes you revisit something you read years ago and it all comes back to you, including why you loved it, and it casts its spell once again. Still brimming with life.
Beautiful stuff with all the rage and pathos and humor of great literature but pulpy, psychedelic, edged with an urban grit. Sometimes you revisit something you read years ago and it all comes back to you, including why you loved it, and it casts its spell once again. Still brimming with life.
May 18, 2021
To think I went my whole life thus far without reading Harlan Ellison: what a shame! I knew of him, of course, and knew he was a legend, but I also knew (or thought) he mostly wrote in sci-fi and maybe fantasy and anyone who knows me knows those genres just aren’t for me. However, since Ellison’s passing in 2018 I’ve meant to finally read him, and I finally did it.
I didn’t expect to love one of his books this much.
Shatterday (1980) is often heralded for its opener “Jeffty is Five”—a melancholy rumination on nostalgia and progress’s destruction of the past, and is that really such a bad thing? Reader, you decide—and its closer, the title story, a short and stabby look at a man literally torn in two: both of which were total winners, but I don’t think either would be my favorite in this collection. That honor might go to the novella-length look at a long and complicated friendship between two writer types, “All the Lies That Are My Life”, or maybe the succinct and heartbreaking “Opium”. Can I pick a favorite, really? No, it’s Ellison. The whole damn collection’s a winner.
My surprise at Ellison writing effective horror and fantasy and sci-fi and other flavors that fall under the “fantastical” or “speculative” umbrella is total. I knew Ellison was (is) a legend, yes, and now I see why: and I’m happy to say I whole-heartedly now consider myself an Ellison fan. My horror-loving friends would do well to check this out, as well as anyone who just likes a damn good story well told. I sped through this collection, spellbound, unable to look away nor did I want to. Ellison brought colors down from worlds only he could see, and we the readers are still the better for it.
I didn’t expect to love one of his books this much.
Shatterday (1980) is often heralded for its opener “Jeffty is Five”—a melancholy rumination on nostalgia and progress’s destruction of the past, and is that really such a bad thing? Reader, you decide—and its closer, the title story, a short and stabby look at a man literally torn in two: both of which were total winners, but I don’t think either would be my favorite in this collection. That honor might go to the novella-length look at a long and complicated friendship between two writer types, “All the Lies That Are My Life”, or maybe the succinct and heartbreaking “Opium”. Can I pick a favorite, really? No, it’s Ellison. The whole damn collection’s a winner.
My surprise at Ellison writing effective horror and fantasy and sci-fi and other flavors that fall under the “fantastical” or “speculative” umbrella is total. I knew Ellison was (is) a legend, yes, and now I see why: and I’m happy to say I whole-heartedly now consider myself an Ellison fan. My horror-loving friends would do well to check this out, as well as anyone who just likes a damn good story well told. I sped through this collection, spellbound, unable to look away nor did I want to. Ellison brought colors down from worlds only he could see, and we the readers are still the better for it.
Read
January 2, 2026The voice from the Edge.
Harlan Ellison was a superb storyteller who could, from the most innocuous idea, create the most original and twisted story. He frequently walked the path of the darkest and cruellest sides of human nature, yet he also celebrated fleeting moments of rapture and transcendence. His voice was powerful, unique, and very abrasive.
Much of the "Shatterday" collection deals with the "shattering" of the self and the darker side of human relationships. He often described these stories as "mortal dreads," focusing on the quiet, everyday horrors of modern life rather than monsters or aliens.
As with his other short-story collections I reviewed, this one seeks to capture the unique impressions left on me by each narrative. This particular volume contains several award winners and nominees; the tone is consistently sombre, demanding a disciplined, careful reading to achieve full impact.
Jeffty is Five
We all inhabit a realm of Mortal Dreads, where souls are routinely stolen. We fear the theft of the self by the unknown and the unimaginable, lurking in the shadows of the night. In "Jeffty is Five," however, the thief is the adult world itself, closing its predatory maw upon a child's innocence.
This stands as one of Ellison’s most visceral works—a heartbreaking elegy for the death of wonder. We have each, in our turn, beaten and drowned our own innocence to assimilate into "real life": a cycle of industry, profit, and conflict. And always, we persist in the masquerade, pretending this is exactly the world we desired.
How's the Night Life on Cissalda?
Satyromaniacs and nymphomaniacs beware, this story is not for the faint of heart.
Only Ellison could tell us how the "perfect fuck" exterminated mankind and, therefore, the cockroaches inherited Earth.
Disgustingly hilarious. The flaw is obvious, but I let you discover it...
Flop Sweat
The title draws its name from the showbiz shorthand for raw anxiety: cold sweat. Ellison was famously vociferous regarding the need for moral responsibility to moderate the unchecked power of the media, and in this apocalyptic horror, that power turns lethal.
In this vision of the end, humanity—like Christ—is hauled before a Sanhedrin from Hell and found wanting. But unlike the biblical narrative, there is no "Harrowing of Hell" to rescue the condemned; no saviour is coming to break the gates. We are left in the dark with the chilling realisation that this fate is no more than we deserve.
Would You Do It for a Penny?
The Art of the Aisle: A tactical guide to store-front flirting!
So, you’ve spotted someone intriguing between the frozen peas and the artisanal sourdough. Before you go full "Don Juan protagonist," you need a plan that doesn’t end with a security escort. Here is how to manoeuvre with grace, wit, and a dash of tactical positioning.
Step 1: Long-Range Reconnaissance!
First, establish a baseline of interest. Make brief eye contact to see if there’s a spark or if she’s trying to remember if she’s out of milk. You’re looking for a reaction that’s extra positive—a lingering look or a soft smile. If she immediately becomes fascinated by the expiration date on a carton of yoghurt, abort mission; she’s just not into your choice of cereal.
Step 2: The Casual Flank!
Once you’ve confirmed she hasn't fled to the pharmacy section in panic, it’s time to meander. Don't sprint; instead, casually navigate the linoleum tundra until you’ve positioned yourself within a respectable, non-threatening distance—roughly two aisles and a display of discounted crackers away. The goal is to enter her peripheral vision without looking like you’re closing in to pounce.
Step 3: The Smile Deployment!
From your new vantage point, wait for the "accidental" re-connection. When your eyes meet again, deploy a quick, warm smile. Think charming protagonist, not Batman villain. This is the moment of truth. Focus entirely on her response: if she returns the smile, you have a green light. If she looks at you like you’re a suspicious dent in a soup can, it’s time to pivot and spend the next ten minutes very intensely comparing the fibre content of different granolas.
The story idea was from Ellion's friend and collaborator, Haskell Barkin, and, being written almost sixty years ago, it's cruelly misogynistic in an extremely clever tale of a skilled con artist who manages in his single-minded pursuit of the art of what it passes for one-directional "animal attraction" in supermarkets.
I found this story a bit out of place in this collection.
The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge
Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on Earth. (Edward Yashinsky)
Cosmic justice—that sudden lightning bolt meant to punish the wicked and succour the broken—doesn't exist. It feels good to dream about, sure. Or not. It is one thing to wish the worst upon someone; it is quite another to see those wishes granted. In the aftermath, we realise how little revenge truly helps and how little it actually provides any sense of compensation.
This brings us back to the classic Harlan Ellison avalanche of doom. It’s a descent where no one claims the blame. As Stanisław Jerzy Lec famously put it: No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Shoppe Keeper
This one is a deconstruction of the "The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday" trope.
This story—Harlan Ellison’s "Shoppe Keeper"—originated from a simple, nagging curiosity about a classic fantasy trope. We, who read, we’ve all "seen" the mysterious magic shops that appear in alleyways to sell protagonists exactly what they desire. But Ellison looked deeper. He wondered about the person behind the counter: Who would run such a shop? What could they possibly gain by selling magical trinkets to unsuspecting passers-by? And most importantly, where do they go when the shop inevitably disappears?
In just eighteen pages, the narrative shifts seamlessly from whimsical fantasy to hard science fiction, all while deconstructing the struggle of the artist against the cold necessities of survival. Ultimately, Ellison poses a harrowing choice: which is more important—the art or the artist’s life? He pushes the reader to consider why one must eventually triumph over the other, and ultimately, challenges us to question the true role of the "narrator" in the fabric of a story.
Imagine this, please:
Setting: A snowy London rooftop, overlooking a bustling Christmas Eve street. Gonzo, in his frock coat and top hat, perches precariously on a chimney, quill in hand. Rizzo the Rat clings to the same chimney, shivering and looking utterly unimpressed.
The Scene:
"I told you, storytellers are omniscient; I know everything!" Gonzo declared with a flourish.
Rizzo the Rat shivered, pulling his tiny scarf tighter around his neck. "Hoity-toity, Mr Godlike smarty-Pants. If you're so omniscient, how come you can't tell me where I stashed that half-eaten cheese danish this morning?"
Gonzo puffed out his chest. "My dear Rizzo, an author's omniscience pertains to the grand tapestry of narrative! Not the mundane minutiae of a rat's gastronomical misplacements."
He peered down at the street. "Ah, yes! Behold, the very moment young Ebenezer will encounter the charitable gentlemen!"
Rizzo squinted. "Are you sure? Because it looks like he's just... yelling at a dog."
"Details, details!" Gonzo waved a dismissive hand. "The spirit of the scene is what truly matters, the foreshadowing of his impending transformation! The very air itself, pregnant with untold tales!"
"Yeah, well, this air feels pregnant with frostbite," Rizzo grumbled, rubbing his paws together. "And what's our particular narrative function up here, anyway? Besides giving me a fear of heights and a craving for warm, delicious food?"
"Why, we are the Greek Chorus, Rizzo! The omnipresent, all-knowing narrators guiding our audience through the moral labyrinth of Mr Scrooge's soul!" Gonzo proclaimed.
"More like the 'reek chorus' after two days on this rooftop," Rizzo muttered under his breath, then called out, "Hey, if you know everything, what's for dinner tonight? Because I'm picturing something involving lots of gravy and no chimney soot."
Gonzo paused, his quill hovering above the parchment. He tapped his chin thoughtfully, a rare moment of silence. "Hmm. Dinner... Yes. I foresee... a rather splendid gruel."
Rizzo gasped, clutching his head dramatically. "Gruel?! Oh, the humanity! I knew you weren't omniscient! An all-knowing being would never inflict gruel upon a starving rat! You're a fraud, Gonzo! A literary charlatan!"
I, the author of this, I'm certainly also a literary charlatan with my flimsy rumbles, but H Elisson was no charlatan at all.
All the Lies That Are My Life
What is friendship? How—and where—do we find an adequate answer? For concepts such as friendship, love, or art, the definition redefines itself each time the question arises. These are not static terms found in a dictionary; they are lived experiences that yield a multitude of shifting answers. Because these definitions are fluid, we must look beyond traditional meanings to gain a deeper understanding—especially when a dark, hidden secret looms beneath the surface.
Is it entirely appropriate to employ the term "infidelity" within the context of friendship? While disloyalty often describes a general failure of support, infidelity more accurately captures a profound breach: the violation of a foundational faith. When a friend violates the trust inherent in that bond, are they truly a friend any longer?
This story is semi-autobiographical; not SF or Fantasy, but a contemporary mainstream story taken from possible real-life events. His most solipsistic work I have read, so far and one that is among my least favourites.
Django
The smell of dust, the weight of silence, and the transition from old ambitions to a new reason for living.
In a graveyard of ambition, art demanded its due, laying its sacrifices upon the stone altars of forgotten gods—those silent idols that no longer answered any prayers.
A tribute to Django Reinhard, written in two days, sitting in the front window of a bookstore in Boston; he had offered up years to the ink and the paper, watching the smoke of his youth rise and vanish into the rafters. But in the quiet rot of that sanctuary, he found a different pulse. It wasn't in the finished masterpiece, but in the simple, steady rhythm of a breath shared with another. He stopped reaching for the heavens and finally found something to live for right there.
Count the Clock That Tells the Time
Where does the time go, Shakespeare?
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier ...
Without love, we fade into nothingness—I know that very well. But dreaming about love can also destroy us (a truth I know even more intimately). It is when the dream dies that we perish along with it, never having tasted joy because no one ever told us what it was supposed to be.
In the story “Count the Clock That Tells the Time,” we are forced to plumb the depths of human loneliness and despair. It posits that the universe obeys a Law of Conservation of Time just as strictly as the Law of Conservation of Energy: nothing is truly lost, yet nothing can be reclaimed. It is a concept that is as sweet and poignant as it is devastating.
Where did time go? Where did we waste our lives? Metaphysics SUCKS!
In the Fourth Year of the War
A horror story! Another "revenge" story!
Each of us moves through life shadowed by memories we never forget. We are bent, shaped and broken by those ancient fears and hatreds...within every adult is caged a frightened child...
Have you ever heard "voices" in your head?
What are they? An alien? A ghost? A psychotic doppelganger or a fragmented personality? Or, most horrifically, is it your innermost self finally unleashed?
Memories: “Zombie things from the quicklime pit…” I love this concept of our memories. We try to ignore them. We try to inter them in the shallow burial grounds of our minds. But like the undead, they refuse to stay down. We are made up of our memories, including the rotten ones, and as human beings, we never really let things go. They just wait to find their way home.
Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage
This is a play on the biblical phrasing "the truth shall make you free".
We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space, drifting through a hermetic silence we can never quite break. We are tiny creatures in a cosmos that is neither benign nor malign; it is simply vast and unaware of us, save perhaps as fodder for the cold mechanics of a biological chain. We reach across the void for meaning, yet there is a danger in the discovery: you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. It is enough to make one wonder if we have been looking at the heavens all wrong—that perhaps this world is not a beginning, but another planet's hell.
All the Birds Come Home to Roost
Picture this: you are a big, powerful male, a body full of heat and hormones, sitting alone in the quiet of your home. You are a vault of memories, a collection of former lovers tucked away in the dark corners of your mind. Then, the timeline collapses.
They start to arrive. One after another. They don't come in a blur; they march in chronological order, from the woman you left last month to the girl you lost two decades ago. The "past" is no longer a concept—she is standing in your living room, real as stone, asking for a glass of water.
It’s a brutal awakening. It destroys the lie that any single relationship was perfect. Standing there, you’re forced to see them through the eyes of who you are now, rather than the delusional version of yourself that loved them then.
Seeing them all in one room reveals the "Type." You see the cycle. You see the recurring emotional wounds you’ve spent a lifetime reopening. They are a mirror reflecting exactly what you were at every stage of your life, and the view is devastating.
Most hauntings depend on the mystery of the dark. But when you drag everyone into the light at once, the ghost story ends. You realise that while you believed you were capable of loving all these different women, you were really just looking for different versions of yourself.
Close the door. Seek the silence. It is a necessary reminder that we carry these people as ghosts because we cannot carry them as flesh and blood. The weight of all that history, gathered in a single room, is physically and emotionally unsustainable.
Opium
We spend the better part of our lives hiding from reality.
We hide within cheap TV shows; we are enslaved and exploited by vapid social media. We drown in religion, alcohol, and drugs—numbed by fast food, hollow shopping sprees, and the endless void of the Internet.
All these distractions are designed to keep us mindless. We are a people living in a delusion of illusions. Marx was right.
But the screen eventually goes dark, and the high always drops. In the quiet, we find ourselves standing in a desert of our own making. We have traded our souls for convenience and our musical consciousness for a comfortable muzak. We are strangers to our own reflections, staring into the mirror only to see a ghost of the person we were meant to become. We are awake, yet we have never been more asleep.
The Other Eye of Polyphemus
This modern, surrealist parable explores themes of alienation, the burden of utility, and the profound human ache for connection.
The absence of the "other eye"—the missing lens of self-awareness and self-care—is deeply symbolic. It serves as a metaphor for a perspective long lost: the ability to recognise our own needs or to be perceived by others as a human being rather than a mere tool.
This is the most tragic layer of Ellison’s narrative, mirrored in the myth of the blinded Polyphemus. When an individual is "blinded" by those in their life, they suffer the consequences of having lived as a Nobody—a utility stripped of personal identity. When they finally break or cry out for help, the world remains indifferent. Because they are surrounded by "friends" who have caused the blindness, those friends ignore the pain; they see only the Nobody they have grown accustomed to using.
The Executioner of the Malformed Children
The future, no longer a distant promise, is bleeding into the present. Sentient horrors—the entropic dregs of a dying timeline—are tearing through the fabric of our reality. Only the Paladins, those sanctified mutations bound by ancient code and cybernetic scars, can hold back the dark.
But they are still forged from men, and betrayal is the darkest of all sins—a rot that no amount of holy light can cleanse.
Shatterday
You live alone. One evening, you dial your own number by mistake, only to hear the phone ringing inside your empty apartment. Then, the receiver is picked up. You answer yourself from across town.
What if your conscience—that little voice you never paid any attention to—suddenly split into a physical double of yourself?
At its core, the story uses the literary trope of the doppelgänger (a spirit double) to explore how we distance ourselves from our own failures. Only one can stay, and the other must be "deleted"
................................................
For those who summon the courage to enter Ellison’s world, there is no middle ground: you will either recoil in regret or find a revelation. Regardless, you will not be the same reader you were when you began.
Harlan Ellison didn't just tell stories; he committed them. His prose was forged in speculative fiction and raw fury, delivered with a vocabulary that hits like a kick in the "family jewels." He was a master of shattering the naive tropes of golden-age sci-fi, choosing instead to focus on the messy, bleeding interior of the human soul.
When accused of writing a story merely to provoke and shock, his answer was characteristically blunt: "At least you got that part right!" For Harlan, hydrogen and idiocy were the two most common elements in the universe.
Long live Harlan Ellison!
Harlan Ellison was a superb storyteller who could, from the most innocuous idea, create the most original and twisted story. He frequently walked the path of the darkest and cruellest sides of human nature, yet he also celebrated fleeting moments of rapture and transcendence. His voice was powerful, unique, and very abrasive.
Much of the "Shatterday" collection deals with the "shattering" of the self and the darker side of human relationships. He often described these stories as "mortal dreads," focusing on the quiet, everyday horrors of modern life rather than monsters or aliens.
As with his other short-story collections I reviewed, this one seeks to capture the unique impressions left on me by each narrative. This particular volume contains several award winners and nominees; the tone is consistently sombre, demanding a disciplined, careful reading to achieve full impact.
Jeffty is Five
We all inhabit a realm of Mortal Dreads, where souls are routinely stolen. We fear the theft of the self by the unknown and the unimaginable, lurking in the shadows of the night. In "Jeffty is Five," however, the thief is the adult world itself, closing its predatory maw upon a child's innocence.
This stands as one of Ellison’s most visceral works—a heartbreaking elegy for the death of wonder. We have each, in our turn, beaten and drowned our own innocence to assimilate into "real life": a cycle of industry, profit, and conflict. And always, we persist in the masquerade, pretending this is exactly the world we desired.
How's the Night Life on Cissalda?
Satyromaniacs and nymphomaniacs beware, this story is not for the faint of heart.
Only Ellison could tell us how the "perfect fuck" exterminated mankind and, therefore, the cockroaches inherited Earth.
Disgustingly hilarious. The flaw is obvious, but I let you discover it...
Flop Sweat
The title draws its name from the showbiz shorthand for raw anxiety: cold sweat. Ellison was famously vociferous regarding the need for moral responsibility to moderate the unchecked power of the media, and in this apocalyptic horror, that power turns lethal.
In this vision of the end, humanity—like Christ—is hauled before a Sanhedrin from Hell and found wanting. But unlike the biblical narrative, there is no "Harrowing of Hell" to rescue the condemned; no saviour is coming to break the gates. We are left in the dark with the chilling realisation that this fate is no more than we deserve.
Would You Do It for a Penny?
The Art of the Aisle: A tactical guide to store-front flirting!
So, you’ve spotted someone intriguing between the frozen peas and the artisanal sourdough. Before you go full "Don Juan protagonist," you need a plan that doesn’t end with a security escort. Here is how to manoeuvre with grace, wit, and a dash of tactical positioning.
Step 1: Long-Range Reconnaissance!
First, establish a baseline of interest. Make brief eye contact to see if there’s a spark or if she’s trying to remember if she’s out of milk. You’re looking for a reaction that’s extra positive—a lingering look or a soft smile. If she immediately becomes fascinated by the expiration date on a carton of yoghurt, abort mission; she’s just not into your choice of cereal.
Step 2: The Casual Flank!
Once you’ve confirmed she hasn't fled to the pharmacy section in panic, it’s time to meander. Don't sprint; instead, casually navigate the linoleum tundra until you’ve positioned yourself within a respectable, non-threatening distance—roughly two aisles and a display of discounted crackers away. The goal is to enter her peripheral vision without looking like you’re closing in to pounce.
Step 3: The Smile Deployment!
From your new vantage point, wait for the "accidental" re-connection. When your eyes meet again, deploy a quick, warm smile. Think charming protagonist, not Batman villain. This is the moment of truth. Focus entirely on her response: if she returns the smile, you have a green light. If she looks at you like you’re a suspicious dent in a soup can, it’s time to pivot and spend the next ten minutes very intensely comparing the fibre content of different granolas.
The story idea was from Ellion's friend and collaborator, Haskell Barkin, and, being written almost sixty years ago, it's cruelly misogynistic in an extremely clever tale of a skilled con artist who manages in his single-minded pursuit of the art of what it passes for one-directional "animal attraction" in supermarkets.
I found this story a bit out of place in this collection.
The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge
Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on Earth. (Edward Yashinsky)
Cosmic justice—that sudden lightning bolt meant to punish the wicked and succour the broken—doesn't exist. It feels good to dream about, sure. Or not. It is one thing to wish the worst upon someone; it is quite another to see those wishes granted. In the aftermath, we realise how little revenge truly helps and how little it actually provides any sense of compensation.
This brings us back to the classic Harlan Ellison avalanche of doom. It’s a descent where no one claims the blame. As Stanisław Jerzy Lec famously put it: No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
Shoppe Keeper
This one is a deconstruction of the "The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday" trope.
This story—Harlan Ellison’s "Shoppe Keeper"—originated from a simple, nagging curiosity about a classic fantasy trope. We, who read, we’ve all "seen" the mysterious magic shops that appear in alleyways to sell protagonists exactly what they desire. But Ellison looked deeper. He wondered about the person behind the counter: Who would run such a shop? What could they possibly gain by selling magical trinkets to unsuspecting passers-by? And most importantly, where do they go when the shop inevitably disappears?
In just eighteen pages, the narrative shifts seamlessly from whimsical fantasy to hard science fiction, all while deconstructing the struggle of the artist against the cold necessities of survival. Ultimately, Ellison poses a harrowing choice: which is more important—the art or the artist’s life? He pushes the reader to consider why one must eventually triumph over the other, and ultimately, challenges us to question the true role of the "narrator" in the fabric of a story.
Imagine this, please:
Setting: A snowy London rooftop, overlooking a bustling Christmas Eve street. Gonzo, in his frock coat and top hat, perches precariously on a chimney, quill in hand. Rizzo the Rat clings to the same chimney, shivering and looking utterly unimpressed.
The Scene:
"I told you, storytellers are omniscient; I know everything!" Gonzo declared with a flourish.
Rizzo the Rat shivered, pulling his tiny scarf tighter around his neck. "Hoity-toity, Mr Godlike smarty-Pants. If you're so omniscient, how come you can't tell me where I stashed that half-eaten cheese danish this morning?"
Gonzo puffed out his chest. "My dear Rizzo, an author's omniscience pertains to the grand tapestry of narrative! Not the mundane minutiae of a rat's gastronomical misplacements."
He peered down at the street. "Ah, yes! Behold, the very moment young Ebenezer will encounter the charitable gentlemen!"
Rizzo squinted. "Are you sure? Because it looks like he's just... yelling at a dog."
"Details, details!" Gonzo waved a dismissive hand. "The spirit of the scene is what truly matters, the foreshadowing of his impending transformation! The very air itself, pregnant with untold tales!"
"Yeah, well, this air feels pregnant with frostbite," Rizzo grumbled, rubbing his paws together. "And what's our particular narrative function up here, anyway? Besides giving me a fear of heights and a craving for warm, delicious food?"
"Why, we are the Greek Chorus, Rizzo! The omnipresent, all-knowing narrators guiding our audience through the moral labyrinth of Mr Scrooge's soul!" Gonzo proclaimed.
"More like the 'reek chorus' after two days on this rooftop," Rizzo muttered under his breath, then called out, "Hey, if you know everything, what's for dinner tonight? Because I'm picturing something involving lots of gravy and no chimney soot."
Gonzo paused, his quill hovering above the parchment. He tapped his chin thoughtfully, a rare moment of silence. "Hmm. Dinner... Yes. I foresee... a rather splendid gruel."
Rizzo gasped, clutching his head dramatically. "Gruel?! Oh, the humanity! I knew you weren't omniscient! An all-knowing being would never inflict gruel upon a starving rat! You're a fraud, Gonzo! A literary charlatan!"
I, the author of this, I'm certainly also a literary charlatan with my flimsy rumbles, but H Elisson was no charlatan at all.
All the Lies That Are My Life
What is friendship? How—and where—do we find an adequate answer? For concepts such as friendship, love, or art, the definition redefines itself each time the question arises. These are not static terms found in a dictionary; they are lived experiences that yield a multitude of shifting answers. Because these definitions are fluid, we must look beyond traditional meanings to gain a deeper understanding—especially when a dark, hidden secret looms beneath the surface.
Is it entirely appropriate to employ the term "infidelity" within the context of friendship? While disloyalty often describes a general failure of support, infidelity more accurately captures a profound breach: the violation of a foundational faith. When a friend violates the trust inherent in that bond, are they truly a friend any longer?
This story is semi-autobiographical; not SF or Fantasy, but a contemporary mainstream story taken from possible real-life events. His most solipsistic work I have read, so far and one that is among my least favourites.
Django
The smell of dust, the weight of silence, and the transition from old ambitions to a new reason for living.
In a graveyard of ambition, art demanded its due, laying its sacrifices upon the stone altars of forgotten gods—those silent idols that no longer answered any prayers.
A tribute to Django Reinhard, written in two days, sitting in the front window of a bookstore in Boston; he had offered up years to the ink and the paper, watching the smoke of his youth rise and vanish into the rafters. But in the quiet rot of that sanctuary, he found a different pulse. It wasn't in the finished masterpiece, but in the simple, steady rhythm of a breath shared with another. He stopped reaching for the heavens and finally found something to live for right there.
Count the Clock That Tells the Time
Where does the time go, Shakespeare?
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier ...
Without love, we fade into nothingness—I know that very well. But dreaming about love can also destroy us (a truth I know even more intimately). It is when the dream dies that we perish along with it, never having tasted joy because no one ever told us what it was supposed to be.
In the story “Count the Clock That Tells the Time,” we are forced to plumb the depths of human loneliness and despair. It posits that the universe obeys a Law of Conservation of Time just as strictly as the Law of Conservation of Energy: nothing is truly lost, yet nothing can be reclaimed. It is a concept that is as sweet and poignant as it is devastating.
Where did time go? Where did we waste our lives? Metaphysics SUCKS!
In the Fourth Year of the War
A horror story! Another "revenge" story!
Each of us moves through life shadowed by memories we never forget. We are bent, shaped and broken by those ancient fears and hatreds...within every adult is caged a frightened child...
Have you ever heard "voices" in your head?
What are they? An alien? A ghost? A psychotic doppelganger or a fragmented personality? Or, most horrifically, is it your innermost self finally unleashed?
Memories: “Zombie things from the quicklime pit…” I love this concept of our memories. We try to ignore them. We try to inter them in the shallow burial grounds of our minds. But like the undead, they refuse to stay down. We are made up of our memories, including the rotten ones, and as human beings, we never really let things go. They just wait to find their way home.
Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage
This is a play on the biblical phrasing "the truth shall make you free".
We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space, drifting through a hermetic silence we can never quite break. We are tiny creatures in a cosmos that is neither benign nor malign; it is simply vast and unaware of us, save perhaps as fodder for the cold mechanics of a biological chain. We reach across the void for meaning, yet there is a danger in the discovery: you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. It is enough to make one wonder if we have been looking at the heavens all wrong—that perhaps this world is not a beginning, but another planet's hell.
All the Birds Come Home to Roost
Picture this: you are a big, powerful male, a body full of heat and hormones, sitting alone in the quiet of your home. You are a vault of memories, a collection of former lovers tucked away in the dark corners of your mind. Then, the timeline collapses.
They start to arrive. One after another. They don't come in a blur; they march in chronological order, from the woman you left last month to the girl you lost two decades ago. The "past" is no longer a concept—she is standing in your living room, real as stone, asking for a glass of water.
It’s a brutal awakening. It destroys the lie that any single relationship was perfect. Standing there, you’re forced to see them through the eyes of who you are now, rather than the delusional version of yourself that loved them then.
Seeing them all in one room reveals the "Type." You see the cycle. You see the recurring emotional wounds you’ve spent a lifetime reopening. They are a mirror reflecting exactly what you were at every stage of your life, and the view is devastating.
Most hauntings depend on the mystery of the dark. But when you drag everyone into the light at once, the ghost story ends. You realise that while you believed you were capable of loving all these different women, you were really just looking for different versions of yourself.
Close the door. Seek the silence. It is a necessary reminder that we carry these people as ghosts because we cannot carry them as flesh and blood. The weight of all that history, gathered in a single room, is physically and emotionally unsustainable.
Opium
We spend the better part of our lives hiding from reality.
We hide within cheap TV shows; we are enslaved and exploited by vapid social media. We drown in religion, alcohol, and drugs—numbed by fast food, hollow shopping sprees, and the endless void of the Internet.
All these distractions are designed to keep us mindless. We are a people living in a delusion of illusions. Marx was right.
But the screen eventually goes dark, and the high always drops. In the quiet, we find ourselves standing in a desert of our own making. We have traded our souls for convenience and our musical consciousness for a comfortable muzak. We are strangers to our own reflections, staring into the mirror only to see a ghost of the person we were meant to become. We are awake, yet we have never been more asleep.
The Other Eye of Polyphemus
This modern, surrealist parable explores themes of alienation, the burden of utility, and the profound human ache for connection.
The absence of the "other eye"—the missing lens of self-awareness and self-care—is deeply symbolic. It serves as a metaphor for a perspective long lost: the ability to recognise our own needs or to be perceived by others as a human being rather than a mere tool.
This is the most tragic layer of Ellison’s narrative, mirrored in the myth of the blinded Polyphemus. When an individual is "blinded" by those in their life, they suffer the consequences of having lived as a Nobody—a utility stripped of personal identity. When they finally break or cry out for help, the world remains indifferent. Because they are surrounded by "friends" who have caused the blindness, those friends ignore the pain; they see only the Nobody they have grown accustomed to using.
The Executioner of the Malformed Children
The future, no longer a distant promise, is bleeding into the present. Sentient horrors—the entropic dregs of a dying timeline—are tearing through the fabric of our reality. Only the Paladins, those sanctified mutations bound by ancient code and cybernetic scars, can hold back the dark.
But they are still forged from men, and betrayal is the darkest of all sins—a rot that no amount of holy light can cleanse.
Shatterday
You live alone. One evening, you dial your own number by mistake, only to hear the phone ringing inside your empty apartment. Then, the receiver is picked up. You answer yourself from across town.
What if your conscience—that little voice you never paid any attention to—suddenly split into a physical double of yourself?
At its core, the story uses the literary trope of the doppelgänger (a spirit double) to explore how we distance ourselves from our own failures. Only one can stay, and the other must be "deleted"
................................................
For those who summon the courage to enter Ellison’s world, there is no middle ground: you will either recoil in regret or find a revelation. Regardless, you will not be the same reader you were when you began.
Harlan Ellison didn't just tell stories; he committed them. His prose was forged in speculative fiction and raw fury, delivered with a vocabulary that hits like a kick in the "family jewels." He was a master of shattering the naive tropes of golden-age sci-fi, choosing instead to focus on the messy, bleeding interior of the human soul.
When accused of writing a story merely to provoke and shock, his answer was characteristically blunt: "At least you got that part right!" For Harlan, hydrogen and idiocy were the two most common elements in the universe.
Long live Harlan Ellison!
June 2, 2012
What is Harlan Ellison's best short fiction collection? My automatic answer is Deathbird Stories but Shatterday packs a wallop too. Two of his best short fiction works are here, "Jeffty is Five" and the title story yet there is not a filler piece to be found. All are quite impressive. I especially like his sad and reflective "All the Lies That Are my Life". Shatterday may surpass Deathbird Stories in that it encompasses a wider variety of emotions. Best Ellison collection? Call it a tie.
January 23, 2017
Reading again. Wow, I forgot how much I loved this book.
July 16, 2025
I have always enjoyed reading the fantasy stories of Harlan Ellison. Fortunately, Shatterday had some real lulus, especially "Jeffty Is Five," "Count the Clock That Tells the Time," "All the Birds Come Hoime to Roost," and "How's the Night Life on Cissalda?"
Ellison was always a very controversial figure who did not hesitate to make enemies. But his stories will outlive his reputation as a troublemaker. They are unique in their directness, such that there is no mistaking the author of one of his stories.
Ellison was always a very controversial figure who did not hesitate to make enemies. But his stories will outlive his reputation as a troublemaker. They are unique in their directness, such that there is no mistaking the author of one of his stories.
October 21, 2018
These stories are good. I have a problem with Ellison's introductions to them, however. Harlan Ellison is smarter than us, a better writer than us, more worthwhile than us, does more than us, is sexier than us...well you get the idea.
There is is one thing I wonder about, though. If all this was true, why wasn't he happier than us?
There is is one thing I wonder about, though. If all this was true, why wasn't he happier than us?
July 6, 2019
Ако има автор, за който просто не съм сигурен какво мисля, това е Елисън.
От една страна, има някои несъмнени шедьоври, а от друга - някои безбожно слаби разкази.
Характерният за повечето му творби песимизъм понякога пасва страшно добре, понякога дразни със самоцелността си.
Стилът му обикновено е между много добър и страхотен... но като го избие на многословие, може да стане ужасно досаден.
Уж има нелошо чувство за хумор, но пък хумористичните му разкази някак си не се получават.
Съответно и в този сборник разказите са с доста променливо качество. Единственият, който бих препоръчал категорично, е Jeffty Is Five. Има още няколко много добри, няколко прилични и тук-там някой скучноват.
Обща оценка - малко над средната. Закръглям я нагоре.
От една страна, има някои несъмнени шедьоври, а от друга - някои безбожно слаби разкази.
Характерният за повечето му творби песимизъм понякога пасва страшно добре, понякога дразни със самоцелността си.
Стилът му обикновено е между много добър и страхотен... но като го избие на многословие, може да стане ужасно досаден.
Уж има нелошо чувство за хумор, но пък хумористичните му разкази някак си не се получават.
Съответно и в този сборник разказите са с доста променливо качество. Единственият, който бих препоръчал категорично, е Jeffty Is Five. Има още няколко много добри, няколко прилични и тук-там някой скучноват.
Обща оценка - малко над средната. Закръглям я нагоре.
December 17, 2016
I have to give this book 5 stars because of the first story in the book - "Jefty Is Five". That is one of the best short stories that I have ever read, and I also had the pleasant experience of hearing Harlan Ellison read it live just before it was first published. The story is about a boy who remains 5 years old for over 20 years, as told by a friend who was originally the same age, but grew up normally. There's more to it than just remaining 5 years old, too.
The book also contains another 5 star story - "All the Birds Come Home to Roost", about a man who had a horrible experience with his first wife which left him broken and mentally unstable. It took him a long time to recover and he is never able to establish a stable relationship with a woman again, but drifts along dating a sequence of different women. After breaking up with his latest girlfriend, he runs into the previous one and spends the night with her. A little later, he runs into the one previous to that, and then the one previous to that. After a few more, he realizes that he's cycling back through every previous girlfriend which will ultimately lead to ...
The introductions to each of the stories are very much worth reading, too.
The book also contains another 5 star story - "All the Birds Come Home to Roost", about a man who had a horrible experience with his first wife which left him broken and mentally unstable. It took him a long time to recover and he is never able to establish a stable relationship with a woman again, but drifts along dating a sequence of different women. After breaking up with his latest girlfriend, he runs into the previous one and spends the night with her. A little later, he runs into the one previous to that, and then the one previous to that. After a few more, he realizes that he's cycling back through every previous girlfriend which will ultimately lead to ...
The introductions to each of the stories are very much worth reading, too.
April 15, 2017
Shatterday is one of Ellison's very best story collections. My favorites, aside from the title story, are Shoppe Keeper, and the undeniably classic Jeffty is Five. Ellison uses the same words that other writers do but puts them together in unique and moving ways.
July 14, 2022
I've only been reading SF for about two years now. I have a lot more to learn, but in that time I've established two comfort writers. One of them is Isaac Asimov. Straightforward stories with fun ideas, adventure, and healthy amounts of not-too-cumbersome science. The other is Harlan Ellison. These two are basically the spectrum of the 40s-70s mainstream, from mellow, pulpy, and wondrous Golden Age, to sharp-edged, biting, challenging New Wave.
This one gets rolling with a fantastic introduction, with Ellison reminding you that he's not here to make you feel good. He doesn't write stories about the indomitable human spirit or the innate goodness of people. In his world, all will not be well. He digs into the dark corners and basements of your mind. He pulls forth the bad thoughts, the twisted feelings, the depravity you like to pretend you don't have, that you're above. But we all have it. He's not here to hold your hand and tell you love wins. Love doesn't win. The indifferent universe swallows you whole. The consulation? We're all being swallowed up together.
I can understand why a lot of people don't like Ellsion. Aside from the unpleasant mirror he makes you look into, it's also impossible to separate fact from fiction, manipulation from truth. Is the Ellsion in the intros actually genuine, or is he another character? A fictional extension or exaggerated reality? The stories may be true on the surface, but what about what lies beneath?
Of the four Ellison collections I've read, this one feels the most personal. Even if he constantly reminds the reader that the line between fact and fantasy is hazy and ellusive, some concepts and ideas--sometimes very specific ones--were repeated too often to not have a strong personal basis. Many stories are about regrets for lives lived 'wrong.' For cruelties, screw-ups, mistakes, and wasted time. The edge hasn't quite dulled, but Ellison was in his forties here. There's something like maturity present, a more reflective, literary quality that didn't come through as much in previous works.
3.5 stars, rounded up.
This one gets rolling with a fantastic introduction, with Ellison reminding you that he's not here to make you feel good. He doesn't write stories about the indomitable human spirit or the innate goodness of people. In his world, all will not be well. He digs into the dark corners and basements of your mind. He pulls forth the bad thoughts, the twisted feelings, the depravity you like to pretend you don't have, that you're above. But we all have it. He's not here to hold your hand and tell you love wins. Love doesn't win. The indifferent universe swallows you whole. The consulation? We're all being swallowed up together.
I can understand why a lot of people don't like Ellsion. Aside from the unpleasant mirror he makes you look into, it's also impossible to separate fact from fiction, manipulation from truth. Is the Ellsion in the intros actually genuine, or is he another character? A fictional extension or exaggerated reality? The stories may be true on the surface, but what about what lies beneath?
Of the four Ellison collections I've read, this one feels the most personal. Even if he constantly reminds the reader that the line between fact and fantasy is hazy and ellusive, some concepts and ideas--sometimes very specific ones--were repeated too often to not have a strong personal basis. Many stories are about regrets for lives lived 'wrong.' For cruelties, screw-ups, mistakes, and wasted time. The edge hasn't quite dulled, but Ellison was in his forties here. There's something like maturity present, a more reflective, literary quality that didn't come through as much in previous works.
3.5 stars, rounded up.
October 12, 2016
Harlan Ellison collections are often hit or miss with me, and this one was no different. It contains a few of his best works, and then some that just did not work. On the whole, though, this reflects a mature author operating at the peak of his popularity and talent spanning several genres.
Jeffty is Five—Winner of the 1978 Hugo and Nebula awards. This is my favorite Harlan Ellison story. Jeffty is a boy who never ages and can connect with the past in a special way. This subtle sophisticated tale manages to be an elegy to pop culture of the 1940’s, rumination on the loss of innocence caused by Growing Up, and an examination of whether technical progress costs us our humanity. Ironically, the “Now” of the story is the late 1960’s juxtaposed to the “Then” of the story which was the 1940’s. Now that the 1960’s themselves have faded into the history books, this story may have new layers of resonance for readers.
How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? – A comedic take on alien sex that veers into social satire. A lot of the pop culture references are dated (I had to google Anita Bryant, whom I never heard of.) Kij Johnson recently covered much the same territory in her much better story “Spar”.
Flop Sweat – A very effective horror story about the Hillside Strangler, a radio call-in talk show host, and the advent of the Apocalypse. It was probably these kinds of stories that influenced a young Stephen King, who has written at length about his admiration for HE.
Would You Do It for a Penny? (with Haskell Barkin) -- My 2nd favorite story in the book. Sure, it might be a tad sexist and misogynistic, but it is funny, and let's face it, truthful. We have all known guys like Great White Hunter Aldo who would endure any humiliation, spare no expense, and leave no lie untold in the pursuit of getting laid.
The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge -- A paper-thin but still entertaining concept story that imagines all of humanity's pain and frustration acts like a giant electric current that can flare up and strike, uncontrolled, anywhere in the world, at any time. The consequences are not always to our liking.
Shoppe Keeper – Ellison has written several magic shop stories. This one is brimming with ideas, but it struggles under the weight of too many subplots. The shop owner is revealed to be a man from the future with God-like powers of creation; he travels through time to create significant changes in history in order to siphon the entropic energy created by those events. Along the way, he argues with his superiors about what constitutes creation of art, and, oh yes, there is a convoluted plan to free his girlfriend from cryogenic sleep. It’s better than “Djinn, No Chaser” but Ellison’s real magic shop masterpiece is “Incognita, Inc.”
All the Lies That Are My Life-- Nominated for the 1981 Hugo Award-Best Novella. Ellison is clearly writing about himself in the character of Jimmy Crowstairs, and this narrative focuses on the aftermath of his death and the reading of his last will and testament. Ellison seems to be having some fun at his own expense, describing the very important people who will attend his funeral and recounting various affairs with beautiful women. He is also trying to make some important statements about the ability of art to outlast its creator and the potentially damaging effects of trying to manipulate close personal friendships after one’s death. The core of the story is this question: What is the single great lie at the center of Jimmy’s life that defines his entire existence? We are never given a straight-up answer, but several possibilities are openly hinted at.
Django -- Another overwrought dark fable about art. (There's at least one in every Ellison book!) This one seems to imply Great Art is more important than people's lives, and that any behavior no matter how selfish is justified in pursuit of it.
Count the Clock That Tells the Time -- Another concept tale: Imagine the laws of entropy act to conserve wasted time to balance out diffused matter. People who waste their whole lives can get stuck in a sort of gray Limbo world wandering through the afterimages of great historical events.
In the Fourth Year of the War – A nasty little psychological suspense story that asks if anyone ever really moves past the angers of their childhood.
Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage—Experimental writing that reminded me of what Ellison had been writing in the mid-1960’s. At first I did not understand it, but on a second pass I realized it could be read as an allegory of Jesus. The main character Moth goes from person to person on a space shift assuming their pain and bad deeds upon himself. Once the other passengers disembark, he takes their sins into oblivion with him.
All the Birds Come Home to Roost – A man finds that all the women he’s ever slept with begin to drift back into his life, one by one in reverse order, so that he is somehow working his way backwards towards the first sour romantic relationship that has haunted him his whole life. It ended it too soon, right before the expected clash. Ellison provides an introduction about the origins of the story that is better than the story itself.
Opium – A fanciful piece of absurdist fiction. Modern man is so used to tuning out reality with television, fast food, cheap sex, etc., so the Real World fights back by transforming itself into a fantasy land to make it itself more appealing.
The Other Eye of Polyphemus – A badly written piece of melodrama about a man who believes he always gives to others and never takes care of his own needs. Ellison tackled this exact same theme years before in “Like A Dull Knife”
The Executioner of the Malformed Children- Again, Ellison tackles a theme from his early stories—people with special telepathic gifts are shunned and mistreated by those in power. The title is the best thing about this attempt.
Shatterday—A quirky science fiction tale that was later adapted for Twilight Zone. One of the better stories in this collection.
Jeffty is Five—Winner of the 1978 Hugo and Nebula awards. This is my favorite Harlan Ellison story. Jeffty is a boy who never ages and can connect with the past in a special way. This subtle sophisticated tale manages to be an elegy to pop culture of the 1940’s, rumination on the loss of innocence caused by Growing Up, and an examination of whether technical progress costs us our humanity. Ironically, the “Now” of the story is the late 1960’s juxtaposed to the “Then” of the story which was the 1940’s. Now that the 1960’s themselves have faded into the history books, this story may have new layers of resonance for readers.
How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? – A comedic take on alien sex that veers into social satire. A lot of the pop culture references are dated (I had to google Anita Bryant, whom I never heard of.) Kij Johnson recently covered much the same territory in her much better story “Spar”.
Flop Sweat – A very effective horror story about the Hillside Strangler, a radio call-in talk show host, and the advent of the Apocalypse. It was probably these kinds of stories that influenced a young Stephen King, who has written at length about his admiration for HE.
Would You Do It for a Penny? (with Haskell Barkin) -- My 2nd favorite story in the book. Sure, it might be a tad sexist and misogynistic, but it is funny, and let's face it, truthful. We have all known guys like Great White Hunter Aldo who would endure any humiliation, spare no expense, and leave no lie untold in the pursuit of getting laid.
The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge -- A paper-thin but still entertaining concept story that imagines all of humanity's pain and frustration acts like a giant electric current that can flare up and strike, uncontrolled, anywhere in the world, at any time. The consequences are not always to our liking.
Shoppe Keeper – Ellison has written several magic shop stories. This one is brimming with ideas, but it struggles under the weight of too many subplots. The shop owner is revealed to be a man from the future with God-like powers of creation; he travels through time to create significant changes in history in order to siphon the entropic energy created by those events. Along the way, he argues with his superiors about what constitutes creation of art, and, oh yes, there is a convoluted plan to free his girlfriend from cryogenic sleep. It’s better than “Djinn, No Chaser” but Ellison’s real magic shop masterpiece is “Incognita, Inc.”
All the Lies That Are My Life-- Nominated for the 1981 Hugo Award-Best Novella. Ellison is clearly writing about himself in the character of Jimmy Crowstairs, and this narrative focuses on the aftermath of his death and the reading of his last will and testament. Ellison seems to be having some fun at his own expense, describing the very important people who will attend his funeral and recounting various affairs with beautiful women. He is also trying to make some important statements about the ability of art to outlast its creator and the potentially damaging effects of trying to manipulate close personal friendships after one’s death. The core of the story is this question: What is the single great lie at the center of Jimmy’s life that defines his entire existence? We are never given a straight-up answer, but several possibilities are openly hinted at.
Django -- Another overwrought dark fable about art. (There's at least one in every Ellison book!) This one seems to imply Great Art is more important than people's lives, and that any behavior no matter how selfish is justified in pursuit of it.
Count the Clock That Tells the Time -- Another concept tale: Imagine the laws of entropy act to conserve wasted time to balance out diffused matter. People who waste their whole lives can get stuck in a sort of gray Limbo world wandering through the afterimages of great historical events.
In the Fourth Year of the War – A nasty little psychological suspense story that asks if anyone ever really moves past the angers of their childhood.
Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage—Experimental writing that reminded me of what Ellison had been writing in the mid-1960’s. At first I did not understand it, but on a second pass I realized it could be read as an allegory of Jesus. The main character Moth goes from person to person on a space shift assuming their pain and bad deeds upon himself. Once the other passengers disembark, he takes their sins into oblivion with him.
All the Birds Come Home to Roost – A man finds that all the women he’s ever slept with begin to drift back into his life, one by one in reverse order, so that he is somehow working his way backwards towards the first sour romantic relationship that has haunted him his whole life. It ended it too soon, right before the expected clash. Ellison provides an introduction about the origins of the story that is better than the story itself.
Opium – A fanciful piece of absurdist fiction. Modern man is so used to tuning out reality with television, fast food, cheap sex, etc., so the Real World fights back by transforming itself into a fantasy land to make it itself more appealing.
The Other Eye of Polyphemus – A badly written piece of melodrama about a man who believes he always gives to others and never takes care of his own needs. Ellison tackled this exact same theme years before in “Like A Dull Knife”
The Executioner of the Malformed Children- Again, Ellison tackles a theme from his early stories—people with special telepathic gifts are shunned and mistreated by those in power. The title is the best thing about this attempt.
Shatterday—A quirky science fiction tale that was later adapted for Twilight Zone. One of the better stories in this collection.
March 22, 2007
The field for when I read this is deceptive. I reread it every couple of years. And each time, I find myself reflected more and more in Ellison's writing.
Ellison can be self absorbed. He's much more interested in being somebody than in being a writer. But when he's good, he's among the best, especially as a short story writer. And this is, in my opinion, his best collection. The title story is pretty straightforward science/alternative fiction that investigates our many parts. Jeffty is Five is a beautiful little story.
But the centerpiece is the story All the Lies That Are My Life. Along with Lonesome Dove, it best describes what it means when I call someone a friend. It is everything I wish I could say to all of the people I love about the true nature of our relationship. Through our friendship, I have bonded with each of them.
Even when I am angry, even when I don't like them, I still love them.
The best book by the best science fiction author on the planet. Too good to pass up.
Ellison can be self absorbed. He's much more interested in being somebody than in being a writer. But when he's good, he's among the best, especially as a short story writer. And this is, in my opinion, his best collection. The title story is pretty straightforward science/alternative fiction that investigates our many parts. Jeffty is Five is a beautiful little story.
But the centerpiece is the story All the Lies That Are My Life. Along with Lonesome Dove, it best describes what it means when I call someone a friend. It is everything I wish I could say to all of the people I love about the true nature of our relationship. Through our friendship, I have bonded with each of them.
Even when I am angry, even when I don't like them, I still love them.
The best book by the best science fiction author on the planet. Too good to pass up.
June 21, 2017
Here's my pseudo Biblioklept attempt:
1. Ellison's favorite subject is Ellison. It's his most engaging characteristic as a writer. You can imagine whole conversations with him after anything you've read be him all the way down to where and when he dismisses you as an idiot.
2. More than half of the stories in the two Ellison books I read back to back could be published tomorrow and they'd be relevant and meaningful. Fairly impressive since they were from the 1970s and 80s. That's the greatness of Sci-Fi (a term Ellison hates) and also a weakness; Ellison's a fantastic Doomsayer.
3. A third of his stuff is hamstrung by some brutal sex norms that are common to Sci-Fi. Ellison tells you directly he was a weird, isolated kid. Ellison's writing hints that he got laid a lot in the 1960s and 70s. He's not a better writer for it.
4. Someone much smarter than me is currently pissing Ellison off, writing whole college courses on Sci-Fi and Sexuality that feature his less than flattering moments. That really sucks, because Ellison is challenging and genuinely valuable.
1. Ellison's favorite subject is Ellison. It's his most engaging characteristic as a writer. You can imagine whole conversations with him after anything you've read be him all the way down to where and when he dismisses you as an idiot.
2. More than half of the stories in the two Ellison books I read back to back could be published tomorrow and they'd be relevant and meaningful. Fairly impressive since they were from the 1970s and 80s. That's the greatness of Sci-Fi (a term Ellison hates) and also a weakness; Ellison's a fantastic Doomsayer.
3. A third of his stuff is hamstrung by some brutal sex norms that are common to Sci-Fi. Ellison tells you directly he was a weird, isolated kid. Ellison's writing hints that he got laid a lot in the 1960s and 70s. He's not a better writer for it.
4. Someone much smarter than me is currently pissing Ellison off, writing whole college courses on Sci-Fi and Sexuality that feature his less than flattering moments. That really sucks, because Ellison is challenging and genuinely valuable.
March 10, 2018
Chiunque abbia scritto un racconto ispirato a Django Reinhardt merita stima e rispetto - quanto meno per il buon gusto musicale. Se poi i suoi racconti di fantascienza sono interessanti e inusuali, si riesce a perdonare qualche passo falso, neppure troppo piccolo, a fronte di piccole gemme come il celebre Jeffty ha cinque anni o il crudele L'uomo che pensava solo alla vendetta. E si perdonano anche le introduzioni autocelebrative che precedono ogni singolo racconto - solitamente mi affascina leggere ciò che un autore ha da dire riguardo alla sua ispirazione o alle circostanze che hanno portato alla creazione di un'opera, ma Ellison è riuscito a creare irritazione invece che aspettativa (ottimo lavoro, Harlan).
E Django è Django https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXTrP...
E Django è Django https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXTrP...
September 15, 2008
This is hands down one of my favorite books. I try to read it every year or so. Harlan is at his best when he's dishing out the pathos, and here he puts his characters in some very strange and disturbing settings and situations. I love the title story in this short story collection, I read it whenever I am at a crossroads and there is something I desperately want to change about my life, or when I'm feeling depressed. It reminds me that everyone has the power of self-determination, that there is the possibility of change if we are brave, and stare down the selfish person within. Highly recommended.
January 6, 2009
Harlan Ellison refuses to let things work themselves out. In his stories, (especially my favorite in this book "Count the Clock that Tells the Time") slighted people who wait around for justice and karma to right the universe get just as screwed as the characters acting in the wrong. Bottom line: do things for yourself and fight back when people take advantage of you. There is no room for pity in a well crafted Ellison story. I think he was especially pissed when he wrote the stories for Shatterday.
May 2, 2016
Dos de los cuentos que forman esta antología son sublimes ("Jeffty is Five" y "Shatterday"), si solamente hubiera leído esos dos, se hubiera llevado cinco estrellas sin problemas, pero ps el resto está medio eeeeeeh. Igual está recomendable, cómo ño.
August 13, 2016
Out of this world
Neil Gaiman speaks very highly of Harlan Ellison. Having read this book you can clearly see why. Some very good short stories in this collection. Every one of them leaving some lasting mark long after you have read them.
Harlan Ellison is something else.
Neil Gaiman speaks very highly of Harlan Ellison. Having read this book you can clearly see why. Some very good short stories in this collection. Every one of them leaving some lasting mark long after you have read them.
Harlan Ellison is something else.
December 31, 2008
Great stories.... Don't read more than one or two at at time though or you'll have to lock yourself in your room until the darkness passes ::::smile::::
March 2, 2013
It's Harlan Ellison. What more needs to be said?
September 30, 2016
Seriously my favourite author, I love the variety of stories in this but the short story titled after the book took the cake for me. Ellison is amazing.
January 13, 2017
The more personal introspective stories ruined this collection for me. This would be a very poor collection for a first timer reading Harlan Ellison.
April 7, 2017
Shatterday
I felt this was a very balanced collection and enjoyed Harlan's introductory anecdotes. He is one of my favorite writers.
I felt this was a very balanced collection and enjoyed Harlan's introductory anecdotes. He is one of my favorite writers.
August 23, 2018
I came to buy this book after reading Neil Gaiman's journal; an article he wrote about his friendship with (the recently departed) Harlan Ellison. I'm no fan of Gaiman's fiction but I do admire him as a writer, and I don't like the science fiction or fantasy genre, and yet something compelled me to buy Ellison's Shatterday. I am now a converted admirer of fantasy (although I suspect only fantasy written by Ellison {and Ray Bradbury}). I don't think I have come across a writer quite like Ellison, and I have never highlighted as many passages in a book as I have this one. It isn't a book I would recommend for everyone, it's definitely one for those who appreciate sci-fi, fantasy, and the art of writing.
***Amber and Clare, I can't wait to discuss this one at our first book club dinner!
***Amber and Clare, I can't wait to discuss this one at our first book club dinner!
September 22, 2018
Harlan Ellison takes his readers on a tour of their own worst imaginings. Irresistible prose, witty, gritty, unsettling and thoroughly entertaining. Recommend!
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