Synopses & Reviews
Shatterday is a revolutionary classic from Harlan Ellison, science fictions most controversial author. This collection of sixteen visionary stories remains as scathing and influential today as when it was initially published. Read as fanatically by intellectuals as by college students, these category-defying stories combine 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 humanitys encounter with dangerously seductive aliens in Hows the Night Life on Cissalda?”, culminating in Shatterday,” the dark allegory of an identity-stealing doppelganger replacing his inferior twin. Back in print for the first time since its stunning debut in the early 1980s, this incendiary collection reestablishes its legendary author at the cutting-edge of the short-story form.
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"The spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind." The New York Times Book Review
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"Ellison, that feisty, unreasonable, prevaricating, megalomaniacal, and revanchist monster [is] the quintessential science fiction short story writer of his time." Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
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"You have to read Shatterday, feel it, experience it. It is an event." Science Fiction Review
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"Speculative fiction without Harlan Ellison would be like the Fourth of July without fireworks." Ursula K. Le Guin, author, The Left Hand of Darkness
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"Timeless stuff, speaking to (mostly) the dark within each of us, but also at times uplifting, light, and funny." SFScop.com
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"One of the greatest speculative fiction writers this country has ever produced." Ron Moore, executive producer, Battlestar Galactica
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"Fiction with a sharp, fantastic edge." People Magazine
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...only a few short-story collections that have changed the course of literature in a profound way....
Shatterday is the heart of the heart of energy and insight that is Harlan Ellison.”
Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion and Ilium
The spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker with a cultural warehouse for a mind.”
New York Times Book Review
One of the greatest speculative fiction writers this country has ever produced....”
Ron Moore, executive producer of Battlestar Galactica
Harlan Ellisons short stories have already won high praise in his native America, and the sixteen recent specimens collected in Shatterday are impressively various and accomplished.... An authentic writer.”
The Guardian
Fiction with a sharp, fantastic edge.”
People
...one of the great living American short-story writers.”
George R. R. Martin
You have to read Shatterday, feel it, experience it.... It is an event.”
Science Fiction Review
Shatterday should be banned from all science-fiction shelves. Harlan Ellison no longer belongs there. Do Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allan Poe, Rimbaud, or Kafka? Occasionally, theres a writer with the mind, passion, and audacity to create a one-man revolution in his field. Harlan Ellison is such a writer.”
Roger Corman
Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, stand aside: Harlan Ellison is a better short-story writer than you will ever be again in the rest of your lives.”
Ray Bradbury
Whatever the genre or blend of genres, Ellison delivers.”
Publishers Weekly
One of the great living American short-story writers.”
Washington Post Book World
The categories are too small to describe Harlan Ellison. Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of old psychological corners, moralist, purveyor of pure horror and black comedy; he is all these and more.”
San Francisco Chronicle
Speculative fiction without Harlan Ellison would be like the Fourth of July without fireworks.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
Its long past time for Harlan Ellison to be awarded the title: 20th-century Lewis Carroll.”
Los Angeles Times
He is a brave and lively little beast, who makes a great show of himself to the hounds but remains far too wary to lead them to his real lair.”
Michael Moorcock, author of The Best of Michael Moorcock
Harlan Ellisons prose has a remarkable vitality. Adrenaline seems to drive him to the typewriter where, for our entertainment, he produces cracking and powerful tales.”
Steve Allen
Harlan Ellison has a supersonic mind, and Shatterday is its flagship, a streak of literary light across a mythological sky.”
William Kotzwinkle
Because Harlan Ellison pretends that he is just a nice guy who has dropped in to read you his latest tale, you drop your defenses and whamyou discover that he is a horror writer in disguise. Things do not go bump in Ellisons tales. That would be too easy. Instead, his heroes crash into the night en route to final, fatal meetings.”
Saturday Review
One of the few masters of the short story.”
Locus
...confrontational and shocking...youll remember again why Harlan Ellison is considered one of Americas best short-story writers.”
Charles de Lint, Fantasy and Science Fiction
...timeless stuff, speaking to (mostly) the dark within each of us, but also at times uplifting, light, and funny.”
SF Scope
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Harlan Ellison has written or edited more than 75 books and more than 1,700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns as well as two dozen teleplays and a dozen movies. His work includes such classics as Deathbird Stories, Dangerous Visions, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Strangewine, Shatterday, Angry Candy, and Slippage. He has won multiple Hugo, Nebula, Edgar, Stoker, Locus, and Audie awards as well as the Silver Pen, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Bradbury, and American Mystery awards. Ellison was nominated for a Grammy award in 2009 for his reading of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
Table of Contents
Introduction, Mortal Dreads
Jeffrey Is Five
Hows the Night Life on Cissalda?
Flop Sweat
Would You Do It for a Penny? (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