Book description
Harlan Ellison's masterwork of myth and terror as he seduces all
innocence on a mind-freezing odyssey into the darkest reaches of mortal
terror and the most dazzling heights of Olympian hell in his finest
collection. Deathbird Stories is a collection of 19 of Harlan Ellison's
best stories, including Edgar and Hugo winners, originally published
between 1960 and 1974. The collection contains some of Ellison's best
stories from earlier collections and is judged by some to be his most
consistently high quality collection of short fiction. The theme of the
collection can be loosely defined as God, or Gods. Sometimes they're
dead or dying, some of them are as brand-new as today's technology.
Unlike some of Ellison's collections, the introductory notes to each
story can be as short as a phrase and rarely run more than a sentence or
two. One story took a Locus Poll Award, the two final ones both garnered
Hugo Awards and Locus Poll awards, and the final one also received a
Jupiter Award from the Instructors of Science Fiction in Higher
Education (discontinued in 1979). When the collection was published in
Britain, it won the 1979 British Science Fiction Award for Short
Fiction. Winner of the BSFA Award for best collection, 1978 Harlan
Ellison is a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winning writer and editor.
He wrote the script for the hugely popular Star Trek episode, The City
on the Edge of Forever, the Nebula Award-winning novella, A Boy and his
Dog, and many acclaimed stories including 'Shatterday' and 'I Have No
Mouth and I Must Scream'. His groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions
was instrumental in defining the New Wave movement. Harlan Ellison lives
in Los Angeles.
