Deathbird Stories

Harlan Ellison

Mar 2012 · Hachette UK

About this ebook

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

About the author

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.