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Harlan Ellison
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Approaching Oblivion Paperback – May 19, 2009

by Harlan Ellison (Author)
3.0 3.0 out of 5 stars 2 ratings
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The New York Times called him "relentlessly honest" and then used him as the subject of its famous Sunday Acrostic. People Magizine said there was no one like him, then cursed him for preventing easy sleep. But in these stories Harlan Ellison outdoes himself, rampaging like a mad thing through love ("Cold Friend", "Kiss of Fire", "Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman"), hate ("Knox", "Silent in Gehenna"), sex ("Catman", "Erotophobia"), lost childhood ("One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty") and into such bizarre subjects as the problems of blue-skinned, eleven-armed Yiddish aliens, what it's like to witness the end of the world and what happens on the day the planet Earth swallows Barbra Streisand. Oh yeah, this one's a doozy!
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  1. Print length
    204 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    e-reads.com
  4. Publication date
    May 19, 2009
  5. Dimensions
    5.51 x 0.47 x 8.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0759204292
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0759204294
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ e-reads.com (May 19, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 204 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0759204292
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0759204294
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.51 x 0.47 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.0 3.0 out of 5 stars 2 ratings

About the author

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Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison

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Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Harlan Jay Ellison (born May 27, 1934) is an American writer. His principal genre is speculative fiction.

His published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic book scripts, teleplays, essays, a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He was editor and anthologist for two science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). Ellison has won numerous awards including multiple Hugos, Nebulas and Edgars.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Pip R. Lagenta from San Mateo, San Mateo [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Thomas Parker
    3.0 out of 5 stars Uneven, but Worth Reading
    Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    This book collects eleven stories that were mostly written in the late 60's and early 70's. It was published in 1974, when Ellison's view of the world and of America was at a low ebb, as he makes clear in one of his patented in-your-face introductions. (Not many authors have the chutzpah to call their readers cowards and sell-outs and fools and...other words that start with f...) Like a lot of collections, it's an uneven affair. A couple of stories are so slight as to make you wonder why they were included at all, and several more are written at such a pitch of paranoid political and cultural rage (an Ellison trademark) as to be a bit embarassing now, forty years down the road. (Embarassing for the reader, that is - I'm sure Ellison would stand by them completely, and would hand a profanity-punctuated beating to anyone who suggested otherwise). But even weaker Ellison stories are still definitely live wires, and a few tales here are very fine, especially the autoboigraphical and deeply-felt One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty, in which a middle aged writer travels back in time to befriend a lonely, outcast little boy - himself, at the age of seven. With Harlan Ellison, you take the good with the bad; you'll find them, not just in the same book, but often in the same paragraph. You certainly can't snooze through his stories - alternately appaling and brilliant, they're never a waste of time.
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  • Jonathan "WorldsWithoutEnd dot com"
    3.0 out of 5 stars Bi-Polar Oddities
    Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2013
    Harlan Ellison is one of those writers I not only love to hate but hate to love. He is one of those irascible writers who will permit no criticism of his work to sink in to any depth of his soul. He is also one of those wildly creative writers who is inexplicably able to form fictional worlds entirely different from one another in both setting (hard enough) and tone (nearly impossible). His progressivist politics and often blasphemous hatred of religion infuriates me, but in a seven page tour of a dying earth he can reduce me nearly to tears. Ellison has developed a powerful level of artistic talent, and he is not someone to be taken lightly. Many of the videos of the man one can find online too often depict him simplistically as an old crank--which, to be sure, he is--but this can scarcely explain the stories that could only come from a soul which feels deeply.

    Too often Ellison's wrath gets the better of him. "Knox," the first story in this collection, concerns a liberal's wet dream of a conservative racist party turning violent and creating what amounts to a police state. Does Charlie Knox hate every person who is not wholly like himself, or is it truly himself that he hates?, Ellison asks, rather uninterestingly. The way in which Knox memorizes and recites his list of racial slurs might be revelatory in subtler hands, but with Ellison it comes off as a paranoid delusion. The great irony, though, is that Knox is revealed in the end to be telepathically manipulated by alien invaders who wish to destroy our civilization. The worst irony is that Ellison probably didn't understand the irony at all.

    Other times Ellison's penchant for wallowing in the bizarre and perverse gets the better of him, as in "Catman." This is the story--if an incoherent narrative set in a incohesive future world can be called a story--which would be better left on the cutting floor, but which (I suspect) Ellison furiously refused to trash simply because a friend recommended that course of action. One wonders if he wrote this story about freakishly Oedipal, immortal, machine-humping characters on a dare. There are discrete elements of creativity within the story that would be the envy of science fiction masters, but which are smashed together with such violence as to nullify any spark of humanity. The less said about it the better.

    Even so, there are stories here which are worth tracking down at any cost. "Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman" is astoundingly different from Ellison's usual approach, being the story of a saxophone player grieving for a dead lover, and his attempt to reach her beyond the grave. "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" is a nostalgic look back at the influences that make us what we are as adults, and is haunting enough that I can forgive the time-travel conceit (well, a bit). "Hindsight: 480 Seconds" is a wistful look back at the Earth humanity is leaving behind, wondering what we could have done better, and what we still might. These are the stories which make one suspect Ellison of a secret lycanthropic condition: the moon is new, and darkness consumes his soul; it is full, and he sees all the beauty of the night; it wanes, and he sleeps.

    I don't know what to make of this collection. It is distinctively bi-polar, and one must use discretion in approaching its individual parts. I suppose I must recommend it, but with all the cautions listed above intact. Ellison is a wild beast, but now and then you may find him in a sanguine, or at least tolerable, mood.
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