Ellison Wonderland

By: Harlan Ellison, Josh Olson - afterword

Narrated by: Gabrielle de Cuir, Richard Gilliland, Alex Hyde-White, Jim Meskimen, Arthur Morey, full cast

Originally published in 1962 and updated in later decades with a new introduction, Ellison Wonderland contains 16 masterful stories from the author's early career.

This collection shows a vibrant young writer with a wide-ranging imagination, ferocious creative energy, devastating wit, and an eye for the wonderful and terrifying and tragic. Among the gems are "All the Sounds of Fear", "The Sky Is Burning", "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman", and "In Lonely Lands". Though they stand tall on their own merits, they also point the way to the sublime stories that followed soon after and continue to come even now, more than 50 years later.

©1962, 1974, 1990, 2002 Harlan Ellison (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc., and Skyboat Media, Inc.

The first Ellison I've read... did not disappoint!

Smooth, smart, engrossing speculative fiction. I can't wait to read more by him. Fantastic narration. Lots of grins. Highly recommend. 5 stars!!!

Not Stories: self-aggrandizing Essays about himself

This book is largely a series of very long, self-aggrandizing and rambling statements/essays from Harlan - bit stories. He talks a LOT about how he doesn’t drop names or tell stories and then proceeds to drop every name of every famous person he ever met or with whom he even corresponded. It’s sometimes funny. But we - the readers - really only needed to hear it all once.

He will tell you that he infuriated a good friend by refusing to tell which famous person invited him to a party - only to then talk all about his good friend Kurt Vonnegut or how he met whitey bulger, the famous mobster.

But to be fair - he does tell you that he is a professional liar. I don’t know what to make of it.

The best part of this book was Ellison’s diatribe.

It is supposed to be an introduction but it takes
up nearly half the book. Just listening to him unleash his unrestrained stream of consciousness, exposing so many people who had done the dirty on him 40, 50, 60 years ago, with unrestrained wit & vitriol, is hysterically funny and better than the rest of the book.

As Josh Olson says, the stories are early, formative, light & fluffy short stories, written by a young man.
The are like listening to “She Loves You”, when you know “Sgt. Pepper’s” is in the future.

Seriously though, this whole book is worth buying, just for the glimpse into what Harlan would have been like, if he was your friend and you were sitting around having drinks while he told anecdotes about his life.
Such an insight.

Good listen...it's just that...

...I just can't stand the sound of Scott Brick. It must be a regional accent or the inflection. Scott can make a good book terrible. Just my viewpoint.

Harlan was truly one of a kind.

Great stories, but my favorite part is Harlan’s 45,000 word introduction, read by the author. It’s worth the price of admission alone.