I always think it's funny when I read a collection of "all new" stories only to learn I've read over half of them already, but them's the breaks. :)

Maybe I shouldn't have been so dedicated in reading as many Harlan Ellison stories, huh!? Ah well, that's okay. He writes great shorts.

My Favorites were "From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet" - Super short stories for each letter of the alphabet.

"The New York Review of Bird" - a wonderful tribute (or otherwise) to Cordwainer Smith.

and especially "Seeing" - a pretty hard SF tribute to perception in all it's glories. :)

I might have enjoyed this collection better if I hadn't already read most. But again that's okay! It comes with the territory of shorts! ( )

“And reading is the drinking of strange wine.”
“Drinking strange wine pours strength into the imagination.”
“The dinosaurs had no strange wine.”

All the above quotes are from the Introduction, which is mostly about the evils of television, something I wholeheartedly agree with! And most of the author's introductions to each short story are pretty on-the-mark as well!

As for the stories...
This collection starts off well! I liked the first four stories right away, and five of the first six! "Killing Bernstein" may be my favorite of them! Then my enjoyment fell precipitously! Maybe four of the final nine held any entertainment value for me, with "Emissary From Hamelin" being the best of those four. The more sci-fi the stories became, the less I enjoyed them. But make no mistake, Ellison is an excellent writer! And he included one of may favorite quotes by Jack Kerouac in here, from "The Dharma Bums" -

“But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.” ( )

(Original Review, 1980-11-07)

I was reading a book by the name of 'Strange Wine' by Harlan Ellison recently. The book is very good, but that is not what I want to talk about. He has an introduction titled "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself." I would like to tell you a few things from this introduction. According to an HEW study, only 8% of the American population buy books (I wonder what those numbers are in Portugal). Furthermore, only 2% buy more than one book per year. Harlan once said, in front of a university audience, that he had thought up the words that Spock had said in a Star-Trek episode. A student jumped to his feet, with tears in his eyes, screaming that Harlan was a liar. The average American watches between 3-8 hours of TV PER DAY. In some of the lectures he gives at Universities, Harlan found this to be true in University audiences as well. Harlan tells about a friend of his who is a High School media teacher. She had students who would not read books because they were 'not real'. TV was considered real. She had normal 17 year old students who could not tell the difference between a TV dramatization and real life. She found that if she turned a TV monitor on in an unruly classroom, WITH NOTHING BUT SNOW ON THE SCREEN, that the entire class would quiet down and watch the screen. He tells about an experiment where a monitor was set up one side of a lecture hall and the lecturer stood on the other. The monitor carried a picture of the lecturer. Everyone watched the monitor. He tells about a case where a mother was being raped and her 7 year old child walked in. The rapist told the child to go watch TV. The child watched TV for 6 hours while his mother screamed repeatedly. I highly suggest reading the book, or at least the introduction. Perhaps the 'glass teat' is worse than we think.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] ( )

Like most short story collections, this one runs a bit hot and cold. If you are a fan of science fiction or fantasy, Ellison is a founding father. Most of what he does here has been done better by other authors since, but if you are at all interested in the roots of some of the primary ideas in the genre, Ellison is a must-read, an influence for an entire generation, from William Gibson to Stephen King. More even that the stories themselves, which run from didactic to entertaining to outstanding, Ellison's introductions to the stories are fascinating insights into everything from his writing process to the state of the 20th century publishing industry. ( )

this is rather a grab-bag anthology, but one does find some curious gems in these fifteen stories. I liked "Hitler Painted Roses", but more for the rant in the introduction than anything else. Your knowledge of Harlann Ellison is incomplete if you haven't read this book. ( )