Edgeworks 1: Over the Edge/An Edge
in My Voice
Edgeworks 2: Spider Kiss/Stalking the Nightmare
I, Robot (screenplay)Edgeworks 1: Over the Edge/An Edge
in My Voice
Edgeworks 2: Spider Kiss/Stalking the Nightmare
I, Robot (screenplay)
Harlan Ellison.
The guy is amazing. I swear, I don't think that I know of another writer
anywhere who is as good at drawing out every bit and every variant of emotion
I can muster.
These two books are the first two books in what is to eventually be the complete collection of Harlan Ellison's works, published by White Wolf. I was loaned these by a friend who recommended them highly (thanks a lot, Rob!), and I ended up being forced to go shell out the cash to order all four that have currently been published from Amazon (thanks a lot, Rob. Thhppt.). All kidding aside, these books are worth it. Just a stylistic comment before I go into the real review: White Wolf has done an amazing job with the layout for this series. They are the kind of books that you will be proud to have on your bookshelf because they look absolutely amazing. You can't judge a book by its cover, but a damn nice cover never hurts.
OK, on to Edgeworks 1. The first half is a collection of assorted short fiction and essays, most of which are excellent - I am particularly fond of "Ernest and the Machine God". The second half is a collection of essays from the columns he wrote in Future Life and L.A.Weekly. They are all fascinating, entertaining, and above all, insightful.
Edgeworks 2 is similarly split into two halves. The first half, Spider Kiss, is an amazing novel about the rise of a rock and roll star in the vein of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. I never would have thought that anynovel about a rock star could hold my attention, but Spider Kiss enraptured me from the get go, with Ellison's amazing driving style holding me enthralled through the entire book. The second half is again a collection of stories and essays, all of which are fantastic. "The Three Most Important Things in Life" is particularly amazing- I don't think I've ever read anything that could take me from wild laughter to gut-wrenching chills to wild laughter so quickly.
Ellison is definitely not for the timid - his "I Have No Mouth and
I Must Scream" is still one of the most traumatizing stories I have
ever read - but he is a tremendously evocative writer with an unparallelled
grasp of the language (I have to read a lot of his stories with a dictionary
handy, and I have a large vocabulary). I have yet to find anything
he has written that doesn't leave me gasping for breath by the end - be
it in awe, laughter, horror, or dread.
As a writer of speculative fiction, Ellison may have a very few equals, but he has no betters. Thanks for real, Rob, and for all the rest of you, I highly recommend these books.
I had never read a screenplay before my friend Rob bought
this for me as a going away present. (Yes, I recently moved. No, I haven't
found my Superman under-roos. They're in the box in Bjorn's garage? Thanks!)
I have read all of Isaac
Asimov's robot stories and have read some of Harlan Ellison's short
stories, though not the complete works. So I was curious: how would the
rather eccentric Mr. Ellison do in adapting Asimov's robots to the screen?
Very well, I discovered.
I found reading a screenplay to be disorienting at first. The experience is something like reading a play, except there is more description of the scene and the angle of view and less dialogue than a play. The scenes also tend to be fairly short, with the screenplay comprised of 317 "scenes" (which counts different camera shots of the same action as it progresses). However, by about the tenth page I became comfortable with the style and stopped noticing the format and started concentrating on the story.
Ellison focuses on Susan Calvin, the brilliant woman robopsychologist behind the success of U.S. Robots Corp. By focusing on Calvin Ellison succeeds in tying several of Asimov's stories, which are all set in the same shared future, into a coherent whole. He actually creates a captivating backdrop to tie the sequence together and weaves stories which are very good but very simple (which is true of most of Asimov's work) into a more complex tapestry.
The edition also comes with an excellent forward by Ellison describing the saga which has prevented the script from being made into a movie. Mark Zug has provided some excellent drawings throughout, and 16 full color prints in the center of the book. Overall, I recommend the book for both veteran Asimov fans as a creative new slant on his work and for those who haven't read Asimov as an introduction to some of his work.
