Steven Jay Cohen

• Biography

  Steven Jay Cohen has been telling stories his whole life, and has worked professionally as a storyteller since 1991. A classically trained actor, he has worked both on stage and behind the microphone for most of his career. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Steven now resides in scenic western Massachusetts.

• Connect

  Sign up and keep informed of the latest on Steven Jay Cohen and Blackstone Publishing

  Email* Person CID Person Name

  Sign Up

• Praise for Books

  “These are not stories that should be forgotten; and some of you are about to read them for the first time…I envy you.” —Neil Gaiman, #1 New York Times bestselling author of American Gods 

  “Harlan was not just a great fantasist and/or science fiction writer; he was a great writer, period. When he was at the top of his form, from the late 60s through the 70s and well into the 80s, there was no finer short-story writer in all of English literature.”  —George R. R. Martin

  “Robots through the Ages is pure science fiction gold. Classic and new stories filled with weird science, adventure, wild twists, and awesome fun! Silverberg and Schmidt have a winner here!” —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author

  “A stellar assembly of impressive talent…A must-read for genre fans.” —Publishers Weekly

  “You should buy this book immediately, because this is a book that knows perfectly that you are seething inside.” —Algis Budrys, winner of the Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement in Speculative Fiction

  “Robert Silverberg and Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s anthology is an indispensable collection of stories about Robots through the Ages. The reader receives a terrific overview of the history of robot tales from such stories as Jack Williamson’s ‘With Folded Hands,’ which grows more chilling and prophetic by the day; Robert Silverberg’s masterful Nebula-Award winning tale of robots and ‘Good News from the Vatican’; and Connie Willis’s amusing mystery that presents an intriguing ‘Dilemma’ to Isaac Asimov and a coterie of robots. At the same time, this book offers the joy of discovering never-before-published gems by writers like Seanan McGuire and Ken Scholes. This is a delightful and informative book for anyone interested in robotics, AI, or science fiction.” —Sheila Williams, Hugo-winning editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

  “This anthology has been a shibboleth of a book, a phantasm from the mind of the late Ellison…SF readers will be captivated by this collection.” —Library Journal

  “In his stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things that horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives…Most of all, we sense outrage and anger—as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic.” —Stephen King

  “Robots through the Ages ponders questions that arise in the face of evolving innovation, including how technology has changed over time.”  —NPR’s Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson

  “A worthy capstone to Ellison’s monumental legacy.” —Booklist

  “Categories are too small—even the catch-all category of science fiction—to describe Harlan Ellison. Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, one-line comedian, purveyor of pure horror and of black comedy; he is all these and more.” —Washington Post

  “You might know the reveal, but how it all comes together is fascinating.”  —The RetroRockets Podcast

  “A furiously prolific and cantankerous writer [who] looked at storytelling as a ‘holy chore,’ which he pursued zealously for more than sixty years. His output includes more than 1,700 short stories and articles, at least 100 books, and dozens of screenplays and television scripts…ranked with eminent science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.” —New York Times

  “Sci-fi nerds and robotics geeks will find joy in this collection. The anthology includes a wide variety of robot tales. Silverberg and Schmidt do a great job of showing trends and attitudes toward the subject through history. They have selected stories about the fear of new technology as well as incorporating robots and AI into our daily lives.” —San Francisco Book Review

  “Harlan Ellison was, after all, one of the most interesting humans on Earth. He was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction writers alive. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, lectured to college kids, visited with death row inmates, and once mailed a dead gopher to a publisher. Ellison brought a literary sensibility to sci-fi at a time when the entire establishment was allergic to any notion of art. To say he was one-of-a-kind would be trite, and he would likely hate that. What he was, was a legend.” —NPR

  “There’s a real power to the way he uses the language and how he draws pictures in your mind.” —Ron Moore

  “You see Ellison’s unswerving social conscience throughout his fiction and critical essays…forcefully and eloquently—and at some length—lamenting the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and railing against the scourge of misogynistic ‘knife-kill’ films.” —RogerEbert.com

  “The words—there is an attention to the words. There is an attention to the sound of the words. You’re reading them in your head, and they sing.” —Neil Gaiman

  “The spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural  warehouse for a mind.” —New York Review of Books

  “Feisty, furious, yet extraordinarily kind and generous; Harlan Ellison was one of a kind.” —Leonard Maltin

  “Harlan Ellison—terrific prose, razor-sharp intellect, pulp gut punches and invention when needed, terse poetics…An original.” —Guillermo del Toro

  “An original and valuable writer…A twentieth-century Lewis Carroll.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, stand aside. Harlan Ellison is now a better short-story writer than you will ever be again during the rest of your lives.” —Ray Bradbury

  “The incredible Harlan Ellison writes as if an inner fuse is about to blow before he can get all the words on his pages.” —Anne McCaffrey

  “He doesn’t write like anybody else. What emerges is a surprising, eclectic, almost protean series of visions, often disturbing, always strongly felt.” —Michael Crichton

  See All +See Less -

• 

  • The Last Dangerous Visions

  • Edited by Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski

    Stories by Max Brooks, James S. A. Corey, Cory Doctorow, Cecil Castellucci, and various authors

    Read by various narrators

  • Release Date: 10/01/24

  • Formats: Hardcover, Trade Print ARC, Trade Paperback

  An anthology more than half a century in the making, The Last Dangerous Visions is the third and final installment of the legendary science fiction anthology series.

  In 1973 celebrated writer and editor Harlan Ellison announced the third and final volume of his unprecedented anthology series, which began with Dangerous Visions and continued with Again, Dangerous Visions. But for reasons undisclosed, The Last Dangerous Visions was never completed.

  Now, six years after Ellison’s passing, science fiction’s most famous unpublished book is here. And with it, the heartbreaking true story of the troubled genius behind it.

  Provocative and controversial, socially conscious and politically charged, wildly imaginative yet deeply grounded, the thirty-two never-before-published stories, essays, and poems in The Last Dangerous Visions stand as a testament to Ellison’s lifelong pursuit of art, uniting a diverse range of science fiction writers both famous and newly minted, including Max Brooks, Edward Bryant, Cecil Castellucci, James S. A. Corey, Howard Fast, P. C. Hodgell, Dan Simmons, Robert Sheckley, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mildred Downey Broxon, and Cory Doctorow, among others.

  The historic publication of The Last Dangerous Visions completes the long-awaited final chapter in an incredible literary legacy.

  • The Last Dangerous Visions

  • Edited by Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski

    Stories by Max Brooks, James S. A. Corey, Cory Doctorow, Cecil Castellucci, and various authors

    Read by various narrators

  • Release Date: 10/01/24

  • Formats: Hardcover, Trade Print ARC, Trade Paperback

  Learn More
• 

  • Dangerous Visions

  • Edited by Harlan Ellison

    Stories by Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, and various authors

    Foreword by Isaac Asimov

    Read by various narrators

  • Release Date: 3/26/24

  • Formats: Hardcover, Trade Print ARC, Trade Paperback

  WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY PATTON OSWALT

  Dubbed “the most significant and controversial SF book” of its generation, Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking collection launched an entire subgenre: New Wave science fiction. With contributions from legendary authors and multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Dangerous Visions returns to print in a stunning new edition perfect for new and returning fans alike. 

  A landmark short story collection that put the more character-based New Wave science fiction on the map, Dangerous Visions won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many others. This now-classic anthology includes thirty-three stories by thirty-two award-winning authors, over half of whom have won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Contributing authors include: Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and Ellison himself.

  As relevant now as it was when first published, Dangerous Visions is a phenomenal collection that deserves a place on every bookshelf.

  • Dangerous Visions

  • Edited by Harlan Ellison

    Stories by Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, and various authors

    Foreword by Isaac Asimov

    Read by various narrators

  • Release Date: 3/26/24

  • Formats: Hardcover, Trade Print ARC, Trade Paperback

  Learn More
• 

  • Robots through the Ages

  • Edited by Robert Silverberg and Bryan Thomas Schmidt

    Introduction by Robert Silverberg

    Read by Leonard Nimoy, Stefan Rudnicki, Jesse Vilinsky, Bronson Pinchot, Jim Meskimen, Peter Ganim, James Anderson Foster, Neil Hellegers, John Pirhalla, Steven Jay Cohen, Matt Godfrey, Noah Michael Levine, Dan Bittner, Scott Aiello, Tim Campbell, and Natasha Soudek

  • Release Date: 7/25/23

  • Formats: Hardcover, Trade Print ARC, Trade Paperback

  A remarkable collection, Robots through the Ages includes stories from some of the best writers of science fiction, both old and new.

  This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad—in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus “with minds and wisdoms”—humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce’s tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are—and who creates them—can be drastically different.

  This book collects a broad selection of short stories from celebrated authors such as Philip K. Dick, Seanan McGuire, Roger Zelazny, Connie Willis, and many more. Robots through the Ages not only celebrates the history of robots and the genre of science fiction, but the dauntless nature of human ingenuity.

  • Robots through the Ages

  • Edited by Robert Silverberg and Bryan Thomas Schmidt

    Introduction by Robert Silverberg

    Read by Leonard Nimoy, Stefan Rudnicki, Jesse Vilinsky, Bronson Pinchot, Jim Meskimen, Peter Ganim, James Anderson Foster, Neil Hellegers, John Pirhalla, Steven Jay Cohen, Matt Godfrey, Noah Michael Levine, Dan Bittner, Scott Aiello, Tim Campbell, and Natasha Soudek

  • Release Date: 7/25/23

  • Formats: Hardcover, Trade Print ARC, Trade Paperback

  Learn More

Coming Soon

Coming Soon

Coming Soon