Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Previously Unpublished Stories was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1997, and it collects twenty pieces — stories and essays — that had fallen through the cracks of Ellison’s other collections, along with several previously unpublished works. The title refers to Ellison’s sense that time was slipping away — that the stories he had not yet collected might be lost if he did not gather them — but it also captures a recurring theme: the slippage between what we intend and what we achieve, between the world we inhabit and the world we imagine.
“Mefisto in Onyx” is the collection’s centerpiece — a novella about Rudy Pairis, a Black telepath who is asked by a friend to enter the mind of a serial killer on death row to determine whether the man is truly guilty. What Rudy finds in the killer’s mind — and what the killer finds in Rudy’s — upends every expectation. The story won the Bram Stoker Award and is one of Ellison’s most accomplished longer works.
“The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” is a surreal fantasia in which an ordinary man walks through American history, witnessing key moments from the arrival of Columbus to the present, unable to intervene. The story is a meditation on the relationship between the individual and history — a subject that Ellison, as a writer who believed passionately in individual agency, found both fascinating and terrifying.
Collecting Slippage
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Signed copies: $40–$100