Everyone, it seems, has a Harlan Ellison anecdote.
Words that have been used to describe Ellison include angry. Genius. Jerk. Legend. “Sci-fi’s most controversial figure” (Wired). “A giant squeezed into a 5’5” frame” (Steven Barnes). “A parasite who can kiss my ass” (James Cameron). Ellison called himself “troublemaker, malcontent, desperado . . . a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket.” The advice “never meet your heroes” feels tailor-made for Ellison.
Yet he also had his good points. Ellison marched in Selma, Alabama with Martin Luther King, Jr. He let friends live in his house rent-free. He was fearless and passionate, a friend and mentor, a thorn in the side of censorship. George R.R. Martin remembered that he “fought for women’s rights and the ERA. He fought publishers, defending the rights of writers to control their own material and be fairly compensated for it. He served on the Board of Directors of the WGA. He gave of himself to Clarion [writers’ workshop], year after year.” Writers he championed—Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, Octavia Butler—became major literary players, making Ellison a sort of sci-fi Ezra Pound (without Pound’s troubling politics). Like most human beings, he was a mixed bag—yes, he was fractious and sometimes behaved very badly; at other times, he fervently advocated for and supported others (exception: that Fantagraphics defamation suit).
Harlan Ellison will be remembered for all these actions, righteous and reprobate, and for his work, which was voluminous: novels, short stories, essays, screenplays, comic books. The man even voice-acted. And it wasn’t simply voluminous; it was pioneering. His 1967 story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” described an AI supervillain seventeen years before Skynet (and 55 years before ChatGPT). “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” won the 1965 Nebula Award and the 1966 Hugo Award, one of only twelve stories to win both since 1953, the first year of the Nebula. (Ellison did it again in 1977/1978 with “Jeffty Is Five.”) The Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which he wrote, is widely considered the pinnacle of the original series. His collection of TV criticism, The Glass Teat, still holds up despite its 1970 release date. “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” was included in The Best American Short Stories 1993.
Most of all, he will be remembered for editing two anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), which together heralded the so-called New Wave of science fiction. And he will be remembered for The Last Dangerous Visions, a collection he said would be published “approximately six months” after the second one. It actually appeared on October 1, 2024, fifty-two years after promised and six years after Ellison’s death, edited by his longtime friend, writer and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski.
We’ll come back to that.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, American literature changed quite a lot. The “genteel” realism and naturalism of the nineteenth century gave way to modernism, which “sought to break away from ordinary social values.” World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, Freudian psychology, the rise of fascism—these were destabilizing events, and they forever changed authorial voices. America had never before seen writers such as Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Richard Wright gave us Native Son and Black Boy, both of which depicted racism in ways the white reading public had never witnessed. The Beat Generation—Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs—represented another avant-garde flowering, as did Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers.
Science fiction, however, had remained largely static, sticking to the pure entertainment of the genre’s Golden Age: plot-heavy narratives, clear heroes and villains, cursory characterization, space opera, high technology. Writing in the Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, Darren Harris-Fain observed that “American SF remained rather conservative from the late 1920s through the 1950s, seemingly unaffected by the formal experimentation associated with literary and artistic modernism.” This all changed in the 1960s with the so-called New Wave. There were still astronauts and aliens, but, as literary fiction had done half a century earlier, the focus of many stories had turned inward. Writers felt freer to integrate more earthbound horrors like depression, violence, drug abuse, prejudice, and dystopian governments. They also began experimenting stylistically through wordplay, mixed-up chronologies, and unreliable narrators.
It was into this milieu that the first Dangerous Visions appeared.
Consisting of thirty-three never-before-published stories, DV, as fans call it, had a singular ethos, described by Ellison in the oft-quoted opening of his introduction: “What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution.” Ellison had been writing speculative fiction, as he preferred to call science fiction, for about a decade, so he knew what editors were looking for. He wanted a collection of stories that were genre-popping, boundary-pushing, taboo-incinerating—in short, and to use his word, “unpublishable.” To that end, he courted writers who were both new voices (Carol Emshwiller, John Sladek, Sonya Dorman) and established craftsmen at the top of their game (Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Lester del Rey).
Reviews, as you can imagine, were mixed. Critics tended to think the revolutionary aspect of the book was overblown. Algis Budrys called it “hoohah.” For P. Schuyler Miller, the book “doesn’t live up to its billing.” Judith Merril wrote that “Ellison’s New Thing resembles to a great degree the same New Thing Anthony Boucher and J.F. McComas brought into s-f in 1949.” (She also wrote “I wish this book had had an editor for the editor,” a one-liner worthy of Dorothy Parker.) Yet all conceded that many stories were well done, and that a few were outstanding.
Awards committees agreed. Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” won a Hugo, while Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah . . .” won a Nebula. “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber won both, for Best Novelette. It’s one of my favorites, a cheeky take on the trope of gambling against Death, in a world that resembles ours, but only kinda. In addition to the general introduction, Ellison wrote a gossipy preface for every story. He also cajoled each author into writing an afterword, which was overkill. (Fiction doesn’t benefit from the same framework as a graduation speech: tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, then tell ’em, then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em.)
Five years later, in 1972, Again, Dangerous Visions was released. This time, there were forty-six writers, none of whom had appeared in the first book. The second volume was longer than DV, exceeding the former’s 520 pages by over 50 percent. (Incredibly, you can find the whole thing online, free of charge.) There was the same mix of obscure and prominent authors, though the Big Names this time around seemed bigger: Ray Bradbury, James Sallis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Moreover, the tone is different. Ellison’s introduction to DV, though written in his trademark gamboling style, had been a manifesto. By contrast, his Again, Dangerous Visions introduction reads like a bad movie sequel: bloated, self-parodic, and headache-inducing. Here, for instance, is how he describes his agent, Larry Ashmead: “I am too much the gentleman to comment on the history of congenital insanity in the Ashmead ancestry, save to report Larry is inordinately proud of a spinster Ashmead aunt who was said to have had repeated carnal knowledge of a catamaran, and a paternal great-grandfather who introduced the peanut-butter-and-tuna-fish ice cream sundae in the Hebrides.”
Weird.
The focus, of course, must be on the stories, and as with DV, there are some stellar ones. Vonnegut’s “The Big Space Fuck” is both knife-like political satire (“In 1977 it became possible in the United States of America for a young person to sue his parents for the way he had been raised”) and Douglas Adams-esque comic sci-fi. “With a Finger in My I” by Star Trek veteran David Gerrold is the best description of a mental breakdown I’ve ever read. And Gahan Wilson’s story, whose title is a literal black blob (check it out, page 427), is the world’s first amalgam of H.P. Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse.
(An aside: it amazes me that Stephen King doesn’t appear in Again, Dangerous Visions. In 1967, he had published a single story, “The Glass Floor,” so it’s unsurprising he didn’t make the first book. By 1972, however, there was “Graveyard Shift,” one of his most famous stories; “I Am the Doorway,” “Night Surf,” “The Mangler,” “Battleground,” and “Suffer the Little Children,” all of which would appear in his later anthologies; and “The Dark Man,” whose titular character would morph into Randall Flagg, the big bad of The Stand. King revolutionized horror fiction. Hell, he revolutionized publishing. His absence? Embarrassing.)
Death does not respect ambition. This is as true of writers as of anyone else. When a writer turns that last page, it falls to those who stay behind to sort out the literary legacy. In some cases, this includes unfinished series. Thus, Jody Lynn Nye collaborated on, and then continued, Robert Asprin’s Myth Adventures series. Frank Herbert’s series of Dune books was concluded by his son Brian along with Kevin J. Anderson (though fans have mixed opinions on the later books). Brandon Sanderson finished Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (three books, 2,500 pages).
Harlan Ellison’s ambition had been two-thirds realized by Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. His introduction to the latter made clear that he was already working on a third and final volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, which would include stories—and full-length novels!—by Clifford Simak, Fred Saberhagen, Anne McCaffrey, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, and many other luminaries. Over the next few years, Ellison made public proclamations about the size and scope of TLDV. In February 1974, for example, according to Christopher Priest’s tell-all “The Last Deadloss Visions” (later published in paperback as The Book on the Edge of Forever), Ellison told the fanzine The Alien Critic that there would be 78 stories totalling 491,375 words, “with Preface, Forewords, Afterwords, Introduction, etc., yet to be added.” Priest comments, “Assuming that the non-fiction matter still amounted to 110,000 words, the book has now reached over 600,000 words in prospect: equivalent to seven and a half normal-length novels.” By the late 1970s, the book was several years late, but it looked like it would still happen. Eventually, however, most people gave up. Some treated TLDV as a running joke. For others, like Priest, its absence stung.
Enter J. Michael Straczynski.
In February 2011, Ellison, age 76, asked Straczynski to be his literary executor. He had been unwell for a couple of years, writing little, spending days in bed, binge-watching TV (an irony, considering how he savaged the medium in The Glass Teat and its sequel, The Other Glass Teat), and evincing little of his legendary fire. Antidepressants helped for a while, but then he suffered a series of strokes. He died in his sleep on June 28, 2018 from pulmonary arrest.
Once Straczynski assumed control of Ellison’s estate, TLDV became his priority. He worked on the book for years, neglecting his own writing to do so. Why had Ellison never completed it? The answer is complicated. Straczynski addresses it in a 56-page “Ellison Exegesis,” in which he reflects on the man and his legacy. Now that the book is finally here, what’s it like?
Well, it’s not like it would have been in 1973, obviously. Some of the authors whose stories he bought have passed away. Others got tired of waiting and asked for their stories back, a request Ellison usually honored. Straczynski worked with what was left, eliminating outdated stories and adding a few contemporary ones. He wrote introductions to each story, as is the DV way, and he also wrote the afterwords, each in the present tense, even for stories that were part of the original TLDV. Thus: “Edward Winslow Bryant, thirty, lives in Denver, Colorado.” In fact, Bryant died in 2017. He was 71.
Reviews of the book, of which there aren’t many, have been, of course, mixed. (“Mixed” is inevitable with Harlan Ellison.) Fantasy Literature calls it “meh” and “predictable.” Review site Looking for a Good Book, declared that it is “of high caliber and great reading.” Publishers Weekly thinks that TLDV “fulfills the series’ mandate to present ‘cutting-edge stories that spoke to our humanity in all its flaws, faults, and glories.’” My view is that, in 2024, not much feels “dangerous,” fiction-wise. Some of these stories, however, certainly grabbed (and held) my attention.
I was fully into Richard Peck’s “None So Deaf,” a contribution to the original TLDV, after two sentences: “Warren Patterson could hear. He could hear because he was deaf.” If you know Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series, you know that Harry has Wizard’s Sight, the ability to see a person’s essence behind their facade. Patterson is like that, but with sound. Steve Herbst’s “Leveled Best,” another original selection, follows the travails of a person jailed for possessing contraband books. It isn’t preachy or heavy-handed, and it’s a story that seems more urgent now than in 1973. “After Taste” by Cecil Castellucci is a new story, and its premise—a galactic food critic sampling alien cuisine—made me ask, “How has nobody thought of this in a hundred years of science fiction?” I said these words aloud. In fact, I shouted them.
Finally, a word about Kayo Hartenbaum’s “Binary System.” In honor of Ellison’s habit of paying literary success forward, Straczynski held a contest for a single story slot. Hartenbaum had the winning entry, an account of a lightship keeper, which is basically a lighthouse keeper in space. Not much happens in the story, though it’s well done, the language crisp, the narrator likable. The premise of being stranded, isolated and alone, has been used many times—see Cast Away, The Martian, the Black Mirror episode “Beyond the Sea,” and so on. The difference is that, in these instances, the outcast is trying to get home. Hartenbaum’s narrator volunteered to be cut off from humanity, removed from society, left entirely to their own devices… If that isn’t a dangerous vision, I don’t know what is.
In addition to a Harlan Ellison anecdote, everyone has a favorite story from the original Dangerous Visions or Again, Dangerous Visions. Which ones do you like? If you have read The Last Dangerous Visions, what are that collection’s best entries?
