The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison & J. Michael Straczynski: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
The Last Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison & J. Michael Straczynski, eds. (Blackstone 979-8-212-18379-6, $27.99, 450pp) October 2024.
Speaking of unusual ways to assemble an anthology, here we have The Last Dangerous Visions, nominally edited by Harlan Ellison, but also by Ellison’s executor J. Michael Straczynski, who added seven stories he solicited himself after Ellison’s death. By my count, nine of the 24 stories were among the nearly 90 listed in a table of contents that Ellison released in 1973; presumably the rest were acquired by Ellison sporadically over the next 40 years or so; a typed manuscript of a table of contents from 1979, reproduced in Straczynski’s Afterword, lists no fewer than 120 stories. (For purposes of counting, I’m treating a series of eight fragmentary “intermezzos” by D.M. Rowles as a single story). It’s long been well-documented that many of the stories were withdrawn by authors or their estates over the years, and Straczynski is quite up-front about admitting that other stories have aged badly and still others, some by Ellison’s own admission, should never have been bought in the first place. Since there seems to have been no final table of contents, that 1979 figure of 120 stories suggests that the present volume represents something like 15% of the volume that Ellison had been envisioning then.
So how should we approach such an anthology? A heroic act of literary archeology or just an unnecessary excavation? A partly restored lost masterpiece or a rummage sale? A classic Rolls or a refurbished ’73 GTO which seemed supercool back in the day and still sort of runs with replacement parts? Or, as Straczynski rather energetically insists in his 56-page introductory essay, an act of devoted friendship? None of that really matters, nor does the inevitable question of whether these stories, old or new, are really “dangerous” in any meaningful sense – even in Ellison’s 1967 original, that word was a bit of marketing hyperbole, though I did talk to a few writers from those first two anthologies who found Ellison’s invitation liberating. (Another typed page reproduced by Straczynski shows that Ellison rejected a few stories as “not dangerous,” which implies that he did have some sort of definition in mind, likely something as simple as potentially controversial – though what was controversial in 1973 can now seem almost quaint.) The question, as always, comes down to the quality of the stories, and that leads to another issue: Is it reasonable to compare archival stories written over a half-century ago with others commissioned or invited by Straczynski in the last couple of years? This gets even more complicated, since Straczynski makes it something of a challenge to figure out which stories were acquired when, let alone when they might have been written. Endnotes to the stories aren’t much help, since they often jumble verb tenses, as though partly written by Ellison decades ago and later completed by Straczynski. We’re told, for example that Stephen Robinett “is thirty-four and lives in Los Angeles”, with two novels published, but that “He will go on to publish more novels… before passing away on February 16, 2004, at the age of sixty-two.”
One approach might be to regard The Last Dangerous Visions as more a tapestry, assembled over decades, than a coherent anthology. Let’s start with those stories that were included in Ellison’s 1973 table of contents, and thus are over 50 years old. While some of these are dated in obvious ways – references to cutting-edge word processors, tape cassettes, coin-operated automats, etc. – some hold up pretty well. The best is Edward Bryant’s “War Stories”, which is also the only story for which Ellison’s original introduction is included. Combining dream imagery, surrealism, absurdist military/espionage satire, and hypnotically evocative prose, it’s a surprisingly contemporary-sounding consideration of (mostly) what it’s like to be a shark. The most effective fantasy story – in fact, one of the very few fantasies in the book – is Mildred Downey Broxon’s chilling “The Danann Children Laugh”, in which a nurse in rural 1916 Ireland comes across what seems like a nightmare of child abuse, but which later invokes Celtic changeling legends involving the Sidhe. Ward Moore’s “Falling from Grace” is a fairly amusing satire of how the affluent society of midcentury America is comically misremembered in a diminished future. On the other hand, Robert Sheckley’s “Primordial Follies” and A.E. Van Vogt’s “The Time of the Skin” seem to have dropped in from an even earlier era; the Sheckley displays his characteristic sharp wit in a tale of a massive primordial being trying to devour the universe but with some rather jarring old-school gender roles, while the Van Vogt is a fairly standard adventure involving body-shifting aliens hiding out in a pulp-era spaceport.
Of Straczynki’s own contemporary selections – a kind of mini-anthology on its own – there are strong contributions from Cory Doctorow, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and James S.A. Corey. Straczynski says that Corey’s “Judas Iscariot Didn’t Kill Himself: A Story in Fragments” might be the most actually “dangerous” story in the book, and he might be right: Its depiction of a cultlike group involved in “resheathing,” or taking on different bodies, not only raises questions of gender and racial identity, but of child abuse and the potential hazards of social media as well. Social media also figure significantly in Doctorow’s “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart)”, whose narrator is trying to rebuild a life with the aid of a counselor in a rehabilitation facility after having repeatedly damaged others in ways that aren’t immediately clear. Tchaikovsky’s “First Sight” is one of the more original first-contact stories I’ve seen in years, in which what appear to be minor mistakes in communicating with a remarkably stable culture leads to catastrophic results. Of the newer writers, Cecil Castelluci’s “After Taste” is another treatment of alien contact, in the story of an intergalactic food critic that isn’t quite as lighthearted as that sounds, while Kayo Hartenbaum – the winner of a sort of contest in which Straczynski briefly invited submissions by previously unpublished writers – offers an evocative exploration of isolation in “Binary System”, which is set on a remote “lightship” but otherwise might as well be about a lighthouse keeper.
The remaining stories, many of which are surprisingly short, are tonally all over the map. Jonathan Fast’s “The Malibu Fault” is a rather unpleasant class-warfare fable in which New Yorkers who have escaped to the West Coast are unnerved by the sudden arrival of the poorer folks they’ve left behind, while Dan Simmons offers an equally unsettling depiction of how modern technology might be used to stage a second Holocaust in the US, in “The Final Pogrom”. Steven Utley’s “Goodbye” is a slight but touching tale of a romance with a time traveler from the far future. In Stephen Dedman’s “The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale – Hurry, Last Days”, which Ellison apparently bought in 1990, a corporation sets about reincarnating historical figures into new bodies, with results about as playful and silly as its title suggests, while the oddest piece in the book is the lead story, Max Brooks’s “Hunger”, cast in the form of a threatening letter from China to the US President, which reads more like a New York Times op-ed piece than an actual story.
It’s fair to say that this version of The Last Dangerous Visions is unlikely to produce any classics like the award-nominated tales from Le Guin, Russ, Delany, Leiber, Dick, and Farmer that emerged from Ellison’s original volumes – but many of those were novelettes or novellas. Whether Straczynski simply opted for more and shorter stories, or whether some of the many longer stories listed in Ellison’s various tables of contents were no longer available or suitable, is unclear. It’s also unclear whether Straczynki’s own 76 pages of supplementary material – an introduction; a long essay called “Ellison Exegesis”, largely describing Ellison’s struggles with bipolar disorder; and a rather defensive account of how the book was assembled (including an ill-advised list naming diverse authors who were invited to contribute but didn’t) are the most helpful way of memorializing Ellison’s considerable original achievement. While there are some fine stories in The Last Dangerous Visions, and some that may evoke a degree of nostalgia among older readers, it may be that the book’s most immediate achievement is that it gives us permission to finally stop talking about it.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.
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