The last dangerous visions
Edited by Harlan Ellison
Blackstone, 450 pages, $27.99

I BECAME A FAN OF HARLAN ELLISON long after his heyday, long after he had established himself not only as an exceptionally good science fiction writer, but also as a funny, unreasonable, ambitious, prolific asshole. Therefore, from where I sat, the saga of the notoriously unfinished third volume of his so-called trilogy of seminal speculative fiction anthologies, The last dangerous visions (after the truly influential and genre-changing Dangerous visions (1967) and Again, dangerous visions (1972)), was over. All anyone could do by the time I came along was wonder what had happened, and trace the development and crumbling of this book through Ellison’s own periodic references to it in his various columns and essays.

The first story I read about the infamous unfinished third volume (which was once intended to be a multi-part affair) and what happened behind the scenes was The book on the edge of forever (aka The last deadly visions) by the late Christopher Priest. Priest was approached by Ellison to write a story The last dangerous visionswhich he did, but years passed without any progress being made in the book. For Priest, this was such a frustrating period that he, and others, felt there was a certain unfairness at play. The long essay he wrote, supported by comments from other irritated writers, was far from flattering to Ellison. When I read what Priest wrote, I had to admit it looked bad. It seemed like Ellison had bitten off far more than he could chew, and instead of admitting it and throwing in the towel (he allowed many writers, including Priest, to take back their stories to be published elsewhere, although other writers, loyal to Ellison, died without ever seeing the stories they submitted published anywhere), he instead kept stringing everyone along, announcing new, impossibly longer versions of this final book until eventually all the announcements simply stopped , because everyone knew the book would never be completed, and therefore it would never be published.

Well, now it’s here, courtesy of Blackstone Publishers. Ellison died in 2018, and his wife, Susan, died in 2020, leaving the estate in the hands of Ellison’s close friend, the writer J. Michael Straczynski. As executor of the will, he took on the task of completing the city’s great, unfinished project The last dangerous visions. He whittled down the number of stories Ellison had bought for the book (in his introduction to the new book, Straczynski writes that Ellison bought stories like other people buy potato chips) to those that seemed worthwhile. Not only for Straczynski, but also for Ellison. The two writers spoke often about all aspects of the project, including the stories Ellison had purchased from friends that simply weren’t good enough and couldn’t be made good enough (of course, these stories and writers remain unnamed). Straczynski also organized an open call for stories from new writers, something Ellison himself had done for the previous two volumes. The idea behind these anthologies was to expand the possibilities of speculative fiction, to encourage even old professionals to write the kinds of stories they’d always wanted to write but were put off by a skittish market. If they had a story to tell that could be considered shocking or “dangerous” in some way, that they knew no other editor would touch, Ellison would do it. That also meant that new writers, with new ideas, had to be given a chance. In the two parts of Dangerous visions that Ellison was still alive, he kept the door open for many such writers. Straczynski did the same. The result is still a fairly large book, with a total of 31 stories.

Part

Before I get to the stories themselves, I should say that in Straczynski’s 60-page introduction to The last dangerous visionshe explains why Ellison was never able to complete it himself, and why his final years were so marred by the controversies and mini-scandals that seemed to follow him everywhere. Some, even many, of the problems Ellison faced in his later years, and in his quixotic attempts to finish The last dangerous visionswere of our own making. Straczynski does not excuse Ellison’s behavior. But he does explain it, and many pieces of Harlan Ellison’s life fall into place. Straczynski’s introduction is deeply moving (and sometimes angry) and would in itself justify the existence of this book. It all has a sad meaning.

So while Ellison is the only credited editor on this Last dangerous visions, and Straczynski’s meticulous details of how this last book came about show that most of the work was done by Ellison, Straczynski deserves no small amount of credit for his part in it all. The strangest thing about this book is how little of Ellison’s writing is actually present. One of his trademarks, as with the previous two volumes, was writing introductions, of varying length, to each story (and those books contained at least a few dozen stories each). Here only one story, Edward Bryant’s “War Stories,” includes an introduction by Ellison. It’s a short, funny intro, where Ellison and Bryant were good friends. And that’s it. It gives the book a slightly spooky feel.

The good news is that “War Stories,” for example, is great, exactly the kind of strange, bleak story that would have felt right at home in 1967 or 1972. To keep it simple, it’s a bit about sharks and espionage, and, in some vague sense, evolution. If I were to explain it in more detail it would sound absurd and comical. But although ‘War Stories’ is absurd, it is not comical in any way. It’s the kind of story that gets under your skin in ways that you, or at least I, can’t quite explain. It’s the kind of story that wouldn’t exist and would never exist if Bryant hadn’t written it.

NOT EVERY STORY IS AS SUCCESSFUL as Bryant’s. Max Brooks’ “Hunger” reads like a lecture, and “The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale – Hurry, Last Days!” by Stephen Dedman aims for humor and mistakes. But if nothing else, this speaks to the variety that all three have Dangerous visions books meant. Ellison’s conception of what speculative fiction could be seemed to encompass all genres. “War Stories,” for example, with its intelligent, vicious, and vengeful sharks, could almost qualify as horror. Science fiction horror, sure, but horror nonetheless.

The same goes for Robert Wissner’s ‘A Night at the Opera’. This story is about a composer named Reissen, who attends the premiere of his new opera. A young woman sits next to him and asks what to expect from the night. Reissen’s description of what is to come is a night of possible horror. The woman does not believe him, but the reader is meant to take his word for it. The story ends with the deadly potential of Reissen’s composition unfulfilled – or rather, unfulfilled yet– and so the reader is left to imagine what will happen in that opera house. But we know what to imagine because we have been told so.

The nature of all these stories as science fiction is vital to everything that happens in these pages, even if that facet of it is sometimes incidental (hence, I think, why Ellison could be so confused when he was described as ‘just’ a science fiction writer). While Cory Doctorow’s “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart)” is undeniably science fiction, there is no obvious reason why this story, about a life of addiction and crime that successfully faces rehabilitation, has to be a story. belongs completely to that genre. On the other hand, the two best stories in the collection, better even than “War Stories,” could only be understood as science fiction.

The first is “The Final Pogrom” by Dan Simmons. According to Straczynski’s notes, this story was written early in Simmons’ professional career. That career was started in large part by Ellison, who discovered Simmons at the 1982 Milford writing workshop where Ellison was teaching. Simmons delivered his now-classic horror story “The River Styx Runs Upstream,” Ellison chose it, and he helped Simmons launch a decades-long, hugely successful and respected career as a novelist working across many genres. “The Final Pogrom,” which is so striking and relevant that it feels like it could have been written this morning, is also something of a science fiction/horror hybrid, though the horror is historical rather than supernatural. In it, Simmons imagines Hitler’s Final Solution gaining a foothold in America (and eventually the rest of the world). At the end of the story, Simmons presents graphs detailing the Jewish population of each state, and how much of that population has been successfully removed. The rest of the story is alternately told through the eyes of a Holocaust survivor, who faces all this again, and the government bureaucracy that cold-bloodedly carries out their plans. It’s the story in it The last dangerous visions that disturbed me the most, made me so uncomfortable that I thought more people should read ‘The Last Pogrom’, that it might be important for people to do so.

Get a 30-day free trial

My other favorite story here is the one Straczynski himself commissioned: “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum. I found this story truly remarkable. Essentially plotless, “Binary System” is about a nameless keeper of a lightship (in this case, the science fiction equivalent of a lighthouse) and their lonely existence. The lightship keeper talks in detail about their isolation, why this kind of life is both amenable to them and potential (probablythey acknowledge) harmful. Hartenbaum’s gift for prose, coming from someone who has never been published before, is striking: the writing and imagining seem so easy in Hartenbaum’s hands. The story also contains a lot of humor, although for me the most important achievement of ‘Binary System’ is the construction of the narrator. You get the sense that Hartenbaum feels a strong affinity with the character and their desire for solitude. To be honest, so am I. But Hartenbum is not blind and does not present such an existence as some kind of obvious life goal. It’s presented as something to be both desired and feared, and the story appropriately ends with nothing resolved. Life goes on as usual.

On a fundamental level The last dangerous visions is only an approximation of what Harlan Ellison would have released had he been able to complete the project. But like Orson Welles’ last film, The other side of the windwhose editing was completed decades after the director’s death, an honest, good-faith approach is all we’ll get. And for that I am very grateful to J. Michael Straczynski, who did the hard work and put out a good book.