Dangerous Visions

Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison (1967/2024 Blackstone Publishing eBook 772p)

 

Harlan Ellison was one of the semi-mythical SF writers I always read referenced and quoted growing up but almost never actually encountered in print. I think my first brush with his fiction was the 1980s Twilight Zone television adaptations of a couple of his short stories. He seemed to be highly regarded but his books simply didn’t seem to physically exist here in the days before online booksellers. One of his claims of fame was the creation of the Dangerous Visions series of so-called ‘New Wave’ science fiction anthologies. As a SF fan you’d read about all the controversies and battles Ellison encountered or indeed created and it left you wanting to see what it was all about. Unique among Ellison’s output, Dangerous Visions always seemed to be in print in one form or another throughout its 57-year history but I never got hold of a copy until a few years ago when the SF Masterworks version came into my possession. I never got around to reading that copy before I had to pack up all my books and put them out of my own reach into storage.

Well-known SF alumni J Michael Straczynski and a couple of publishers seem to be on a mission to bring Harlan Ellison back into the public spotlight. All the Dangerous Visions series (including the 3^rd volume that was never published in the early 1970s for reasons that remain unclear) are being republished in new editions and a new collection of Ellison’s short stories (Greatest Hits) has recently been released.

I picked up the Kindle version of the new Dangerous Visions edition and my first surprise is that it contains the full text of ALL the previous editions’ wordy introductions – there’s quite a lot to wade through before you even reach Ellison’s original intro and eventually the 33 stories themselves.

There’s a quite a variety of writers on offer in this volume, some who were already established big names in the field at the time and others who were just up-and-coming and went on to find later fame or infamy. Some disappeared without a trace and seem to be to be eternally associated with the ‘New Wave’ era.

I’m not going to review all the individual stories in this book, some made little impact on me and I’ve now (several weeks after I finished it) already forgotten the finer details. Others switched on a light bulb in my head and produced a desire to read more.

Even with so many stories, Ellison’s words somehow dominate this work – he introduces each story with his trademark half-smug, half-humble style. Sometimes he gets a little much but his little snippets of biographical information on the authors and how he relates to them are on the whole a valuable addition.

I was born just a few years after this book was published and this makes it something of a historical item to me – the attitudes and social upheavals of 1960s America (as most of the authors in here are Americans) are reflected in most of these supposedly ‘dangerous’ short stories. There’s a certain ‘cringe’ factor to a lot of this material for those of us who grew up later and that makes my personal appreciation of it a little more difficult. Racial and sexual issues seem to dominate the ‘dangerous’ side of things, sometimes buried deep behind SF analogies, so be aware this is a very much a period piece.

Some of the stories which have become celebrated later (like Philip Jose Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage) really didn’t work well for me and I was often tempted to skip them completely after a mental bad taste started developing in my mind. Maybe that says more about my own current 2020s personal attitudes and tastes than the quality of the writing here.

A few stand-outs in my opinion include the ever-reliable Philip K. Dick’s Faith of Our Fathers which may have been original here but I’m sure was later included in his 5-volume short story collection. Its very clear and polished, standing out from the murk of some of the surrounding stories. Yes, it contains all the sixties obsessions – drugs, the cold war, race and religion but here put together in an entertaining and intriguing form.

For novel and amusing ideas, Brian Aldiss’ The Night That All Time Broke Out takes the cake with its story of time being distributed via reticulated means and becoming a metered commodity – something which can of course go horribly wrong.

I recently was alerted to the existence of David R. Bunch’s Moderan stories by the excellent “Book Pilled” YouTube channel. These are represented here by Incident in Moderan, set in a possible future earth where the dominant species are emotionless cyborgs who wage war on each other as a sport and are bemused by the few remaining humans and their struggle to survive the conflicts.

Jame Cross’ The Doll-House is not really SF at all, instead a fantasy of the ‘be careful what you wish for’ kind. A financially stressed businessman gets desperate and turns to the fantastic for help with all usual consequences you might expect from such a tale.

I won’t go on much further, simply it’s a mixed bag. Not exactly the earth-shattering book you may have been led to expect but I’m glad I finally read it all the same.