Garishly, in big yellow letters on a bright red ground, the cover of a 2024 volume proudly announces itself to be The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison. But to understand why it isn’t even the book Harlan Ellison imagined, we need to look back, into the tangled history from which this volume emerges. It is the history not just of Harlan Ellison, or of the many writers who appeared—and very much did not appear—in his anthologies, but of science fiction itself.

There is an argument (to which I don’t subscribe) that the birth of science fiction can be traced back only as far as when it became self-conscious as a genre. In other words, science fiction sprang fully armed from the head of Hugo Gernsback in 1926. If, just for the sake of argument, we accept this preposterous notion, then the story I am about to tell occupies fully half of the entire history of science fiction. In fact, it fills more than half, since there is a good case for saying that this story began when Michael Moorcock took over the editorship of New Worlds in 1964, not quite forty years after Gernsback unleashed scientifiction on the world.

Moorcock’s New Worlds initiated a radical transformation in the character of science fiction, at least as it was being written in Britain, a transformation that Christopher Priest, in a review of the magazine, would christen a “new wave.” It was, when all is said and done, the 1960s, a moment when the postwar generation was finding as many ways as it could to turn against the dull, austere, conservative world of their parents. They voted out a tired Tory government; they wore jeans and sheepskin jackets rather than suits and ties; they listened to the Beatles and watched James Bond. And science fiction had to capture the zeitgeist also, so it was out with both the familiar Wyndhamite cosy catastrophe and the very conservative competent-man hard SF that came in from America. In their place, British new wave writing began to borrow from literary forms that had never previously troubled genre SF: modernism, the avant-garde, unreliable narrators, inner space, and the like.

None of this had much impact in America. They would become aware of the British new wave through Judith Merril’s anthology, England Swings SF (1968), but apart from those American writers temporarily resident in the UK—Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Samuel R. Delany—American science fiction continued to be dominated by the kind of Heinleinian work that would hardly have been out of place in the 1950s. Then along came Harlan Ellison who, for more than a decade, had been positioning himself as the radical enfant terrible of American science fiction. Perhaps, in the light of what was happening in Britain, he felt that his radical crown was in danger of slipping. Or perhaps he simply recognised that the angry new voice rising out of American youth—shouting out from anti-Vietnam War protests, from the new feminist movement, from the freedom riders standing up to southern racism, possibly even the first mutterings of what would in a year or two become the Stonewall riots—all of these voices needed to be heard in American science fiction also. However it emerged, Ellison lived up to his radical billing by beginning work, some eighteen months after Moorcock’s take-over of New Worlds, on what was probably the single most important anthology in the long and often sad story of American science fiction.

Believe me, it was obvious from the get-go who was endangered by 1967’s Dangerous Visions: everyone whose science fiction clung to the shibboleths of the past rather than the promise of the future. Science fiction in America (at once and by far the largest market and the largest manufactory for science fiction) did not trouble the censors: The censor did not need to lift a finger. American writers meekly conformed to the most conservative of social standards: no sex, no politics, no race, nothing that might upset the comfortable status quo. There was nothing adventurous or experimental in the writing, because that might disturb the horses. So, in the main, the science fiction that the American reading public encountered (and therefore, by default, what the SF reading public in the rest of the anglophone world encountered) was safe, bland, and predictable, with John W. Campbell’s invariably straight, white, and American men inevitably saving the day. It was this status quo ante that was put on the endangered list by the sudden eruption of Dangerous Visions.

What you got when Dangerous Visions appeared was thirty-three stories by thirty-two writers (uniquely, David R. Bunch had two stories in the collection). Three of these authors were British and already familiar names as part of the new wave that was occurring there: Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and John Brunner. But the rest were American, and in the main safe, well-established names, the names you’d have been comfortably encountering in any of the magazines of the time: Lester del Rey, Frederik Pohl, Robert Bloch, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson. These are not the sorts of names that one might have associated with a revolution—quite the contrary, they were the sorts of names that one might have turned to at the time for the safe and familiar and conservative tales that SF magazines had been turning out for the last twenty years or more. But this was a revolution, or so Ellison insisted in his introduction: “What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution.” This was a point that Isaac Asimov had already made in the first of his two forewords, “The Second Revolution,” and for once the hyperbole was only a little wide of the mark.

A second revolution? Inevitably (this is Asimov, this is America, this is science fiction before the big bang) the first revolution was Campbell, the Golden Age in which Campbell demanded real science and real stories. As a result, Asimov insists, “the real life of the Fifties and Sixties is very much like the Campbellesque science fiction of the Forties.” (I must have blinked and missed that.) And, Asimov persisted, Campbell’s goading meant that the writing of his proteges had got better and better, so they could go off and write other things. (It seems I blinked an awful lot.) And thus, so goes Asimov’s version of events, in the early sixties a new generation of science fiction writers emerged who were literally the children of Campbell’s revolution, and what Dangerous Visions was doing—all it was doing—was riding the crest of this wave that had arisen half a decade earlier in the pages of Galaxy.

I don’t think that Asimov understood what Dangerous Visions represented. I don’t think he ever got it. And since Ellison so proudly placed Asimov’s foreword right at the very start of his anthology, one has to ask whether Ellison himself really understood what he was doing. One hopes so, because he tells us it is “intended to shake things up,” but still so many of the writers who appeared in the anthology were indeed children of Campbell, they were the writers you would encounter in Galaxy and other magazines of that era. Yet what they were invited to contribute was work that would never have been accepted in those magazines, work that would have been (that indeed was) condemned by Campbell and his closest acolytes as practically the spawn of the devil. This wasn’t science fiction, they might have said; it was pornography.

Because what Ellison was telling his contributors, in effect, was that it was time to toss out all of the unspoken, self-applied censorship that had bedevilled their work to that point—that the social revolution then underway in America was to be reflected in the stories they wrote (“new stories, in a new mode” as he later put it). It wasn’t quite the new wave—the literary experimentation that was commonplace in New Worlds wasn’t part of the bargain—but, as Ellison explained in his introduction to Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers,” he was looking for “taboo subjects, [and] stories that would be difficult to sell to … the insulated specialist magazines of the science fiction field.” The basic instruction, in other words, was: Free your mind, there are no restrictions.

All of the contributors tried to live up to these instructions, they really did, though of course not all of them succeeded. Larry Niven—already known as a safe, conventional, hard-SF writer—concluded his so-so organlegger story, “The Jigsaw Man,” by saying: “I think I could have sold the story anywhere. But it will cause arguments, thus fulfilling the purpose.” I suspect he was right on one level: The story could have made an unexceptional and largely forgettable appearance in any of the SF magazines of the 1960s; but I don’t recall this, or any of the numerous other organlegger stories with which he followed it, provoking much in the way of argument.

On the other hand, Philip K. Dick lived in California, wrote about paranoia, and did drugs, which must have made him the next best thing to a hippy among the more traditional SF writers; but even he would have been unlikely to get away with a story in which the Eastern bloc won the Cold War and Mao was god anywhere other than in the pages of Dangerous Visions, at least not in the good ol’ USofA. If we are thinking about upsetting the political status quo, however, it is worth noting that, in his introduction to 1972’s sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, Ellison recounts a story that J. G. Ballard told. Ballard claims to have written “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” specifically for Dangerous Visions, but that it was rejected “on the grounds it would offend too many American readers.” (The story appeared in Ambit in autumn 1966, which just about fits within the timescale of the book.) Ellison himself claims that he never saw this story, but it must be said that the “condensed novel” feels like a much closer fit to the stated aim of Dangerous Visions than Ballard’s eventual contribution, “The Recognition”—which, as Ellison admits, “wasn’t in the same time-zone.” (The intended US edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, which was slated to include the JFK story, was pulped before publication in 1970 on the grounds that it would indeed offend American readers.)

Or there was Theodore Sturgeon, who was pretty widely known as a swinger and occasional nudist, but can you imagine even him getting away with a title like “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” anywhere else at the time? Sex, of course, was the greatest taboo of all in American SF. It was unthinkable to suggest that the great white American hero would indulge in such unspeakable activities, let alone take part in perversions. Yet in Dangerous Visions was to be found the wonderful “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” by Carol Emshwiller, one of only three women among the thirty-three contributors to this volume, because despite the ongoing sexual revolution, SF was still not seen as a place for women. In his introduction to the story, Ellison very carefully places her in a domestic context: “Levittown housewife—three kids, bad housekeeper, can cook if she makes the effort and now and then she does”; and the closest he comes to praising the story is to say it is “by no means a failure.” But this faint praise applies to one of the most remarkable stories in the anthology, one that would certainly never have appeared in any contemporary SF magazine, and that probably no male writer could have conceived: a female voyeur spying on the genitalia of her immensely fat neighbour. This is more likely to cause arguments than Niven ever could.

Sometimes the conceptual journey on which Dangerous Visions takes its readers seems to be played out in the pages of the book itself. Thus the anthology opened with a story by Lester del Rey, who sold his first story even before John W. Campbell came into his pomp. The story here, “Evensong,” begins—and hence the very first words of fiction we read in the book are—“By the time he reached the surface of the little planet, even the dregs of his power were drained.” Oh this is so familiar; we know exactly where we are because we have been there many times before. And though del Rey’s afterword tells us that the paraphernalia of science fiction is being used for the purposes of allegory, that hardly makes the story dangerous. But then the anthology ends with one of the younger writers gathered here, someone who was just coming into his pomp: Samuel R. Delany. And the first words of “Aye, and Gomorrah …” seem to echo the first of “Evensong” while at the same time twisting them so it takes us in a completely unfamiliar direction: “And came down in Paris:” The opening “And”, the final punctuation: that is not how science fiction was supposed to be written. The clean, simple, unfussy, transparent prose that was supposed to be used by everyone associated with science fiction had been discarded. And what was revealed by these jazzy chords? Good grief, was that overt sex? Was that homosexuality? The work of Sturgeon and Emshwiller and Delany was enough to make the maiden aunts of science fiction clasp their brows and call out for smelling salts. “Shame, shame on you!” as one reader wrote to Ellison. It may have passed Asimov by, but this was what Dangerous Visions was all about, this was what made it dangerous. Could the safe, familiar science fiction we had known for decades ever survive this onslaught?

For a time, at least, it seemed not. In the immediate aftermath of the anthology, stories that appeared there dominated the science fiction awards. “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip José Farmer was joint winner of the inaugural Hugo Award for Best Novella (with “Weyr Search” by Anne McCaffrey, as if the voters wanted to reassure people that conservative values hadn’t been entirely abandoned). The same work was also shortlisted, along with Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” for the Nebula Award. “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber won both the Hugo and Nebula Award for Best Novelette, with Dick’s “Faith Of Our Fathers” also making the Hugo shortlist. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah …” won the Nebula Short Story Award and was shortlisted for the Hugo, along with Niven’s “The Jigsaw Man.” And Ellison himself received a special citation at that year’s Worldcon which read: “To Harlan Ellison, Editor of ‘Dangerous Visions,’ the Most Significant and Controversial SF Book Published in 1967.”

More than fifty years on from all this, there are still stories from the anthology that feel fresh and important; but still more have not stood the test of time, and there were, inevitably in any anthology, a few stories that never did work. But at the time, Dangerous Visions was a dazzling intrusion into the all-too-often-monochrome world of American science fiction. In the years that followed, any number of new anthologies appeared that took the taboo-breaking of Dangerous Visions as the unquestioned benchmark against which all new fiction should be measured. In short, Dangerous Visions was important.

It also became a brand. In 1969, with Dangerous Visions appearing as a paperback in three volumes, Ellison wrote new introductions to volumes two and three. The introduction to volume three announced Again Dangerous Visions (no comma), which “I have been working on … for almost a year as I write this.” Given that this particular introduction is dated May 1969, it means Ellison must have begun work on Again, Dangerous Visions barely six months after the appearance of the original. It wouldn’t appear until 1972, and it made that first volume seem slim.

In the extended advertisement for his putative new anthology (it takes up more than half of the introduction to volume three of Dangerous Visions), Ellison listed fifteen writers who were due to appear in Again, Dangerous Visions. In a strange precursor to the ever-changing lists of contributors to The Last Dangerous Visions, two of these, Hank Davis and Graham Hall, did not make it into Again, Dangerous Visions. As it happens, both appear in a 1979 contents list for The Last Dangerous Visions, though neither are included in the anthology that has now belatedly appeared. They have, in effect, waited fifty-five years to not be published in an anthology. Two of the other authors listed as forthcoming have their names misspelled: “N. John Harrison” and “Greg Senford,” which suggests a haste or a carelessness about the thing. But then, I suspect that all this was by 1969 more about the prestige of the Ellison name and the Dangerous Visions brand than anything else.

When it did finally appear, three years later, Again, Dangerous Visions was indeed a prestigious project. It was the biggest SF anthology to have appeared by that date. Depending on how you counted it, there were forty-two or forty-six stories included (Gene Wolfe’s “Mathoms from the Time Closet” consists of three pieces, “Robot’s Story,” “Against the Lafayette Escadrille,” and “Loco Parentis”; Bernard Wolfe’s “Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations” consists of two pieces, “The Bisquit Position” and “The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements”; and James Sallis’s “Tissue” consists of “at the fitting shop” and “53rd american dream,” all in modish lower case). In truth, none of these fragments of story amount to very much, and in each case the whole is very much not greater than the sum of its parts. At the same time that “Mathoms” appeared, for instance, Gene Wolfe was already producing far more impressive work such as “The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories” and “The Fifth Head of Cerberus.” But in 1972, Gene Wolfe was very much a name you wanted to include in your anthology if you wanted to ensure that it was the place to be seen, and there was a whiff of experiment about the structure of “Mathoms” even if the quality wasn’t quite up to scratch.

So what was the idea behind this place to be seen? In his introduction (with the almost archetypal Ellisonian title, “An Assault of New Dreamers”) Ellison claimed that he “did not want to edit another Dangerous Visions.” I do not want to accuse Ellison of lying, but this claim doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. As noted above, he seems to have been at work on this successor volume within a few short months of the first anthology coming out, barely enough time for the reviews to appear, and certainly not enough time for the dominance of the awards ballots to be clear. It would be months after he began this sequel that Ellison received his special award. Most of the “dazzle and delight” engendered by that first volume would, by the very nature of things, have come after the point at which he assures us he began work on the sequel. This is not an editor being dragged unwillingly to his fate.

Echoing a then-recent television programme, Ellison tells us that the authors who appeared in Dangerous Visions “went where no one had gone before,” and that as a result they “managed to stand the field on its ear and alter its direction.” But if one iteration had already changed the genre, what could a second iteration do? Answer comes there none! If Dangerous Visions, which hit a conservative genre in the middle of a less-than-conservative decade, was all about revolution and liberation and an end to taboos, what can yet more Dangerous Visions be about? So far as we can glean from Ellison’s introduction, the impetus behind Again, Dangerous Visions would appear to be less revolutionary than pecuniary. It seems to exist simply because the first volume sold all these copies and won all these awards, and look at all these cool writers we’ve got stories from. Oh, and just to complete the picture, Ellison tells us that he demanded, and received, “three times as much money as Doubleday had ever offered for a science fiction book.” The revolution is dead, long live the cash register!

So, if its stories were no longer storming the barricades, what made this second collection dangerous? Since Ellison couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say, perhaps we need to turn to the various contributors. Forty-two people wrote stories for Again, Dangerous Visions, a more varied list than the previous cast. There are, for instance, seven women featured, not a huge improvement on the earlier book but a little better nonetheless. (Though when Ellison says, in his introduction to the story by Joanna Russ, that “the best writers in SF today are the women” and then adds, “Most of them are represented in this volume,” one gets the feeling that there should therefore have been more included, and many more.) Nevertheless, this too-short list does include three of the most significant women writers of science fiction from the latter part of the twentieth century: Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, and Russ, as well as Lee Hoffman, Joan Bernott, Evelyn Lief, and Josephine Saxton. Along with too many other writers in this volume, Hoffman, Bernott, and Lief barely made a mark on the history of science fiction, and their stories in Again, Dangerous Visions don’t exactly stand out from the crowd. But the other four, now that’s a different matter.

Le Guin takes up a considerable proportion of the page count with her short novel The Word for World Is Forest, which not too long afterwards was published as a separate book. “The Funeral” by Wilhelm (it is typical and irritating that Ellison begins his brief introduction by being “charmed by the total womanness of Kate Wilhelm”) began a run of classic stories that marked Wilhelm as one of the dominant voices in short SF in America through the 1970s and ’80s. “When It Changed” by Russ was a companion piece to the novel she was still, at this point, failing to get published, and that would eventually appear to considerable controversy three years later as The Female Man. Meanwhile, Saxton was, along with M. John Harrison, one of only two British writers to make it into this volume, and both she (with “Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon”) and Harrison (with his early Viriconium story, “Lamia Mutable”) produced stories that would fit comfortably alongside the new wave work they were producing for New Worlds at the time.

Actually, I lied. There was, in fact, an eighth woman featured in Again, Dangerous Visions. But at the time, in 1972, there were still five years to go before it would be revealed that James Tiptree Jr., was in fact Alice Bradley Sheldon. Ellison certainly didn’t know. This year, he tells us, “Wilhelm is the woman to beat, but Tiptree is the man.” He also tells us, repeatedly, that “The Milk of Paradise” is the best story in the anthology (he’s not far wrong on that count), which is why he placed it last in the book, just as Delany had been last in the original volume. “The Milk of Paradise” is, indeed, a good story, as practically every story Tiptree wrote around this time was good. It can also justify the description “dangerous,” but only to exactly the same extent that all Sheldon’s best fiction was carefully designed to upset masculine norms and expectations.

Russ’s “When It Changed” was also a conscious challenge to an accepted norm of American science fiction: an overall attitude towards gender that had barely shifted despite the so-called revolution of Dangerous Visions. This is particularly evident when, with the benefit of hindsight, we look at the story in the context of The Female Man, and see that it was indeed dangerous. But in this it was something of an outlier in Again, Dangerous Visions. The stories by Le Guin, Wilhelm, Saxton (and Harrison), excellent all, are not dangerous in this sense. They do not set out to upset the apple cart, they are not revolutionaries in the process of inventing an entirely new science fiction. These, like Tiptree’s story, are the fruit of that earlier revolution, the revolution in style, taste, and what was permissible that was the true legacy of Dangerous Visions.

Each of these writers had learned to escape the straitjacket that had been science fiction, and they had been putting these lessons into practice in their fiction for years now. The stories that represent them in Again, Dangerous Visions were, in a very real sense, more of the same. The Word for World Is Forest, for instance, does not look out of place falling chronologically between The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), though both of those novels are considerably more daring and therefore more dangerous. Furthermore, using the other test associated with Dangerous Visions, I don’t imagine that any of these stories (yes, even including “When It Changed”) would have faced the slightest difficulty in being placed in any of a dozen or more original anthologies or magazines being produced at around the same time. Dangerous Visions had been, in a sense, too successful: It had established the new norm in science fiction. There was nothing for Again, Dangerous Visions to react against. Now it was publications like Astounding/Analog, which clung to the old ways, that looked to be out of step with the ecology of science fiction. Again, Dangerous Visions was not driving forward; it was marking time, securing the ground that had been won.

And that is precisely what we see throughout the anthology. The book opens with a keynote entry, a piece clearly presented as if setting the tone for all that follows. It was written by a magazine editor, John Heidenry, who did not otherwise intrude upon the world of science fiction. “The Counterpoint of View” begins with a reference to “one of the scholars of Tlön,” mentions Pierre Menard, cites George Berkeley and David Hume, Celine and Nabokov. It concerns, amid its cod-academic tone, the suggestion that Shakespeare was one of the people involved in the translation of the King James Bible. It is, in other words, a Borgesian take on Borges who had, in truth, only started to become widely known to the American reading public over the preceding decade. It will surprise no one that this rather distinctive style and voice is not picked up by any of the contributions that follow. But it does suggest some vague glimmering of an editorial ambition for the book: that it should equate science fiction with the more adventurous aspects of mainstream literature. But that is precisely what the first volume, with its demand that authors should ignore any artificial constraints upon their writing, had already set in play. By ventriloquising Borges, Heidenry was doing no more than Le Guin and others, whose contributions were carefully judged to be precisely in line with what was already popular out there in the big bad world of science fiction.

What resulted from all this was something modelled on Dangerous Visions in more than just structure (long introduction by Ellison—60,000 words of introduction in total he tells us, always proud of the statistics—and a brief, or sometimes not so brief, afterword by the author). As in the first volume, there were stories by long-established writers (Ross Rocklynne, Ray Nelson, Ray Bradbury, Chad Oliver, Ben Bova, James Blish) trying their hand at this new style of science fiction, some more successfully than others. Kurt Vonnegut, for instance, took the implied instruction to shock the maiden aunts rather too literally by calling his contribution “The Big Space Fuck” (Tiptree had already taken the same idea and done something more subtle and more effective, but that isn’t the story included here). Then there are the writers who are just making a name for themselves, and for whom an appearance in Ellison’s mega-anthology is an opportunity to show they are playing with the big boys now—writers like Edward Bryant, David Gerrold, Piers Anthony, Gregory Benford, James Sallis, Thomas M. Disch, Richard Lupoff. These tended to take to the manner and style of Dangerous Visions more naturally than their elders, because after all this is the pool in which they have already been swimming. Stories like Gerrold’s “With a Finger in My I,” Anthony’s “In the Barn,” and above all Lupoff’s “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama” (the sort of title that had come roaring in around the time of Dangerous Visions and, perhaps thankfully, seemed to roar out again not long after Again, Dangerous Visions) certainly capture the reader’s attention. (It is noticeable, however, that whatever proficiency these new young turks showed with the mores and devices of this iteration of the new wave, few of them remained true to this form of science fiction much beyond the closure of Again, Dangerous Visions.)

Then there are the previously unknown names, writers presumably plucked from the slush pile because their work somehow matched Ellison’s ill-defined aesthetic for the anthology, but who mostly had no further impact on science fiction. Of the contributors to Again, Dangerous Visions, James B. Hemesath, H. H. Hollis, Ken McCullough, David Kerr, Burt K. Filer, Richard Hill, and Leonard Tushnet, among others, warrant no entry in the SF Encyclopedia; this doesn’t mean that they wrote nothing further, just that their impact, for whatever reason, was narrow to the point of nonexistence. Certainly their contributions are not among the handful of stories from this anthology that continue to shout out to us across the intervening decades.

So what did stand out? Less than you might think given the size of the endeavour. Its predecessor’s dominance of the awards was not repeated. Ursula K. Le Guin won the Hugo Award for best novella and was shortlisted for a Nebula in that category, along with Richard Lupoff’s “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama.” “The Funeral” by Kate Wilhelm was shortlisted for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette (the Hugo in that category was in abeyance that year). Joanna Russ won the Nebula for Best Short Story for “When It Changed” and was shortlisted for the Hugo. Inexplicably, Gene Wolfe was shortlisted for the Nebula for “Against the Lafayette Escadrille.” And that was it. Five stories out of forty-six troubled the award ballots, and of these I think the Lupoff is one of those where you have to shrug and say “you had to be there at the time” while the Wolfe is never among the first titles named when people discuss his best work. Of the rest, I would say that the Saxton, Harrison, and Tiptree repay a visit, but not much else.

Still, both Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions have now been republished by Blackstone as curtain raisers for the appearance of The Last Dangerous Visions. Looking back at them now, over a gap of more than fifty years, we can see that, as much as anything, their importance lay in their size, in the sheer number of stories suddenly thrust in front of the SF public. The original Dangerous Visions was a little ahead of its time. The change it heralded was probably inevitable—the social, political, and cultural changes then occurring in the US meant that some such reimagining of the literary landscape had to come at some point—but Dangerous Visions, by its size and by the hullabaloo it generated, simply catapulted this revisioning to the forefront of the SF consciousness. Again, Dangerous Visions, by contrast, was a little behind the time. On the whole, it feels as though 1967 never happened and they are trying to restage the Dangerous Visions revolution all over again from scratch. But by then readers were familiar with what it was selling, so it all felt a little less dangerous, a little less dramatic. But after this came the strangest story in SF publishing history, the seemingly interminable non-appearance of a book whose ever-changing contents were tracked across the years but that was always too big, too unwieldy, to ever see the light of day.

*

The first we hear about the book that would become The Last Dangerous Visions, “the final book of the trilogy” (wait! When did this become a trilogy? Nobody said anything about a trilogy before!), is about halfway through Ellison’s long introduction to Again, Dangerous Visions. It came about because Ellison had already bought far, far too many stories to fit into a single book. So they decided to divide the contents in half and “bring out a final volume six months after this one.”

Let us be clear what we are being told here. As of May 6, 1971 (which is when he dates this introduction), Ellison had already bought enough stories for another volume at least the size of Again, Dangerous Visions. He provides a list of the authors who have contributed this “already-purchased wordage.” There are thirty-one names on that list, though he insists “this is only a partial list.” The lineup includes complete novels by Richard Wilson and John Christopher, as well as stories from Clifford Simak, Avram Davidson, Michael Moorcock, Daniel Keyes, Octavia Butler, and more. As a matter of interest, the list includes four women writers (being “the best writers in SF today” still doesn’t seem to include getting into Ellison’s anthologies). Some of these stories had been bought by Ellison before 1970, though only three writers from that initial list actually make it into the version of The Last Dangerous Visions that has finally been published: Steve Herbst, Howard Fast, and Robert Sheckley. But that is something I will come to later. Because, as we all know, despite having a sizeable contents list already bought and paid for, despite having an approximate publication date (and six months in terms of publisher’s schedules is no time at all; on such a timescale the book should have already been securely slotted into Doubleday’s plans), The Last Dangerous Visions did not appear. And it went on not appearing, year in and year out, even though Ellison continued buying stories, and continued to announce its imminent appearance.

During 1974 (two years after the appearance of Again, Dangerous Visions and three years after the content of The Last Dangerous Visions was supposedly settled), Christopher Priest was working on The Space Machine, a novel at least partly set in Richmond. On one of several visits to Richmond for research, Priest got the idea for a story that would not fit within the novel. That story was “An Infinite Summer” and, because Ellison had been asking if he had a story for The Last Dangerous Visions, Priest sent the finished story to him. Ellison seems to have made no response to this submission, not even an acknowledgement of receipt, so after four months Priest instructed his agent to take the story back. Thus “An Infinite Summer” has the distinction of being the first story withdrawn from The Last Dangerous Visions. It also triggered Priest’s interest in the saga of this non-appearing anthology.

In the mid-1980s, Priest published an occasional fanzine that he called Deadloss. In 1984 he wrote a special edition of the fanzine about the failure of The Last Dangerous Visions to appear, but the project was shelved when Ellison was forced to pull out of a convention in Scotland. When Britain hosted the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton, Priest dusted off that essay and updated it, producing it as a special bound edition of his fanzine—which he titled, for the occasion, The Last Deadloss Visions. Here Priest catalogued Ellison’s various announcements that the book was on the point of publication: June 1972; August 1973; a letter of September 1973 in which he says the book is now closed for submissions and lists sixty-eight authors and stories totalling 445,250 words of fiction plus 110,000 words of introduction, making a book well in excess of half a million words; a letter of February 1974 adding seven more stories to the closed collection; February 1976 saying it still hadn’t been turned in to a different publisher; an interview of July 1976 saying it was now over one hundred stories; a letter of December 1977 guaranteeing publication before Christmas 1978; a letter of January 1979 saying it was now 115 stories and would appear from yet another publisher by Christmas that year; a report of June 1979 saying it was now 113 stories and scheduled for 1980. And so on.

After various other pieces analysing the impossibility of The Last Dangerous Visions ever actually appearing, Priest listed the ninety-nine authors announced as appearing in the anthology in the June 1979 Locus. The discrepancy between the number of names and the 113 stories claimed is not addressed. (Of those named in Again, Dangerous Visions, neither Wyman Guin nor Thomas Scortia are at this stage on the list; it is slightly more encouraging that thirteen of those named actually did make it, though this includes Edward Bryant despite Ellison’s insistence that nobody who appeared in the first two volumes would appear in the third.) And since I’ve been keeping track of these things, I should add that there are fourteen women on the 1979 list, still not a particularly great showing.

To indicate how rapidly The Last Dangerous Visions was changing around this time, J. Michael Straczynski’s “Afterword” to the newly published version of the book reproduces Ellison’s typed contents list, also from 1979. This features 120 stories by 108 writers, so in the space of a year the anthology (now in three volumes) had gone from 115 stories to 113 stories to 120 stories. Thirteen names do not appear on the Locus list, and the number of women has now risen to the dizzying heights of fifteen. (For the record, of the twenty-four authors who finally appear in Straczynski’s The Last Dangerous Visions, there are four women, plus the genderqueer Kayo Hartenbaum.)

Priest concluded his fanzine with a list of twenty people who had, at one time or another, been listed as contributors to The Last Dangerous Visions, all of whom had died by 1987. More deaths would, of course, follow. Of the twenty-four authors who finally made it into print in The Last Dangerous Visions, eight died before there was any possibility of this volume actually appearing: Stephen Robinett, Edward Bryant, A. E. Van Vogt, John Morressy, Howard Fast, Steven Utley, Robert Sheckley, and Ward Moore. Both Fast and Sheckley had appeared on the original list in Again, Dangerous Visions; Moore died as long ago as 1978.

Over succeeding months, Priest would publish occasional updates to the story, adding new information and letters from interested parties, as well as, among other things, a report of a party in London at which a beaming Moorcock approached Priest to tell him that Ellison had “hired a hit man to get you.” Eventually The Last Deadloss Visions and its various addenda were brought together, updated once more, and published in 1994 as The Book on the Edge of Forever, which was shortlisted for a Hugo Award. After spelling out the long and repetitive story—regular claims that the manuscript had been delivered when it hadn’t, authors dying or withdrawing their contributions, the constant bloat that promised a book far too big for publication. (The 1979 contents list in Straczynski’s “afterword” mentions 680,027 words of fiction but does not include the more than 100,000 words of Ellison’s various introductions; at several points Priest estimated it would have been well over a million words in total), Priest concluded: “The Last Dangerous Visions does not exist. Good or bad, it does not exist. Long or short, it does not exist.”

Except now it does.

No one expected it. I’m not absolutely sure that anyone really wanted it. But it is here.

In 1979, Ellison described it thus: “The cornerstone work of imaginative literature in our time; the ultimate SF anthology; the nonpareil overview of the ‘state of the art’ in the genre of fantastic fiction.”

Yes, well …

Here we return to my opening contention: This is not Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions. There are a couple of reasons for pointing this out. One I will come to in a little while. But the first, and perhaps the most important reason, is that Priest was perfectly correct. The Last Dangerous Visions, as constructed and boasted about by Ellison, does not, and could never, exist.

Oh, I know, those hundred-odd yellowing manuscripts did fill box after box in Ellison’s study at his Los Angeles home. But a pile of manuscripts, no matter how venerable or how fine, does not make a book. They need to be edited, put into order, introduced, and a host of other tasks completed. And, the more that pile of paper grew, the more those tasks were beyond Ellison’s ability to cope. In a thoughtful and loving essay at the beginning of this volume, “Ellison Exegesis,” J. Michael Straczynski describes his friendship with Ellison, and the mental problems that increasingly assailed him. Straczynski’s suggestion that Ellison was bipolar is an amateur diagnosis—Ellison refused to see a professional or to seek therapy until he was forced into it late in the day—but it fits with what we know of the man and his behaviour. Through the last three decades or more of his life at least, as the gloom steadily took over, he became increasingly unable to write. His output of short stories, prolific through the 1950s and 1960s, slowed down noticeably during the 1970s and practically ground to a halt in the 1980s. And this applied even more to the work he needed to undertake if he was to turn the mess of material he had for The Last Dangerous Visions into something resembling a book. In the end, he was able to write only one author introduction, to “War Stories” by Edward Bryant, and five-and-a-bit paragraphs of what was intended to be the general introduction to the collection. This introduction ended in mid-sentence, which seems sadly symbolic of the whole enterprise. The problem was not, or not simply, as Priest diagnosed, that the resultant book would be just too damned big for any publisher to handle. It was that it was too damned big for Ellison to handle. The more stories that came in, the more impossible it became for Ellison to even contemplate what was needed to sort and introduce the material; and the more blocked he was from working on the project, the more stories he accepted to keep the whole thing alive in his own mind. After his initial manic enthusiasm at the time of Again, Dangerous Visions, the whole thing became less a book than a cycle of despair.

I understand and sympathise with Straczynski’s decision to produce this volume. Partly, perhaps most importantly, it honours the memory of his friend. It brings to a close the long, disputatious saga of The Last Dangerous Visions, the blot that hung for so long over Ellison’s memory. But despite that, possibly because of that, a book produced in 2024 can never match the dream envisaged in 1971.

That said, stepping past the introduction into the actual content of this anthology is to step out of time. More than once, as we read these pieces, we are brought up short by the realisation that the weird future being presented is still in the twentieth century. We turn a page to find a character writing away on a typewriter. And this chronological dislocation continues into the surrounding matter. The stories have been shorn of the afterwords provided by the authors in the two previous volumes; in their places are brief italicised paragraphs introducing the author, yet in a way seemingly designed to disturb the reader. Stephen Robinett, we are told, “is thirty-four and lives in Los Angeles,” except that two sentences later, and still in present tense, we learn that he died in 2004 “at the age of sixty-two.” In the space of three short sentences, all in that same tense, we learn that Robinett is both alive and dead, both thirty-four and sixty-two. And that jarring chronological conflict occurs time and again. Richard E. Peck is thirty-eight and still writing stories, except that Richard E. Peck is now over eighty and the ISFDB lists only a handful of stories by him, none more recent than 1976. Steve Herbst is nineteen and this is the first short story he ever sold; but more than fifty years have gone by since he was listed in Again, Dangerous Visions, and the ISFDB tells us he published a total of just four stories, all between 1971 and 1974. Herbst has gone on to other things, but, if your writing career effectively ended before it began, one can see that there would be no great pressure to withdraw that first sale from a book that was always never quite appearing.

In his Afterword, Straczynski tells us what we already knew from Priest’s book: that withdrawal was the fate of many of the stories which at various times over the years were slated for inclusion in The Last Dangerous Visions. With the obvious exception of Priest’s own “An Infinite Summer,” those that we have been able to identify, such as “Himself in Anachron” by Cordwainer Smith (completed by his wife, Genevieve Linebarger), are hardly among the shining examples of their authors’ work. Maybe the author waited too long before withdrawing a story that was already past its sell-by date, or maybe the story wasn’t that good to start with. Straczynski notes that it was increasingly Ellison’s habit to buy stories from friends who were in need of a little financial help. The one author introduction that Ellison completed for The Last Dangerous Visions tells us that Edward Bryant enjoys the unique distinction of appearing in two Dangerous Visions volumes because Ellison made a joke, in his introduction to Bryant in Again, Dangerous Visions, that didn’t go down well—and so Ellison made it up to him by buying the rather messy and lacklustre story, “War Stories.” Maybe quality wasn’t a necessary condition for inclusion in The Last Dangerous Visions, or maybe by this time Ellison himself had given up on the idea that the book might actually appear and so was using it as a sort of safety net for authors in financial need. Either way, when he was going through what inventory remained for The Last Dangerous Visions, Straczynski found he had to discard most of the stories. Either they were too much of their time, or they were just not good enough. Indeed, so much was cast aside that Straczynski commissioned one story, “First Sight” by Adrian Tchaikovsky (who wasn’t even born when Ellison first announced The Last Dangerous Visions), and in addition “for twenty-four hours during the final stages of editing The Last Dangerous Visions, I opened the door for previously unpublished writers to submit a story.” The result is “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum, a young writer only twenty-seven at the time the story was sold.

Even so, and including these two stories that Ellison could never even have seen, this volume consists of only thirty-one pieces by twenty-four writers. (I say “pieces” because the number includes eight very short “Intermezzos” by D. M. Rowles, most less than one page long, which are more hints of something weird than anything developed and complex enough to count as a story.) That is a long way short of the hundred-plus stories so frequently promised. It feels rather skimpy even by comparison with the original Dangerous Visions, and if bulk was part of what gave the first two volumes their impact, then this third book is decidedly lacking. What is also lacking is the surrounding material that was so characteristic of the first two anthologies. The long introductions to each writer have been replaced by the sort of brief puff that is familiar from most of the SF magazines, while the author’s own afterword has gone in favour of the achronological bio squibs that I noted above.

For all of these reasons, this is not what the front cover advertises: The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison. It is certainly not edited by Harlan Ellison. It was partly compiled by Ellison, in the sense that the bulk of the contents were acquired willy-nilly by Ellison over a period of fifty years or more; but it was not edited. The editor, at least in terms of the person who did all of the thankless editorial work, was J. Michael Straczynski, and it is he who deserves whatever praise or blame is due to this volume.

Is it even The Last Dangerous Visions? That is a trickier question. Most of the contents were among pieces acquired with at least the intention of being included in a work of that name. Although. If you compare the actual contents list with the putative contents featured in the afterword, you see that, for instance, in 1979 the story by Stephen Robinett was called “Iron Will” but the one featured here is called “Assignment No.1.” I don’t think “Assignment No. 1” is a very good title for the story, but “Iron Will” would be even less appropriate, which makes me suspect this is a different piece. Similarly, the single story previously listed by D. M. Rowles was called “Thumbing It on the Beam, and Other Magic Melting Moments” which seems to bear no relationship to the titles (or contents) of any of the eight “Intermezzos” that actually appear here. Admittedly A. E. Van Vogt’s “Skin” and Howard Fast’s “All Creatures Great and Small” might well have transmogrified into “The Time of the Skin” and “The Size of the Problem” respectively. The stories by Richard E. Peck, Edward Bryant, Stephen Dedman, Steve Herbst, John Morressy, Jonathan Fast, Robert Wissner, Steven Utley, Robert Sheckley, Dan Simmons, Ward Moore, P. C. Hodgell, and Mildred Downey Broxon are all as advertised in 1979, but Max Brooks, Cecil Castellucci, Cory Doctorow, David Brin, and James S. A. Corey were all apparently acquired after that 1979 list, in most cases probably long after. This sort of piecemeal acquisition across fifty years cannot make for any coherent vision of what counts as a dangerous vision, as what warrants inclusion in this particular volume.

After all, the world has changed radically and changed again since we were treated to Again, Dangerous Visions; what was socially or culturally dangerous then is not necessarily dangerous now; in fact what was thought unexceptional back in the 1970s could well be considered terribly dangerous in today’s USA. And a fifty-year-old list of writers is always going to seem rather safe without the diversity of contributors we expect as standard in an anthology today. Furthermore, given that the bulk of the content was lined up as long ago as 1979, this particular volume can only represent a small fraction of what the anthology was then intended to be. And the later additions, including those acquired since Ellison’s death, make it harder still to judge what The Last Dangerous Visions was ever intended to be, and how close this volume can possibly come to that ideal. Bearing all of this in mind, a Last Dangerous Visions conceived in 1971 and compiled in multiple different forms over the succeeding fifty years cannot be the same work as one taking final form in 2024. It is responding to different worlds and different conceptions of science fiction at different times and with different content. In that sense, therefore, this is not and cannot be The Last Dangerous Visions.

Except that in an odd way, sometimes in a way that may have changed over the decades between acquisition and publication, there are stories here that feel more dangerous, more appropriate than many of the stories that made it into Again, Dangerous Visions. It is, for example, hard to imagine that a story like “The Final Pogrom” by Dan Simmons might have been considered dangerous back in the 1970s. There were, after all, any number of fictions detailing ways in which contemporary America attacked its minorities. True, most of these would concern the suffering of Black or Hispanic or Japanese or female characters, so the fact that it is here America’s Jews facing extermination might make the story a little unusual, though memories alluded to in the title of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution would suggest that even this is not much of a stretch. But keep the story to one side, until we get to a present which contains the very real rise of the neo-Nazi right in American politics and the condemnation of Israel in the light of the Gaza war, and suddenly the story acquires an immediacy it just wouldn’t have had before. It’s not a great story, and the one novel aspect of it—the suggestion that racial hatred has a viral cause that could be medically eliminated—isn’t well enough developed to raise the story up a level. But, even so, happenstance has given it a surely unexpected relevance.

“Leveled Best” by Steve Herbst might have benefitted from the same unearned immediacy if it had come out two decades or so back, when the horror stories from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were first hitting the headlines. As it is, this first-person account of someone whose sense of freedom and of self is eroded and eventually destroyed by torture reads like the final part of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) rewritten in the style of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1959). And, as those referents might suggest, I’m not sure if it would have come across as all that groundbreaking even if it had appeared in the original Dangerous Visions. Still, distrust of America’s political and legal system seems to be one of the themes of this collection. It crops up again, for instance, in one of the better stories in this anthology, “The Weight of a Feather (the Weight of a Heart)” by Cory Doctorow, in which we enter a penal colony so designed that the inmates become afraid of ever venturing outside. “Hunger” by Max Brooks argues that America’s concentration on military might means they have taken their eye off the ball, as China’s secretive investment in genetically modified crops means that they can induce a famine across the USA, giving them the geopolitical upper hand. It is a story that calls to mind Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers,” though it feels rather more mechanical than that earlier dangerous vision.

Meanwhile the social and cultural aspects of living in America generate a similar dis-ease; not many of the writers here seem to have much faith in the place. The social and cultural response to disability or disadvantage crops up as the focal point of a couple of low-key stories. In the context of a hundred-plus hyperactive stories all clamouring for attention, I don’t suppose that either Stephen Robinett’s quiet lament for the way the old are parked out of sight and out of mind, or Richard E. Peck’s “None So Deaf,” about trauma-induced deafness, would have stood much chance of being noticed. In this altogether sparser setting, they stand out a little more as at least worthy—though I can’t help feeling that both of them need a little more in the way of story. That was in fact a feeling I got several times as I read through this anthology. One of the exceptions to this is “The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale—Hurry, Last Days!” by Stephen Dedman (and believe me, that title is the worst thing about the story). Here, cloning of the long-dead is combined with celebrity culture to undermine the political rise of Evangelical Christianity. This is another story that just might qualify for the description of dangerous, at least dangerous to American self-satisfaction. It is interesting, too, that we have to look to a Canadian (Doctorow) and an Australian (Dedman) for the two most heartfelt and cutting dissections of contemporary American society in this book.

There are, as in the previous volumes, stories that play with the typical paraphernalia of science fiction. There are aliens, for example, in “First Sight” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, “Men in White” by David Brin, “The Time of the Skin” by A. E. Van Vogt, and “After Taste” by Cecil Castellucci. The best of these is the Castellucci, but I don’t think any of them are really taking us anywhere new. There is what is effectively a ghost story, “Dark Threshold” by P. C. Hodgell; and a story of Irish gods, “The Danann Children Laugh” by Mildred Downey Broxon. There’s a far-future society failing to make sense of survivals from our age, “Falling from Grace” by Ward Moore. There’s someone left behind by time travel in “Goodbye” by Steven Utley. And so on and so forth. These are decent enough stories; I don’t object to reading them here as I wouldn’t object to reading them in any other anthology or magazine. But that’s the problem: You could find them anywhere, and, while they are pleasant enough for the moment, a day or so after you close the book you won’t remember any of the details.

Other than the Doctorow and the Dedman that I’ve already mentioned, the only two stories that really stuck out for me were “A Night at the Opera” by Robert Wissner and “Judas Iscariot Didn’t Kill Himself: A Story in Fragments” by James S. A. Corey. The Wissner story is simply a weird little knife to the guts. A composer is attending the first performance of his latest opera, and starts to talk about it to the woman who happens to sit next to him. Only his description of the work becomes more bizarre and more upsetting as he goes on. Then the music begins …

As for the Corey, this is the one point where Straczynski reveals that he is reaching towards some sense of what is supposed to be meant by Dangerous Visions. To be fair, Ellison never really managed to express such a sense; it is perhaps inexpressible. But I was brought up short when I came to the introduction to this story and read that this “may be the most dangerous of all … But it is also the most relevant,” as if danger and relevance are two separate, perhaps incompatible, things. No, the stories that stand out through these three anthologies as the most dangerous are dangerous precisely because they are the most relevant. What they are relevant to may vary from time to time, from story to story, but the link is inescapable. The Corey (let us draw a veil over that rather clumsy title) is about people who can “resheath” in different bodies, who can’t imagine “what it was like to have a single body your whole life.” But how does a community of people who are not confined to a single race or gender or anything else fit in with a wider community who are prey to all the familiar prejudices? And what happens when that community falls apart? Like the Doctorow, like the Dedman, like so many other of the stories here, it is about a discontent with the state of America. That may be why, in the current moment, it is dangerous.

So we come in the end to one last question: What did Ellison create here? What was meant to be dangerous about this enterprise? Who should be in danger? And the answer is … ?

If science fiction is anything, it is a literature designed to make us think, designed to make us doubt, designed to make us question. Any science fiction that soothes our nerves, that plays to our prejudices, that says we don’t need to consider the new or the other, is not doing the job we expect of science fiction. In short, any science fiction worthy of the name is in itself a dangerous vision. All that Ellison did was collate this tendency into a couple of massive anthologies that, by their size as much as anything, raised a fuss. The first volume was a goad to upset the complacent; it meant that science fiction was no longer constricted. Most of the stories in themselves made no particular impact, but en masse they changed the face of science fiction. The second volume confirmed that this was the way that science fiction would go from now on. And, again, it did this by sheer bulk rather than the impact of any individual story. In both books there were good stories, in both books there were some very good stories, but they each mattered less than they did as part of the rebel army.

And then? Well, to be honest there was no need for a third volume. There was nowhere else to take the struggle. Indeed, The Last Dangerous Visions probably was more important as a myth, as a dream of something that could never be. But now the myth has become a reality, and it is inevitably an anticlimax. It’s a decent collection. J. Michael Straczynski has done a good job in the circumstances, certainly better than Ellison ever could have done, and among the contents there are some very good stories (though I don’t really suppose they will be featuring on award ballots the way the two previous volumes managed). But really all it does is lay a ghost to rest. We will not be troubled by stories of The Last Dangerous Visions again, we will not be subjected to endless, empty, impossible promises. And that is a good thing.

Read the collection. You won’t be disappointed. But neither will you be electrified or endangered. Because when we come down to it, this is not the book announced in 1971. This is not the book that was promised; it could not be. This is not The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison.