The Last Dangerous Visions Is Finally Published

The Last Dangerous Visions is probably the most famous book that (almost) never was. The third in a series of legendary anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison was supposed to be published in 1974, but the publication date kept slipping, Ellison died in 2018 and the anthology has finally been published thanks to the efforts of Ellison's friend and literary executor, J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5, among many other things). 

I can still remember the impact that reading Dangerous Visions had on me as a teenager and I'm certainly not alone in that. It's unlikely that The Last Dangerous Visions will have the same impact, but it's still an important book and deserves ntoice. In Rolling Stone, Jason Sheehan writes about the book's history and why it still matters. (archive.ph link)

That original Dangerous Visions was legendary. It featured new writers alongside famous ones (a collaborative model more or less unheard of at the time), took on topics like race and god and war and freaky space sex. It celebrated the New Wave movement in science fiction that would go on to invent the future we’re living in today, and stuck sparklers and road flares in it so no one could possibly claim they didn’t see it coming. The book was kinked to the frequency of chaos and revolution at a time when mainstream writers were afraid to speak truth to power lest it upset their ability to eat, and publishers were afraid to take chances on new voices. And since we find ourselves again in a similar moment, it’s only fitting that this final installment of Harlan’s anthology comes to the table with the same kind of blood on its teeth.

So here, now, in this cursed year, at history’s dumbest inflection point, we have the capstone to Harlan’s 50-year project. The Last Dangerous Visions gives us Stephen Robinett doing a school kid’s “What I Did Over The Summer” essay on the nightmare warehousing of the elderly and Max Brooks’s epistolary document on the asymetric warfare of hunger and panic. There’s stochastic, structural weirdness from John Morressy; a short, sharp wake-up call from all the things we refuse to see by David Brin; Cory Doctorow on forgiveness and robots; and Cecil Castellucci’s tale of a galactic food critic arriving at a terrible conclusion about how one might come to truly appreciate a culture through their food. With TLDV, Joe followed the model originally established by Harlan — new voices right next to the established ones, young outlaws and old masters together. From the universe of stories that Harlan selected for inclusion in TLDV (in all of its various iterations), Joe kept 24, plus a four-page introduction to Ed Bryant’s trippy “War Stories” written by Harlan himself and never before published. He then added seven more stories, newly commissioned for this publication — including “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum which is about isolation, the loss of definition in the absence of societal constructs, and the conditional immortality of being useful to capitalism. It’s the first story that Kayo ever sold, and that, too, is in keeping with Harlan’s model because, 50 years ago, Harlan bought a story about torture and resistance called “Leveled Best” from a then-19-year-old unpublished writer named Steve Herbst that was supposed to be included in the original, non-existent 1974 edition. Joe included that one in TLDV, too.