Harlan Ellison Gets a Little Help from His Friends
‘The Last Dangerous Visions,’ reviewed
The Last Dangerous Visions
Edited by Harlan Ellison
Blackstone, 450 pp., $27.99
I BECAME A FAN OF HARLAN ELLISON long after his heyday, long after he’d established himself not only as an uncommonly good science fiction writer, but also as a funny, unreasonable, ambitious, prolific pain in the ass. Therefore, from where I sat, the saga of the notoriously unfinished third volume of his purported trilogy of groundbreaking speculative fiction anthologies, The Last Dangerous Visions (following the genuinely influential and genre-altering Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972)), was over and done with. All anyone could do by the time I’d gotten to it was wonder what had happened, and trace the development, and crumbling away of, this book through Ellison’s own periodic references to it in his various columns and essays.
The first narrative I read about the infamously unfinished third volume (itself at one time intended to be a multi-volume affair) and what went on behind the scenes was The Book on the Edge of Forever (also known as The Last Deadloss Visions) by the late Christopher Priest. Priest was approached by Ellison to write a story for The Last Dangerous Visions, which he did, but years went by with no forward motion on the book. For Priest, this was such a frustrating period that he, and others, sensed a certain dishonesty was at play. The long essay he wrote, backed up by comments from other exasperated writers, was far from flattering to Ellison. When I read what Priest wrote, I had to concede that it looked bad. It did seem as though Ellison had bitten off way more than he could chew, and instead of admitting it and throwing in the towel (he did allow many writers, including Priest, to take their stories back to be published elsewhere, though 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 announcements just petered out, because everyone knew the book would never be completed, and therefore it would never come out.
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 good friend, the writer J. Michael Straczynski. As executor, he took it upon himself to complete the great unfinished project of The Last Dangerous Visions. He pared 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 eat potato chips) to the ones that seemed deserving. Not just to Straczynski, but to Ellison. The two writers spoke often about all aspects of the project, including which stories Ellison had bought from friends that simply were not good enough and could not be made to be good enough (naturally, these stories and writers go unnamed). Straczynski also set up an open call for stories by 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 pros to write the kind of stories they’d always wanted to but were scared off of doing so by a skittish market. If they had a story to tell that might be considered shocking, or “dangerous” in some way, that they knew no other editor would touch, Ellison would touch it. That also meant that new writers, with new ideas, should be given a chance. In the two volumes of Dangerous Visions that Ellison lived to complete, he kept the door propped open for many such writers. Straczynski did the same. The result is still a fairly large book, totaling 31 stories.
BEFORE GETTING TO THE STORIES themselves, I should say that in Straczynski’s 60-page introduction to The Last Dangerous Visions, he explains why Ellison was never able to complete it himself, and why his last 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 Visions, were of his own making. Straczynski doesn’t excuse Ellison’s behavior. But he does explain it, and a lot of the pieces in the life of Harlan Ellison fall into place. Straczynski’s introduction is deeply moving (and, at times, angry), and would, by itself, justify the existence of this book. It all makes a sad kind of sense.
So, while Ellison is the only credited editor on this Last Dangerous Visions, and Straczynski’s meticulous detailing of how this final book came to be does show that most of the work was done by Ellison, Straczynski deserves no small amount of praise for his part in all this. The strangest thing about this book is how little of Ellison’s writing is actually present. One of his trademarks, with the previous two volumes, was to write introductions, of varying lengths, to every story (and those books contain at least a couple dozen stories each). Here, only one story, “War Stories” by Edward Bryant, features an introduction by Ellison. It’s a brief, jokey intro, Ellison and Bryant having been close friends. And that’s it. It makes the book feel slightly haunted.
The good news is that, for example, “War Stories” is great, exactly the kind of strange, bleak story that would have felt right at home in 1967 or 1972. To simplify it, it’s sort of about sharks, and espionage, and, in a kind of vague sense, evolution. If I were to lay it out in more detail, it would sound absurd, comical. But while “War Stories” is absurd, it is in no way comical. It’s the kind of story that gets under your skin in ways you, or anyway I, can’t quite explain. It’s the kind of story that would not exist, and would never exist, had Bryant not sat down to write it.
NOT EVERY STORY IS AS SUCCESSFUL as Bryant’s. Max Brooks’s “Hunger” reads like a lecture, and “The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale – Hurry, Last Days!” by Stephen Dedman aims for humor and misses. But if nothing else, this speaks to the variety that all three Dangerous Visions books aimed for. Ellison’s conception of what speculative fiction could be seemed to encompass all genres. “War Stories,” for instance, with its intelligent, malicious, and vengeful sharks, could almost count as horror. Science fiction horror, certainly, but horror nonetheless.
The same goes for Robert Wissner’s “A Night at the Opera.” This story features a composer named Reissen, attending the premiere of his new opera. A young woman sits by him and asks what she can expect from the night. Reissen’s description of what’s to come is a night of possible horror. The woman doesn’t believe him, but the reader is meant to take him at his word. The story ends with the deadly potential of Reissen’s composition unfulfilled—or rather, not fulfilled yet—and so the reader is left to imagine what will transpire inside that opera house. But we know what to imagine, because we’ve been told.
The nature of all these stories as science fiction is vital to everything that goes on in these pages, though at times that facet of them is ancillary (hence, I suppose, why Ellison could become so rankled when he was described as “merely” a science fiction writer). In fact, while Cory Doctorow’s “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart),” is undeniably science fiction, there is no clear reason why this story, about a life of addiction and criminality successfully facing rehabilitation, needs to be a part of that genre at all. On the other hand, the two best stories in the collection, better even than “War Stories,” could only be conceived as science fiction.
The first is “The Final Pogrom” by Dan Simmons. Per Straczynski’s notes, this story was written early in Simmons’s professional career. That career was largely kicked off by Ellison, who discovered Simmons at the 1982 Milford writing workshop, at which Ellison was teaching. Simmons brought his now-classic horror story “The River Styx Runs Upstream,” Ellison flipped for it, and he helped usher Simmons into a decades-long, enormously successful, and well-respected career as a novelist working in many genres. “The Final Pogrom,” which is so striking and relevant that it feels like it could have been written this morning, is also a kind of science fiction/horror hybrid, though the horror is historical, rather than supernatural. In it, Simmons imagines Hitler’s Final Solution taking hold in America (and eventually the rest of the world). By the end of the story, Simmons presents charts that detail the Jewish population of each state, and how much of that population has been successfully removed. The rest of the story is told alternately through the eyes of a Holocaust survivor, facing all of this again, and the government bureaucracy coldly following through with their plans. It’s the story in The Last Dangerous Visions that disturbed me the most, discomfited me to the degree that I thought more people should read “The Final Pogrom,” that it might be important for people to do so.
My other favorite story here is the one Straczynski commissioned himself: “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum. I found this story to be truly remarkable. Essentially plotless, “Binary System” is about an unnamed keeper of a lightship (in this case, the science fiction equivalent of a lighthouse) and their solitary existence. The lightship keeper talks at length about their isolation, why this kind of life is both amenable to them and potentially (probably, they acknowledge) damaging. Hartenbaum’s gift for prose, coming from someone never before published, is striking—the act of writing, and of imagining, seems so easy in Hartenbaum’s hands. The story has wit to spare, as well, though for me the primary achievement of “Binary System” is in its construction of the narrator. One gets the sense that Hartenbaum feels a strong affinity with the character and their desire for solitude. Quite frankly, so do I. But Hartenbum isn’t blind, and doesn’t present such an existence as some sort of obvious life goal. It’s presented as something to be both desired and feared, and the story ends, appropriately, with nothing resolved. Life simply continues.
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’s last film, The Other Side of the Wind, the editing of which was completed decades after the director’s death, an honest, good-faith approximation is all we’re going to get. And for that, I am very grateful to J. Michael Straczynski, who did the hard work and put out a good book.
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