Like any fan of print sf, I am familiar with the long saga of the never-printed third Dangerous Visions anthology from Harlan Ellison. It was finally released last year, alongside new editions of the first two volumes. Though I've read some of the stories from Dangerous Visions in other collections (a couple were reprinted in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, for example), I'd never actually read them, so I asked for (and received) the whole set for my birthday this year.
Dangerous Visions |
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Originally published: 1967 Acquired: July 2025 Read: September 2025 |
I will say that the book gets off to a rough start, because it has four forewords and three introductions. A full seven things to read, totally forty pages, before you even get to a story! Well, no, because then each story has its own introduction from Ellison, so you have another four pages to go before you get to the first story. Geeze. I get that each new edition presumably needed new stuff to justify its existence, but it's just too much to slog through, and a bit too self-congratulatory on the whole. Seven introductions or forewords, really!?
Like any anthology, you are going to find good stories here and bad ones. Though there are some very good ones, I didn't find the hit rate here as high I would have liked—or would have expected, given the reputation of the book. Many are gratuitous in some way, pushing "boundaries" I suppose, but not saying anything interesting. I thought the duo about the Jack the Ripper, Robert Bloch's "A Toy for Juliette" and Ellison's own "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," were particularly uninteresting for example. Perhaps the most disappointing was "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" by Theodore Sturgeon, which has a great title, and starts very strongly with some fun meta genre stuff, but fifty pages later is inexplicably still going on.
Still, there was some good stuff. Stories I particularly enjoyed included "The Day after the Day the Martians Came" by Frederick Pohl, a very well-written and grounded story about how the discovery of aliens might affect our society; "The Doll-House" by James Cross, a surprisingly successful cautionary tale about getting greedy with prophecy; and "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" by Carol Emshwiller, a very weird but captivating story. Also of note, though I didn't love the story itself, is Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man," a cautionary tale about how far people will go for immortality.
One of the very best was, not surprisingly, by Philip K. Dick; I've been reading my way through his collected short stories, but I haven't got to "Faith of Our Fathers" yet, and it's a particularly potent distillation of some of his most common themes: the need for conformity and the inescapable feeling that it's all bullshit underneath. My other favorite was one of the rereads, "Aye, and Gomorrah..." by Samuel R. Delany, which is sort of a queer rewrite of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain." A great story about sexual desires and the self-loathing that can come with them.
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