Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions (anthology, 1967)

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
edited by Harlan Ellison

Originally published: 1967
Acquired: July 2025
Read: October 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.

Library of America: More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth / More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon / The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

More Than Human (1953) is the second novel collected in Gary K. Wolfe's American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956. While three of the books in its companion volume, Five Classic Novels, 1956-1958, were Hugo winners, none of the books published here were, mostly because they come at the very beginning of the process. Though the first Hugos were given out in 1953, the second set was in 1955; the 1954 Worldcon didn't do any—and this is the year that More Than Human would have been eligible. The book was a finalist for the 1954 Retro Hugo (awarded in 2004), which was intended to fill that gap, though it lost to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. And fair's fair, that book is a juggernaut. Even a very good book probably didn't stand a chance against it.

Collection published: 2012
Novel originally published: 1953
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2024

More Than Human is an expansion of Theodore Sturgeon's novella "Baby Is Three" (1952); the novella makes up the middle section of the novel, to which is added a first part, showing where all the main characters came from, and a third, showing where they all ended up. I had a vague inkling that I had read "Baby Is Three" though I remembered nothing about it, and when I finished More Than Human, I went and looked up "Baby Is Three" on ISFDB, which tells me I must have read it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two A... which I remember as being my least favorite of the four SFWA "Hall of Fame" volumes that I have read! Sturgeon is someone I haven't read much by; as a Star Trek fan, I primarily know of him as one of the legit sf writers who was courted by Roddenberry and ended up contributing to the show; he wrote "Amok Time" and "Shore Leave," two of the second season's most significant episodes. (Trivia fans will note there is a character here named "Barrows," as well as in Sturgeon's "Shore Leave.")

Alas, the novel didn't do much for me. All science fiction is of course very much of its time, but there's a particular kind of science fiction that I feel like was popular in the middle of the twentieth century whose appeal has not really persisted, the story of (to steal a term from DC's "Captain Comet" comics) the "evolutionary throw-forward," the next phase in human evolution born ahead of time. Usually this entails precocious intelligence and psi powers. A lot of mid-century sf writers seem fascinated by this figure—but unfortunately I do not find it fascinating, and I rarely get anything out of such stories...* even if they are well told from a writing standpoint, which I must admit More Than Human was.

Sturgeon is a strong writer, with an above-average sense of voice and place for a 1950s sf author, and there were lots of little moments of characterization that shone strongly. Unfortunately, the actual story was one that largely failed to engage me. It's one of those cases where I can recognize the craft, but fundamentally the story is just doing something I don't care about.

That said, I am already a few chapters into the third novel in this anthology, Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, and it is much more my jam—and as different from the first two novels as they were from each other. It's a very diverse set of selections!

* One exception: I do remember really liking Wilmar Shiras's "In Hiding" (1948), which is collected in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two B. Maybe that's because, if I recall correctly, its precocious superchild was a Boy Scout!