Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair: An Introduction to Alas, Dangerous Visions By Christopher J Garcia

It would be far too easy to see Dangerous Visions as a museum piece. Easy, and possibly true, sadly. Dangerous Visions was released in 1967, two years before Woodstock, itself a genre-defining event that now must be handled gingerly and only while wearing white gloves. Again, Dangerous Visions came out in 1972, the year that gave arcades Pong, a video game that was revolutionary as the prose, and now considered archaic by all but us historians. Taken as they have come to us, there is little in the two released volumes of Dangerous Visions that stands the test of time. But the stuff that does is like air and water and fire and life. It is essential. When I undertook to put this issue together, it was because it’s been staring at me for months. After my mould-induced move back to the City of My Birth, I had arranged one bookshelf facing me whenever I would lie in my bed. On the second shelf, there whenever I opened my eyes, were the single volumes, the spines staring at me. I had read neither in years, but after a couple of weeks, I picked Dangerous Visions up, read the del Rey, the Lieber, the Farmer, the Sturgeon. I returned it to the shelf and was called to Again, Dangerous Visions a few days later. From this, the LeGuin, the Wilhelm, the Wilson, the Vonnegut. I put it back as well, only to repeat the process a week later. I realized they had burrowed into my mind, forced me to remove them from the shelf, place it next to my bed where I could reach down and pull a story out every few days. Gonna Roll The Bones. The World for World is Forest. Ersatz. Time Travel for Pedestrians. Ching Witch. Bounty. These I read and re-read and re-re-read. When some- thing hits me that hard, I have to do an issue around it, and when I decided I was going to do a full issue about Dangerous Visions, I knew I had to do it at least somewhat right. I am writing these words in July. If all goes well, they’ll hit the street in January. This is my attempt at looking at Dangerous Visions under three temporal lens: one of the day the antholo- gies hit the streets, one of today, and one of Some Other Time. You’ll understand that last one by the time we’re finished. As I revisit these words in January, I’ve not been able to get much in the way of reaction to DV from the day, but these things happen. Unless otherwise noted, all the art in this issue is from Mo Starkey, most of it having appeared previously in The Drink Tank. It just felt right to feature Mo in the annual after everything she’s done for me over the last year. A well-deserved Hugo noinee in 2011. I hope that Mo, Steve Stiles and Taral all get their rockets in the near years. They all completely deserve one.

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read What this issue is not is a tribute to Harlan Ellison. There is no question that his vision was at least largely achieved, and the form of his vision is apparent throughout the anthologies, but at the same time, the stories that were crafted for his anthologies are much of was truly achieved. The power is the story, and Harlan’s entry to the anthology was only OK, and his introductions to the various stories were actually pretty good, and occasionally extremely enlightening. This is not a work done to honor him, though I’ll be the first to say that the architect of the program was Harlan Happy-Go-Merrybuttons Ellison, and he almost certainly changed science fiction forever, and in my eyes, for the better. But if this were a tribute to the man (and for an excellent tribute to him, I recommend the Harlan Ellison tribute issue of Earl Kemp’s eI at http://efanzines.com/EK/eI54/index.htm), it would miss several points. First, nei- ther Dangerous Visions nor Again, Dangerous Visions are flawless. In fact, I’d say both had a few giant errors of edito- rial vision and of writerly logic. It is difficult to be a tribute and still manage to say that the Emperor’s clothes are, at best, tattered if present at all. And there’s the entire matter of The Last Dangerous Visions, and we’ll be talking about the most famous of all the screeds against Harlan: Christopher Priest’s The Last Deadloss Vision (also called The Book on the Edge of Forever). Then again, we will be talking about where Harlan and his writers hit it and hit it hard. One of the greatest successes as far as a story goes is The Man Who Went to the Moon Twice, it also happens to be a story that could have easily been published in F&SF, or Galaxy, or Boy’s Life for that matter. It was a story that did not fit everything Harlan was saying this anthology would be, but was also one of the great stories.

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies I am also not claiming that everything has held up, and there were some that even at the time would have seemed as moulded as my former apartment. The worst of them, in either released volume, was Ersatz by Henry Slesar, I thought at first had simply not held up to the cask for forty years, but when reading reviews that came from the release date often singled it out as feeling outmoded. It was a simple story, too simple, and exceptionally phobic. A Toy for Juliette by Robert Bloch was a story that had absolutely nothing to it. In a pre-Shaymalan world, a twist like that was possibly still fresh, but really, there was barely anything else there. Ooh, Jack the Ripper! Time Travel! A Grandfather who assists in an adolescent’s sexual awakenening. Well, I could see why at least one reviewer singled out the piece as among the weakest of the set. I can also see how Harlan would run with the concept come up with something pretty decent. Keith Laumer, an author whose stuff I am not usually a fan of did nothing to change my mind with his story Test to Destruction. While it’s an interesting story for a guy who has spent ages working on a project that looks at how fictional computers and factual computers interact, it had little to make me look at it as merely an interesting story. Can I see that it would have been hugely different from what else was out there? Not at all. In Again, Dangerous Visions there seem to be less dogs, though Christ, Old Student in a New School by Ray Bradbury stuck out not only as the only poem (though I might argue that Gahan Wilson’s story might be consid- ered as such), but also as a bit flat when weighed against the heavyweight stuff from the likes of Russ, Tiptree, Le Guin and Lupoff. It’s basic poetry, really. One that I have a certain affection for but understand has neither aged well nor was really a good story for the time was Time Travel for Pedestrians. Time Travel via masturbation? How could I not enjoy, but also where’s the importance, the danger in it? Then again, Piers Anthony gives us In The Barn, which feels like an author trying very hard to make a story that is very hard. Does he manage? Perhaps for some at the time, but the moment must have passed and passed quickly.

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things The ones that truly hit me were the ones that felt as clear and clean today as they did when they found readers in the days before my birth. The first story to make my mind reel was a Farmer. One of my favorite au- thors, no question, and this was his masterpiece. Riders of the Purple Wage won the Hugo for Best Novela, and it deserved it. There are few stories that work around the language like Farmer’s, and there’s a lovely winding of story and prose into character and phrasing. If this story had been the only one published, the only Dangerous Vision, there’d have been no doubting the dangerousness of the idea and the perfection of the execution. And then there’s the Lieber. Gonna Roll the Bones, which is a strange story for a gambler like myself to attach to. This is another twist, a dark and expanded twist of the kind that I would hate today, but here it feels not only fresh, but it acts like a lighter in a cave where you expected to find a bear. The story of throwing craps with a creature who has all the power in the world is as old as the cautionary tales of the oldest hill people, but the way Lieber applied his voice, his tough as nails dialogue and transitions that feel like you’re moving between worlds. Yes, his language here, at times, feels like a product of his times, but reading it a third time, I realize that perhaps he went to that direction specifically to make it more dangerous, and he did. Lieber never approached this level with any of the other work I’ve read from him. Kris Neville’s From The Government Printing Office is a dangerous vision which came at me in a way that was not quick, but sudden. It posits a world that is truly dangerous, but not the kind of danger that you only under- stand after you’ve passed through that town. The same thing could be said of Sturgeon’s If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? Is another remarkable story that looks at a world where our taboos are not their taboos. What’s interesting is that Sturgeon was writing dangerously for at least a decade before Ellison put his anthology cry out. I can not say enough about Aye, and Gomorrah by Samuel R. Delany. There is a sense of amazement and the power that Delaney gives to his characters and every phrase makes each story worthy of reading. One of the best short stories of the 1960s. Perhaps the greatest story of any length of the 1970s was the highlight of Again, Dangerous Visions was The World for World is Forest. Think. Think back to that time when the world opened up before, when the possibilities all showed through. For me, it was Le Guin’s story of native subjugation and imperialism. It is a story that could only be written with Vietnam both in the rear-view and visible through the windshield. The moment, Le Guin captures it, and with a voice that neither spits nor purrs, she gives us a world that would influence a generation of writers, and a film called Avatar owes her a royalty check. Ah, yes, Kurt Vonnegut. The Big Space Fuck is perhaps the most Vonnegut story that Vonnegut ever Von- neguted. It’s a story that is so simple, like almost all of his short works, and like all his short works it hits smart. He crams a lot into it, and it works for me as well as anything you’ll read in the anthology. James Tiptree, Jr. was one of the finest at crafting concepts and prose into shapes that the brain has to remold after approaching. The Milk of Paradise is a shooter, the tough guy sent in beat the challenger who might have ideas of walking out a winner. The way it wraps the anthology up, making you take your breath, set the book aside and then not quite deal with it, to let it flow. It overwhelmed me in a way that I had not expected. It’s something that Tiptree did often, and here with the best results outside of Houston, Houston, Can You Read?

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck This issue features some of the most interesting writing I’ve ever had the privilege to run. It’s not nearly as big as many of the other theme issues of The Drink Tank, and it’s far and away the smallest of the Annual Giant Sized An- nuals, but it’s also the one that I think looks at the anthologies, and theoretical one, in some amazing light. As I’ve said, we’ve got Mo, we’ve got stuff from some fine humans, mate- rial stretching from the 1990s to today. I’m proud to have such a line-up and I don’t even think my stuff in here sucks that bad! My guess is that anyone who reads this issue has already read Danger- ous Visions. It’s not about opening eyes, I guess, but more about reminding us all about one thing or another. Whether it’s that the books exist at all, or that there are stories that might jump back at you if you return to them, I dunno, but I do hope it’s one of those. Sometimes, I’m late to a game, and it seems like that this time at least a little because there was all the stuff for the 35th Aniversary, but now, it’s going on 45 years and now it’s my turn. I’m glad I finally got around to doing this issue, and I hope that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed playing Harlan while I was writing the intros! Introduction to Dangerous Visions - A retrospective look by Daniel M. Kimmel

The first article comes from a time called the 1990s and a place called rec.arts.sf.reviews. It was a place on a thingee called USENET. I was a regular on various newsgroups at the time, though I seldom posted, I was lurking on rec.arts.sf for years, and was a member of the various CompuServe SF groups. And AOL. I was big on those various boards. The mid-1990s were a heady time for SF fans. You cold log on to AOL, search the various newsgroups or you could go to any of the chatrooms that were dedicated to the various topics. My faves were all the wrestling-related boards, but I was often reading reviews and commentary on USENET. It was USENET and many of the mailing lists that led to the addition of ‘or other media’ to the Best Fan Writer Hugo definition. There was some great work and you can still find a lot of it with Google. It’s worth reading how a lot of the interesting writers of the time looked on what was going on (James Nicoll is one guy worth searching out) and it gives an instant’s view of a moment in time and that’s a good thing. The net, along with the Web, changed fandom to it’s very core. Now, there’s an entire generation that has come into fandom since the focus became more and more web-based. This is a double-edged sword. Fanzines have certainly lost a lot of importance in fandom, though they were already starting to fade even before the web came to fandom. The rise of Newsgroups, mailing lists like SMoFs, Timebinders, InTheBar and Trufen, and even- tually blogs, podcasts and sites like trufen.net, File770.com, and most important of all, eFanzines.com, changed fandom almost completely. There are those that complain that the Hugos have yet to truly show these changes, though wins in Best Fanzine by Emerald City, Electric Velocipede and StarShipSofa (and maybe even the one that James and I walked off with) has shown that we’ve at least started down the path to recognizing the importance of electronic fandom, and there’s no question that it’s a majorly important part of being a fan in these Modern Times! Dan Kimmel is a guy who deserves a HUGE amount of respect. He’s a film critic, a science fiction fan and, above all, a good human being. I’ve been lucky enough to chat with him at many cons and he stayed with me for a few days following the 2011 Westercon in San Jose. We watched a few short films, I introduced him to the work of Kurt Kuenne and we talked movies. It was a fun time! He’s a film critic, and though we have very different tastes, I have to say that his reviews are extremely impressive. His book, JarJar Binx Must Die! is one of the best pieces of criticism and analysis I’ve ever read in the area of film. It’s well-worth reading, as is everything else I’ve ever read by him. He’s appeared in several fanzines, including Argentus, Emerald City, and even in other issues of The Drink Tank, including a great piece on his choice of career in issue 300. You might wanna consider him for your Hugo ballot... This article on 1967 as viewed from 1994 is especially impressive. Dangerous Visions has gone through vari- ous periods of consideration. I may not agree with all of his conclusions (especially about Gonna Roll The Bones), but I have no problem with the direction he took with his review. It’s good stuff. Dangerous Visions A retrospective look by Daniel M. Kimmel (This essay was written in 1994 and originally appeared online on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.reviews.)

It may seem odd to have finally gotten around to Harlan Ellison’s landmark SF anthology 27 years after it was published, especially since I was 12 when it came out and have had ample opportunity to read it for the past quarter century. Nonetheless, I have only just read it. While it is foolish to review a collection of original stories that presented itself as being on the cutting edge in 1967, I wanted to reflect on how the stories have stood the test of time when read in 1994. My goal is not to ask whether the stories are STILL cutting edge -- a pointless exercise -- but whether they are still worth reading. What follows is, naturally, my own opinion. Your mileage may vary. On the off chance that there are people reading this who have yet to read this collection, be warned: SPOIL- ERS ARE CONTAINED HEREIN. I would rather write as a critic than a reviewer, and not worry about giving away endings of stories that have been in general circulation for more than two decades. To leap ahead to the conclusion, my feeling is that DANGEROUS VISIONS has not held up well. There are some stories that still pack a wallop, and others that are good in spite of no longer being “dangerous,” but many of the others have dated badly.

ELLISON: Let’s begin with Harlan Ellison’s introductions, not only to the volume but to every story in the book. They are horribly self-indulgent, and as likely to produce a grimace as provide a nugget of information about the author. While it is amusing to read about such “young” talent as Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delaney, it is not the 20/20 hindsight that causes Ellison’s words to grate, as it is his incessant self- congratulatory tone. There are certainly stories here that fail to shock that WERE rather “dangerous” in 1967, but there are other stories in here that aren’t especially shocking even by the standards of classic SF. As Brian Ald- iss notes in TRILLION YEAR SPREE, the idea that the sto- ries here were on the cutting edge of SF says more about the insularity and stodginess of SF in 1967 than anything else. Certainly compared to what was going on in the mainstream in that time, there is little here that’s espe- cially daring. I am willing to concede that for the Ellison fan his introductions may be fascinating. Although I thoroughly enjoyed a brief encounter with the author around 1977, I have never been a fan. It’s not that I *dislike* his work. It simply hasn’t appealed to me. On the other hand, I have always enjoyed the late Isaac Asimov’s equally self- indulgent introductory essays in HIS books, so perhaps it’s simply a matter of taste.

BLASPHEMY: No doubt in 1967 proclaiming the death or defeat of God in an SF story was especially shocking. Today, such stories as Lester Del Ray’s “Evensong,” Damon Knight’s “Shall the Dust Praise Thee?,” and Jonathan Brand’s “Encounter with a Hick” seem little more than graffiti. Hey look: we can be blasphemous, aren’t we dar- ing? SF writers and fans like to think they are especially open minded, but the condescension of SOME towards those who maintain religious faith and practice demonstrates otherwise. These stories seem to exist for the sole purpose of thumbing their nose at believers. The exception here is John Brunner’s “Judas” which posits a robot who has assumed the role of deity through mimicking Christian theology. He makes an interesting point about how some believers will see everything through the lens of their particular belief system. Perhaps the lesson here is one learned by such obviously reli- gious writers as Orson Scott Card -- critiques of religious organizations work much better when the focus is on PEOPLE rather than an attempt to attack the ineffable.

SEX: Aldiss, in TRILLION YEAR SPREE, suggests that most of the taboos being challenged here are sexual in na- ture. For the most part that isn’t true, although there ARE such stories. The biggest disappointment, IMHO, was Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage.” For years I had heard about this story, which won Farmer a Hugo award. This may be sacrilegious to some, but the story seemed to me to be little more than a LOT of style and very little substance. While the style is impressive, it seems largely in service of some very labored puns. At the end of this LONG story (novella? novelette?) I was hardpressed to see what it had all been for. Robert Bloch’s “A Toy for Juliette” is basically a gimmick story (see below) but Ellison’s instant sequel, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World,” is an interesting extrapolation on how people might turn to vicari- ous violence for their sensual pleasure. Here they go back in time in the consciousness of Jack the Ripper, and the idea of a jaded society looking for SOME sensation to make life worth living works well. Carol Emshwiller’s “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” is one of these annoying writer’s exercises where simply having an interesting idea is a sufficient excuse for not having much in the way of characters or plot. The two stories that retain an ability to shock are Theodore Sturgeon’s “If All Men are Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” and Samuel Delaney’s “Aye, and Gomorrah....” Sturgeon’s story would probably still have trouble getting published -- it is a defense of incest. On the other hand, it is not an especially good story, as the final third is about as dramatic as PLATO’s REPUBLIC consisting almost entirely of philosophic debate. Here, the breaking of the taboo seemed to be paramount. Delaney’s story stands up well (it won a Nebula) in positing neutered spacefarers and the Earthers who are attracted to them.

VIOLENCE: Ironically, it is the stories about violence that are most likely to retain the ability to shock, and also stand up the best to the ensuing years. Robert Silverberg’s “Flies” sends a space traveller back to Earth with the task of transmitting human emotions to an alien race. Unfortunately the process has rendered him totally amoral, and he brutalizes everyone he comes in contact with. Stories like Miriam Allen DeFord’s “The Malley System” and Larry Niven’s “The Jigsaw Man” focus on the criminal justice system. DeFord’s penalogical concept is horrifying and her conclusion is logical. Niven’s story is also horrifying, but in the end it is a gimmick story (people are harvested for spare parts) and the young Niven is too easily taken with his gimmick. The last page or so lands with a thud. Keith Laumer’s “Test to Destruction” may be the best story in the book -- from a 1994 perspective – after “Flies.” The premise is simple: a man is tortured by a dictator using a device that will cause him to spill the con- tents of his brain at the SAME time he has been chosen by alien invaders for tests of the potential dangerousness of the human species. Laumer plays one off the other to great effect, and the conclusion -- where we discover how the hero is changed by the experience -- is the perfect twist.

DRUGS: For SF in 1967 to acknowledge that people were taking recreational drugs was apparently a big deal. While these stories no longer shock, they hold up well. Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” is dated by its presumption of a Communist Chinese conquest of the West [Perhaps not. – DMK 2011], but is fascinating for questioning whether individual hallucinations are superior to collective hallucinations. The idea is that everyone is drugged and sees the Leader in one way, but each of those given the antidote seem to see him differently. John Sladek’s “The Happy Breed” also holds up well, with its society that tries to make all citizens perfectly safe and happy, and which ends up with people permanently infantilized. Brian Aldiss’s “The Night That All Time Broke Out” is a gimmick story, but as long as one doesn’t question the premise too closely, it is fun. (The premise involves a natural gas that makes one subjectively experi- ence the past.) The one other drug story with an impact of Dick’s tale is Norman Spinrad’s “Carcinoma Angels,” where a man uses a hallucinogenic cocktail so that he may directly battle his tumors, and ends up being totally locked within himself with no way out. From Spinrad’s afterword one gets the impression that the “dangerous” idea here was making the story explicitly about cancer. As with Dick’s Communists, it is an element that dates an otherwise powerful story. (His comment that cancer is the “pox” of the 20th cen- tury seems almost innocent in the era of AIDS.)

GIMMICKS: The gimmick stories -- tales that exist largely to shock us with a taboo-busting gimmick -- almost always fail the test of time. Frederik Pohl’s “The Day After the Day the Martians Came” (retitled “The Day the Martians Came” in THE BEST OF FREDERIK POHL) is downright embarrassing. Reporters make crude racial and religious jokes about Martians, and a black porter suggests that this shifting of bigotry towards the Martians will make a differ- ence in HIS life. Equally painful is Poul Anderson’s “Eutopia,” where the surprise gimmick (revealed in the last sentence) is that the protagonist is gay. Clearly feelings in 1967 were differ- ent in 1994 (Ellison’s references to “faggots” are especially embarrassing) but with the shock value neutered there’s not much else there. Fritz Leiber won a Hugo AND a Nebula for “Gonna Roll the Bones,” a story whose gimmick is that a man is rolling craps with the devil. It seems to be that stories of this nature had been around for a long time before and while there’s nothing wrong with Leiber’s story, there’s nothing special about it either. Roger Zelazny’s “Auto-da-fe” exists largely as a bull fight retold as a battle with cars. It’s not especially amus- ing or “dangerous.” At least it was short. Brevity was the chief attraction of Joe L. Hensley’s “Lord Randy, My Son” which seemed to suggest “The Twilight Episode” of “It’s a Good Life” which, if memory serves, was based on a previously published story. Thus there was nothing “dangerous” – or even original -- about this story, even back in 1967. The one gimmick story that worked (although it, too, wasn’t particularly “dangerous”) was R. A. Lafferty’s “Land of the Great Horses” which explains why there are Gypsies all over the world and what replaces them when their stolen homeland is finally returned. It’s a one joke story, but it’s short and the joke is clever.

***\ As noted, there are some stories that have held up nicely, and I certainly wouldn’t attempt to rewrite history by saying that since most of the stories (again, IMHO) have dated badly, therefore they were ineffective in 1967. Indeed, one could argue that it was the SUCCESS of this volume that make the stories so ordinary by contemporary standards. However, DANGEROUS VISIONS seems to have blurred over time. If a story exists only to shock, does it serve any purpose when the shock value fades? For me, a real classic endures even if after the forces that led to its creation have faded from memory. By those standards, DANGEROUS VISIONS is more of a historical artifact than a classic. Introduction to The Future of the Fantastic: Dangerous Visions by Eric Rosenfield It would be far too easy to fill this issue with a lot of reviews saying how amazing an anthology Dangerous Visions was and how it changed the world and won awards and created new writers (even if it was responsible for Orson Scott Card), but that’s not what I’m trying to do here. We could also have found endless numbers of reviews decrying it an Harlan and so on, but that’s also not what we’re trying to do, no matter how much fun it might be. I’m actually trying to get a look at what Dangerous Visions means all these years later. A minor mitigat- ing fact is that I couldn’t get a hold of the old fanzine reviews I had hoped for (I’ve got every Locus on either side of the one that ran the review of Again, Dangerous Visions, and it had yet to be founded when the original came out) and I went trolling through blogs and sites looking for reviews and content. Now, I understand that a lot of folks don’t like zines that regularly re-print stuff like this, I get that. I’d love to have every piece I run be original and purpose-written for The Drink Tank, that would be nice, but it’s not likely to happen, at least not for themed issues. Folks seem to want themes, it’s the first thing people ask when I ask them to write for The Drink Tank, but often, there’s no one to write about a specific theme, so I go trolling for content, and sometimes it comes up solid. This issue is full of re-prints, it happens, and one of the nice thing about trolling for content is that you can find stuff that perfectly fits what you’re going for and know the tactics that the writer are going to use. Sometimes, you can ask for an article about a specific topic and it’ll take a turn you did not expect and it won’t fit what you were going for. It’s a job hazard. Plus, those that read The Drink Tank might not be as tied-in on what goes on around the blogosphere. Or maybe they are. I’m not sure who reads the Drink Tank, but I’m willing to bet that the material in this issue is new to almost all of them. In the AMAZING LoC that Claire Brialey sent last year, she took James and I to task for doing a lot of re-prints in the Hugo for Best Novel issue and running them in a format that was harder to read than they had been originally. It’s a fair cop, no question. Claire is, inarguably, always right. It would have been as good to simply compile a massive list of links and publish that so they could be read in a format that they were designed for. But where’s the fun in that? That wouldn’t give me a chance to play with the material and do the fun stuff like laying out and finding the perfect art piece only to be told that I can’t use it and have to go looking for another one that I know won’t be nearly as good, but then finding one that works just as well. The doing of the thing is as good as the results of the thing having been done. This piece is one that I thought sums up a lot of the thoughts of younger readers who come to DV and wonder what all the fuss was about. That’s not to say the author of the review, Eric Rosenfield, was a rookie. Eric’s a helluva writer, I was first aware of him from a review of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother that ran in Literary Kicks, and have seen his review of Weird Comics in ComiXology, which is where he plies his trade. He’s also a Wold Newton guy and that’s an area where I am EXTREMELY interested. It’s Farmer, so how could I not be? He has a great take on literature, at least from where this guy sits. I didn’t know he had written a piece on Dangerous Visions until I got into the search for more content. I contacted him and he very kindly replied – Well, that takes me back. Of course, the essay isn’t the most flattering to the book, but if you’d like to run it, feel free. Just be sure to note that it was originally published in Wet Asphalt. Actually, can you add this to the top: In retrospect, there are two things I’d like to change about this essay. One is the line accusing Ellison of putting Pohl and Knight in there because of sf-family nepotism. This completely ignores the fact that they were much lauded and well established authors at the time, and so might have been included on the strength of their reputations. Which exposes my ignorance: at the time I wrote this, I’d never heard of Pohl or Knight. Second, I completely ignore Samuel Delany’s story “Aye, and Gomorrah”. In retrospect, this story is quite good, and its whole meditation on sexual perversion was really novel and interesting for the time. Good points, though I hold many of the stories in higher regard, it’s good to see a guy look back at one of his pieces and find the problems therein. I do that sometimes, look back at what I said. Of course, I never correct it, I simply let it lay there waiting for the unsuspecting person to stumble upon it and become unhappy with me. It’s what happens. Our writings have long tails these days, as is obvious by my finding of a piece posted to a blog (the excellent Wet Asphalt at http://www.wetasphalt.com/) and to me, that’s a plus. The Future of the Fantastic: Dangerous Visions by Eric Rosenfield Originally appeared on the blog Wet Asphalt

One of the things that comes across clearly in the various introductions to the stories in Dangerous Visions, the anthology that defined the “New Wave” of speculative fiction in the 1960’s, is that these aren’t just writers to Harlan Ellison, but to a large degree they are friends. Even those writers Ellison isn’t close to seem part of an extended family, and Ellison admits at one point that he only accepted two stories for the anthology from people he’d never heard of (submissions that were sent to him by agents). On the one hand, this speaks volumes about the sort of collegiality that existed in sf at the time (and in all probability still exists). On the other hand, it makes for an anthology that reads exactly like someone getting stuff from all his friends together whether or not that stuff is actually particularly good. Not that there aren’t fine stories in here. In particular, Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” is correctly identified by Ellison as being the best in the collection. The story seems like nothing less then Pyn- chon-does-the-future, and its absurdities, asides, digressions and interpolated texts come together in a stunning satire of western life. Notable too is Philip K. Dick’s story “Faith of our Fathers” which treats of the permeability of reality, totalitarianism, free will and the question of belief in a story from his creative peak. Interesting stories are also in the offing from Carol Emshwiller and Harlon Ellison himself, as well as a few stories that are just fun from writers like Howard Rodman, Poul Anderson and James Cross (whose “The Doll-House” reminds me of the kind of thing Neil Gaimen would come up with, many years later). However in a 544 page anthology, this wheat is buried depressingly among the chaff, in one after another trite, one-note story in dry, uninspired prose. If Ellison is really trying to convince us that sf writers deserve to be put alongside John Updike and Saul Bellow, he’s not doing a very good job. The placement of a story like Frederik Pohl’s “The Day After the Day the Martians Came,” which clumsily grasps for a comparison between aliens and black people, or Damon Knight’s “Shall the Dust Praise Thee?” which reads like a teenager’s complaint about bad things happening to good people, can only be explained by a kind of sf-family nepotism. However, the most notable feature of this anthology is the aforementioned introductions by Ellison proceeding each and every story, and the accompanying end notes by the authors themselves. This abundance of material creates a fascinating snapshot of the sf community in the late sixties. Great fun certainly are Ellison’s own anecdotes about insulting Isaac Asimov at a con or how Joe L. Hensley saved his bacon and was an all-around badass. But moreover, the anxieties and preoccupations of the writers at the time give us an idea of just what kind of community this was. Carol Emshwiller ponders why adults are so prudish that ballet dancers have to wear “naked” suits, rather than simply dance in the nude. Philip K. Dick postulates “What if, through psychedelic drugs, the religious experience becomes commonplace in the life of intellectuals? ... Science fiction, always probing what is about to be thought, become, must eventually tackle without preconceptions a future neo-mystical society in which theology constitutes as major a force as in the medieval period.” Larry Niven, whose story “The Jigsaw Man” posits a future where people are given the death penalty for frivolous crimes so that their organs can be harvested to keep other people alive, writes: The good side of organ transplantation is very good indeed. As long as the organ banks don’t run short of materi- als, any citizen can live as long as his central nervous system hols out, since the doctors can keep shoving spare parts into him as fast as the old ones wear out. How long can the brain live with a dependable youthful blood supply? It’s your guess. I say centuries.

But with centries of life at stake, what citizen will vote against the death penalty for: false advertising, habitual jaywalking, rudeness, cheating on income tax, having children without a license? Or (and here’s the real danger) criticizing government policy? Given the organ banks, “The Jigsaw Man” is a glimpse into the best of pos- sible futures. The worst is a never-ending dictatorship. Before we accuse Larry Niven of, um, insanity, let’s just remember it was the sixties. People were running around spouting all kinds of crazy things in the sixties, and as these afterwards evince, sf writers, whose main activity involved thinking of outlandish possibilities, were among the most likely to be swept up in the rush. But if Larry Niven gives an example of mild insanity and paranoia, then Theodore Sturgeon is psychotic. Stur- geon’s story, “If All Men Were Brothers, Would you Let One Marry Your Sister,” is about a utopian planet where love is so free it includes incest and pederasty. “How does being aroused harm a child?” asks Sturgeon, and thus his arguments both in the story and afterward read like the propaganda of the National Man/Boy Love Associa- tion. And this from a figure so well regarded in sf that he has an award named after him. But it’s important to remember that Sturgeon wasn’t the only person espousing these sorts of ideas in the sixties. A year after Dangerous Minds was published, the Children of God was founded, a cult that, like Stur- geon, advocated incest and child abuse (and used a kind of prostitution to attract converts and money). River Phoenix, who was raised in the group, stated that he lost his virginity at the age of four. Which is all to say that Sturgeon gives us a chilling example of how some of the more extreme lines of thought that came out of the freewheeling sixties seriously screwed up a lot of people’s lives. If you just want to read good stories*, find a copy of this book in the library or bookstore and read the Farmer story, the Dick, the Emshwiller, Ellison, Rodman, Anderson and Cross stories, and feel confident you haven’t missed out on much. If you want to get a snapshot of a moment in time when a small community of people with some kooky ideas tried to show the world what they were made of and how they could be “danger- ous,” read the book all the way through. Because really it’s as a snapshot that this book is most interesting.

* This originally read “good sf stories,” but then I realized that this categorized them in a way that was antithetical to my whole objection that genre labels do more harm than good. The “sf” tacked on there seemed almost like a pejorative, a way of saying they’re still not as a good as “regular” stories, but good for their type, or for people who like that sort of thing. Which is not the case, and not what I was trying to say. These are good stories and worth reading by anyone. Introduction to Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison from Lazy Self-Indulgant Book Reviews by Ni- cole Cliffe I am rarely published by serious book reviewing locations. Over the years I’ve tried to become an actual reviewer, but I’ve got a method and I stick to it. I write a review, I’m writing about what it means to me, what it makes me feel. All writing is personal writing, and any that tries not to be is an instant failure. The kind of writing I love is the kind that could never have been written by another writer because it belongs to them deeper than anyone else could feel. My best work, as other have told me, are pieces that deal with my life, with the people I love. Pieces like Eight Science Fiction Books and Eight Women, or my memorial issue to my dad are the kinds of articles that I had to write because there is no one else who has that sort of experiences with those people. It is important to me to present articles that talk about my feelings, my history and my experience. And that is why Lazy, Self-Indulgent Book Reviews look at Dangerous Visions is one that I absolutely had to get permission to run. This is the kind of piece that I wish I could write every time out. It is personal, and it talks about something. It uses Dangerous Visions as a branch to hang the ornaments of personal experience and amusement on. I love writing that can do that, that can take a thing like a book review and turn it into something that really tells a true story of the writer. And the writer, in this case, is Nicole Cliffe. She gave me the following brief description of herself – “Nicole Cliffe was born in Canada, educated in Massachusetts, fell in love in New York, writes from Utah.” What could be cleaner? The idea of lazy self-indulgent book reviewing appeals to me, largely because I am lazy, everything I write is self-indulgent (as my appearance in these introductions should demonstrate without question) and reviewing books is something I do at times. Mine are also not nearly as good as those of Nicole Cliffe. Not at all as good. The other fact I like is that some of the best stuff on her blog has nothing to do with reviewing books. In fact, aside from the following gem of a piece, her entries surrounding a little independent film called TRON: Legacy were worthy of Hugo-for-Best-Fan-Writer Nomination! They had me howling. What follows is the kind of thing that really needs no introduction, but that hasn’t stopped me. Nicole also mentioned that Harlan himself, the Rey del Mundo, wrote her a very nice note after reading it. I can see why, and now, you shall, too.

Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison by Nicole Cliffe from Lazy Self-Indulgant Book Reviews http://lazybookreviews.tumblr.com

Harlan Ellison’s 1967 speculative fiction an- thology was the most important book of my ado- lescence. Note that I use the term “speculative fic- tion,” as do most women who have ever dated an individual who attempts to write the stuff. I don’t recommend that, personally, but eventually you will enjoy the genre again. I had been extremely close to my father, a homemaker, for most of my childhood, but our edges had done serious damage to our relationship through my teenage years. Personally, I think we as a species are too dismissive of the breach of common decency that marks adolescence. It serves a very serious purpose, in that we are supposed to look at each other upon reaching sexual maturity, and say, “my God, I must leave your home and build my own life, farewell.” Regrettably, the strange indoor-cat-like domestication of humans between 12 and 18 means that we must continue to live and friction with our parents for an interminable amount of time. Deeply unnatural, seemingly unavoidable. But I was about 17, anyway, and had recently began sleeping with my boyfriend, who did, it must be said, write terrible speculative fiction, despite being excruciatingly nice and introducing me to the Replacements. (Peace be upon him.) My father and I had not spoken in approximately six months. This had nothing to do with sleeping with my boyfriend, as my parents had delightedly and Canadian-ly whisked me off to get oral contracep- tives four seconds after the idea had been casually floated. It had to do with Stalin. I was con, my father pro. He has always romanticized the Soviet Union in a way which continues to puzzle me, but, then, I find books about the antebellum South rather fascinating, and it is surely a small leap to saying “gosh, wasn’t that sort of a nice pretty way to live?” So we had had a vigorous argument about Stalin, which I was on the side of the angels in, obviously, and then we just didn’t speak for six months. Drove my mother crazy. My boyfriend, whose name was Jay, gave me “Dangerous Visions.” It’s completely transporting, and you should all immediately read it, and resulted in me tracking back the individual contributors and thus being intro- duced to Philip Jose Farmer, and Philip K. Dick, and Samuel Delany, and Roger Zelazny, and Poul Anderson. And some of the stories are dreck (naked women in space!), but most are phenomenal little nuggets. I was about halfway through “Dangerous Visions” when I ran into my dad in the hallway one morning during Month Six Point Five of not-talking, and heard myself say: “Hey, Dad, did you ever read ‘Dangerous Visions’?” At which point he almost fell over with readiness to end our detente, and informed me that it was the single most important book of his adolescence. And then he offered me a ride to school, and I pretty much remember being an adult after that

Art from Ditmar A Gambler Reads Gonna Roll The Bones By Chris Garcia You never play to get that feeling, that rush of win- ning, that thrill of hitting it big, of touching the immortality that comes with capturing lightning and bending the odds to your will. That’s what the dangerous ones do, the ones who don’t un- derstand what they’re dealing with. The smart ones, they play to pay the mortgage, to feed the kids. They play smart. They never go for the score, the real scores. They go for the smart money. They play blackjack, stay on the system, play poker only when the out-of-towners arrive, making sure they never sit too long at a table with another trying to make their payments. It’s not a smart thing to play for the win. That’s what Mr. Fritz Leiber got when he gave us Gonna Roll The Bones; his entry into the original Dangerous Visions anthology. The story is kind of simple, when you boil it down the way a handicapper would when considering the third race fol- lowing a downpour. It’s a gambler who goes out to have a night of booze and sex and, most frightfully, craps. He meets a man, a dark and terrible man, and they play craps for hours. He goes up, only to lose it all and then realize that he’s been duped. It’s a dangerous vision, without ques- tion, but to a gambler, it is the ultimate cautionary tale. It basically says that the rules don’t apply. Let’s look at the characters. The first one is our gambler: Joe Slattermill. He is the most damaged kind of man and the worst kind of gambler. He is abusive, and has an addictive type of personality. HE loves to drink, he loves to whore, and perhaps most of all, he loves to sling the dice. He has a system, and unlike ninety-nine per- cent of other gamblers who think they have a system, his actually works. He’s what’s called a mechanic, able to manipulate the prop, in his case dice, to gain an unfair advantage. He can, apparently undetectably, toss die so that they’ll land on specific numbers. In my life, I’ve only met one or two people who could do that, and one of those is a sharp who is on various banned lists. It takes an incredibly talent set of hands to be able to control that sort of thing. Joe is a terrible person, especially terrible to his wife, who we see in the first scene. He treats her like dirt, if you frequently beat dirt just to prove that you could. Joe goes out and drinks and comes home and does all the things that heavy-handed American dramas have taught us that men who drink do when they get home. He gambles, but he cheats, which means that he wins, which means that he has nothing but Highs, and that means he has to manufacture his lows. It’s not the winning that’s a problem, it’s the losing, but it is the down of losing that brings on the elation of winning when it finally does happen. A winning gambler must drink, or harder, to get that downer. The ultimate proof of this might be Stu Unger, the first man to win the World Series of Poker three times. He was also quite possibly the best Contract Bridge player in history. He would gamble, win thousands, and then bring himself down with massive amounts of cocaine. It is unfathomable to me that anyone could live high enough that the high from coke was actually a downer. The other character that we must consider is Joe’s wife. She’s a gin drinker, which makes sense as it is the Housewife’s Elixer. They live in a house with an elderly cat and Joe’s mother, who seems to know the score and does nothing because it would threaten her secure living situation. Joe’s wife is as combative as Joe, and that sort of connection is a long-standing tradition. Intense people seem to attract intense people, and often those intensi- ties play off each other in ways that make them more destructive than the singular impulses would be. And like so many of those Whitney-Bobby relationships, even after terrible things, she stands behind him. When last Joe went and got himself nice and tight, he came back and beat her, got arrested and taken downtown, but she came to him and handed him a bottle through the small window. Yeah, codependence: it’s not just a river in China... She also turns out to have created the entire concept of the evening that Joe encounters... maybe. Looking at the settings, we’re first shown that Joe & Co. live in a world where there is space travel, but also a place which is run-down. I was on a panel with a writer who claimed that no matter where you are, a slum will always look like a slum. I can kinda see that, and the description seems to indicate that this place was the typical slum of All Places of the 1960s. Joe goes to his Casino and everything you need to know about why people go to Casinos is there. There are women. There are women who sling drinks, there are women who belly-dance for the amusement of the gamblers who all appear to be bald, mushroom-like men. In reality, more men than women gamble in casinos, though not by much. Men make up a majority of players at table games, especially community table games like Craps, Roulette and Poker. It’s about 50-50 when it comes to Blackjack, and women make up a fairly large major- ity when it comes to Slots. The funny thing is that there was a study years ago that show that scantily-clad women bring in players of both sexes. The more attractive the waitresses are, the more of everyone that they’ll bring in! The Bellydancers are a nice touch. Theming has proven to be a big draw when it comes to casinos in the modern-age. Caeser’s Palace really introduced the concept, and I think that the bellydancers are something of a reference to that. The description of the Casino as giant would seem to point to a Las Vegas like Casino, of which Caeser’s would have been the biggest name at the times. It might actually be more a reference to The Sands, one of the first major themed properties. Or maybe The Aladdin. Hard to say. The dice girl’s are next to naked, which would show this as the lowest of low-class joints. Yes, the servers at Casinos are dressed in outfits that use only a quarter yard of fabric per shift, but those that deal with cards and/or dice. In the olden days, it was important that you played at tables that saw dealers that were men. Real gamblers played at the tables where men dealt because the way to go about it was to have tables with women dealers only as a way to get the cash off of horny vacationers and not real gamblers. There are rules about what dealers can wear now, and almost every Casino has a uni-sex uniform for dealer’s now. It’s an interesting thing. They wear white gloves, which makes sense because the table seems to be located directly above a blast fur- nace. The final character is the Big Gambler. He is the foil, in a way he’s every gambler’s worst nightmare. He is a mechanic, but one who makes no point of hiding it and doesn’t seem to have to; he’s rolling for the house. He wins big with a robot-like precision. Joe had won a huge pile of money with his ‘proper’ mechanics, but this Big Gambler is just weird, dark and almost phantom-like. He goes for the bet against the soul, as was obviously gonna happen from the second the story started, and then the whole house of cards come down. The funny thing is that the entire illusion comes down at the end. It was a ploy by Joe’s wife, a sort of magic done through baking. He leaves, heading home “the long way around the world.” Joe’s wife had released him, in a sense, and he had abandoned his wife and mother, or more honestly, had given them their freedom. Joe was holding them back, his wife running a bakery and could probably handle everything herself, because as much as they must love each, they were a two-part epoxy that ended up gluing them together in the worst way. Joe was free and would end up far away, giving Joe’s wife a space to breathe in. Gonna Roll The Bones is one of the finest stories of the 1960s. It felt like it was cutting edge from the first word, and Leiber’s use of tough and tense language, combined with a story that flows gorgeously and heavily makes it even better. The best part is the realization that this is all something that has been created to test Joe, or at least give him a proposition that he must rise to. That makes this the best story for a gambler, but one that has a dark message to my kind of player – It may all just be an illusion. We may go and put our financial lives on the line, and we may win or we may lose, but when we step out of the casino, it may all have been nothing but some spell put upon us. We didn’t win, we didn’t lose, it was all some magic beyond our understanding. What could be more terrifying to someone who enjoys a trip to a casino, to play the cards? It’s all an illusion, nothing is real: not the losses, not the wins. >shiver< Introduction to Avatar - The Word for World is Forest...

I hate James Cameron’s films after Last Action Hero. I have never been able to watch Titanic all the way through. I have tried to watch Avatar once and it didn’t take. One of the things I very much wanted for this issue was an article about Avatar and its distant, much better cousin: Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest. It’s one of my favorite stories, not only in the Dangerous Visions anthologies, but in all of science fic- tion. While I see the politics of LeGuin and don’t think I’m fully in accord with them, I totally love the story, the way she presents it, the characters, and especially, the way she ties it together. I re-read it on a plane trip from San Jose to St. Louis, finished it in the Days Inn just before the 2007 NASFiC begun. It was a revelation to me, opened me to LeGuin’s marvelous fiction, even though I’d read a couple of her things before, including The Word for World Is Forest, this was the story that hit me at the exact right time to open things up. It was a mo- ment when all things aligned. And about the author. I had been on the hunt for this very sort of article when I found the follow- ing essay. I was blown away because it said many of the things I would have said had I written it, plus it said so much more and had a real point of view. I read the rest of his blog, which you can find at http://morningdonut. blogspot.com/ , and was equally impressed. This is a writer who I had never heard of, but who has put an amaz- ing amount of great stuff out there. Yes, he mixes up Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, but toi me, it makes no difference: the impact is the same. Sadly, there’s been no new material from Allan Erickson since May of last year, but there’s enough material to make for a very good day of reading. Allen was kind enough to send a brief bio - Independent writer and photographer, Oregon based, single father of two, 60 years old, 40 year fan of sci-fi and mad as hell. I think his essay speaks of that experience...

Avatar - The Word for World is Forest... By Allan Erickson

“The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it,”

- Ursula K. LeGuin ---

When I was a young man I was stationed in Thailand in 1973, serving with the Air Force. I lived in the small town of Takhli, north and a bit east of Bangkok. I arrived in March of ‘73, not knowing quite what I was getting into. I was a GI. I went where I was told and pretty much did what I was told. I worked as a photo lab technician, running film pro- cessors, printers and doing copy work of the images pro- duced by the F-111 pilots flying missions over Cambodia. We worked 6 days a week, 12 hour shifts - and there wasn’t a lot of down time. When there was time off it was spent sleeping, maybe going to town for a Chinese movie (Bruce Lee!) or if Sunday was the day off we could go to the Takhli Gardens (Tahkli Ga-den) where local bands played rock and roll (sometimes good, usually mediocre to bad) and dance, drink and hang out. In December of ‘73 we stopped bombing Cambodia. Suddenly my work went from 6 days on to 2 days on and 5 off. I went native. I rented a small bungalow in town for $25 a month (I think I was making about $200/mo) and spent my time reading, going to Bangkok or taking the bus east into the hills and visiting monasteries, or go- ing to the ruins in Ayutthaya or hiking out into the local rice paddies with my camera and a few of the local dogs (snake alarms). I spent a great deal of time laying in my front porch hammock, eating and sleeping while I was reading. Just out front of my complex was a kwiteau (Thai noodle soup) stand run by a woman by the name of Nit. Nit made the best kwiteau... I’d eat at least 2 bowls, maybe 3 and I had to be her best customer. I could send one of the little kids down with some money, give them a baht and Nit would bring my soup plus the spices in their little jars, fish sauce and a soda (orange spot!). The traditional kwiteau comes with luk chins, little pork meatballs. The slang for kwiteau with luk chin was monkey ball soup. Made with flat noodles, bean sprouts, green onions and shredded bamboo shoot - and of course monkey balls- it’s ubiquitous and pretty standard street fare. And I love it. But I digress... (again)(still, always)(I think I think and talk with a lot of digressions too...) Anyone with a television couldn’t miss the previews for the new Sci-fi flick Avatar. I went and saw it today with my kids. Wow. Don’t miss it if you have a love for good movies. Before the release of the movie the previews I saw made me think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s wonderful clas- sic novella, The Word for World is Forest. I read the story (a Hugo Award winner) in a copy of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, a wonderful and challenging collection of science fiction and speculative fiction. Ellison is a master and his Dangerous Visions collec- tions were great introductions for me to many authors of the genre. More importantly were the ideas entering my head. Politics, environmentalism, religion, spirituality, science, love, hate... But Le Guin’s story was a standout. It struck a note in me I had never heard. Well, at least didn’t recog- nize... Life is sacred... it is what is. I mean physics tells us that none of this... this whatever is around each of us, our space, our home, our environment... none of it exists. There is no matter, there is electricity and lots of space - what Michio Kaku calls the cosmic foam (or Custard as some I know prefer to call it) - that seperates molecules in their spinning and whirling dervish existence. But, here we are, tapping on keys on our qwertys, making sense or not. Life is all around us and I’ll be damned if it ain’t, ‘cause it is. And I think we treat our home like shit. And that is the message of Le Guin’s tale and of Avatar, the movie. “We don’t get it.” And we are the poorer for that. A disconnect like we have manufactured for ourselves away from the natural world is a dangerous thing. Especially if, as a culture, we are incredibly immature. In reading reviews today I was looking for others who saw the Le Guin connection. And there are plenty. But there are other influences as well. Avatar is the epic tale, the iconic hero story, with a happy and good ending. If you were cheering for the tall blue folks and their big trees, of course. That immaturity I speak of? It’s plain and simple. We’re spoiled. We have too much. We don’t share and we don’t play well with others much anymore. To those who would say “of course we care you hippie moron!” I can only say that in a world where 30,000 people die each day not from old age but from starvation and malnutrition, we obviously don’t care. At least not enough as far as those 30,000 people go. In Avatar we cheer for the natives and dislike the human invaders. We go against our own. But not really. What we do by cheering the natives in Avatar is acknowledge humanity’s indigenous roots. We have been humanoid for a long time. Like... a realllly long time. We’ve been civilized (and I truly do use the term loosely) for just a blink of time in our long existence as humanoids. I’ve never really understood this arrogance we display... like this... this stuff we have, makes us any different than the us we were when we slept in caves and huts. And that’s a scary thought. Not that we’re like our native selves but that may have been like we are. Yuck... Personally, I think we’re devolving. I think we used to care more, before we discovered stuff. I believe we once loved sunsets more than mirrors, that we knew and respected the beauty, bounty and power of the natural world. My images of nature are just that for me. For me trying to capture the raw, eternal beauty of this earth, our sole sustenance, is a duty. I remember well the day I stood for the first time in a crowd and spoke on bealf of the wild. I haven’t turned back.

---

“To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy -- and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.” - Robert A. Heinlein

Art from Ditmar Introduction to On reflection, not very dangerous: Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions By JO WALTON

It would be completely unfair to tar-and-feather Harlan for never releasing The Last Dangerous Visions. It’s not the only project that’s been delayed, and some of them have even eventually seen the light of day in the end. Smile by the Beach Boys was recorded (largely) in the late 1960s, and then a version was released in 2004, and the final version was released in 2011. Chinese Democracy, an album from Guns ‘n Roses that was begun in 1994, was finally released in 2008, after more than a dozen different changes of line-up. When it was finally released, it was pretty darn good. Duke Nukem Forever was announced in 1997, was released in 2011 (and was not at all suc- cessful) and fourteen years in the realm of video games is roughly a century in any other medium. But for every Team Fortress 2, Darkfall Online and The Theif & The Cobbler, there are projects like Action Gamemaster, Game Runner or The Overcoat that never see the light of day. It’s a shame because of the kind of ma- terial that they feature could be amazing. The Theif & The Cobbler proves that material that is more than 20 years old can still be incredibly impressive even when technology has surpassed what it was created with. Endless amounts of ink have been expended both deriding and protecting Harlan over the matter of The Last Dangerous Visions, and I’ll be spending a little more a little later in this issue. Harlan is tied too closely to the material. He believes, perhaps rightly, that for better or worse, The Last Dangerous Visions will reflect on him and him alone. At first, he wanted to put together all of the materials to- gether and found himself tied-up on other projects, or he was simply trying to make sure that he could get the most material from the most important writers that were appearing since this was the last of the series and he wanted to get every possible individual involved. The real problem may have been calling it The Last Dangerous Visions. And after a while, in this case, a couple of decades, he decides it’s not going to happen, it’s been too long, the material isn’t relevant anymore, the mainstream has caught up and surpassed whatever was Dangerous in The Last Dangerous Visions. He can’t just say “It ain’t gonna happen.” He can’t go back on the claims of ‘It’s gonna hap- pen!” that appeared every year or two. It’s a situation that is sad, but every now and again he gets the itch, started working on putting it into shape (I’ve heard from folks who said in the 1990s they saw Harlan’s house and he had the stuff out like he was working on it) and whenever a piece ends up out in the world (see the venom he spit when NESFA published Cordwainer Smith’s story in the collection of the author’s work) he blows a gasket. It’s a shame, because what Harlan has is a Museum Piece now, and that’s not a dig at all. There’s good work in there, surely, and it’s a moment in time, recorded in fiction. That’s the most important thing that it can be. Selections made today of work written in the early 1970s through the early 1980s, even if the selections were made from unpublished or little-seen material, you’d still have the eye of today picking out the material. The eye of Harlan Ellison in 1973 is different than it would be even today, and the work would be selected for different reasons, and the material in The Last Dangerous Visions tells the story of the times. Or at least we think it does. And when something is so serious, someone has to make comedy from it! Jo Walton did just that for an April Fool’s Day piece in 2009. From Jo’s own bio that ran with the piece when it first appeared on Tor.com on April 1st, 2009 – Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied. I first heard of Jo back in those old days of rec.arts.sf and CompuServe and so on. I read Half A Crown about six weeks after the deadline for Hugo voting and was quite unhappy that I couldn’t nominate it! It was damn good stuff! I’ve got Lifelode, but alas, have never found the time to give it a read. She also has the greatest accent in Fandom. I can’t think who is second place in that contest... Jo’s novel Among Others was on my Hugo ballot for this year, and it’s awesome!, This piece is the kind of piece that I love: a false review! It’s sly at points, but more importantly, it’s as close as we’re going to get to actually seeing The Last Dangerous Visions... or at least some kind of Alternate Earth Last Danergous Visions. On reflection, not very dangerous: Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions JO WALTON I suppose everyone knos the history of this volume. Harlan Ellison edited two brilliant anthologies, Dan- gerous Visions (1967) and Again Dangerous Visions (1972). The Last Dangerous Visions was announced, and came out over budget and ten years late, and only then because Roger Elwood got on board to help Ellison with the heavy lifting. I’m not going to touch the question of whether Elwood’s name should have appeared in the same size print as Ellison’s on the cover—though it’s a question that can still get fans buzzing whenever there’s a new edition. The important thing is the stories. The first time I read the book I was disappointed. I don’t think this was avoidable. After all the buildup and all the controversy, after the amazing success of the earlier books, I was expecting something that no book could possibly have fulfilled. “Visionary” proclaimed the cover, and even more provocatively “We have seen the future!” Well, it wasn’t visionary and they certainly hadn’t seen the future. But we don’t condemn science fiction for not being prediction—and it’s just as well. The best thing here is Ian Watson’s “Universe on the Turn”, a darkly funny satire of a future Britain that has become a surveillance state where everyone is obsessed with watching a “reality” TV show about ordinary inane people trapped in a house together. Calling the show “Big Brother” is perhaps a little unsubtle, but the parallels be- tween the claustrophobia of the show and the highly surveilled every- day lives is done with a light touch that recalls the author’s “The Very Slow Time Machine” and Whores of Babylon. Also brilliant, if implausible, is Bruce Sterling’s “Living Inside”. This reminds me of his “We See Things Differently” with its Islamic terrorists—but this time they steal planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, bringing down both towers. Don’t ask whether that could even happen—within days of the event people are ques- tioning whether it was an inside government job. Sterling makes you think you’re getting one kind of story and then gives you another—the attack becomes the excuse for wars and loss of civil liberties across the world. Chilling and memorable, much like Distraction. Sterling’s president is kind of an absent figurehead, but in Sheckley’s “Primordial Follies” the US presidency has become a dy- nasty of morons. I laughed, I always laugh at Sheckley’s tall tales, no matter how thin he stretches them. The Monsters and Other Science Fiction Tales collects some of his best. Jerry Pournelle is here with a story called “Free Enterprise” in which NASA pretty much abandons space to robots, the shuttle fleet is al- lowed to decay, and prizes are offered for the first private companies to meet various space goals. This has the usual Pournelle style and flair, but this is a very familiar subject for him—not dangerous, not vision- ary, not to mention so very much not what happened. I like him better in more upbeat romantic works like Exile and Glory. I was impressed with Doris Piserchia’s “The Residents of Kingston”, in which there’s an ice storm in Canada paralyses the country and one small city in particular. Nothing happens, and that’s what’s good about it. No looting, no riots, and the lights come back on because everyone works together. There aren’t enough stories of co- operation and human kindness. This is a “Man against Nature” story in which man, though actually most of the characters are women, wins. We could do with more engineer heroes like Louise, out in the cold getting the power back, and domestic ones like Peggy making soup for the neighbours. I don’t know that it’s dangerous, it’s certainly an unusual kind of vision. James Gunn’s “Among the Beautiful Bright Children” is a solid science fiction story about technology— “cell phones” and the “internet” changing the way people communicate, and even meet. The “children” of the internet age chat online and even fall in love through the medium of text as it whizzes around the world, living more and more of their lives through the computer. Now this is visionary, and maybe even dangerous. (Gunn has a new collection out, Human Voices.) Other highlights include Cordwainer Smith, Octavia Butler (I like the way China’s becoming capitalist without liberalising, interesting), Michael Bishop, Mack Reynolds (with a utopian story of the fall of the Soviet Union in which it all just collapses like a house of cards in 1989) and Clifford Simak. Lowlights—well “Emerging Nation”, Bester’s story of a black president trying to force through a health- care bill while the nation is engaged in a war in the middle east that’s just a carbon copy of Vietnam. (Did they really think it could take so long for the US to become a first world country?) Michael Coney’s story (“Susy is Something Special”) of the complete economic collapse of Iceland and a worldwide depression—this isn’t vision- ary, this is just 1929 all over again. And I just couldn’t buy Algis Budrys’s “Living Alone in the Jungle”—all about a stolen election, way too much detail about the US system and “hanging chads” and the Supreme Court—who cares about this stuff? On the whole this is a good collection. It’s not as good as the first one, but probably up there with the second. It’s unfortunate that the delays and the hype made it into something that no book could live up to. It’s also funny looking at all these stories by such different writers, all written at about the same time, could make such weird predictions about the future, while missing all the real developments that were about to happen. These futures, except maybe Gunn’s, are so tame compared to what really happened. And were people paying attention? The first of the experiments that gave us cold fusion and put the solar system in our grasp had already been done by 1982, guys! And what’s with so many people wishing away the Cold War? And why are these visions—with the honourable exception of Pischeria’s—so very bleak? Oh well. Definitely worth reading. I’m glad Elwood helped Ellison get it out—for a while there I was thinking the universe was conspiring to suppress it for some mysterious reason. Review: The Book on the Edge of Forever by Christopher Priest

The first fanzine lounge I ever ran was at BayCon in 2006, the last year at the DoubleTree in San Jose. It was a good time, I brought a suitcase full of zines and we hung out and had a good time. There was a small table with a lamp coming up through the centre and there was only room for one thing. I had recently picked up a copy of Christopher Priest’s The Book on the Edge of Forever, the look at the constant disappointment that was all that existed of The Last Dangerous Visions. There was never a time during the convention when that zine wasn’t being read. It attracted readers more than anything else in the Lounge and was a constant piece of entertainment. It was only a year later at the WorldCon in Denver that it walked off with someone who really wanted to keep reading it. I can’t blame them. The Book on the Edge of Forever started out as The Last Deadloss Vision, a fanzine published by Chris Priest, that took a stern look at Harlan’s words over the years about what would be in and how big and impressive The Last Dangerous Visions would be. It also looks briefly at the reasons it has become a legend and why. I think that’s obvious, it just leapt up in his face and he realized that he couldn’t fight it at the size it had become. These things happen. The Book on the Edge of Forever was published in the style of a graphic novel by the good people at Fanta- graphics. It’s impressively set-up, with an almost grotesque image of Harlan on the cover. It’s nothing over-the-top, but it’s the kind of image that makes you uncomfortable after a while. What is that emotion going on behind those eyes? Is there any emotion going on behind them? My guess is that was exactly what the artist was going for. The story, as it is, is obviously heavily researched. I’ve heard about folks tearing through things and find- ing a slight contradiction here and there, but on the whole, no one has stood up and said that the thing is full of lies. While researching for the issue, I found several folks who faulted it for being a biased hatchet job. I don’t quite see that, though I understand how someone could come to that opinion. There are a few moments where it seems that Priest is a bit testy, and a few points where testy is almost replaced by a tinge of bitterness, but it never seems to be into the realm of out-and-out character assassination. It seems to go along as a document of a series of promises that were never paid out, and Priest has evidence all over the place. At the same time, while I never feel sorry for Harlan, I do feel for him. There’s the fact that in his corre- spondence and the various interviews quoted, Harlan considered The Last Dangerous Visions to be a masterpiece, perhaps his greatest work. This is an important part of the story because if you know you had the greatest thing you’d ever done already out there in the minds of readers and fans and writers, and you can’t deliver it, wouldn’t you do everything you could to make people believe that they would eventually be buying it, holding it in their hands. If you announced that it wasn’t going to happen, you’d feel like the ultimate failure? Now, Priest seems to come to the idea that he was simply acting the part to try and back the heat off, and that could be, but taken on the surface, it could be that way. Priest’s assumptions also seem very reasonable, though. There is a serious interplay between the two: the statements of Harlan (which may well be far more honest than Priest gives him credit for) and the suppositions of Priest (who may actually have undersold how manipulative Harlan was being). No one will ever be sure of anything beyond one thing: The Last Dangerous Visions has never appeared. The responses to the original version of the essay are another highlight, especially the ones from folks like Harry Harrison, Michael Bishop and Barry Malzberg. They add some points, but they also show that this is not a story of merely Christopher Priest being the only one interested. Graham Charnock’s letter is particularly interesting. George R. R. Martin points out his own difficulties getting out one of his anthologies. It’s good stuff. The look at the authors in the back adds another layer. He names all the writers who have been men- tioned at various points, plus he goes through the names and says who’s dropped off, who’s come on when, and who had passed away by the time he wrote it. There have been many more deaths since 1994. Likely half the authors who have stories held by Harlan are now dead. I would say you should go and find The Book on the Edge of Forever. It’s hard to find these days, I paid 30 bucks for my copy, but to read this much wonderful material is exceptional. The Least Dangerous Vision... Also the Best By Christopher J Garcia

Some have said that all writers are liars: fiction writers openly, non-fiction writers secretly, and journal- ists only when they can’t find the right source to lie for them. The urge to tell stories is the urge to lie and have those lies appreciated. It would make sense then that one of my favorite stories in the original Dangerous Visions is the one about a liar. A story about a man who lied twice... maybe. Howard Rodman was mostly a writer of scripts. He wrote some of the finest television scripts of the 1950s and 60s. He passed away in 1985 at the age of 65. He always had a good eye for the human and the humane. That shows in his addition to Dangerous Visions, The Man Who Went to the Moon Twice. It is a simple story, a story of a man named Marshall Kiss, who as a child ends up carried on a balloon away to the moon, and then leads a normal life of work and toil before he goes back into town and claims to have been back to the moon. No one bats an eye at that, the minor twist at the end sorta explains that, but really, it’s a simple and beautifully written story of only about 8 pages. Wonderful stuff, and perfectly situated. Also, not at all dangerous. Harlan tried to give it some danger, saying that it took him a while and several readings to get why it was dangerous, and I see his point for his time. The danger I think he was thinking of was the danger that what once was magic becomes commonplace, and even banal, and the loss that is to our imaginations. It’s like the constant complaint of older fans who decry the loss of the Sense Of Wonder. I don’t see it that way, a Sense of Wonder always exists as long as you are willing to give in to it, and here, Rodman seems to be saying just that. But there is still a question: did he lie once or twice or not at all? The first story of travel to the moon is so interesting. He got caught on a balloon that just went up and up until it arrived at the moon. If it is the truth, this entire story exists in a very different universe. It is one where the moon is very nice and full of singing, a moon where you can get to merely being carried by a balloon, and one where you don’t need expensive breathing apparatus. Marshall goes there, as we’re told by the first sentence of the story, and we then hear about it after his return, when the awe-filled residents of his town question him about it. If it is the truth, this story is magical indeed (and let us remember that while this was before we actu- ally landed on the moon, it was after we had a very good idea of what was up there), and if it was a lie, it is a very obvious lie, the kind of myth that would be concocted in the mind of a child. He gains a bit of fame from it and rides it for years and years, and when he becomes old, and perhaps out of nothing so much as boredom, he creates the story that he had spent a month on the moon. If this is true, it’s not a great story, it’s simpler, less adorned than the story from his childhood, but it is also a story that does not gain him what he might have been going for. It is a story that isn’t the kind of thing a liar, a really dyed-in-the-wool liar would tell. It’s going back to the well, and if the first was true, maybe the second one was as well. But the way Rodman wrote it, we were supposed to believe that his second claim was a lie. Or was it? Could that first trip have been a dream, waking or otherwise, and could it have actually meant that he BELIEVED he went to the moon without really going. Could that second trip have been dementia slipping in, or even just a plain-old hallucination? That would make neither of the lies actual lies, merely a recounting of things that weren’t true. That is a tradition that you had playing itself out in the late 1890s and again in the 1940s with the Airship/Flying Saucer flaps. These aren’t people who are lying, they were people who saw something they couldn’t explain and then reported it, jumping to a conclusion that might not have been wise. Still, it works. The power of this story lies in three things: the belief that we can be a part of something magic as children (and the children that happen to pop up at the end of the story who experience the real end of Marshall’s story are, perhaps, the ones this entire tale is meant for), that our truths and lies are sometimes deeply connected, and that a good story is better than the best truth. Maybe that is a little dangerous, but this isn’t a story written to impress the dangerousness of the vision. It is a story of beauty and meaning and memory and the loss of our collective wonder at the same time as being a story of wonder. It walks that line and perfectly, and that is why it’s one of my all-time faves. Art from Ditmar