The Drink Tank

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 something 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 anthologies 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, neither 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 considered 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.

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