When J. Michael Straczynski, Executor of the Ellison Estate, announced last November his plan to complete Last Dangerous Visions for publication, one thing he promised was —
Plus, one last slot will be opened up for submissions from unknown and unpublished writers, giving “one new voice, one last chance to make it into The Last Dangerous Visions.”
Now Straczynski has now said that on April 30, for one and only one day, the submission window will be open for stories from unpublished writers.
Full guidelines and a mandatory release form are in his open Patreon post “The Last Dangerous Visions Submission Info”.
Harlan Ellison was a fierce advocate for new writers. For that reason, one slot in THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS has been set aside for a new, unpublished writer. The submission period will last just 24 hours. One day, one voice, one vision, one new writer who will be included in a volume featuring some of the most respected writers in the science fiction genre.
DANGEROUS VISIONS stories are expected to be top-flight, challenging, new, experimental or otherwise daring in scope and vision. They are nominally SF but there’s some room to play in there. The most essential part is that they’re not about the space battles, or the McGuffin, they’re ultimately about what it is to be human…about what William Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.” They can address issues of controversy, be political in nature, or deal with gender, identity, privacy, technology…a story that appears in Dangerous Visions generally does so because it couldn’t find a home in more conventional anthologies or magazines. That doesn’t mean having gratuitous sex or violence just for shock value. Shock doesn’t endure. Good storytelling endures.
Take us to the horizon and beyond.
Straczynski’s definition of “unpublished writer” is –
[One] who has not received payment for his or her work, in print or online. If you’ve self-published books that have sold via Amazon or another vendor, that’s publication. If you’ve had stories appear online in non-paying web-magazines, for which you have not received any money, or if you’ve been paid in nonfiction arenas, that counts as being unpublished in fiction.
He also says:
Further to that point, there is no fee for submitting stories. This process is entirely free of cost or obligation. Stories not selected for THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS remain the sole property of their original authors. Payment for the selected story is on par with current leading SF magazines at 10 cents per word. All stories appearing in THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS are exclusive to that book for only a two-year period, after which all the writers shall have the nonexclusive right to resell their stories elsewhere.
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Pingback: AMAZING NEWS FROM FANDOM: 4-25-21 - Amazing Stories
So am I to assume based on the graphic shown above that there’s not yet a publisher for this? It’s Spring 2021 and JMS has beeen working on this for quite some years now. I admit if there isn’t a publisher, I’m rather surprised.
He is at least straightforward in saying that the book does not have a publisher at this point. Ellison had over the years named at least 5 different publishers (per Christopher Priest’s “Last Deadloss Visions”), none of which ended up publishing the book. (Not their fault, as far as I’m aware, since I can’t find any confirmation that any of them ever got the complete final manuscript.)
I do wish JMS well, but until I hear an announcement from an established publisher that they have the complete manuscript in their possession and will be publishing it on a specific date, I don’t have much higher hopes on seeing this book than I did when it was Ellison’s project. Folks who feel differently should free to submit, of course, but I would recommend that any contract signed with them includes a right to withdraw the submission if the book has not been published by a specified date.
John Mark Ockerbloom says I do wish JMS well, but until I hear an announcement from an established publisher that they have the complete manuscript in their possession and will be publishing it on a specific date, I don’t have much higher hopes on seeing this book than I did when it was Ellison’s project. Folks who feel differently should free to submit, of course, but I would recommend that any contract signed with them includes a right to withdraw the submission if the book has not been published by a specified date.
I too have my doubts that this book will get published. If it gets published, I’m doubting that it’ll be by a major publisher, more likely it’ll be a publish on demand affair undertaking.
I was initially disappointed that it was only completely unpublished writers— I’d rather have seen criteria more like the Resnick Award– but the more I think about it the more it’s just as well I’m not eligible to submit, given how this remains something to be skeptical of. (Well, I wouldn’t have been eligible to submit even under Resnick Award criteria, but that wasn’t true when they first announced it.)
I understand the skepticism, but JMS has a pretty impressive track record of Getting Stuff Done. I think that the book will be available to buy within — let’s be generous — three calendar years of today. It might be only available as an e-book, to be sure.
The graphic looks like the same one from the initial November 2020 announcement, which included this bit:
That seems reassuring. However, that post also said:
So it’s not exactly on schedule.
In the year 2021, I find it impossible to think a man or resources and reputation who says he is going to publish a book will find a obstacle do doing so.
Expressing that kind of optimism in a discussion of Last Dangerous Visions made my day.