Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions anthology, finalized under J. Michael Stracyznski’s stewardship, can now be pre-ordered from Blackstone Publishing.
The official release date is October 1, 2024.
JMS’ announcement today names some of the contributors, and reveals the cover:
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Based on JMS and Blackstone announcements we now have 20 known authors, since JMS has stated there will be “32 stories, poems and essays”, and he has said there will be an unpublished Harlan Ellison piece included, we have a pretty good idea of what his TLDV will contain:
JMS purchased stories (7)
Cory Doctorow, Jeffty is Five
James S.A. Corey
Neil Gaiman
Probably new
Max Brooks
Cecil Castelluci
Patton Oswalt
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Previously unpublished writer
Kayo Hartenbaum, “Binary System”
Ellison TLDV (12)
John Morressy, “Rundown”
Edward Bryant
Stephen Dedman
Howard Fast
Jonathan Fast
Richard Peck
D M Rowles
Robert Sheckley
A. E. van Vogt
Probably Ellison
David Brin
Stephen Robinette
Dan Simmons
Finally! I’ve just sent in my pre-order. It might even reach me in time for this year’s MileHiCon!
It’s happening!
holy shirt, I didn’t realize it was going to be so much of a sausagefest, even the JMS parts. Some visions are apparently more dangerous than others …
The fact that it’s mostly white guys, many of whom are well established and older, does make it feel significantly less radical and “dangerous” than it might have been 40 or 50 years ago.
The haters just hate this project. I hear “I’m melting! I’m melting!” as it approaches publication. And their bad notices have already been written for years.
I lived in the real world with Ellison and we had some good contacts and sometimes not so good. But I admire his friend’s act of faith by finding a way and form to bring this project to the finish line.
Not melting, just supremely disinterested. (And disappointed: I am old enough to remember JMS writing some good female characters in the ’90s and, more impressively, actually getting many of them on screen.) Shepherding Ellison’s work to the finish line would, I agree, be an act of faith and it’d be much easier to just read the TOC as a ’70s TOC (well, a ’70s TOC that is known to’ve shed a number of contributors over the years, including some who are not white dudes). But it’s actually an Ellison-and-JMS project, published in the 2020s, and by 2020s standards it’s an embarrassing TOC: not just because it’s a sausagefest, but because it displays a lack of interest in recent short SFF.
I mean, at least half is stuff that Ellison paid for back “in the day” (when this was first announced), but the blasted thing /was/ sitting on the shelf for…what, 45-50 years? If you are publishing an anthology that was commissioned before Jimmy Carter took office, it is not going to look like modern SF/F.
On some level I think JMS should have pulled withdrawn stories (for obvious reasons) and most of the “published elsewhere” ones, but perhaps not ones “overtaken by events” (depending on what that means) but avoided commissioning new stuff (letting it /be/ a 70s TOC). I think I would prefer to regard this as a long-delayed publishing artifact – an anthology thrown forward in time and published somewhat out-of-place – rather than as anything seeking to be “fresh”. Harlan Ellison had a chance to do the latter, and then the project got buried for…well, whatever reason.
JMS said three years ago, “In reaching out to the best and the brightest who would have name value for the book, I personally extended invitations (either directly or through their reps) to a diverse group of top writers including Namwali Serpel, Martha Wells, Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor, NK Jemisin, Becky Chambers, Amal El-Mohtar, Marlon James, Charlie Jane Anders, Ta-Nehesi Coates and Walter Mosley. By the time of the deadline, they had either not replied or their reps said they were busy or otherwise not available.”
Since these are names to conjure with in the sff marketplace, they don’t need to say yes unless they want to be part of the anthology.
What JMS didn’t say, but which I think is something that needs to be considered, is whether there are writers who simply don’t want their names and contributions propping up an Ellison project. Maybe there are people who are too busy, and what’s keeping them busy is remembering the Connie Willis boob-grab episode at the 2006 Hugo ceremony, or some other bit of history.
Of the Ellison-purchased authors on Roger’s list, David Brin isn’t on any previous LDV author lists that I have.
I’m unimpressed and kind of saddened that this is what passes for Dangerous Visions in 2024. It could be much more interesting, it could be ground-breaking like the original project, but instead it’s a sad little lump of nostalgia with a sprinkling of glitter on the top.
I don’t buy the “I reached out and no one wrote for me” argument. I’m sure it happened, but that means you keep reaching and you search out the really interesting people that sometimes get overlooked rather than let apathy drive your ToC.
I do suspect the Connie Willis boobgrab pissed off enough writers, including myself, that a lot of people didn’t want to be associated. It was a moment that said to every woman in the field, You can have awards, accolades, and sales off the charts and men will still feel they have the right to put their hands on you for the sake of entertainment.
The person I feel sorriest (and it is only very brief and glancing at that) for in all this is Mack Reynolds.
Ellison had been keeping him on the hook for nearly twenty years before “Again, Dangerous Visions” even saw print. During the last couple of issues of his fanzine “Dimensions”, Ellison was already the huckster proclaiming how the stories he’d acquired for print from other writers were too scandalous and transgressive to appear between the covers of mainstream sf magazines. One of the stories he listed as forthcoming was Mack Reynolds’ “Ponce De Leon’s Pants”, and that was circa 1954. “Dimensions” came to an end soon after these grandiose promises as Ellison went off to become a professional writer in NYC so the story was never published.
Once the “A,DV” / “L,DV” project grew so large Ellison may have thought why not throw this quite short story in as a kind of in-joke, and as proof that he’d always been an advocate for provocative sf, even in his earliest fan days.
Reynolds has been dead for over forty years, and his story “Ponce De Leon’s Pants” has been in limbo for seventy. Of course Reynolds was a grown man and could have done anything he wanted with the story. But seventy years – really. Has any story been promised for longer? Possibly ones that have been buried in time capsules?
One of the people on this list (I forget who) complained on social media that they were getting so many anthology requests in the name of a diverse TOC that it was becoming annoying. That might be a reason that the invitation for LDV wasn’t compelling to them.
Another might be that Ellison is gone and the dangerousness of the anthology is way past its sell-by date. How many writers in the above list would have ever cared about LDV?
For a long time it was infamous, and on those grounds I am looking forward to reading how JMS and the posthumous Ellison close the book on it, though I wish there was also an enormous ebook with everything ever accepted to LDV that was still permitted to be included. I also wish that Christopher Priest was still around to see it (sigh).
Still, as someone who devoured all the SF I could as a preteen in the 1970s, count me as one of the people in the Excited to See This category.
Hmmm. A lot of interesting sociological comments here. But a lot of the critique is just obvious. “It’s old!” “It’s not what we would do today!”
I wonder if the stories are any good though. Don’t we owe it to the individual writers to find out? I guess some of us will never know now because the book has been found tragically deficient by design.
I am never impressed by summary dismissals. Sure, it would have been nice if the book spoke more to today in today’s terms—I think Ellison would have liked that too.
But I have never liked every single story in an anthology I’ve read, and I’m sure there will be parts of this one I skip for reasons that might be some of the reasons mentioned here or entirely different reasons.
There are a thousand ways to criticize anything. This is an interesting document for what it includes and fails to include. I’ll enjoy what I enjoy and leave the rest.
I ecpect to buy it. I am of the era so I have a mental slot to put it in.
Also, I too have not liked most anthologies, for whatever reason, so I won’t expect to like everything – or anything – in it. But I’ve been waiting since it was first announced, and I want to read it.
No.