Blackstone Publishing has announced on a brief “coming soon” page that The Last Dangerous Visions will be released September 1, 2024.
When Blackstone announced the acquisition in April at the London Book Fair, J. Michael Straczynski, the executor of Harlan Ellison’s literary estate who is carrying the project to the finish line, said they had bought the rights to republish Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, as well as the unpublished collection The Last Dangerous Visions.
Straczynski also said at the time the book was “slated for ‘23”. However, Blackstone’s intention is to begin with the reprint of Dangerous Visions, which has its own “coming soon” page and a scheduled release date of September 1, 2023.
Straczynski explained the timeline for File 770:
The reason TLDV is coming out in ‘24 instead of ‘23 is because Blackstone will be publishing all three of the Dangerous Visions anthologies both individually and as a unified edition, and it takes more time to prep three books for release than it does to do just one. They also want to have time to do publicity for the new book, and to get new intros to all of them from writers who were influenced by the DV books and Harlan in particular.
This will then set the stage for the publication of all of Harlan’s back catalog of his anthologies.
They also want to stagger the DV books out in chronological order, from the first DV next year, to ADV then TLDV. Then they will do the unified edition.
[Thanks to John Mark Ockerbloom for the story.]
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It feels so unnecessary. I remember reading Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions in the 70’s. I just can’t imagine it being relevant 50 years later.
So, the End of the Universe is actually coming?
I wonder how “dangerous ” the stories will seem when they’re finally published.
A long time ago in a mass media format I could barely afford while homeless in the 1990s, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions completely broke my mind. It was a brilliant collection of brilliant writers of short fiction (the kind that my autistic/neurodivergent/adhd mind loves) and I fell in love with Harlan Ellison. Then I met the gentleman, and fell out of love with everything since “Repent, Harlequin” and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”.
Whatever excitement I have for the last volume is merely out of respect for J. Michael Straczynski as a writer/show runner for many decades. It feels not just autre but disgusting to put Mr. Harlan Ellison’s name on a new volume of Science Fiction in 2023 given how many women and queers were chased out of SF/F circles by his antics from the 1960s to his death.
So who has Ursala Krober LeGuin’s rights, anyway? It seems like her/her brother Karl’s successors and executors would be far more suited to putting together a collection of The Last Dangerous Visions than anyone who would be interested in continuing to preserve Mr. Ellison’s reputation as an editor as opposed to writer.
Every single year at the Hugos, Nebulas, and Otherwise Awards we get a stirring speech about how Science Fiction and Fantastic Fiction and Fantasy writ large have finally transcended the oppressive English-only, Men-primarily, Cigar-filled era of [choose your favorite origin point of fantastic or scientifically informed fantasy fiction]. So when will we, as collective fans/fens/readers and writers finally say Daiyenu, Enough, it’s better to let certain kinds of legacies in our field just… remain dead.
There’s plenty horrible to say about every writer and editor, of course. But abuse is abuse and it shouldn’t take another dozen writers of colour from outside of the Los Angeles/Hollywood/New York City/London editorial circuit to make a truer Dangerous Visions than Mr. Ellison’s Last, no matter how much I love the person who is arranging the republication and collection.
If horror writers can find a way to write about the horrors beyond the stars without invoking the name of an American Anti-Semite in the process, certainly Dangerous Visions can end under the helm of some editors and authors from Africa, South America, Australia, or (heaven forfend) the deepest, darkest swamps and jungles of the American-Anglican-Canadian-United Kingdom’s orientalist diaspora (if that offends, just pretend I’m referencing Greg Egan here, not using fancy literary criticism lingo).
August 30, 1974 9:30pm in the Sheraton Hall at Discon II during the run up to the showing of “A Boy and His Dog” Harlan did a Q&A but started with the answers to the usual 3 questions: how tall is he, how many times he’s been married, and when is the Last Dangerous Visions coming out.
The answer, as best as I can recall, to last question was next year, 3 volumes, from Houghton Mifflin.
Let me just add, that when I read DV and ADV back when they were published … it was quite an experience. I think one issue with LDV is that the two previous books were successful in changing SF. But hey, we’ll see what JMS has up his sleeve.
Two years, eh? That couldn’t be because the massive amount of work that JMS said he was going to get done in some six months – selecting which of the original stories to keep, putting them in a new order, updating the introductions (? – he didn’t say anything about that as I recall), commissioning new stories, editing them, salting them in, adding other spanking new material – isn’t all done yet, could it be? And if it isn’t, who’s to say it’ll be done by then? JMS isn’t Harlan, but the more he emulates Harlan’s habit of making improbably big announcements for a future date, the more skeptical I get. Would love to be proven wrong, but … two years, that’s a long time for a book that’s supposedly done, and a specious-sounding reason for waiting.
I’m a fan of the controversy, not the original anthologies, so I’m looking forward to seeing this book. I am not expecting it to be dangerous.
The Last Dangerous Visions is the property of Harlan Ellison’s Kilimanjaro Corporation. Whether his name is suitable or unsuitable to put on the book is irrelevant. It belonged to Ellison and his friend and colleague J. Michael Straczynski was asked to complete it.
A lot of Cthulhu is in the public domain, making it ripe for reappropriation and reinvention. Dangerous Visions is a 16-year-old registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation that’s in effect until at least 2027.
To the comment above about my workload, writing habits and TLDV…the book was finished months ago. It could not have been sold unless it was done. All of the stories are in and the book has been put into the production pipeline. This part was announced some time ago. Clearly you missed it. It would have been altogether lovely if you had actually bothered to find out the situation before smearing someone.
Just to underscore the point here: how was TLDV sold? The way any book is sold. The completed manuscript was sent to a number of publishers who read it and made bids. This is how Blackstone acquired the book and announced a publication date for it. Real simple. And again, this whole process has been done out in the open, with regular updates at each step: we announced when it was finished, then when the completed manuscript was taken to market, and when the finished book was purchased. This is all available via Google had you simply bothered to check.
I will await your retraction. Will you ever get around to it? Probably not.
I think it’s pretty amazing that the TLDV project will happen, after having had to endure decades of reading toxic snark from people who are invested in its failure, including a new load every time I publish news about it.
It was just the beginning of this month the Scroll quoted from Lincoln Michel’s article “Why Does It Take So Long to Publish a Book?”. Two years from turning in the manuscript to release is common in tradpub. He leads into comments about the process by saying:
I think September 2024 is sufficiently distant that additional causes for delay may yet occur, in keeping with the fine tradition of LDV. If that happens, I’ll be mildly curious to see what we see.
And I’ll believe in the completed book when I see it. Till then, vaporware.
Here, let me present the other cheek. And I have two more if you need to slap them.
A Boy and His Godstalk
Can we stop with the whining about the delays in the publishing of this anthology please?
I’ve got authors who are friends who can tell you how many delays can happen under the best of conditions so that a given book that’s supposed to happen this year suddenly isn’t. And now it’s two years later. Or three. Or four. Or in some cases never. Or their contract with the publisher is suddenly revoked.
You’ll read it when it gets published. Certainly you’ve got more than enough else to read in the meanwhile.
My cynicism certainly isn’t about OGH, and not even about JMS.
It’s about The Last Dangerous Visions, and the number of times it’s been promised over the last several decades.
I regard the fact that the LDV we get won’t be the one Harlan might have given us to be a good thing. It has a much better chance of being truly exciting than getting now the book Harlan might have published 30 years ago or so.
Perhaps the mythical library of lost/unwritten/unpublished books will be losing a volume one of these days.
Yes, I saw some of those announcements – here on F770. Wherever else it’s being announced is somewhere I don’t read.
But, as Lis Carey says, we’re talking about The Last Dangerous Visions here. Maybe JMS has forgotten this, but I remember this from my more active days in fandom, and if you don’t, you can read about it from Christopher Priest: more than two times Harlan promised that LDV really truly was about to be published this time, finished, turned in, contracted and everything, with the publisher’s editors trotted out to swear up and down that it was true, same kind of assurances were getting now, and then … it didn’t get published: As I wrote, “JMS isn’t Harlan, but the more he emulates Harlan’s habit of making improbably big announcements for a future date, the more skeptical I get.” It’s the speed with which this unnecessarily massive project was completed in – “unnecessariy” because all JMS really had to do was cut the stories he wasn’t going to include and leave the rest alone, and not all this rearranging and added material he’s announced – that makes me wonder the most, and if JMS is going to comment here, maybe he could elucidate that part. Just a thought. He’s under no obligation to quell my doubts, but if he wants to, that would be a better start than what he’s been saying.
As for “people who are invested in its failure,” Mike, if that was me I also wrote “would love to be be proven wrong.” Maybe you missed that part. I’d like to see this book. I’ve been liking to see it for fifty years.
DB: Of course you’re invested in its failure. Own it, stop denying it. Christopher Priest’s booklet came out in 1994, and the fanzine version before that. So what? It’s fanwriting, not inerrant scriptural prophecy. This isn’t the Nineties. Ellison is dead. Things are happening that never did before. A book has been turned into a publisher. (“What rough…” Never mind.)