At Last, ‘The Last Dangerous Visions’

The name J. Michael Straczynski appears nowhere on the cover, the spine, not even the inside dust cover flap of The Last Dangerous Visions, just published in October some 51 years after the original editor first announced its existence.

Instead, the words “Edited by Harlan Ellison” are there, remarkable given that Ellison died in 2018. At that time, more than 100 stories that were supposed to comprise the last volume of the famed speculative fiction trilogy still sat in cabinet files, many of them accompanied by clipped newspaper obituaries for writers who died waiting for their stories to appear.

The story of how Straczynski finally published The Last Dangerous Visions decades after many had written off the possibility is at least as interesting as any of the 32 short stories and “Intermezzo” vignettes that make up the finished product. Straczynski, a comics and movie writer best known for creating the TV show Babylon 5, explains the story well in two parts: at the end of the book, he delineates the lengthy, complicated process of assembling the anthology, at the late legend’s request, after agreeing to serve as Ellison’s executor.

The other nonfiction bookend, “Ellison Exegesis,” by Straczynski, opens The Last Dangerous Visions by demystifying Ellison himself in ways that will be revelatory for anyone who is or was a fan of the famously cantankerous writer.

The short version: Harlan Ellison rose to prominence as part of the new wave of sci-fi (a term he hated)/speculative fiction writers of the 1960s and ‘70s. Ellison’s star burned brighter than most, not only the strength of now-classic short stories like “A Boy and His Dog,” “Shatterday,” and “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” but his reputation as a pugnacious fighter, lover, and thorn in the side of Hollywood. He wrote the best-regarded episode of the original run of Star Trek. Hollywood adapted many of his stories, intentionally or not, into films and episodes on shows like The Outer Limits and one of The Twilight Zone revivals.

Now, as revealed in The Last Dangerous Visions, Ellison’s incredibly prolific career, his reputation for pugnaciousness, the sharp dropoff in completed projects in the ‘90s-2000s, and embarrassing incidents late in his life weren’t the result of misunderstood genius, but rather undiagnosed bipolar disorder and manic depression. Ellison got treatment, after decades of ignoring the problems, but it came too close to his death for him to tackle the last Dangerous Visions book, which had grown and grown in Ellison’s mind into an impossible task so massive it would have required three more volumes.

Lucky for us, Straczynski, one of the few people Ellison and his late wife Susan truly trusted, was willing to set aside his own writing career for several years to bear down on the impossible project. He revisited decades-old contracts and commissioned a few new works to make up for the original lineup’s expirations, out-of-touch themes, and hard-to-avoid lack of diversity. Straczynski chalks it up to karmic payback: he figures he’d never have a life at all as a writer if Ellison hadn’t inspired and mentored him.

We’ll never know what the original version would have been like with stories placed alongside the introductions that Ellison meant to write for each. A list of the original plan includes authors such as Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, and Frank Herbert. But according to Ellison’s own surviving notes, not all of them were great. (On Heinlein’s submission: “Fails as a story.”) He commissioned fiction from friends fallen on hard times and writers who maybe weren’t ready for the big leagues whose stories in the end weren’t “dangerous” enough to push barriers or strong enough to stand among the entries in the previous volumes.

In 2024, it’s much harder to break taboos, but Straczynski says that even now some writers were leery to allow him to publish their previously contracted stories, or to submit new ones. Nobody wants a cancelation, even if it’s only by association to the late Ellison.

So. What remains? The stories themselves are almost beside the point if you’re most interested in The Last Dangerous Visions as a belated eulogy and apologia for Ellison. However, even accounting for the variation of quality you’d expect in a five-decade project involving hundreds of writers, the mixed bag of stories in this finale still has quite a few strong pieces.

The only story that still includes an Ellison introduction, Edward Bryant’s “War Stories,” is a weird, still-relevant fantasy about body modification, the military, and sharks. A story Dan Simmons wrote in the early 1980s, “The Last Pogrom,” about a final American-based roundup of Jews and a viral connection to such, is easily the most terrifying in the book in its continued relevance four decades later. The short “Intermezzo” interludes by D.M. Rowles are wicked, fine-tuned little palate cleansers.

“After Taste,” Cecil Castellucci’s story about an interstellar food critic, Cory Doctorow’s social-media cancel-culture piece, “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart),” Adrian Tchaikovsky’s alien-contact horror story “First Sight,” and Kayo Hartenbaum’s surprising confident publishing debut, “Binary System” all vibrate with great ideas and skillful execution.

The rest? They range from fine to perfectly OK to quite dated to not-that-great, with the closing short story, “Judas Iscariot Didn’t Kill Himself: A Story in Fragments,” by the authors of The Expanse fiction universe landing with much less impact than they intended; we’ve become so accustomed to real-life stories about people perverting new technology into a vehicle for child pornography that the concept isn’t so shocking or dangerous anymore, just sad.

Would Ellison have enjoyed the end product? It doesn’t matter. I think he would have definitely taken pride in the heroic work Straczynski accomplished just to get it out into the world in this imperfect final form. It’s unlikely The Last Dangerous Visions will break the kind of barriers that its predecessors did, but it’s still a worthy tribute to Harlan Ellison’s own troubled, imperfect career and a great meta story: it’s about how far a friend will go to see to a departed mentor’s last wishes.