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Dangerous Visions #2
Again, Dangerous Visions
All you need to know about this book:
1- It is the companion volume to the most influential book of speculative fiction in the past twenty-five years, the award-winning "Dangerous Visions". Of course, you've heard of "Dangerous Visions".
2- It contains original stories, written especially for this anthology, by forty-two very special writers, none of whom were in "Dangerous Visions". Of course, you remember the writers who won all those awards for "Dangerous Visions".
3- It contains forty-six stories ranging in length from shorties of 1,000 words to short novels of 40,000 words; each story was written without thought to taboos or publishing restrictions that usually hamper sci-fi writers. Of course, you remember what a mind-blower, in this respect, was "Dangerous Visions".
4- Each story has its own Afterword by the author, as well as its own individual Introduction by the editor. Of course, you remember the wealth of addenda that made such a milestone of "Dangerous Visions".
5, 6, & 7- It took over three years to compile this book. It has been edited by Harlan Ellison who put together "Dangerous Visions", which you will surely recall. And... this is a more startling book than "Dangerous Visions". This book takes off where "Dangerous Visions" stopped and it is a BETTER book than "Dangerous Visions".
1- It is the companion volume to the most influential book of speculative fiction in the past twenty-five years, the award-winning "Dangerous Visions". Of course, you've heard of "Dangerous Visions".
2- It contains original stories, written especially for this anthology, by forty-two very special writers, none of whom were in "Dangerous Visions". Of course, you remember the writers who won all those awards for "Dangerous Visions".
3- It contains forty-six stories ranging in length from shorties of 1,000 words to short novels of 40,000 words; each story was written without thought to taboos or publishing restrictions that usually hamper sci-fi writers. Of course, you remember what a mind-blower, in this respect, was "Dangerous Visions".
4- Each story has its own Afterword by the author, as well as its own individual Introduction by the editor. Of course, you remember the wealth of addenda that made such a milestone of "Dangerous Visions".
5, 6, & 7- It took over three years to compile this book. It has been edited by Harlan Ellison who put together "Dangerous Visions", which you will surely recall. And... this is a more startling book than "Dangerous Visions". This book takes off where "Dangerous Visions" stopped and it is a BETTER book than "Dangerous Visions".
830 pages, Hardcover
First published March 17, 1972
705 people are currently reading
4032 people want to read
About the author
Harlan Ellison
1,075 books2,792 followersHarlan Jay Ellison (1934-2018) was a prolific American writer of short stories, novellas, teleplays, essays, and criticism.
His literary and television work has received many awards. He wrote for the original series of both The Outer Limits and Star Trek as well as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; edited the multiple-award-winning short story anthology series Dangerous Visions; and served as creative consultant/writer to the science fiction TV series The New Twilight Zone and Babylon 5.
Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog".
His literary and television work has received many awards. He wrote for the original series of both The Outer Limits and Star Trek as well as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; edited the multiple-award-winning short story anthology series Dangerous Visions; and served as creative consultant/writer to the science fiction TV series The New Twilight Zone and Babylon 5.
Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog".
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August 17, 2025What a strange hour I’ve just spent with this fossil. The casual misogyny of every single intro to a story by a female writer is far more chilling than any of the fiction. Not even Le Guin escapes it! (But, hilariously, James A. Tiptree does. I don’t think Ellison knew...)
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January 25, 2017This copy is signed by Harlan Ellison .
October 18, 2019
Sometime between the first Dangerous Visions anthology and the second, Harlan Ellison jumped the shark. Perhaps in those four years, he started to believe his own hype. It is true that the first anthology did seem to set a fire under a number of writers, both old and new, to experiment and try new things, and it happened because Ellison championed it. But in the preparation of the second volume, Ellison took on much more than a simple championing role—he became a dangerous vision of himself.
But before I get to the real criticism of this volume, let me note that it still contains a couple of the greatest short fiction stories ever published: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest,” a piece that merges environmentalism and racism in such a talented way that it’s as hard to read it as, Le Guin says in her afterword, it was easy for her to write it; and Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” one of the best feminist science fiction stories, posting a world where the men died off and the women did what they had to do to continue, then the ramifications of being “rediscovered” by the rest of humanity. Both of these stories are as powerful today as they were forty years ago, because the problems remain. To be entirely frank, I’ve never been a fan of either writer, some of whose other stories set my teach on edge. But there’s no disputing that these stories are worthy of being read by every reader, especially any reader who wants to understand the power of science fiction when it’s done well and done correctly.
There are some other good stories in this 46 story anthology as well. “Ching Witch” by Ross Rocklynne is one of the funniest stories that incorporates a cat. H. H. Hollis’ “Stoned Counsel” is an interesting idea of how legal work could be transformed in the future through hallucinogens. The two stories by Bernard Wolfe, “The Bisquit Position” and “The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements,” are unusual and strange in their mixture of 70s cultural themes (Vietnam war, sleep research) with 50s era style (world-weary protagonists caught up in weirdness). Gregory Benford’s “And the Sea Like Mirrors” predates Stephen King by a decade, containing much of what has become King’s stock-in-trade: a horrific world in which an “everyman” tries to survive.
But the majority of these stories are simply “meh,” and in some instances, downright awful. One story in particular, Richard Lupoff’s “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old Alabama,” was so annoying (i.e., made-up language similar to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker), I skimmed it after the first section. And it’s not hard to discover why this may be, because the very process of putting this anthology together can be pieced together from the introductions and afterwords. The culprit: Ellison’s increasing need to grandstand, to puff up the book and himself. One of the earliest things you learn is that this huge volume comprises only half of what Ellison had accepted and bought, and that it became so large, he and the publisher agreed to release this volume and then one called The Last Dangerous Visions later—so much later that it never appeared.
Grandstanding? The best example of which can be read in the introduction and afterword to “Bed Sheets are White“ by Evelyn Lief, which is more of a story than the story itself. Basically, Ellison shows up at Clarion determined to be a holy terror to the students by tearing apart their stories on the first day of his week. In the afterword, Lief reports that Ellison said this about her story that first morning, "This story is trite and schoolgirlish. It's the perfect example of every single thing that can be done wrong, all in one piece of writing." She goes back to her room and writes “DAMN YOU, HARLAN ELLISON” on a sign and hangs it above her typewriter and then proceeds to write something that he will like. He likes it and immediately buys it for Again, Dangerous Visions.
And that would be a beautiful story if “Bed Sheets are White” was any good, but it’s not. It’s short enough that you can forgive it for being mediocre, but Ellison lauds it as on par with Le Guin or Russ or Benford? Sorry, not even close. What the foreword by Ellison and afterword by Lief depict is Ellison’s increasing role in the creation of not only the book, but the stories themselves, as he started to see himself as the great savior of literature, challenging both established authors and beginning students, and becoming their benefactor, muse, and daemon. It becomes all about him, both from his standpoint and the author’s. And thus, when it fails to be about the story, things fall apart.
Unlike others before me who’ve laid criticism at Ellison’s feet, his recent departure from this world means I have no fear of a late night phone call or sharply worded threat made in a public place. The thing is, I’ve always liked Ellison’s writing—his short story and essay collections were meat and potatoes to me in my formative years, and I loved his zeal and passion to champion perceived and real injustices in the world. In particular, his essays in The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat were early influences on how I viewed popular entertainment and the role of the critic. The Dangerous Visions anthologies were a great idea, and the two that were published had an impact that could be felt beyond the SFF world. Yet the warning signs for the project going off the rails could clearly be seen in A,DV even if Locus picked it as the best original anthology published in 1972.
It’s probably for the best that The Last Dangerous Visions never appeared, because it simply could not have lived up to its hype. What’s sad is that the stories got bumped into that stillborn volume never had the opportunity to feed their author’s careers aside from cover letters where they might have been listed as a sale. The other sad part of the whole debacle is how it continually cast a cloud over Ellison’s career, even until the very end.
But before I get to the real criticism of this volume, let me note that it still contains a couple of the greatest short fiction stories ever published: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest,” a piece that merges environmentalism and racism in such a talented way that it’s as hard to read it as, Le Guin says in her afterword, it was easy for her to write it; and Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” one of the best feminist science fiction stories, posting a world where the men died off and the women did what they had to do to continue, then the ramifications of being “rediscovered” by the rest of humanity. Both of these stories are as powerful today as they were forty years ago, because the problems remain. To be entirely frank, I’ve never been a fan of either writer, some of whose other stories set my teach on edge. But there’s no disputing that these stories are worthy of being read by every reader, especially any reader who wants to understand the power of science fiction when it’s done well and done correctly.
There are some other good stories in this 46 story anthology as well. “Ching Witch” by Ross Rocklynne is one of the funniest stories that incorporates a cat. H. H. Hollis’ “Stoned Counsel” is an interesting idea of how legal work could be transformed in the future through hallucinogens. The two stories by Bernard Wolfe, “The Bisquit Position” and “The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements,” are unusual and strange in their mixture of 70s cultural themes (Vietnam war, sleep research) with 50s era style (world-weary protagonists caught up in weirdness). Gregory Benford’s “And the Sea Like Mirrors” predates Stephen King by a decade, containing much of what has become King’s stock-in-trade: a horrific world in which an “everyman” tries to survive.
But the majority of these stories are simply “meh,” and in some instances, downright awful. One story in particular, Richard Lupoff’s “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old Alabama,” was so annoying (i.e., made-up language similar to Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker), I skimmed it after the first section. And it’s not hard to discover why this may be, because the very process of putting this anthology together can be pieced together from the introductions and afterwords. The culprit: Ellison’s increasing need to grandstand, to puff up the book and himself. One of the earliest things you learn is that this huge volume comprises only half of what Ellison had accepted and bought, and that it became so large, he and the publisher agreed to release this volume and then one called The Last Dangerous Visions later—so much later that it never appeared.
Grandstanding? The best example of which can be read in the introduction and afterword to “Bed Sheets are White“ by Evelyn Lief, which is more of a story than the story itself. Basically, Ellison shows up at Clarion determined to be a holy terror to the students by tearing apart their stories on the first day of his week. In the afterword, Lief reports that Ellison said this about her story that first morning, "This story is trite and schoolgirlish. It's the perfect example of every single thing that can be done wrong, all in one piece of writing." She goes back to her room and writes “DAMN YOU, HARLAN ELLISON” on a sign and hangs it above her typewriter and then proceeds to write something that he will like. He likes it and immediately buys it for Again, Dangerous Visions.
And that would be a beautiful story if “Bed Sheets are White” was any good, but it’s not. It’s short enough that you can forgive it for being mediocre, but Ellison lauds it as on par with Le Guin or Russ or Benford? Sorry, not even close. What the foreword by Ellison and afterword by Lief depict is Ellison’s increasing role in the creation of not only the book, but the stories themselves, as he started to see himself as the great savior of literature, challenging both established authors and beginning students, and becoming their benefactor, muse, and daemon. It becomes all about him, both from his standpoint and the author’s. And thus, when it fails to be about the story, things fall apart.
Unlike others before me who’ve laid criticism at Ellison’s feet, his recent departure from this world means I have no fear of a late night phone call or sharply worded threat made in a public place. The thing is, I’ve always liked Ellison’s writing—his short story and essay collections were meat and potatoes to me in my formative years, and I loved his zeal and passion to champion perceived and real injustices in the world. In particular, his essays in The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat were early influences on how I viewed popular entertainment and the role of the critic. The Dangerous Visions anthologies were a great idea, and the two that were published had an impact that could be felt beyond the SFF world. Yet the warning signs for the project going off the rails could clearly be seen in A,DV even if Locus picked it as the best original anthology published in 1972.
It’s probably for the best that The Last Dangerous Visions never appeared, because it simply could not have lived up to its hype. What’s sad is that the stories got bumped into that stillborn volume never had the opportunity to feed their author’s careers aside from cover letters where they might have been listed as a sale. The other sad part of the whole debacle is how it continually cast a cloud over Ellison’s career, even until the very end.
June 19, 2014
Sometimes the worst thing that can happen is to be successful. Because your next thing has to surpass your first success. Just ask the guy who came up with the idea of pet rocks.
Harlan Ellison probably knows what I am talking about. Dangerous Visions was a raging success. It is still the definitive sci-fi anthology of the last half of the 20th century. It was a risk and a risk well taken. So of course there had to be a sequel.
But in Again, Dangerous Visions the writers know the score. Be ground-breaking. Be controversial. Be different. So what we get is 46 authors in 800 plus pages trying to out-innovate the others and trying too hard. The result is an uneven set of stories that pale to the original collection. That isn't to say there are not some nice tales here. It just isn't Dangerous Visions.
Update: Today I took this off my shelf and looked at the inscription Ellison wrote for me on the title page. It reads "I never wanted to edit this book!". Pretty much sums it up
Harlan Ellison probably knows what I am talking about. Dangerous Visions was a raging success. It is still the definitive sci-fi anthology of the last half of the 20th century. It was a risk and a risk well taken. So of course there had to be a sequel.
But in Again, Dangerous Visions the writers know the score. Be ground-breaking. Be controversial. Be different. So what we get is 46 authors in 800 plus pages trying to out-innovate the others and trying too hard. The result is an uneven set of stories that pale to the original collection. That isn't to say there are not some nice tales here. It just isn't Dangerous Visions.
Update: Today I took this off my shelf and looked at the inscription Ellison wrote for me on the title page. It reads "I never wanted to edit this book!". Pretty much sums it up
January 11, 2015
Man, most of these stories are extremely bad. Some of the standouts include the Le Guin and the Tiptree and the Hollis and perhaps the Vonnegut, but even then, man, I don't know. There is one fun bagatelle about the legal implications of cryogenics that reads like droll sci-fi Thackeray, and H.H. Hollis' story about LSD lawyering was also spry, but these do not justify the many many bad stories you will read. Really, the only reason to read this collection is if you have any kind of fascination with the kinetic and utterly self-involved world of seventies sci-fi, a world that is rather dead now, and which was charming without ever actually being very relevant or producing any stand-out writers. I have such a fascination; reading this collection was my own fault.
There is a Piers Anthony story about a PARALLEL DIMENSION where all dairy products come from milking human women that is pretty jaw-dropping and would make a great short film for Lars Von Trier perhaps, but which cannot be taken seriously on its own merits at all, no matter what dimension you are from. Reading the explanation in the afterword of this piece, where it is explained that it is a parable about animal cruelty, I was uh...unpersuaded...that it was not just an elaborate, disturbing, specific, jolly fucked-up sex fantasy. I liked it on that level, I guess, but DAMN... who was this story for? Now we have Smashwords for such "dangerous visions," I guess.
I like reading bad books, but I cannot recommend this to anyone unless you like journeying into REALMS OF THE MISGUIDED AND CRANKY AND SELF-INDULGENT AND DEAD IN SPIRIT.
There is a Piers Anthony story about a PARALLEL DIMENSION where all dairy products come from milking human women that is pretty jaw-dropping and would make a great short film for Lars Von Trier perhaps, but which cannot be taken seriously on its own merits at all, no matter what dimension you are from. Reading the explanation in the afterword of this piece, where it is explained that it is a parable about animal cruelty, I was uh...unpersuaded...that it was not just an elaborate, disturbing, specific, jolly fucked-up sex fantasy. I liked it on that level, I guess, but DAMN... who was this story for? Now we have Smashwords for such "dangerous visions," I guess.
I like reading bad books, but I cannot recommend this to anyone unless you like journeying into REALMS OF THE MISGUIDED AND CRANKY AND SELF-INDULGENT AND DEAD IN SPIRIT.
August 24, 2009
I watched a TV documentary on Harlan Ellison recently, a larger-than-life writer who seems to put Hemingway and Hefner to shame. His science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions was often mentioned in the program. I could not get the book at the library by instead found "Again, Dangerous Visions" - the sequel ( I believe even a third anthology was compiled due to its popularity at the time). I read a dozen stories from the 46 presented in the sequel, and it gave me my dose of speculative, edgy fiction that was termed the "new science fiction" of the time.
It was quaint reading SF written in the late sixties, where several of the predictions have now become "science fact" - including propositions that children would sue their parents for improper upbringing, the frustrations of navigating the labyrinthine confines of a super-department store in search of sexual aids (some of these aids haven't been invented yet, I believe), executing children after the maximum two-child limit had been reached (didn't many unoficial executions take place in parts of the world where "one child" was the limit, leaving us with the legacy today of a nation of spoilt children?)
Many of the writers -juxtaposed between a few heavyweights like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - were newbies at the time, in their twenties and thirties, some being published for the first time in this anthology. Ellison is generous in giving each writer a personally written copious introduction (the most revealing parts of the book, I think) and lots of praise, and affording each writer an afterword at the end of his/her story. Some writers needed the afterword as their stories were'nt very coherent to me. One writer actually said that he set out to confuse and frustrate the reader! What happened to entertaining, educating and enlightening us?
Nevertheless, in an era when the Internet was still a closely guarded military secret, and online forms of shameless self-promotion were not available to the writer, Ellison tirelessly goes out to beat the bushes on behalf of his authors, doing his bit to grow the next generation of SF writers, revealing frank stories about how he met his contributors, nutured them, browbeat them when required, and extracted their best work from them. One writer was so overcome that she wrote Harlan a note back saying "F... you Harlan Ellison you don't know so goddam much". She was still published and I'm sure that more than a few careers were made subsequently.
What threw me off was the rough writing - inelegant prose in exchange for mind bending premises. It was hard to find a writer, perhaps Vonnegut was the exception, who combined clear prose with an intriguing premise. Perhaps that is why 12 stories was enough for me.
It was quaint reading SF written in the late sixties, where several of the predictions have now become "science fact" - including propositions that children would sue their parents for improper upbringing, the frustrations of navigating the labyrinthine confines of a super-department store in search of sexual aids (some of these aids haven't been invented yet, I believe), executing children after the maximum two-child limit had been reached (didn't many unoficial executions take place in parts of the world where "one child" was the limit, leaving us with the legacy today of a nation of spoilt children?)
Many of the writers -juxtaposed between a few heavyweights like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - were newbies at the time, in their twenties and thirties, some being published for the first time in this anthology. Ellison is generous in giving each writer a personally written copious introduction (the most revealing parts of the book, I think) and lots of praise, and affording each writer an afterword at the end of his/her story. Some writers needed the afterword as their stories were'nt very coherent to me. One writer actually said that he set out to confuse and frustrate the reader! What happened to entertaining, educating and enlightening us?
Nevertheless, in an era when the Internet was still a closely guarded military secret, and online forms of shameless self-promotion were not available to the writer, Ellison tirelessly goes out to beat the bushes on behalf of his authors, doing his bit to grow the next generation of SF writers, revealing frank stories about how he met his contributors, nutured them, browbeat them when required, and extracted their best work from them. One writer was so overcome that she wrote Harlan a note back saying "F... you Harlan Ellison you don't know so goddam much". She was still published and I'm sure that more than a few careers were made subsequently.
What threw me off was the rough writing - inelegant prose in exchange for mind bending premises. It was hard to find a writer, perhaps Vonnegut was the exception, who combined clear prose with an intriguing premise. Perhaps that is why 12 stories was enough for me.
November 27, 2016
It's been years since I've read this, and I'm still thinking about it. This really raised some potent and hard-hitting questions about gender roles and life in general. Really wish this had been a whole novel.
December 29, 2019
Wow. I set myself up to read 100 books this year and then give myself this doorstopper in December. Smart, self.
Some day I'll find a copy of "Dangerous Visions" which is what I was recommended to read and why I picked up its sequel. The introductions frequently reference a third volume called "Last Dangerous Visions" but it doesn't appear to have been made, or if made, didn't have that title.
The premise of the collection is "Stories too taboo for traditional markets." And I suppose taboos were pretty tight in 1972 because most of the stories just have a little sex in them and tons of misogyny but I sadly don't think that was taboo in 1972.
There are some gems in here. Joanna Russ' excellent "When It Changed" which is often reprinted, Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations"--really two stories by Bernard Wolfe, has a real literary feel, the first "Bisquit Position" is an excellent short play on the horrors on napalm, and I hope in the second story "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements" the author meant for us to feel the misogyny internalized by said girl that she doesn't realize she's the smartest and most creative person in the story, however the author's afterword was pure bunk about 'the muse'.
"Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer had a good mix of cool invention and motorcycle chases, plus a female character who is competent at something --shockingly rare-- though of course the two women in the story are both marked for how they can't do something the men do. At this point in the collection I was wondering if men used to only use female characters when they wanted a character to fail at something, because gosh they couldn't bear to see a man do that.
"Moth Race" by Richard Hill was a good classic SF piece. For me it really captures the ineffable joy and madness of sports.
"In Re Glover" by Leonard Tushnet is pure hard sf for lawyers. Reads like a legal brief but fascinating!
"Zero Gee" by Ben Bova has moments of "hey maybe this is toxic masculinity" insight but I felt the ending robbed its meaning.
"With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" will stay with me but I'm not sure if for good or ill... military SF with New Haiti fighting New Alabama, and the Haitians are written in standard English and the New Alabamans in thick dialect. Problematical things all over the board. Are the Alabaman's being gay meant to be a slur against them or just an example of hypocrisy? Did I lose a character in there? Some of the people run together. It's a long piece and... yeah ok I see why this one is a dangerous vision, if only for all the use of the N-word.
"Ozymandias" by Terry Carr is lovely, one of those stories that says a lot that isn't on the page.
"The Milk of Paradise" is classic Tiptree, so beautiful writing, but the story itself felt a little weak and rapey. Mostly rapey.
Those are the ones I liked. Among the ones I didn't like there were a few that were so awful... I suppose Harlan would be glad to hear that. But not awful in the way he'd think. I love sex and drugs and taboo-breaking. I loathe flat characterizations and lack of structure.
Now about the introductions and afterwords. Like a good completionist, I read them all, and as is usual when I force myself to read things just because I can't bear to skip stuff, I regret almost every single one.
You know what the worst type of wedding toast is? The one that begins "I met Kevin when..." You know this wedding toast. It's a painful ten minutes of personal exposition saying nothing interesting but giving the toaster a chance to talk about himself. Almost all of Harlan's intros are like that. Also, more than half of the afterwards are "Harlan made me write an afterward and I hate afterwards my work should stand on its own." So skim those at will, my friends, or just read the ones for your favorite authors because you want to know more about them.
Some day I'll find a copy of "Dangerous Visions" which is what I was recommended to read and why I picked up its sequel. The introductions frequently reference a third volume called "Last Dangerous Visions" but it doesn't appear to have been made, or if made, didn't have that title.
The premise of the collection is "Stories too taboo for traditional markets." And I suppose taboos were pretty tight in 1972 because most of the stories just have a little sex in them and tons of misogyny but I sadly don't think that was taboo in 1972.
There are some gems in here. Joanna Russ' excellent "When It Changed" which is often reprinted, Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations"--really two stories by Bernard Wolfe, has a real literary feel, the first "Bisquit Position" is an excellent short play on the horrors on napalm, and I hope in the second story "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements" the author meant for us to feel the misogyny internalized by said girl that she doesn't realize she's the smartest and most creative person in the story, however the author's afterword was pure bunk about 'the muse'.
"Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer had a good mix of cool invention and motorcycle chases, plus a female character who is competent at something --shockingly rare-- though of course the two women in the story are both marked for how they can't do something the men do. At this point in the collection I was wondering if men used to only use female characters when they wanted a character to fail at something, because gosh they couldn't bear to see a man do that.
"Moth Race" by Richard Hill was a good classic SF piece. For me it really captures the ineffable joy and madness of sports.
"In Re Glover" by Leonard Tushnet is pure hard sf for lawyers. Reads like a legal brief but fascinating!
"Zero Gee" by Ben Bova has moments of "hey maybe this is toxic masculinity" insight but I felt the ending robbed its meaning.
"With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" will stay with me but I'm not sure if for good or ill... military SF with New Haiti fighting New Alabama, and the Haitians are written in standard English and the New Alabamans in thick dialect. Problematical things all over the board. Are the Alabaman's being gay meant to be a slur against them or just an example of hypocrisy? Did I lose a character in there? Some of the people run together. It's a long piece and... yeah ok I see why this one is a dangerous vision, if only for all the use of the N-word.
"Ozymandias" by Terry Carr is lovely, one of those stories that says a lot that isn't on the page.
"The Milk of Paradise" is classic Tiptree, so beautiful writing, but the story itself felt a little weak and rapey. Mostly rapey.
Those are the ones I liked. Among the ones I didn't like there were a few that were so awful... I suppose Harlan would be glad to hear that. But not awful in the way he'd think. I love sex and drugs and taboo-breaking. I loathe flat characterizations and lack of structure.
Now about the introductions and afterwords. Like a good completionist, I read them all, and as is usual when I force myself to read things just because I can't bear to skip stuff, I regret almost every single one.
You know what the worst type of wedding toast is? The one that begins "I met Kevin when..." You know this wedding toast. It's a painful ten minutes of personal exposition saying nothing interesting but giving the toaster a chance to talk about himself. Almost all of Harlan's intros are like that. Also, more than half of the afterwards are "Harlan made me write an afterward and I hate afterwards my work should stand on its own." So skim those at will, my friends, or just read the ones for your favorite authors because you want to know more about them.
November 29, 2019
For a good part of my senior year of high school (1973) I carried a copy around with my notebook, sneaking reads when I could. It did more to prepare me for the future I would soon be living in than all my boring classes. It would deeply disturb today's high schoolers, but it would do them a lot of good. Age-appropriate is for losers.
May 30, 2022
Harlan Ellison was the enfant terrible of the sf/f/h industry for most of his writing life. I often viewed him as the anti-Robert Silverberg. Both flooded the market because they wrote so much and submitted so much they couldn't help but be published as often as possible. Many markets now have a "no multiple submissions" policy and I wonder how either Ellison or Silverberg would fare.
It quickly became obvious to me why many of the stories in Dangerous Visions, Again made it. They hit all the historical Ellison buttons. When Ellison was good he was brilliant, but his other mode was WTF? I scratched my head in disbelief as often as I sat back wowed by his work.
There are some massive standouts in Again, Dangerous Visions (Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest is one, Russ' When It Changed is another. A blow-me-away standout is Bernard Wolfe's two-fer Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations, which is a graduate course (no pun intended if you've read it) on dialogue and character development (and would probably come with trigger warnings if published today)
I'd read the first two in other anthologies so, while still entertaining and good reads, they weren't revelatory. Some stories I really wondered about. Vonnegut's entry is pure Vonnegut; amusing and (to me) only included because Vonnegut was Vonnegut when this anthology came to be and if you didn't include Vonnegut you were a fool or an idiot (several stories are from authors in this category. SF/F was making it's mainstream push at this time. Specific to Vonnegut, the industry spent lots of time and money trying to make Vonnegut fit in the sf/f author category. He didn't accept it as anything sf/fish made up only a small part of his work).
Some stories are beautifully written but don't do anything or go anywhere. I read many purely on the strength of the writing only to finish them wondering "What was this about, again?"
The other side of this is remembering what the SF/F community was like during the period this anthology came to be; seeking validity, seeking recognition, wanting desperately to reach beyond its original audience of geeks and nerds (before such terms existed), and disenfranchised, pimply-faced teenage males. An example of this is a story about a third of the way through which has the following words in its first paragraph (of only seven lines): glissando, paroxysmal, deliquesce. I'm positive these words gave many original audience members pause.
But they do go a long way to establishing some kind of effetery, don't they?
David Gerrold's With a Finger in my I was, to me, well-written dreck.
A few stories later one finds "Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer. This one story is so standout I'm not sure what it's doing in the anthology. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
The gem is, of course, James Tiptree, Jr.'s The Milk of Paradise and here I confess a bias. Everything I've ready by her is brilliant, amazing, breathtaking and The Milk of Paradise is no exception. She grabs you in the first sentence and doesn't let go or let you breathe until the end.
The book could easily have been a third shorter if Ellison didn't feel the need to introduce each story, something he recognizes in his intro to Tiptree's piece with "For those of you who hate my introductions, you'll have decided to forego them at this point, ..."
I read the stories and, as I always do when reading anthologies (including those in which my work appears), wonder what caught the editor's eye. About 4/5ths through, I began to notice an oft occurring thread of effete intelligence. Many of the stories (not all, simply a lot) were snarky smart, what I would call an in-your-face intelligent, almost an arrogance.
Yeah, well, nobody ever accused Ellison of that.
But that led me to "What was going on that such was the vogue?" and I remembered something my high school sophomore year English teacher, Mrs. Baraniak, told the class one day, "I love it when Time magazine comes in the mail because I know I'm going to have an afternoon's good reading and I'll need a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a couple of foreign language dictionaries to get me through."
Time magazine was muchly different than it is today. And she was exhilarated just from anticipating the next issue based on memories of past issues. It enlivened her. Being intellectually challenged excited her.
Such were the 1960's-70's. The world was in chaos (when isn't it? And most of it man made), we beat the Russians to the moon, we lost Jimmy and Janis, Nixon was a liar and a thief, ...
What a marvelous escape that must have been, escaping into arrogance (which is an alternate spelling of "ignorance" in my dictionary).
It quickly became obvious to me why many of the stories in Dangerous Visions, Again made it. They hit all the historical Ellison buttons. When Ellison was good he was brilliant, but his other mode was WTF? I scratched my head in disbelief as often as I sat back wowed by his work.
There are some massive standouts in Again, Dangerous Visions (Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest is one, Russ' When It Changed is another. A blow-me-away standout is Bernard Wolfe's two-fer Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations, which is a graduate course (no pun intended if you've read it) on dialogue and character development (and would probably come with trigger warnings if published today)
I'd read the first two in other anthologies so, while still entertaining and good reads, they weren't revelatory. Some stories I really wondered about. Vonnegut's entry is pure Vonnegut; amusing and (to me) only included because Vonnegut was Vonnegut when this anthology came to be and if you didn't include Vonnegut you were a fool or an idiot (several stories are from authors in this category. SF/F was making it's mainstream push at this time. Specific to Vonnegut, the industry spent lots of time and money trying to make Vonnegut fit in the sf/f author category. He didn't accept it as anything sf/fish made up only a small part of his work).
Some stories are beautifully written but don't do anything or go anywhere. I read many purely on the strength of the writing only to finish them wondering "What was this about, again?"
The other side of this is remembering what the SF/F community was like during the period this anthology came to be; seeking validity, seeking recognition, wanting desperately to reach beyond its original audience of geeks and nerds (before such terms existed), and disenfranchised, pimply-faced teenage males. An example of this is a story about a third of the way through which has the following words in its first paragraph (of only seven lines): glissando, paroxysmal, deliquesce. I'm positive these words gave many original audience members pause.
But they do go a long way to establishing some kind of effetery, don't they?
David Gerrold's With a Finger in my I was, to me, well-written dreck.
A few stories later one finds "Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer. This one story is so standout I'm not sure what it's doing in the anthology. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
The gem is, of course, James Tiptree, Jr.'s The Milk of Paradise and here I confess a bias. Everything I've ready by her is brilliant, amazing, breathtaking and The Milk of Paradise is no exception. She grabs you in the first sentence and doesn't let go or let you breathe until the end.
The book could easily have been a third shorter if Ellison didn't feel the need to introduce each story, something he recognizes in his intro to Tiptree's piece with "For those of you who hate my introductions, you'll have decided to forego them at this point, ..."
I read the stories and, as I always do when reading anthologies (including those in which my work appears), wonder what caught the editor's eye. About 4/5ths through, I began to notice an oft occurring thread of effete intelligence. Many of the stories (not all, simply a lot) were snarky smart, what I would call an in-your-face intelligent, almost an arrogance.
Yeah, well, nobody ever accused Ellison of that.
But that led me to "What was going on that such was the vogue?" and I remembered something my high school sophomore year English teacher, Mrs. Baraniak, told the class one day, "I love it when Time magazine comes in the mail because I know I'm going to have an afternoon's good reading and I'll need a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a couple of foreign language dictionaries to get me through."
Time magazine was muchly different than it is today. And she was exhilarated just from anticipating the next issue based on memories of past issues. It enlivened her. Being intellectually challenged excited her.
Such were the 1960's-70's. The world was in chaos (when isn't it? And most of it man made), we beat the Russians to the moon, we lost Jimmy and Janis, Nixon was a liar and a thief, ...
What a marvelous escape that must have been, escaping into arrogance (which is an alternate spelling of "ignorance" in my dictionary).
November 18, 2024
Sequel to the more famous first, and, well, stories of variable quality. TOC here: https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?224813
It was a pretty good anthology, with a few stone classics, such as UKL's "The Word for World Is Forest" -- which is classed as a novella or short novel: at 41,300 words it's at the borderline. It won the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novella. Very readable but pretty heavy-handed. I gave it a weak 4 stars, but have only read it once, in 1973.
Anyway. Never re-read ADV and likely won't. Here's a retro-review by the ineffable Jo Walton:
"It’s not that I’d exactly forgotten what an annoying, bombastic, self-important, irritating person Ellison was, but I kind of had, and reading the introduction and the intros to the stories here brought it all back. Dangerous Visions was a significant anthology, and I loved it. This later volume is much less impressive, even if I discount all the Ellison self-promotional nonsense. It has some top-notch work by Le Guin, Wilhelm, and others, but also a lot of quite lacklustre forgettable work. I remembered it as being not as good, but… well, sometimes the suck fairy works overtime."
https://reactormag.com/jo-waltons-rea... Hee hee.
It was a pretty good anthology, with a few stone classics, such as UKL's "The Word for World Is Forest" -- which is classed as a novella or short novel: at 41,300 words it's at the borderline. It won the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novella. Very readable but pretty heavy-handed. I gave it a weak 4 stars, but have only read it once, in 1973.
Anyway. Never re-read ADV and likely won't. Here's a retro-review by the ineffable Jo Walton:
"It’s not that I’d exactly forgotten what an annoying, bombastic, self-important, irritating person Ellison was, but I kind of had, and reading the introduction and the intros to the stories here brought it all back. Dangerous Visions was a significant anthology, and I loved it. This later volume is much less impressive, even if I discount all the Ellison self-promotional nonsense. It has some top-notch work by Le Guin, Wilhelm, and others, but also a lot of quite lacklustre forgettable work. I remembered it as being not as good, but… well, sometimes the suck fairy works overtime."
https://reactormag.com/jo-waltons-rea... Hee hee.
April 5, 2008
This is quite as good as Harlan Ellison's 1969 anthology, Dangerous Visions.
July 4, 2009
I have to say that this massive anthology of science fiction novellas and short stories completely blew me away in the early 1970's. I read this one before the original "Dangerous Visions." Editor/author Harlan Ellison encouraged contributing writers to cut loose with their most daring and provocative ideas. In so doing, he not only pushed the boundaries of what was being published in those days, he expanded his readers' ideas of what was possible in the genre. This book helped to kick off what I would say was the third great era of science fiction in the 1970s. The first was its invention by Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Doc Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the second period, known as the Golden Era, began in the 1940's with Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, etc.
"Again, Dangerous Visions" was also my introduction to Ursula Le Guin, who wrote "The Word for the World is Forest." I thought this was one of the most amazingly well-written science fiction stories I had ever read.
"Again, Dangerous Visions" was also my introduction to Ursula Le Guin, who wrote "The Word for the World is Forest." I thought this was one of the most amazingly well-written science fiction stories I had ever read.
August 4, 2018
Disappointing! I love short story and novella collections, and dove into this tome expecting interesting tales. Instead, I ran into one story after another about rape, alien sex, gore, and the like; add to that an introduction to every story, followed by comments afterward, and you have one big mess. In one introduction, the editor discussed "masturbatory fantasies," which seems an apt description for much of what passes for sci-fi in this book. To me, the "project" behind the book's creation seemed more an excuse to engage in borderline-porn storytelling than anything else. If you like lots of deviancy and degradation in your science-fiction, this is the book for you. If not, there are plenty other story collections out there that focus more on otherworldly wonders than deviancy ...
March 24, 2024
The "Use Your Illusion" (or "The Fragile", you choose) of SF anthologies: a few timeless pieces of work surrounded by hectares of mediocrity and some outright garbage. There's no reason this book needed to be even half its length save for Ellison's metastatic ego. An extra star awarded for Le Guin's "The Word For World Is Forest", but you can get that one elsewhere.
November 1, 2021
Perhaps overall weaker than the predecessor, but probably because of the sheer amount of material. And also, because Ellison's introductions are less inspired (he doesn't have the same familiarity with these writers as the last group -- a ton of them he hadn't even met yet.) As with DV, most stories are middling to bad, a few particularly bad, and a small handful are absolutely worth reading.
The stories I found rewarding were:
-The Funeral by Kate Wilhelm, is hardly a great story, but it is an example of Wilhelm as a great writer -- approachable and entertaining.
-When It Changed by Joanna Russ, is a story I have read before and I will happily read it again -- perhaps right after I finish writing this -- because it is so immense. Masterfully composed, with such staggering weight despite being remarkably concise. It's known as a classic for a reason, and it's a rightful one.
-The Bisquit Position by Bernard Wolfe, is the better of Wolfe's two selections, and a total fucking barnstormer. It has nestled itself into my brain, and it just pops up as a nightmarish mental image fairly routinely. While it does (purposefully, I suppose) on tedium a bit, it sticks the ending so well it's something of a miracle. I quickly bought a copy of Wolfe's Limbo on the strength of this story alone.
-In the Barn by Piers Anthony, is laudable for just how far it manages to take the idea -- for the pure commitment to the shtick. Additionally, it delivers the supplemental brain-tickle of knowing as you read it that real people out there have most definitely masturbated while reading this absolutely nauseating piece of snickering body horror. Most people will hate this one, but I found it nothing but sickeningly delightful.
-Soundless Evening by Lee Hoffman, is hardly remarkable, but it is brief and effectively somber.
-And the Sea Like Mirrors by Gregory Benford, deals with less tired and familiar topics than so many of the other stories, and held my interest greatly. I found it smart and rousing.
-Moth Race by Richard Hill, is, to the contrary, very typical, but no less cute for that fact.
-Things Lost by Thomas Disch, is a delight. I've been meaning to read Disch forever, but this is the first time that I've actually done so. The story is confounding in a way that is highly gratifying, and exciting. It sparked my interest enough that I am sure I will be digging into his major works pronto.
-Lamia Mutable by M John Harrison, is a delight. I've been meaning to read Harrison forever, but this is the first time that I've actually done so. The story is confounding in a way that is highly gratifying, and exciting. It sparked my interest enough that I am sure I will be digging into his major works pronto.
(hehehe)
-The Milk of Paradise by James Tiptree Jr, is (along with the Russ) the collection's best story (Ellison claims this his favorite). Enormously powerful stuff that will knock around in my brain for a long time I'm sure. This is one of those rare, great science-fiction short stories that manages to build a world with compelling details while telling an engaging narrative in but a few clear and artful pages. It is a similar type of story (and something of a counter-part) to Delany's stand-out from DV, and it is of a similar caliber (and I fucking love the Delany).
Almost every other story I actively loathed or found completely unremarkable. Lupoff's novella is admirable for its prose experimentations (which I got a kick out of), but I didn't like much of anything about it besides that. Saxton, Sallis, Bernott, Oliver and Gene Wolfe offer stories that have some merit. I absolutely adore Gene Wolfe, so I was somewhat shocked that I didn't care all that much for his selections (although they are -- as with the Sallis pieces -- clearly the work of an immensely gifted writer).
I know the LeGuin novella is acclaimed, and I typically love LeGuin, but I found it trite and cliche and melodramatic in an unappealing way.
The Vonnegut story fucking sucks.
The stories I found rewarding were:
-The Funeral by Kate Wilhelm, is hardly a great story, but it is an example of Wilhelm as a great writer -- approachable and entertaining.
-When It Changed by Joanna Russ, is a story I have read before and I will happily read it again -- perhaps right after I finish writing this -- because it is so immense. Masterfully composed, with such staggering weight despite being remarkably concise. It's known as a classic for a reason, and it's a rightful one.
-The Bisquit Position by Bernard Wolfe, is the better of Wolfe's two selections, and a total fucking barnstormer. It has nestled itself into my brain, and it just pops up as a nightmarish mental image fairly routinely. While it does (purposefully, I suppose) on tedium a bit, it sticks the ending so well it's something of a miracle. I quickly bought a copy of Wolfe's Limbo on the strength of this story alone.
-In the Barn by Piers Anthony, is laudable for just how far it manages to take the idea -- for the pure commitment to the shtick. Additionally, it delivers the supplemental brain-tickle of knowing as you read it that real people out there have most definitely masturbated while reading this absolutely nauseating piece of snickering body horror. Most people will hate this one, but I found it nothing but sickeningly delightful.
-Soundless Evening by Lee Hoffman, is hardly remarkable, but it is brief and effectively somber.
-And the Sea Like Mirrors by Gregory Benford, deals with less tired and familiar topics than so many of the other stories, and held my interest greatly. I found it smart and rousing.
-Moth Race by Richard Hill, is, to the contrary, very typical, but no less cute for that fact.
-Things Lost by Thomas Disch, is a delight. I've been meaning to read Disch forever, but this is the first time that I've actually done so. The story is confounding in a way that is highly gratifying, and exciting. It sparked my interest enough that I am sure I will be digging into his major works pronto.
-Lamia Mutable by M John Harrison, is a delight. I've been meaning to read Harrison forever, but this is the first time that I've actually done so. The story is confounding in a way that is highly gratifying, and exciting. It sparked my interest enough that I am sure I will be digging into his major works pronto.
(hehehe)
-The Milk of Paradise by James Tiptree Jr, is (along with the Russ) the collection's best story (Ellison claims this his favorite). Enormously powerful stuff that will knock around in my brain for a long time I'm sure. This is one of those rare, great science-fiction short stories that manages to build a world with compelling details while telling an engaging narrative in but a few clear and artful pages. It is a similar type of story (and something of a counter-part) to Delany's stand-out from DV, and it is of a similar caliber (and I fucking love the Delany).
Almost every other story I actively loathed or found completely unremarkable. Lupoff's novella is admirable for its prose experimentations (which I got a kick out of), but I didn't like much of anything about it besides that. Saxton, Sallis, Bernott, Oliver and Gene Wolfe offer stories that have some merit. I absolutely adore Gene Wolfe, so I was somewhat shocked that I didn't care all that much for his selections (although they are -- as with the Sallis pieces -- clearly the work of an immensely gifted writer).
I know the LeGuin novella is acclaimed, and I typically love LeGuin, but I found it trite and cliche and melodramatic in an unappealing way.
The Vonnegut story fucking sucks.
May 7, 2024
This was an extraordinarily chauvinist time in SF. I didn’t realize this when I was reading it when it came out, it was just the culture of the time, but now and then when I go back to read some stories from this time, it’s pretty shocking how one sided it is. The SF of the 50s and early 60s was quite chauvinist, but with the late 60s sexual revolution, male fantasy as the plot or subplot got seriously out of control. These are stories written by men for men where women are here to constantly please them sexually. Also, I’m using the term women merely to refer to the to the female sex as one of the stories features an older man and a ten year old “woman”. Beyond the sexual imbalance there is a lot story telling experimentation and it’s definitely worth reading to find the gems among the many fails. I will admit that even though I’m a big fan of Harlan Ellison, I did skip most of the story introductions. I did, however, read many of the afterwords by the authors. These are people playing around with things, experimenting with what is possible, and I appreciate that, but not all experiments are successful, and that’s fine too, because some are very successful. For what it’s worth, following are my ratings for each story, which run the gamut from DNF to 4 stars. How do you give a single rating to a collection of stories from different authors who are all trying to push the boundaries of late 1960’s SF? Also, I tried to rate the stories from the perspective of craft rather than my uncomfortableness with their treatment of women.
- THE COUNTERPOINT OF VIEW - 1
- CHING WITCH! - 2
- THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST - 4
- FOR VALUE RECEIVED - 2
- MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET - 2
- TIME TRAVEL FOR PEDESTRIANS - 3
- CHRIST, OLD STUDENT IN A NEW SCHOOL - 2 1/2
- KING OF THE HILL - 3
- THE 10:00 REPORT IS
- BROUGHT TO YOU BY….. - 3
- THE FUNERAL - 4
- HARRY THE HARE - 2
- WHEN IT CHANGED - 3
- THE BIG SPACE FUCK - 2
- BOUNTY - 2
- STILL-LIFE - 3 1/2
- STONED COUNSEL - DNF
- MONITORED DREAMS & STRATEGIC CREMATIONS - Dreams 2, Cremations 3
- WITH A FINGER IN MY I - 3
- IN THE BARN - 3 1/2
- SOUNDLESS EVENING - 4
- GAHAN WILSON - 3
- THE TEST-TUBE CREATURE, AFTERWARD - 3
- AND THE SEA LIKE MIRRORS - 2 1/2
- BED SHEETS ARE WHITE - 2
- TISSUE - 1 1/2
- ELOUISE AND THE DOCTORS OF THE PLANET PERGAMON - 2
- CHUCK BERRY, WON'T YOU PLEASE COME HOME - DNF
- EPIPHANY FOR ALIENS - 3
- EYE OF THE BEHOLDER - 3
- MOTH RACE - 3
- IN RE GLOVER - 2 1/2
- ZERO GEE - 3
- A MOUSE IN THE WALLS OF THE GLOBAL VILLAGE - 3
- GETTING ALONG - 3
- TOTENBÜCH - 2
- THINGS LOST - 2 1/2
- WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS ON LITTLE OLD NEW ALABAMA - 3
- LAMIA MUTABLE - 3
- LAST TRAIN TO KANKAKEE - 3
- EMPIRE OF THE SUN - 4
- OZYMANDIAS - 3 1/2
- THE MILK OF PARADISE - 3 1/2
- THE COUNTERPOINT OF VIEW - 1
- CHING WITCH! - 2
- THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST - 4
- FOR VALUE RECEIVED - 2
- MATHOMS FROM THE TIME CLOSET - 2
- TIME TRAVEL FOR PEDESTRIANS - 3
- CHRIST, OLD STUDENT IN A NEW SCHOOL - 2 1/2
- KING OF THE HILL - 3
- THE 10:00 REPORT IS
- BROUGHT TO YOU BY….. - 3
- THE FUNERAL - 4
- HARRY THE HARE - 2
- WHEN IT CHANGED - 3
- THE BIG SPACE FUCK - 2
- BOUNTY - 2
- STILL-LIFE - 3 1/2
- STONED COUNSEL - DNF
- MONITORED DREAMS & STRATEGIC CREMATIONS - Dreams 2, Cremations 3
- WITH A FINGER IN MY I - 3
- IN THE BARN - 3 1/2
- SOUNDLESS EVENING - 4
- GAHAN WILSON - 3
- THE TEST-TUBE CREATURE, AFTERWARD - 3
- AND THE SEA LIKE MIRRORS - 2 1/2
- BED SHEETS ARE WHITE - 2
- TISSUE - 1 1/2
- ELOUISE AND THE DOCTORS OF THE PLANET PERGAMON - 2
- CHUCK BERRY, WON'T YOU PLEASE COME HOME - DNF
- EPIPHANY FOR ALIENS - 3
- EYE OF THE BEHOLDER - 3
- MOTH RACE - 3
- IN RE GLOVER - 2 1/2
- ZERO GEE - 3
- A MOUSE IN THE WALLS OF THE GLOBAL VILLAGE - 3
- GETTING ALONG - 3
- TOTENBÜCH - 2
- THINGS LOST - 2 1/2
- WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS ON LITTLE OLD NEW ALABAMA - 3
- LAMIA MUTABLE - 3
- LAST TRAIN TO KANKAKEE - 3
- EMPIRE OF THE SUN - 4
- OZYMANDIAS - 3 1/2
- THE MILK OF PARADISE - 3 1/2
dnf
August 2, 2023- The Counterpoint of View (John Heidenry): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Ching Witch! (Ross Rocklynne): 😶
- The Word for World Is Forest (Ursula K. Le Guin): 😶
- For Value Received (Andrew J. Offutt): ⭐️⭐️
- Mathoms from the Time Closet (Gene Wolfe): ⭐️⭐️?
- Time Travel for Pedestrians (Ray Nelson): 😶
- Christ, Old Student in a New School (Ray Bradbury): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- King of the Hill (Chad Oliver): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By... (Edward Bryant): 😶
- The Funeral (Kate Wilhelm): 😶
- Harry the Hare (James B. Hemesath): ⭐️⭐️
- When It Changed (Joanna Russ): ⭐️⭐️ (R)
- The Big Space Fuck (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.): ⭐️
- Bounty (T. L. Sherred): ⭐️✨?
- Still-Life (Barry N. Malzberg [as K.M. O'Donnell]): 😶
- Stoned Counsel (H.H. Hollis): 😶
- Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations (Bernard Wolfe): 😶
- With a Finger in My I (David Gerrold): ⭐️⭐️⭐️?
- In the Barn (Piers Anthony): 😶
- Soundless Evening (Lee Hoffman): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- █ (Gahan Wilson): ?
- The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward (Joan Bernott): ⭐️⭐️?
- And the Sea Like Mirrors (Gregory Benford): 😶
- Bed Sheets Are White (Evelyn Lief): ⭐️⭐️?
- Tissue (James Sallis): 😶
- Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon (Josephine Saxton): ⭐️⭐️?
- Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home? (Ken McCullough): ⭐️⭐️?
- Epiphany for Aliens (David Kerr): 😶
- Eye of the Beholder (Burt K. Filer): 😶
- Moth Race (Richard Hill): 😶
- In re Glover (Leonard Tushnet): 😶
- Zero Gee (Ben Bova): 😶
- A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village (Dean R. Koontz): 😶
- Getting Along (James Blish and Judith A. Lawrence): 😶
- Totenbüch (A. Parra (y Figueredo)): 😶
- Things Lost (Thomas M. Disch): 😶
- With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama (Richard A. Lupoff): 😶
- Lamia Mutable (M. John Harrison): 😶
- Last Train to Kankakee (Robin Scott Wilson): 😶
- Empire of the Sun (Andrew Weiner): ⭐️⭐️?
- Ozymandias (Terry Carr): 😶
- The Milk of Paradise (James Tiptree, Jr.): 😶
- Ching Witch! (Ross Rocklynne): 😶
- The Word for World Is Forest (Ursula K. Le Guin): 😶
- For Value Received (Andrew J. Offutt): ⭐️⭐️
- Mathoms from the Time Closet (Gene Wolfe): ⭐️⭐️?
- Time Travel for Pedestrians (Ray Nelson): 😶
- Christ, Old Student in a New School (Ray Bradbury): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- King of the Hill (Chad Oliver): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By... (Edward Bryant): 😶
- The Funeral (Kate Wilhelm): 😶
- Harry the Hare (James B. Hemesath): ⭐️⭐️
- When It Changed (Joanna Russ): ⭐️⭐️ (R)
- The Big Space Fuck (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.): ⭐️
- Bounty (T. L. Sherred): ⭐️✨?
- Still-Life (Barry N. Malzberg [as K.M. O'Donnell]): 😶
- Stoned Counsel (H.H. Hollis): 😶
- Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations (Bernard Wolfe): 😶
- With a Finger in My I (David Gerrold): ⭐️⭐️⭐️?
- In the Barn (Piers Anthony): 😶
- Soundless Evening (Lee Hoffman): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- █ (Gahan Wilson): ?
- The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward (Joan Bernott): ⭐️⭐️?
- And the Sea Like Mirrors (Gregory Benford): 😶
- Bed Sheets Are White (Evelyn Lief): ⭐️⭐️?
- Tissue (James Sallis): 😶
- Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon (Josephine Saxton): ⭐️⭐️?
- Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home? (Ken McCullough): ⭐️⭐️?
- Epiphany for Aliens (David Kerr): 😶
- Eye of the Beholder (Burt K. Filer): 😶
- Moth Race (Richard Hill): 😶
- In re Glover (Leonard Tushnet): 😶
- Zero Gee (Ben Bova): 😶
- A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village (Dean R. Koontz): 😶
- Getting Along (James Blish and Judith A. Lawrence): 😶
- Totenbüch (A. Parra (y Figueredo)): 😶
- Things Lost (Thomas M. Disch): 😶
- With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama (Richard A. Lupoff): 😶
- Lamia Mutable (M. John Harrison): 😶
- Last Train to Kankakee (Robin Scott Wilson): 😶
- Empire of the Sun (Andrew Weiner): ⭐️⭐️?
- Ozymandias (Terry Carr): 😶
- The Milk of Paradise (James Tiptree, Jr.): 😶
November 30, 2024
It is very hard to even to simply expect some sort of consistency with a collection of 40+ works. Most of them are pretty short in length, but quite a few have a wicked punch in them. I really like the format of have some intro about each author and an afterward by the author {sometimes explaining their idea \ inspiration}. I wish that more of these authors were well known to this day {perhaps more by others}. The dangerous visions or perhaps avant-garde \ disruptive ideas for the time of their inception, not all have stood the test of times, but even still, taking into account their pentime, they are very interesting to follow.
I am going to take a breather of a few books, prior to jumping into the third {and last} installment of the series.
I am going to take a breather of a few books, prior to jumping into the third {and last} installment of the series.
August 5, 2024
logging this one again because i read volume 2 which is a separate paperback from volume 1 which i read last year. ellison is the man. what more can i say. this is my favorite collection i’ve ever read and i am so stoked for the last dangerous visions this december
September 7, 2023
Again, Dangerous Visions, published in 1972, was the follow up to the successful anthology Dangerous Visions. Each story has an introduction written by Ellison and an afterword written by the author. In some cases, the introduction and afterword are longer than the story itself.
In many of the introductions, Ellison tells us a third anthology in the series titled The Last Dangerous Visions is going to be published soon, and even shares the names of some of the authors who will appear. Alas, this third volume was never published during his lifetime. I get the impression Ellison wanted to include every prominent science fiction author of the time in these three volumes, but wasn't able to pull it off since new writers kept coming along. (Ellison's executor, J. Michael Straczynski, announced plans to publish a slimmed-down version of The Last Dangerous Visions in 2020, but it still hasn't seen the light of day as of this writing.)
With 46 stories, each with its own introduction and afterword, Again, Dangerous Visions is quite a hefty volume. The stories were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s and certainly show their age, especially in how female characters are treated. Male authors outnumber female authors about 5 to 1. The Dangerous Visions series was meant to showcase stories which couldn't get published in traditional venues due to shocking content, however, with a few exceptions, these read like normal sci-fi stories you could read anywhere. Maybe they were shocking by 1970s standards?
There's a lot of big name writers included. Some were big names at the time and others became big names later. I personally rank 17 of these stories as above average, 7 as average, and 22 as below average, but of course, your own rankings will vary. I won't review all 46 stories, just the ones that stood out to me.
One of the worst stories in the collection is "In the Barn" by Piers Anthony. A man travels to a parallel universe in which human woman are milked like cows. Our "hero" even has non-consensual sex with one of them. Charming.
Another of the worst stories is "And the Sea Like Mirrors" by Gregory Benford. A man and woman are adrift on a life raft surrounded by alien creatures in the water. The man routinely beats the woman for being stupid but he's supposed to be the hero of the story.
In his introduction to "Bed Sheets are White" by Evelyn Lief, Ellison tells us Lief was a writing student of his. After she wrote a bad story, he threatened to beat her and shove the story up her ass if she wrote another horrible story like it. She left the room crying and immediately wrote this story, which was so good he bought it. Was Ellison trying to be funny by telling us this or does he think threatening writing students is the best way to get them to write better? Ellison looks bad either way.
In Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s contribution, Earth is doomed due to pollution, overpopulation, and many extinct species. Swearing is no longer considered bad and everyone does it. The people of Earth fire a rocket full of jizzum into space in order to continue the human race. In this world, children can sue parents for not raising them right. It's kind of funny, I guess, but it reads like it was written by a twelve-year-old. Definitely one of the subpar stories in this collection.
K. M. O’Donnell's "Still-Life" focuses on the domestic problems of an astronaut. He has non-consensual sex with his wife and assaults the babysitter, but neither of these acts is portrayed as a bad thing. Overall, an average story.
Another average story, Leonard Tushnet's "In Re Glover", at least made me think. The Supreme Court tries to decide if a cryogenically frozen man should be considered alive or dead, but the case is rendered moot when a power outage kills him. I can't help wondering what would happen if this came up in real life. Should a person in suspended animation be considered legally dead or not?
Ben Bova's "Zero Gee" is another average story in which an astronaut assigned to go to space with a photographer is looking forward to being the first man to have sex in zero g. However, he first has to deal with a a second woman assigned to the mission who might stand in his way. It didn't end up being as bad as I thought it would be.
"Ching Witch!" by Ross Rocklynne was a fun story. The only man to survive the destruction of Earth travels to the planet Zephyrus where he's an instant celebrity. He doesn't tell them Earth has been destroyed, just that Earth doesn't hold a grudge against them anymore. The teenagers of the planet want to know the latest Earth slang and dances. They ride low gravity brooms for fun. There's a lot of funny parts. It's a bit creepy that he's into teenage girls, though.
"Time Travel for Pedestrians" by Ray Nelson is one of the few stories a traditional outlet wouldn't have published due to its sex, violence, cussing, and sacrilegious nature. I didn't think much of it until the end which made me like it. It's a reincarnation story. The narrator lives several lives. Mary Magdalene expressed the interesting idea that if Jesus wanted a book written about him, he would have written it himself. There's no need for a book when God can speak directly to us. Those who love a book more than God are able to justify committing all manner of atrocities.
H. H. Hollis is a lawyer and his story "Stoned Counsel" has a science fiction legal setting. The narrator's opponent is defending a company responsible for pollution. Hallucinogens are used in court to learn the truth. Opposing lawyers share a hallucination full of trippy images. Fascinating.
Bernard Wolfe provided two stories. "Biscuit Position" isn't a science fiction story at all, but rather literary fiction. In it, a war reporter flirts with a married woman and discusses the Vietnam War at a dinner party. A dog dies a gruesome, drawn-out death which will stick with you for a while. The characters exchange witty repartee throughout, but I thought it was poor taste when the narrator said something witty about the dead dog.
His second story, "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements", features a creative writing teacher who has trouble relating to his stoner student who wants to write rock lyrics. Their discussions are reminiscent of the dialog in Philip K. Dick's Through a Scanner Darkly. It's really fun. Two characters have the ability to influence each other's dreams when they sleep in proximity to each other (I think a machine is also involved somehow). The author claims this isn't a science fiction story even though it clearly is. (What's realistic about two different people sharing the same dream?) In his afterword, the author bad mouths scientists and science fiction authors for being slaves to capitalism. It seems strange to bad mouth sci-fi in a sci-fi anthology.
I quite liked "Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer in which a sculptor's artistic work is used to achieve weightlessness. Art gets turned into science, which is a neat idea.
In "Moth Race" by Richard Hill, people are able to vicariously experience what celebrities eat and drink. They can even experience sex vicariously, but it's not exactly the same as the real thing. People take pills that keep them happy and also keep them from being prejudiced. Everyone in the world has enough to eat, a sexual partner, and a comfortable life, but not everyone gets to have children. Normal people's food is not as good as what celebrities get. People compete in a death race for a chance to become a celebrity, but only one man has ever lived through it. A good story.
James Blish (with Judith Ann Lawrence) wrote "Getting Along" which details the erotic adventures of a woman who visits various relatives who turn out to be a vampire, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, a Lovecraftian horror, etc. It's funny in places.
In his introduction to "The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree, Jr., Ellison says he saved the best story for last. (It's the last story in the collection, however I'm reviewing them out-of-order, saving my favorite stories for the end of my review.) Ellison says Tiptree is the man to beat, a shoo-in for the Hugo Award. (He didn't know at the time that Tiptree was a pseudonym for female writer Alice Sheldon, which amuses me.) The story itself is about a man raised by aliens who is disgusted by humans. However, he finds going home isn't what he remembered either. It's a pretty good story.
The title for Gahan Wilson's story is a picture of a spot or inkblot. A man discovers a stain in his house that disappears when you stop looking at it, but reappears somewhere else, bigger than it was before. It appears to be two dimensional, but actually has depth. Spooky.
"Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home" by Ken McCullough has a narrator who keeps bugs as pets. He once walked a wasp around on a thread which, started a fad at his school. In the present, he's feeding a tick he named Chuck Berry from a cadaver which gave him a wink. He gives the tick drugs and it grows big. His writing style reminded me of William S. Burroughs.
I was surprised to find Dean R. Koontz had a story in this collection. It's titled "A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village". In the story, empathy circuits installed in the brain make everyone telepathic, except for a few who are called Stunted. Even in utopia, some unfortunates will fall through the cracks and get discriminated against. It's really well written.
"Ozymandias" by Terry Carr is another one of the good stories. To protect against grave robbers, cryogenically frozen people are placed in tombs rigged with traps. Superstitious grave robbers think they need to dance in a certain way to avoid the traps. Great world building.
In "The Funeral" by Kate Wilhelm, 14-year-old Carla has never seen a male before and has no last name. She is considered property of the state. She is a student in a school, assigned to become a teacher. This story has really impressive world building, revealing how things work a little at a time. Creepy. In her afterword, Wilhelm complains that store clerks and soda jerks serve middle-aged people before teenagers who were waiting longer. I hadn't realized discrimination against teenagers like this was a thing.
Earthlings colonize a planet called New Tahiti in "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Many animals back on Earth have gone extinct and the colonists are cutting down trees and making animals go extinct on this new planet. Evolution on New Tahiti happened similarly to how it happened on Earth, but the humans died out on this planet. Green monkeys called creechies are the closest thing this planet has to humans. The creechies are used for slave labor and sex. They don't require sleep because they dream while they're awake. The story alternates between different points of view: a human in favor of colonization, a creechie, and a human opposed to colonization. Le Guin does a great job of writing from different points of view. The principle conflict, that humans don't have lumber on Earth, doesn't make a lot of sense, but I suppose lumber is just a stand in for resources in general. One of the best stories in this collection. Despite Ellison predicting a different story in this collection would get the award, this story won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.
"When it Changed" by Joanna Russ won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. In the introduction to this story, Ellison admits that he was a male chauvinist in the past, calls out a fellow sci-fi writer for being a chauvinist, and declares "the best writers in sf today are the women." (Which makes you wonder why he included so few women in this collection.) He also praises the women's lib movement and declares, "I see more kindness and rationality in the average woman than in the average man." This surprised me, since every story in Ellison's collection "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" was quite sexist. Although, to be fair, that was written a few years before this.
Russ's story takes place on a planet in which all the men died 30 generations ago. The women live in a steam-powered, agricultural, honor-based society in which duels are common. A group of men from Earth arrive and want to reintroduce men to the planet. The narrator feels small for the first time in her life since the men are bigger than her. The men are clearly sexist, but claim sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. This story has great characterization. I loved this line: "When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome." In her afterword, Russ mentions that men get served on airplanes before women. It's easy to forget how many ways society has progressed over the years.
In many of the introductions, Ellison tells us a third anthology in the series titled The Last Dangerous Visions is going to be published soon, and even shares the names of some of the authors who will appear. Alas, this third volume was never published during his lifetime. I get the impression Ellison wanted to include every prominent science fiction author of the time in these three volumes, but wasn't able to pull it off since new writers kept coming along. (Ellison's executor, J. Michael Straczynski, announced plans to publish a slimmed-down version of The Last Dangerous Visions in 2020, but it still hasn't seen the light of day as of this writing.)
With 46 stories, each with its own introduction and afterword, Again, Dangerous Visions is quite a hefty volume. The stories were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s and certainly show their age, especially in how female characters are treated. Male authors outnumber female authors about 5 to 1. The Dangerous Visions series was meant to showcase stories which couldn't get published in traditional venues due to shocking content, however, with a few exceptions, these read like normal sci-fi stories you could read anywhere. Maybe they were shocking by 1970s standards?
There's a lot of big name writers included. Some were big names at the time and others became big names later. I personally rank 17 of these stories as above average, 7 as average, and 22 as below average, but of course, your own rankings will vary. I won't review all 46 stories, just the ones that stood out to me.
One of the worst stories in the collection is "In the Barn" by Piers Anthony. A man travels to a parallel universe in which human woman are milked like cows. Our "hero" even has non-consensual sex with one of them. Charming.
Another of the worst stories is "And the Sea Like Mirrors" by Gregory Benford. A man and woman are adrift on a life raft surrounded by alien creatures in the water. The man routinely beats the woman for being stupid but he's supposed to be the hero of the story.
In his introduction to "Bed Sheets are White" by Evelyn Lief, Ellison tells us Lief was a writing student of his. After she wrote a bad story, he threatened to beat her and shove the story up her ass if she wrote another horrible story like it. She left the room crying and immediately wrote this story, which was so good he bought it. Was Ellison trying to be funny by telling us this or does he think threatening writing students is the best way to get them to write better? Ellison looks bad either way.
In Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s contribution, Earth is doomed due to pollution, overpopulation, and many extinct species. Swearing is no longer considered bad and everyone does it. The people of Earth fire a rocket full of jizzum into space in order to continue the human race. In this world, children can sue parents for not raising them right. It's kind of funny, I guess, but it reads like it was written by a twelve-year-old. Definitely one of the subpar stories in this collection.
K. M. O’Donnell's "Still-Life" focuses on the domestic problems of an astronaut. He has non-consensual sex with his wife and assaults the babysitter, but neither of these acts is portrayed as a bad thing. Overall, an average story.
Another average story, Leonard Tushnet's "In Re Glover", at least made me think. The Supreme Court tries to decide if a cryogenically frozen man should be considered alive or dead, but the case is rendered moot when a power outage kills him. I can't help wondering what would happen if this came up in real life. Should a person in suspended animation be considered legally dead or not?
Ben Bova's "Zero Gee" is another average story in which an astronaut assigned to go to space with a photographer is looking forward to being the first man to have sex in zero g. However, he first has to deal with a a second woman assigned to the mission who might stand in his way. It didn't end up being as bad as I thought it would be.
"Ching Witch!" by Ross Rocklynne was a fun story. The only man to survive the destruction of Earth travels to the planet Zephyrus where he's an instant celebrity. He doesn't tell them Earth has been destroyed, just that Earth doesn't hold a grudge against them anymore. The teenagers of the planet want to know the latest Earth slang and dances. They ride low gravity brooms for fun. There's a lot of funny parts. It's a bit creepy that he's into teenage girls, though.
"Time Travel for Pedestrians" by Ray Nelson is one of the few stories a traditional outlet wouldn't have published due to its sex, violence, cussing, and sacrilegious nature. I didn't think much of it until the end which made me like it. It's a reincarnation story. The narrator lives several lives. Mary Magdalene expressed the interesting idea that if Jesus wanted a book written about him, he would have written it himself. There's no need for a book when God can speak directly to us. Those who love a book more than God are able to justify committing all manner of atrocities.
H. H. Hollis is a lawyer and his story "Stoned Counsel" has a science fiction legal setting. The narrator's opponent is defending a company responsible for pollution. Hallucinogens are used in court to learn the truth. Opposing lawyers share a hallucination full of trippy images. Fascinating.
Bernard Wolfe provided two stories. "Biscuit Position" isn't a science fiction story at all, but rather literary fiction. In it, a war reporter flirts with a married woman and discusses the Vietnam War at a dinner party. A dog dies a gruesome, drawn-out death which will stick with you for a while. The characters exchange witty repartee throughout, but I thought it was poor taste when the narrator said something witty about the dead dog.
His second story, "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements", features a creative writing teacher who has trouble relating to his stoner student who wants to write rock lyrics. Their discussions are reminiscent of the dialog in Philip K. Dick's Through a Scanner Darkly. It's really fun. Two characters have the ability to influence each other's dreams when they sleep in proximity to each other (I think a machine is also involved somehow). The author claims this isn't a science fiction story even though it clearly is. (What's realistic about two different people sharing the same dream?) In his afterword, the author bad mouths scientists and science fiction authors for being slaves to capitalism. It seems strange to bad mouth sci-fi in a sci-fi anthology.
I quite liked "Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer in which a sculptor's artistic work is used to achieve weightlessness. Art gets turned into science, which is a neat idea.
In "Moth Race" by Richard Hill, people are able to vicariously experience what celebrities eat and drink. They can even experience sex vicariously, but it's not exactly the same as the real thing. People take pills that keep them happy and also keep them from being prejudiced. Everyone in the world has enough to eat, a sexual partner, and a comfortable life, but not everyone gets to have children. Normal people's food is not as good as what celebrities get. People compete in a death race for a chance to become a celebrity, but only one man has ever lived through it. A good story.
James Blish (with Judith Ann Lawrence) wrote "Getting Along" which details the erotic adventures of a woman who visits various relatives who turn out to be a vampire, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, a Lovecraftian horror, etc. It's funny in places.
In his introduction to "The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree, Jr., Ellison says he saved the best story for last. (It's the last story in the collection, however I'm reviewing them out-of-order, saving my favorite stories for the end of my review.) Ellison says Tiptree is the man to beat, a shoo-in for the Hugo Award. (He didn't know at the time that Tiptree was a pseudonym for female writer Alice Sheldon, which amuses me.) The story itself is about a man raised by aliens who is disgusted by humans. However, he finds going home isn't what he remembered either. It's a pretty good story.
The title for Gahan Wilson's story is a picture of a spot or inkblot. A man discovers a stain in his house that disappears when you stop looking at it, but reappears somewhere else, bigger than it was before. It appears to be two dimensional, but actually has depth. Spooky.
"Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home" by Ken McCullough has a narrator who keeps bugs as pets. He once walked a wasp around on a thread which, started a fad at his school. In the present, he's feeding a tick he named Chuck Berry from a cadaver which gave him a wink. He gives the tick drugs and it grows big. His writing style reminded me of William S. Burroughs.
I was surprised to find Dean R. Koontz had a story in this collection. It's titled "A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village". In the story, empathy circuits installed in the brain make everyone telepathic, except for a few who are called Stunted. Even in utopia, some unfortunates will fall through the cracks and get discriminated against. It's really well written.
"Ozymandias" by Terry Carr is another one of the good stories. To protect against grave robbers, cryogenically frozen people are placed in tombs rigged with traps. Superstitious grave robbers think they need to dance in a certain way to avoid the traps. Great world building.
In "The Funeral" by Kate Wilhelm, 14-year-old Carla has never seen a male before and has no last name. She is considered property of the state. She is a student in a school, assigned to become a teacher. This story has really impressive world building, revealing how things work a little at a time. Creepy. In her afterword, Wilhelm complains that store clerks and soda jerks serve middle-aged people before teenagers who were waiting longer. I hadn't realized discrimination against teenagers like this was a thing.
Earthlings colonize a planet called New Tahiti in "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Many animals back on Earth have gone extinct and the colonists are cutting down trees and making animals go extinct on this new planet. Evolution on New Tahiti happened similarly to how it happened on Earth, but the humans died out on this planet. Green monkeys called creechies are the closest thing this planet has to humans. The creechies are used for slave labor and sex. They don't require sleep because they dream while they're awake. The story alternates between different points of view: a human in favor of colonization, a creechie, and a human opposed to colonization. Le Guin does a great job of writing from different points of view. The principle conflict, that humans don't have lumber on Earth, doesn't make a lot of sense, but I suppose lumber is just a stand in for resources in general. One of the best stories in this collection. Despite Ellison predicting a different story in this collection would get the award, this story won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.
"When it Changed" by Joanna Russ won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. In the introduction to this story, Ellison admits that he was a male chauvinist in the past, calls out a fellow sci-fi writer for being a chauvinist, and declares "the best writers in sf today are the women." (Which makes you wonder why he included so few women in this collection.) He also praises the women's lib movement and declares, "I see more kindness and rationality in the average woman than in the average man." This surprised me, since every story in Ellison's collection "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" was quite sexist. Although, to be fair, that was written a few years before this.
Russ's story takes place on a planet in which all the men died 30 generations ago. The women live in a steam-powered, agricultural, honor-based society in which duels are common. A group of men from Earth arrive and want to reintroduce men to the planet. The narrator feels small for the first time in her life since the men are bigger than her. The men are clearly sexist, but claim sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. This story has great characterization. I loved this line: "When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome." In her afterword, Russ mentions that men get served on airplanes before women. It's easy to forget how many ways society has progressed over the years.
May 18, 2023
Overall grade: B+/A-
Video review: https://youtu.be/-V8QSmgXbek
I actually enjoyed this book more than I enjoyed Dangerous Visions. I think Dangerous Visions is still in print, while this one is not. I also think dangerous visions is more widely read today than its sequel, which is a shame. There are more big names in DV than in ADV but the overall quality of the stories was better and there was a higher percentage of enjoyable and actually dangerous stories.
DV really leaned in on being religiously blasphemous, while this one did not really have near as many stories with that focus. I think there were more big names in DV but ADV had some of my favorite authors like Gene Wolfe and Ursuka K Le Guin and Vonnegut, whereas the only author I am obsessive about from DV is JG Ballard.
Ellison’s introductions were again kinda annoying and presumptuous and pretentious. Some of them were somewhat useful but most of them were basically just filler and platforms for Ellison to brag about either being friends with the author or having taught the author.
There were more women included in this one. This is a good thing. I’m unsure of how many people of color were included but there are at least two stories written by Jewish authors.
Anthologies are always going to be somewhat hit or miss and I can’t think of an anthology where I enjoyed every single story.
Overall there are few very few misses in this book and a lot of solid stories. Some of the stories are spectacular, though, and the highs of this book are higher than DV or any other anthology I have read.
Favorites
1 the word for world is forest - Ursula k Le guin
2 With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff
3 Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson
4 [A spot], by Gahan Wilson
5 Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief
6 The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut
7 For Value Received - Andy offutt
8 Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis
9 When It Changed", by Joanna Russ
10 Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell)
Least favorites
1 "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury
2 Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo)
3 In the Barn", by Piers Anthony
4 Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough
5 Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath
Individual stories
1 Keynote: The Counterpoint of View - John Heidenry - B/B+
Really just a Borges pastiche, which it wears on its sleeve. Too short to really have much of an impact. Kinda an odd keynote or intro given that there is only one other metafictional story in the book.
2 Ching-Witch by Ross Rocklynne - B/B+
Solid story. Seems like a commentary on youth culture in the late 60s and early 70s and how quickly fads pass. Kinda reads like old white guy wish fulfillment.
3 The Word for World is Forest - Ursula k Le guin - A/A+
I did a stand alone video for this novella. I had read it once before separate from ADV. at heart it’s a piece of protest literature that seems to condemn the Vietnam War. Basically a companion piece to Lathe of Heaven. Check out my other video for more about the book.
4 For Value Received - Andy offutt - A-/A
About a girl being born. she lives in the hospital until she is in her 20s because her parents found their hospital bill exorbitant. A send up of health insurance and non socialized health care and how ridiculous health care costs are in this country.
5 Mathoms From the Time Closet - Gene Wolfe - B+/A- - comprises "Robot's Story", "Against The Lafayette Escadrille", and "Loco Parentis"
3 flash fiction pieces all dealing with time travel in one way or another. That being said, the stories read like literary fiction rather than sci fi. Typical Wolfe: literary and inventive but not as spectacular as some of his other books and stories.
6 Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson - A-/A
A fucking trip. Super trippy and very dangerous. I have to imagine that this one caused a stir. Seems to describe a drug trip caused by something like datura or morning glory seeds, which are both very strong deliriant. The narrator jumps around in time experiencing a variety of different scenarios, mainly focusing on various types of western mysticism. I’ve seen it described as past life regression but that’s not clear in the story. A mixture of druggy montage and spiritual exploration. I wish this one was a novel length story. Apparently Nelson wrote the story that They Live is based on.
7 "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury - F
Didnt even finish this one. Why was a poem even included? I didn’t understand this one or why it was included.
8 King of the Hill", by Chad Oliver - B/B+
Seems to predict climate change and some of its effects. Only somewhat prescient. The story concerns overpopulation and rampant extinction. The story does meander some. I found it inventive and well-executed.
9 "The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By...", by Edward Bryant - B/B+
The story is about a news station paying to be the first to report a story by paying criminals to commit crimes then documenting the crimes. There is a rape scene in this one, which is quite haunting. Seems like a precursor to stuff like Nightcrawler. One of the more dangerous visions in this book.
10 "The Funeral", by Kate Wilhelm - B+/A-
I found this story to be fairly mysterious and difficult to pin down. Seems like a reaction to the hippie youth movement and a parody of the 1950s in America. What I’ve read of Wilhelm seems like it was pretty influential in the sci fi genre.
11 "Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath - C+/B-
A flash fiction piece. Seems like an ode to cartoons, also a commentary on copyright law. I was kinda unsure of what was going on in this story. There is some gore and violence but it’s not a particularly dangerous vision.
12 "When It Changed", by Joanna Russ (Nebula Award for Best Short Story) - B+/A-
About a colonized planet where men have gone extinct and there have only been women for hundreds of years. Men from Earth show up and fuck up the status quo. The story kinda subverts the expectations of someone who has just heard the summary, though.
13 "The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut - A-/A
The tone and plot of this story are very Vonnegut. It’s like it is almost logical, but not quite. About earth going to shit and humanity trying to artificially inseminate the universe. The story reminded me of Ariana Grande’s song “NASA”.
14 "Bounty", by T. L. Sherred - B/B+
About vigilantism being legalized and rewarded monetarily, so people bait others into crimes that they can be rewarded for violently stopping. People also kill themselves so their families will get paid. Short and disturbing and misanthropic.
15 "Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell) - B+/A-
About an astronaut slowly going crazy and eventually leaving 2 other astronauts on the moon and going home. The main character rapes his wife in the story’s opening. The main character is basically a villain: short tempered and self centered. Seems like a commentary on how bureaucracy drives you crazy, as he really doesn’t like how nasa tells him not to swear during his mission to the moon.
16 "Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis - B+/A-
This story is trippy and vivid and super inventive. It reminded me of an adult version of adventure time. It’s about 2 lawyers doing drugs and then mind melding as they fight over a legal case. It’s almost a climate fiction story as well.
17 "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations", by Bernard Wolfe—comprises "The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements" - B/B+
Two stories connected by them both having the same main character. The first story is about a rich journalist helping a woman with a husky cheat on her husband, who is heavily tied up in the military industrial complex. The dog accidentally dies in a demonstration of the effects of napalm. It reminded me of Joan Didion’s play it as it lays. The second story is concerned with incomprehensible rock lyrics and how dreams affect reality. Seems to parody songs like “In A Gadda Da Vida”. The story is much more playful and absurd than the first one. Both seem to protest the vietnam war and capitalism. Some parts are really funny.
18 "With A Finger in My I", by David Gerrold - B/B+
Maybe a B-/B. It’s a lot like Borges’ tlon uqbar story. Mass hysteria and hallucinations, how the quirks of our perceptions color the world around us. Too peculiar to be incisive and rather unfocused.
19 "In the Barn", by Piers Anthony - C+/B-
This one is a dangerous vision. It is also pretty damn disgusting. It’s basically about vegetarianism and veganism and how we would never treat humans like we treat people. Kinda reminded me of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin.
20 "Soundless Evening", by Lee Hoffman - B/B+
Solid and rather innocuous. Basically about a society with limits on how many children you can have. You can still have as many babies as you want but they are killed at the age of 5 if you have more than two. It’s too short and low stakes to really affect you emotionally.
21 [A spot], by Gahan Wilson - A-/A
Really fucking good. Inventive and silly and absurd. A simple idea but it’s very well executed. Basically about a spot on a wall growing and eventually consuming everything. Almost an A/A+ but just a bit too short to have that kind of impact on me.
22 "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward", by Joan Bernott - B/B+
A piece of flash fiction. About a genetically engineered pet that other causing or stopping its owners suicide. It reeks of depression and anhedonia. Definitely a dangerous vision.
23 "And the Sea Like Mirrors", by Gregory Benford -B/B+
Pretty close to a B+/A- but way too misogynistic. stated to be a response to Heinlein’s competent man. Reminded me of the show Yellowjackets and the book the Kar Chee reign. A literary thriller, sf-lite. It explores madness and toxic masculinity.
24 "Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief - A-/A
Reminded me of the long walk by Richard Bachman slash Stephen king. It is hallucinatory and very of its time. Some of it is about white nationalism, some of it seems like a dream sequence. Short and sweet and no excess language. Seems like it’s a memory but it couldn’t be, as the world of the story is completely alien,
25 "Tissue", by James Sallis—comprises "At the Fitting Shop" and "53rd American Dream" - B-/B
Thot these were just fine. The first story is about a teenage boy getting lost in a department store shopping for a new penis. The second story is about the highs and lows of parenting. Lot of shock value and subversion in this one.
26 Elouise And The Doctors of the Planet Pergamon", by Josephine Saxton - B+/A-
A haunting and and disgusting visceral story. Kinda ballardian, as it’s the closest thing to the atrocity exhibition I’ve ever read, besides gravitys rainbow. About a perfectly healthy woman on a planet where everyone has grotesque disabilities and horrible illnesses. Kinda like a Beckett play.
27 "Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough - C+/B-
Too low stakes for me. Not really dangerous and not really sci fi. It’s about a guy growing a tick to a humongous size. Very stylized and repetitive.
28 "Epiphany For Aliens", by David Kerr - B/B+
About a team of scientists that discover a group of Neanderthals that are still alive in Europe. It has its own logic. The woman who sacrifices herself for science seems like a stand in for bleeding heart liberal types. Perhaps somewhat racist.
29 "Eye of the Beholder", by Burt K. Filer - B/B+
About an artist who creates sculptures that are mathematically impossible, as they defy the rules of gravity. The cia and a female scientist are quite interested in creating an insterstellar engine from the sculptures. It reminded me of Ballard’s early stories and explores the differences between art and science,
30 Moth Race", by Richard Hill- B+/A-
This story is seemingly about a utopia where everyone is given everything they need by the government. A man goes to watch a race where the drivers have to survive racing around a track with randomly generated obstacles. The only one to ever conquer the track is called the champion and he lives like a modern celebrity. The main character is part of the race’s audience and drunkenly tries to participate in the race.
31 "In Re Glover", by Leonard Tushnet - B/B+
Solid and vaguely funny story, comedic but not hilarious. Somewhat kafkaesque, in that it portrays endless and convoluted bureaucracies. It is more or less about the legal ramifications of cryogenesis tech. Could’ve been more in depth.
32 "Zero Gee", by Ben Bova - B-/B
About a male astronaut trying to be the first human being to have sex in outer space. The woman he is supposed to fuck is a time life photographer, a civilian in a nasa space station. Too long and technical and meandering. Not very exciting as a story.
33 A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village", by Dean R. Koontz - B/B+
This is the only thing I’ve ever read by Koontz. I didn’t realize he wrote sci fi. The story is about a world where almost everyone can communicate telepathically and centers on one of the few who has to communicate normally. His life is quite hellish, as he is beat up and abused for making sounds. The narrator sometimes can’t stop himself from screaming and crying. A visceral story.
34 Getting Along", by James Blish and Judith Ann Lawrence - B/B+
A series of 9 letters detailing a woman’s super odd family and her search for a home. It apparently parodies 9 or 10 different genre fiction authors, which I wouldn’t have realized if not for Ellison’s intro to the story. The concept and idea of the story are better than the actual execution. Seems somewhat random and weird for the sake of being weird.
35 Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo) - D+/C-
I didn’t understand this story at all. I found it confusing and faux deep and random and unfocused. I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to take away.
36 Things Lost", by Thomas M. Disch - B+/A-
I didn’t understand what the point of the story was but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s about a generation ship populated by old immortal people. It’s ostensibly the journal of a scientist whose claim to fame is mapping the genome of mice. He is an amateur author who wants to start writing a novel. There’s a lot of references to Proust. Breezy and low stakes.
37 With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff - A-/A
I really hated this story at first but I grew to love it. I didnt understand ellison comparing it to riders of the purple wage until a while into the story but that is actually a pretty good comparison. Parts of it are written in a mixture of good ol boy talk and phonetic spelling like in finnegans wake. It’s basically about a war between the planets New Alabama and New Haiti, although there’s a lot of more details than that, as there are zombies and some avatar type stuff. A supremely odd story but it is super inventive and consistently surprising.
38 "Lamia Mutable", by M John Harrison - B-/B
I’m not sure I understood this story. It seems somewhat random, also apocalyptic. Just okay, maybe too referential and reliant on allusions. Kinda disappointing as I have heard really good things about the author.
39 Last Train to Kankakee", by Robin Scott - B/B+
About a con artist who dies and gets frozen and then reincarnated. He can’t find a purpose and kills himself multiple times, and eventually succeeds. His cells are then spread into the universe. Solid and low stakes. Does mention rape and murder.
40 "Empire of the Sun", by Andrew Weiner - B+/A-
A hallucinatory montage that plays by its own rules. About a man drafted into a war on mars where he is really just fighting other conscripts from earth. The war might be meant to lower earths population. Parts of it are a dream sequence I think. Solid story.
41 "Ozymandias", by Terry Carr - B/B+
Post apocalyptic tomb robbers journey to an area like the valley of the kings in Egypt. Once there they loot a vault. I didn’t necessarily understand why this one was so long and why some stuff was included. There were some cool details tho. Pretty solid story.
42 "The Milk of Paradise", by James Tiptree, Jr B/B+
I feel similarly about this one as to how I felt about the story by the author included in nova 2 (and I have come upon this place by most ways). I felt it was solid and pretty good, not amazing, and I’m not sure I fully understood it. Think it’s about a human slave revealing the name and location of its home world. The people who got that info go to the home world and are disappointed, so they kill the slave. I felt like there should’ve been more description and more worldbuilding.
Overall grade: B+/A-
Same grade as DV but I liked this one more. More on the A- side while DV was more on the B+ side.
Video review: https://youtu.be/-V8QSmgXbek
I actually enjoyed this book more than I enjoyed Dangerous Visions. I think Dangerous Visions is still in print, while this one is not. I also think dangerous visions is more widely read today than its sequel, which is a shame. There are more big names in DV than in ADV but the overall quality of the stories was better and there was a higher percentage of enjoyable and actually dangerous stories.
DV really leaned in on being religiously blasphemous, while this one did not really have near as many stories with that focus. I think there were more big names in DV but ADV had some of my favorite authors like Gene Wolfe and Ursuka K Le Guin and Vonnegut, whereas the only author I am obsessive about from DV is JG Ballard.
Ellison’s introductions were again kinda annoying and presumptuous and pretentious. Some of them were somewhat useful but most of them were basically just filler and platforms for Ellison to brag about either being friends with the author or having taught the author.
There were more women included in this one. This is a good thing. I’m unsure of how many people of color were included but there are at least two stories written by Jewish authors.
Anthologies are always going to be somewhat hit or miss and I can’t think of an anthology where I enjoyed every single story.
Overall there are few very few misses in this book and a lot of solid stories. Some of the stories are spectacular, though, and the highs of this book are higher than DV or any other anthology I have read.
Favorites
1 the word for world is forest - Ursula k Le guin
2 With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff
3 Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson
4 [A spot], by Gahan Wilson
5 Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief
6 The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut
7 For Value Received - Andy offutt
8 Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis
9 When It Changed", by Joanna Russ
10 Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell)
Least favorites
1 "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury
2 Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo)
3 In the Barn", by Piers Anthony
4 Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough
5 Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath
Individual stories
1 Keynote: The Counterpoint of View - John Heidenry - B/B+
Really just a Borges pastiche, which it wears on its sleeve. Too short to really have much of an impact. Kinda an odd keynote or intro given that there is only one other metafictional story in the book.
2 Ching-Witch by Ross Rocklynne - B/B+
Solid story. Seems like a commentary on youth culture in the late 60s and early 70s and how quickly fads pass. Kinda reads like old white guy wish fulfillment.
3 The Word for World is Forest - Ursula k Le guin - A/A+
I did a stand alone video for this novella. I had read it once before separate from ADV. at heart it’s a piece of protest literature that seems to condemn the Vietnam War. Basically a companion piece to Lathe of Heaven. Check out my other video for more about the book.
4 For Value Received - Andy offutt - A-/A
About a girl being born. she lives in the hospital until she is in her 20s because her parents found their hospital bill exorbitant. A send up of health insurance and non socialized health care and how ridiculous health care costs are in this country.
5 Mathoms From the Time Closet - Gene Wolfe - B+/A- - comprises "Robot's Story", "Against The Lafayette Escadrille", and "Loco Parentis"
3 flash fiction pieces all dealing with time travel in one way or another. That being said, the stories read like literary fiction rather than sci fi. Typical Wolfe: literary and inventive but not as spectacular as some of his other books and stories.
6 Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson - A-/A
A fucking trip. Super trippy and very dangerous. I have to imagine that this one caused a stir. Seems to describe a drug trip caused by something like datura or morning glory seeds, which are both very strong deliriant. The narrator jumps around in time experiencing a variety of different scenarios, mainly focusing on various types of western mysticism. I’ve seen it described as past life regression but that’s not clear in the story. A mixture of druggy montage and spiritual exploration. I wish this one was a novel length story. Apparently Nelson wrote the story that They Live is based on.
7 "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury - F
Didnt even finish this one. Why was a poem even included? I didn’t understand this one or why it was included.
8 King of the Hill", by Chad Oliver - B/B+
Seems to predict climate change and some of its effects. Only somewhat prescient. The story concerns overpopulation and rampant extinction. The story does meander some. I found it inventive and well-executed.
9 "The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By...", by Edward Bryant - B/B+
The story is about a news station paying to be the first to report a story by paying criminals to commit crimes then documenting the crimes. There is a rape scene in this one, which is quite haunting. Seems like a precursor to stuff like Nightcrawler. One of the more dangerous visions in this book.
10 "The Funeral", by Kate Wilhelm - B+/A-
I found this story to be fairly mysterious and difficult to pin down. Seems like a reaction to the hippie youth movement and a parody of the 1950s in America. What I’ve read of Wilhelm seems like it was pretty influential in the sci fi genre.
11 "Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath - C+/B-
A flash fiction piece. Seems like an ode to cartoons, also a commentary on copyright law. I was kinda unsure of what was going on in this story. There is some gore and violence but it’s not a particularly dangerous vision.
12 "When It Changed", by Joanna Russ (Nebula Award for Best Short Story) - B+/A-
About a colonized planet where men have gone extinct and there have only been women for hundreds of years. Men from Earth show up and fuck up the status quo. The story kinda subverts the expectations of someone who has just heard the summary, though.
13 "The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut - A-/A
The tone and plot of this story are very Vonnegut. It’s like it is almost logical, but not quite. About earth going to shit and humanity trying to artificially inseminate the universe. The story reminded me of Ariana Grande’s song “NASA”.
14 "Bounty", by T. L. Sherred - B/B+
About vigilantism being legalized and rewarded monetarily, so people bait others into crimes that they can be rewarded for violently stopping. People also kill themselves so their families will get paid. Short and disturbing and misanthropic.
15 "Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell) - B+/A-
About an astronaut slowly going crazy and eventually leaving 2 other astronauts on the moon and going home. The main character rapes his wife in the story’s opening. The main character is basically a villain: short tempered and self centered. Seems like a commentary on how bureaucracy drives you crazy, as he really doesn’t like how nasa tells him not to swear during his mission to the moon.
16 "Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis - B+/A-
This story is trippy and vivid and super inventive. It reminded me of an adult version of adventure time. It’s about 2 lawyers doing drugs and then mind melding as they fight over a legal case. It’s almost a climate fiction story as well.
17 "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations", by Bernard Wolfe—comprises "The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements" - B/B+
Two stories connected by them both having the same main character. The first story is about a rich journalist helping a woman with a husky cheat on her husband, who is heavily tied up in the military industrial complex. The dog accidentally dies in a demonstration of the effects of napalm. It reminded me of Joan Didion’s play it as it lays. The second story is concerned with incomprehensible rock lyrics and how dreams affect reality. Seems to parody songs like “In A Gadda Da Vida”. The story is much more playful and absurd than the first one. Both seem to protest the vietnam war and capitalism. Some parts are really funny.
18 "With A Finger in My I", by David Gerrold - B/B+
Maybe a B-/B. It’s a lot like Borges’ tlon uqbar story. Mass hysteria and hallucinations, how the quirks of our perceptions color the world around us. Too peculiar to be incisive and rather unfocused.
19 "In the Barn", by Piers Anthony - C+/B-
This one is a dangerous vision. It is also pretty damn disgusting. It’s basically about vegetarianism and veganism and how we would never treat humans like we treat people. Kinda reminded me of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin.
20 "Soundless Evening", by Lee Hoffman - B/B+
Solid and rather innocuous. Basically about a society with limits on how many children you can have. You can still have as many babies as you want but they are killed at the age of 5 if you have more than two. It’s too short and low stakes to really affect you emotionally.
21 [A spot], by Gahan Wilson - A-/A
Really fucking good. Inventive and silly and absurd. A simple idea but it’s very well executed. Basically about a spot on a wall growing and eventually consuming everything. Almost an A/A+ but just a bit too short to have that kind of impact on me.
22 "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward", by Joan Bernott - B/B+
A piece of flash fiction. About a genetically engineered pet that other causing or stopping its owners suicide. It reeks of depression and anhedonia. Definitely a dangerous vision.
23 "And the Sea Like Mirrors", by Gregory Benford -B/B+
Pretty close to a B+/A- but way too misogynistic. stated to be a response to Heinlein’s competent man. Reminded me of the show Yellowjackets and the book the Kar Chee reign. A literary thriller, sf-lite. It explores madness and toxic masculinity.
24 "Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief - A-/A
Reminded me of the long walk by Richard Bachman slash Stephen king. It is hallucinatory and very of its time. Some of it is about white nationalism, some of it seems like a dream sequence. Short and sweet and no excess language. Seems like it’s a memory but it couldn’t be, as the world of the story is completely alien,
25 "Tissue", by James Sallis—comprises "At the Fitting Shop" and "53rd American Dream" - B-/B
Thot these were just fine. The first story is about a teenage boy getting lost in a department store shopping for a new penis. The second story is about the highs and lows of parenting. Lot of shock value and subversion in this one.
26 Elouise And The Doctors of the Planet Pergamon", by Josephine Saxton - B+/A-
A haunting and and disgusting visceral story. Kinda ballardian, as it’s the closest thing to the atrocity exhibition I’ve ever read, besides gravitys rainbow. About a perfectly healthy woman on a planet where everyone has grotesque disabilities and horrible illnesses. Kinda like a Beckett play.
27 "Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough - C+/B-
Too low stakes for me. Not really dangerous and not really sci fi. It’s about a guy growing a tick to a humongous size. Very stylized and repetitive.
28 "Epiphany For Aliens", by David Kerr - B/B+
About a team of scientists that discover a group of Neanderthals that are still alive in Europe. It has its own logic. The woman who sacrifices herself for science seems like a stand in for bleeding heart liberal types. Perhaps somewhat racist.
29 "Eye of the Beholder", by Burt K. Filer - B/B+
About an artist who creates sculptures that are mathematically impossible, as they defy the rules of gravity. The cia and a female scientist are quite interested in creating an insterstellar engine from the sculptures. It reminded me of Ballard’s early stories and explores the differences between art and science,
30 Moth Race", by Richard Hill- B+/A-
This story is seemingly about a utopia where everyone is given everything they need by the government. A man goes to watch a race where the drivers have to survive racing around a track with randomly generated obstacles. The only one to ever conquer the track is called the champion and he lives like a modern celebrity. The main character is part of the race’s audience and drunkenly tries to participate in the race.
31 "In Re Glover", by Leonard Tushnet - B/B+
Solid and vaguely funny story, comedic but not hilarious. Somewhat kafkaesque, in that it portrays endless and convoluted bureaucracies. It is more or less about the legal ramifications of cryogenesis tech. Could’ve been more in depth.
32 "Zero Gee", by Ben Bova - B-/B
About a male astronaut trying to be the first human being to have sex in outer space. The woman he is supposed to fuck is a time life photographer, a civilian in a nasa space station. Too long and technical and meandering. Not very exciting as a story.
33 A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village", by Dean R. Koontz - B/B+
This is the only thing I’ve ever read by Koontz. I didn’t realize he wrote sci fi. The story is about a world where almost everyone can communicate telepathically and centers on one of the few who has to communicate normally. His life is quite hellish, as he is beat up and abused for making sounds. The narrator sometimes can’t stop himself from screaming and crying. A visceral story.
34 Getting Along", by James Blish and Judith Ann Lawrence - B/B+
A series of 9 letters detailing a woman’s super odd family and her search for a home. It apparently parodies 9 or 10 different genre fiction authors, which I wouldn’t have realized if not for Ellison’s intro to the story. The concept and idea of the story are better than the actual execution. Seems somewhat random and weird for the sake of being weird.
35 Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo) - D+/C-
I didn’t understand this story at all. I found it confusing and faux deep and random and unfocused. I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to take away.
36 Things Lost", by Thomas M. Disch - B+/A-
I didn’t understand what the point of the story was but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s about a generation ship populated by old immortal people. It’s ostensibly the journal of a scientist whose claim to fame is mapping the genome of mice. He is an amateur author who wants to start writing a novel. There’s a lot of references to Proust. Breezy and low stakes.
37 With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff - A-/A
I really hated this story at first but I grew to love it. I didnt understand ellison comparing it to riders of the purple wage until a while into the story but that is actually a pretty good comparison. Parts of it are written in a mixture of good ol boy talk and phonetic spelling like in finnegans wake. It’s basically about a war between the planets New Alabama and New Haiti, although there’s a lot of more details than that, as there are zombies and some avatar type stuff. A supremely odd story but it is super inventive and consistently surprising.
38 "Lamia Mutable", by M John Harrison - B-/B
I’m not sure I understood this story. It seems somewhat random, also apocalyptic. Just okay, maybe too referential and reliant on allusions. Kinda disappointing as I have heard really good things about the author.
39 Last Train to Kankakee", by Robin Scott - B/B+
About a con artist who dies and gets frozen and then reincarnated. He can’t find a purpose and kills himself multiple times, and eventually succeeds. His cells are then spread into the universe. Solid and low stakes. Does mention rape and murder.
40 "Empire of the Sun", by Andrew Weiner - B+/A-
A hallucinatory montage that plays by its own rules. About a man drafted into a war on mars where he is really just fighting other conscripts from earth. The war might be meant to lower earths population. Parts of it are a dream sequence I think. Solid story.
41 "Ozymandias", by Terry Carr - B/B+
Post apocalyptic tomb robbers journey to an area like the valley of the kings in Egypt. Once there they loot a vault. I didn’t necessarily understand why this one was so long and why some stuff was included. There were some cool details tho. Pretty solid story.
42 "The Milk of Paradise", by James Tiptree, Jr B/B+
I feel similarly about this one as to how I felt about the story by the author included in nova 2 (and I have come upon this place by most ways). I felt it was solid and pretty good, not amazing, and I’m not sure I fully understood it. Think it’s about a human slave revealing the name and location of its home world. The people who got that info go to the home world and are disappointed, so they kill the slave. I felt like there should’ve been more description and more worldbuilding.
Overall grade: B+/A-
Same grade as DV but I liked this one more. More on the A- side while DV was more on the B+ side.
December 16, 2019
I won't write on everything in the collection. I wrote about "The Word for World is Forest" by Le Guin on the novella's own page, since it was so long and fantastic on its own. On an interesting side note, these stories are certainly of an era, with a good number of them concerned greatly by overpopulation and many also being environmentally focused. It makes sense, given the publication date and years during which the stories were written. Plenty also seem to comment on Vietnam, cryogenics, and other topics that were controversial or cutting-edge at the time.
Ellison's extensive intros to each piece are very hit or miss and often just feel like him bragging about how cool his friends are but mostly make me think these maybe aren't necessarily good stories, just good chances to give favors to some authors.
On an infuriating side note, the Kindle version of this collection screws you over on one piece that was meant to include, indeed shouldn't be read without, some drawings. It's a major bummer, because the story, by Gahan Wilson, is a very enjoyable horror story about a black dot that suddenly appears in a very fastidious man's home.
The first two stories, "The Counterpoint of View" by John Heidenry and "Ching Witch!" by Ross Rocklynne were good, enjoyable shorts, but nothing I care to write about extensively. Heidenry's is a very post modern, experimental short on writing and religion and more, just poking fun and asking questions of many things but offering nothing in way of answers. Rocklynne's story is a fun romp through a strange future where Earth explodes but a part-cat man survives and jets off to a new planet before it, going so fast he has a few years before this planet will know what happened. He enjoys a life there feeling like a king, as this planet loves Earth and those from it. Yet, in the end, he finds he has been lied to as he lied to them. He has been watched and around mostly beings from a third planet, who want to take him back to their planet as a pet. It's fun, but it doesn't really say much beyond portraying the levels of lies and the impacts of loneliness and isolation.
The first short in this collection I'd like to write about is "For Value Received" by andrew j. offutt. To begin, Ellison's extensive foreward to the short is as hilarious and wonderful as the story itself. offutt is a rebel against capitalism, bureaucracy, and American governance both in life and in writing. In the story, he tells of a man who puts his wife in a nice, private room for the birth of his third child. Upon time to check out, he decides he wants the bill mailed to him instead of settling it then and there. The hospital refuses, saying the patient cannot be discharged until he pays. He leaves the baby there, calling their bluff. Except they don't bluff; they keep her until she's 21 and a med school grad. She takes over her debts, works at the hospital as an intern to cover the costs of the original bill, and moves out. It appears it will work too, the hospital board happy to have a way out of the stalemate. Most speaking characters here idolize the father for sticking to his principles, calling him a hero. However, it's absurd for both a father and a hospital to refuse to bend on such small matters to such large consequences, which makes the satire. offutt tells the story with great humor throughout, reminding me of Vonnegut, one of my favorites. Both of these writers like to write satirically to question America, capitalism, and other aspects of life people usually assume are positive or neutral - if they ever consider them at all.
Next came three shorts overall titled "Mathoms from the Time Closet." Gene Wolfe writes them, and all three deal with odd timelines of some kind. First, "Robot's Story" has a time-travelling robot named Robot telling an odd story about a man landing on a grassy planet and quickly deciding to enslave himself to the first woman he meets. After the story, Robot is asked to go buy some weed for the kids he was just talking to. He's from a different time and thinking on a different level than the kids. The story he tells shows men being stupid for lust in a very predictable way. Robot himself shows similar issues but was made by man to serve. It shows how similar we are to what we make. Next comes "Against the Lafayette Escadrille," a nice little story about a hobbyist that made a nearly perfect replica of an old triplane. One day out flying it, he sees a woman in a balloon with everything perfectly replicated. He never finds her again though, so she's likely somehow time traveled. Nevertheless, he continues to dream of her. The last story is titled "Loco Parentis" and examines parenting in only script-style dialogue. The parents each question their son's reality: is he theirs? is he a genetically modified ape? is he a robot? These concerns flash forward throughout their life with him, likely the couple's shared anxiety dream. Then we're chucked back to them meeting their son. They both quickly agree that he is, in fact, fully theirs. This suggests, to me, that parents have their doubts about the alien things they raise, but just as surely take any and all signs that the child is theirs to heart, even if these signs are actually ambiguous and meaningless.
Bradbury's poem "Christ, Old Student in a New School" warrants much more time, thinking, and writing than I feel like giving it. To be as brief as I can, it's a poem in which Christ/man sees all the suffering, realizes it was done by himself/mankind, and decides to start again, renewed, in space. Something like that. A similar story follows, although not written in poetry: "King of the Hill" by Chad Oliver. Oliver's story brings us an Earth on the brink of collapse via overpopulation and environmental negligence. The richest man on Earth, though, spends years and billions finding the best place to send some animal DNA to start life somewhere else. He doesn't send humans. However, raccoons appear to begin taking humanity's place. It's somewhat hopeful for life and intelligent life, but also quite stark for mankind and even the hinted cyclical nature of life.
"The 10:00 Report Is Brought to You by..." comes next, written by Edward Bryant. It's a chilling take on how terribly humans are willing to be for money or fame or whatever enjoyment they seek. In the story, a news station pays a gang to violently destroy a town for their own ratings increase. People that work for the station do nothing. Even the guy that resigns over it asks for a job back. The men doing the violence enjoy it and the money. It's a sad little story, really.
Kate Wilhelm's "The Funeral" threw me for a loop. It's like Margaret Atwood, which means it's very good speculative fiction, often with a healthy dose of feminism. In this story, the matriarch of a school dies, aged 120 or more. She was instrumental in turning the education system into a rigid, system that actually controls most of society after some vague annihilation of the youth. The society has specific jobs that men and women are placed into by the schools. The protagonist thinks she wants to be a Lady, but later is shown what that means (presumably being used for sex). She is selected by the matriarch's protege to be a Teacher. During the extensive process of a funeral for the dead Teacher, the protagonist Carla learns more truths of society and finds a way to escape in a hidden room the same way the dead Teacher escaped from one of the annihilations. This story looks down on how we "mold" children in our own image out of our hate for them. It also suggests that young people have an innate moral compass that will guide them to rebel against adult BS no matter how strictly we attempt to control them.
Vonnegut's contribution to the collection, "The Big Space Fuck," is dark and satirical in deliciously Vonnegutian style. It's quite short, but lambastes overpopulation, pollution, materialism, and more. It's a fun one, which is strange to say because it's effectively about the end of the world due to humanity's horrors.
In T.L. Sherred's "Bounty," we get an interesting prophecy on how gun violence may finally end in America. An unnamed wealthy person or group places an ad in the paper, paying anyone that stops an armed robbery or that dies in said attempt. People start killing everyone with a visible gun. Vigilantes take over everything. Then, with a new President, guns are entirely outlawed, even for police. This seems to suggest we can end gun violence with greed and gun violence. Or something like that.
A later story in the collection, titled "In the Barn," kept me guessing. Written by Piers Anthony, the universe has multiple parallels and "Earth-Prime" - our Earth - is the only one able to go to and from these parallels. We follow an inspector's visit to #772, which is warless and also animal-less. The inspector goes into a barn, on the pretense of being a new farmhand. He finds cows and bulls of humans instead of cattle. He does the work only to finally break the rules and save a "calf" to bring back to EP. At first, I expected this to be a feminist story about women being oppressed. But the bull was male and the society also had non-cow women as well. This society drew the moral line at how terrible it would be to eat filthy creatures and decided using their own mammal kind is better, cleaner. When the inspector returns to EP, he's in a normal barn, and muses on whether or not he did the right thing and if EP is doing the better thing, subjecting a different species to tortures and slavery. The peace of the other world seems to suggest the "evils" of their domesticated-human farming system may be a better way to go than our own system. Chilling, thought-provoking stuff.
A quite short but quite thought-provoking romp was "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward" by Joan Bernott. In this one, a man lives alone with a large cat that we learn is quite intelligent and capable of speech. It takes a turn toward a sad sort of isolation though, when a girlfriend calls him, but he declines and breaks up with her, preferring to spend the evening with his cat. He avoids human love because "Somehow, this, the easier way, was also better." Another chilling one!
Gregory Benford brings an interesting survivalist and psychological thriller type story with "And the Sea Like Mirrors." In this story, a man and woman are stranded on a raft in the Pacific with alien dolphin things attacking them. It's just their young forms though. The older forms are trying to communicate with and help them apparently. In the process of surviving and meeting aliens, the characters follow their gender stereotypes. The man takes charge, stays logical, and uses violence and intelligence to survive and adapt. The woman submits, becomes "hysterical," and irrationally seems to side with the murderous aliens. It's a cool concept all around, even in execution. The end leaves the woman dead after stupidly trying to swim to an island obviously covered with the carnivorous aliens, while the man happily ignores her screams and continues toward the older forms of alien life, leaving the only human behind.
At nearly the end of the collection comes Carr's "Ozymandias." This post-apocalyptic gem of a story tickled me in all the right ways. First, the subtle world building of the short teaches us that this world has vaults that robbers dance to in order to attain tools and food and such. Later, we learn that thinkers of this tribe were all just murdered, save one thinker-in-training that was spared as he was not technically a thinker yet. Once the unique, ritualized dance-ascent was completed, the robbers made the remaining thinker pick a vault. The thinkers said all vaults were empty, but robbers disagreed. The robbers also thought picking the wrong vault can kill you (and maybe everyone), so chose this dispensable thinker. The thinker, however, knows something the robbers do not, so picks an empty vault for safety. He gets them to open a secret bottom to the vault, which contains an Immortal. The immortal wakes up, giant of a man. The thinker, who has a special empath power, feels the immortal wants to be killed, so he kills him. This short manages to damn the rich and their hyper-modern cryogenic pyramids while also pointing to a human tendency toward violence and against knowledge, when that knowledge is inconvenient.
"The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree, Jr. ends the collection in style. Tiptree's story follows a man not named Timor and his struggles to rejoin humanity after living his first several years on a different planet with his father. Having been raised there, he learned to love and make love with these aliens, and finds humans repulsive. He is kidnapped by another human who wants to see "Paradise" like Timor describes. Timor is drugged and gives him enough information that they find it. It turns out that Timor's memory is greatly skewed by his being young and small at the time. To the kidnapper, these aliens are small, ugly gray blobs, not the tall, gorgeous beings that Timor remembers and, shortly, sees. Timor appears to then kill the kidnapper and is able to live happily from then on in "Paradise." Hidden a bit below the surface, it seems these beings may drug people with similar drugs that the kidnapper used on Timor, since their radio said something about a medical recall. It appears Timor is safe, the rest of the humans knowing enough to avoid the addictive aliens. It's a strange and delightful meditation on what true beauty and art and pleasure truly are, and how much of that is nature or nurture.
Ellison's extensive intros to each piece are very hit or miss and often just feel like him bragging about how cool his friends are but mostly make me think these maybe aren't necessarily good stories, just good chances to give favors to some authors.
On an infuriating side note, the Kindle version of this collection screws you over on one piece that was meant to include, indeed shouldn't be read without, some drawings. It's a major bummer, because the story, by Gahan Wilson, is a very enjoyable horror story about a black dot that suddenly appears in a very fastidious man's home.
The first two stories, "The Counterpoint of View" by John Heidenry and "Ching Witch!" by Ross Rocklynne were good, enjoyable shorts, but nothing I care to write about extensively. Heidenry's is a very post modern, experimental short on writing and religion and more, just poking fun and asking questions of many things but offering nothing in way of answers. Rocklynne's story is a fun romp through a strange future where Earth explodes but a part-cat man survives and jets off to a new planet before it, going so fast he has a few years before this planet will know what happened. He enjoys a life there feeling like a king, as this planet loves Earth and those from it. Yet, in the end, he finds he has been lied to as he lied to them. He has been watched and around mostly beings from a third planet, who want to take him back to their planet as a pet. It's fun, but it doesn't really say much beyond portraying the levels of lies and the impacts of loneliness and isolation.
The first short in this collection I'd like to write about is "For Value Received" by andrew j. offutt. To begin, Ellison's extensive foreward to the short is as hilarious and wonderful as the story itself. offutt is a rebel against capitalism, bureaucracy, and American governance both in life and in writing. In the story, he tells of a man who puts his wife in a nice, private room for the birth of his third child. Upon time to check out, he decides he wants the bill mailed to him instead of settling it then and there. The hospital refuses, saying the patient cannot be discharged until he pays. He leaves the baby there, calling their bluff. Except they don't bluff; they keep her until she's 21 and a med school grad. She takes over her debts, works at the hospital as an intern to cover the costs of the original bill, and moves out. It appears it will work too, the hospital board happy to have a way out of the stalemate. Most speaking characters here idolize the father for sticking to his principles, calling him a hero. However, it's absurd for both a father and a hospital to refuse to bend on such small matters to such large consequences, which makes the satire. offutt tells the story with great humor throughout, reminding me of Vonnegut, one of my favorites. Both of these writers like to write satirically to question America, capitalism, and other aspects of life people usually assume are positive or neutral - if they ever consider them at all.
Next came three shorts overall titled "Mathoms from the Time Closet." Gene Wolfe writes them, and all three deal with odd timelines of some kind. First, "Robot's Story" has a time-travelling robot named Robot telling an odd story about a man landing on a grassy planet and quickly deciding to enslave himself to the first woman he meets. After the story, Robot is asked to go buy some weed for the kids he was just talking to. He's from a different time and thinking on a different level than the kids. The story he tells shows men being stupid for lust in a very predictable way. Robot himself shows similar issues but was made by man to serve. It shows how similar we are to what we make. Next comes "Against the Lafayette Escadrille," a nice little story about a hobbyist that made a nearly perfect replica of an old triplane. One day out flying it, he sees a woman in a balloon with everything perfectly replicated. He never finds her again though, so she's likely somehow time traveled. Nevertheless, he continues to dream of her. The last story is titled "Loco Parentis" and examines parenting in only script-style dialogue. The parents each question their son's reality: is he theirs? is he a genetically modified ape? is he a robot? These concerns flash forward throughout their life with him, likely the couple's shared anxiety dream. Then we're chucked back to them meeting their son. They both quickly agree that he is, in fact, fully theirs. This suggests, to me, that parents have their doubts about the alien things they raise, but just as surely take any and all signs that the child is theirs to heart, even if these signs are actually ambiguous and meaningless.
Bradbury's poem "Christ, Old Student in a New School" warrants much more time, thinking, and writing than I feel like giving it. To be as brief as I can, it's a poem in which Christ/man sees all the suffering, realizes it was done by himself/mankind, and decides to start again, renewed, in space. Something like that. A similar story follows, although not written in poetry: "King of the Hill" by Chad Oliver. Oliver's story brings us an Earth on the brink of collapse via overpopulation and environmental negligence. The richest man on Earth, though, spends years and billions finding the best place to send some animal DNA to start life somewhere else. He doesn't send humans. However, raccoons appear to begin taking humanity's place. It's somewhat hopeful for life and intelligent life, but also quite stark for mankind and even the hinted cyclical nature of life.
"The 10:00 Report Is Brought to You by..." comes next, written by Edward Bryant. It's a chilling take on how terribly humans are willing to be for money or fame or whatever enjoyment they seek. In the story, a news station pays a gang to violently destroy a town for their own ratings increase. People that work for the station do nothing. Even the guy that resigns over it asks for a job back. The men doing the violence enjoy it and the money. It's a sad little story, really.
Kate Wilhelm's "The Funeral" threw me for a loop. It's like Margaret Atwood, which means it's very good speculative fiction, often with a healthy dose of feminism. In this story, the matriarch of a school dies, aged 120 or more. She was instrumental in turning the education system into a rigid, system that actually controls most of society after some vague annihilation of the youth. The society has specific jobs that men and women are placed into by the schools. The protagonist thinks she wants to be a Lady, but later is shown what that means (presumably being used for sex). She is selected by the matriarch's protege to be a Teacher. During the extensive process of a funeral for the dead Teacher, the protagonist Carla learns more truths of society and finds a way to escape in a hidden room the same way the dead Teacher escaped from one of the annihilations. This story looks down on how we "mold" children in our own image out of our hate for them. It also suggests that young people have an innate moral compass that will guide them to rebel against adult BS no matter how strictly we attempt to control them.
Vonnegut's contribution to the collection, "The Big Space Fuck," is dark and satirical in deliciously Vonnegutian style. It's quite short, but lambastes overpopulation, pollution, materialism, and more. It's a fun one, which is strange to say because it's effectively about the end of the world due to humanity's horrors.
In T.L. Sherred's "Bounty," we get an interesting prophecy on how gun violence may finally end in America. An unnamed wealthy person or group places an ad in the paper, paying anyone that stops an armed robbery or that dies in said attempt. People start killing everyone with a visible gun. Vigilantes take over everything. Then, with a new President, guns are entirely outlawed, even for police. This seems to suggest we can end gun violence with greed and gun violence. Or something like that.
A later story in the collection, titled "In the Barn," kept me guessing. Written by Piers Anthony, the universe has multiple parallels and "Earth-Prime" - our Earth - is the only one able to go to and from these parallels. We follow an inspector's visit to #772, which is warless and also animal-less. The inspector goes into a barn, on the pretense of being a new farmhand. He finds cows and bulls of humans instead of cattle. He does the work only to finally break the rules and save a "calf" to bring back to EP. At first, I expected this to be a feminist story about women being oppressed. But the bull was male and the society also had non-cow women as well. This society drew the moral line at how terrible it would be to eat filthy creatures and decided using their own mammal kind is better, cleaner. When the inspector returns to EP, he's in a normal barn, and muses on whether or not he did the right thing and if EP is doing the better thing, subjecting a different species to tortures and slavery. The peace of the other world seems to suggest the "evils" of their domesticated-human farming system may be a better way to go than our own system. Chilling, thought-provoking stuff.
A quite short but quite thought-provoking romp was "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward" by Joan Bernott. In this one, a man lives alone with a large cat that we learn is quite intelligent and capable of speech. It takes a turn toward a sad sort of isolation though, when a girlfriend calls him, but he declines and breaks up with her, preferring to spend the evening with his cat. He avoids human love because "Somehow, this, the easier way, was also better." Another chilling one!
Gregory Benford brings an interesting survivalist and psychological thriller type story with "And the Sea Like Mirrors." In this story, a man and woman are stranded on a raft in the Pacific with alien dolphin things attacking them. It's just their young forms though. The older forms are trying to communicate with and help them apparently. In the process of surviving and meeting aliens, the characters follow their gender stereotypes. The man takes charge, stays logical, and uses violence and intelligence to survive and adapt. The woman submits, becomes "hysterical," and irrationally seems to side with the murderous aliens. It's a cool concept all around, even in execution. The end leaves the woman dead after stupidly trying to swim to an island obviously covered with the carnivorous aliens, while the man happily ignores her screams and continues toward the older forms of alien life, leaving the only human behind.
At nearly the end of the collection comes Carr's "Ozymandias." This post-apocalyptic gem of a story tickled me in all the right ways. First, the subtle world building of the short teaches us that this world has vaults that robbers dance to in order to attain tools and food and such. Later, we learn that thinkers of this tribe were all just murdered, save one thinker-in-training that was spared as he was not technically a thinker yet. Once the unique, ritualized dance-ascent was completed, the robbers made the remaining thinker pick a vault. The thinkers said all vaults were empty, but robbers disagreed. The robbers also thought picking the wrong vault can kill you (and maybe everyone), so chose this dispensable thinker. The thinker, however, knows something the robbers do not, so picks an empty vault for safety. He gets them to open a secret bottom to the vault, which contains an Immortal. The immortal wakes up, giant of a man. The thinker, who has a special empath power, feels the immortal wants to be killed, so he kills him. This short manages to damn the rich and their hyper-modern cryogenic pyramids while also pointing to a human tendency toward violence and against knowledge, when that knowledge is inconvenient.
"The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree, Jr. ends the collection in style. Tiptree's story follows a man not named Timor and his struggles to rejoin humanity after living his first several years on a different planet with his father. Having been raised there, he learned to love and make love with these aliens, and finds humans repulsive. He is kidnapped by another human who wants to see "Paradise" like Timor describes. Timor is drugged and gives him enough information that they find it. It turns out that Timor's memory is greatly skewed by his being young and small at the time. To the kidnapper, these aliens are small, ugly gray blobs, not the tall, gorgeous beings that Timor remembers and, shortly, sees. Timor appears to then kill the kidnapper and is able to live happily from then on in "Paradise." Hidden a bit below the surface, it seems these beings may drug people with similar drugs that the kidnapper used on Timor, since their radio said something about a medical recall. It appears Timor is safe, the rest of the humans knowing enough to avoid the addictive aliens. It's a strange and delightful meditation on what true beauty and art and pleasure truly are, and how much of that is nature or nurture.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 20, 2017
Man, this was extremely disappointing. Now, I know it's been a lot of years, but I have a hard time believing most of these stories were particularly dangerous or compelling even at the time. There are a few standouts, but most of the stories are just vague, boring, or (worst) standard. And Harlan Ellison drives me absolutely batty with his introductions--there are a lot of sci-fi writers I would love to hear talk about things, but I've never read someone so full of grandiosity and empty promises.
I guess the most damning thing I can say is that I don't even remember most of the stories. I remember a lot of poor endings, particularly on stories that seemed to be building to something which didn't pay off. I remember a few stories that seemed like deep Borges-style stories, playing with reality somehow, but, upon examination, I couldn't make sense of them. I don't know if that's me or just a bad story.
Flipping back through the table of contents, here are the stories I can say something good about: le Guin's story, "The Word for World is Forest" is good, but too drawn out. offutt's "For Value Received" was excellently funny, although maybe not really sci-fi. Bryant's "The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By" was actually (conceivably) dangerous, telling about the exploitative nature of newscasting; this was a good one. Joanna Russ' "When It Changed" was a nice little story about a planet populated only by women, but it's really a story about gender roles; one of the few stories to really fit in such a volume. Sherred's "Bounty" about regular people's capacity for vengeance and violence. Hollis' "Stoned Council" at least has an interesting premise, even if it's written in a fairly standard drug-addled way that doesn't make it worth remembering, particularly. Bernard Wolfe has two nice stories in here, neither of which really fit in the volume, and a rather long afterword about how terrible science fiction is; this is, unfortunately, some of the best writing in the book. Anthony's "In the Barn" seemed much more dangerous when I read it a few years ago--now it didn't seem nearly so, but certainly interesting and worthy of inclusion. Gahan Wilson's story was original, at least in genre. Benford's "And the Sea Like Mirrors" was one of the first I read. It's well-written, extremely compelling, and appears to be missing the finale. Unfortunately, there's' a lot of that in this book. Burt Filer's "Eye of the Beholder" is probably the strongest entry, about a scientist and an artist who are studying the same thing, without realizing it. It's a discussion of the boundaries between art and science, and what happens if one wins. Tushnet's "In Re Glover" is a nice little story about the legal ramifications of cryogenics. Blish's "Getting Along" is an exercise in genre, mimicking the writing styles of some classic scifi authors. It's not a particularly excellent story, but it's fun to read and try to identify the authors in question. Lupoff's "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" has an excellent setup, and an amazing use of language (reminiscent of Clockwork Orange), but the finale doesn't really do the story justice.
The rest of the stories are either entirely forgettable or bad. (And by forgettable, I mean that even picking up the book and skimming some sentences through the story, I can't remember it.) So that's like 15 stories worth mentioning out of a book of about 45. And, frankly, only a handful of those 15 are really worth remembering. Add in Ellison's annoying essays, and I've certainly read much better (and more dangerous!) collections.
I guess the most damning thing I can say is that I don't even remember most of the stories. I remember a lot of poor endings, particularly on stories that seemed to be building to something which didn't pay off. I remember a few stories that seemed like deep Borges-style stories, playing with reality somehow, but, upon examination, I couldn't make sense of them. I don't know if that's me or just a bad story.
Flipping back through the table of contents, here are the stories I can say something good about: le Guin's story, "The Word for World is Forest" is good, but too drawn out. offutt's "For Value Received" was excellently funny, although maybe not really sci-fi. Bryant's "The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By" was actually (conceivably) dangerous, telling about the exploitative nature of newscasting; this was a good one. Joanna Russ' "When It Changed" was a nice little story about a planet populated only by women, but it's really a story about gender roles; one of the few stories to really fit in such a volume. Sherred's "Bounty" about regular people's capacity for vengeance and violence. Hollis' "Stoned Council" at least has an interesting premise, even if it's written in a fairly standard drug-addled way that doesn't make it worth remembering, particularly. Bernard Wolfe has two nice stories in here, neither of which really fit in the volume, and a rather long afterword about how terrible science fiction is; this is, unfortunately, some of the best writing in the book. Anthony's "In the Barn" seemed much more dangerous when I read it a few years ago--now it didn't seem nearly so, but certainly interesting and worthy of inclusion. Gahan Wilson's story was original, at least in genre. Benford's "And the Sea Like Mirrors" was one of the first I read. It's well-written, extremely compelling, and appears to be missing the finale. Unfortunately, there's' a lot of that in this book. Burt Filer's "Eye of the Beholder" is probably the strongest entry, about a scientist and an artist who are studying the same thing, without realizing it. It's a discussion of the boundaries between art and science, and what happens if one wins. Tushnet's "In Re Glover" is a nice little story about the legal ramifications of cryogenics. Blish's "Getting Along" is an exercise in genre, mimicking the writing styles of some classic scifi authors. It's not a particularly excellent story, but it's fun to read and try to identify the authors in question. Lupoff's "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" has an excellent setup, and an amazing use of language (reminiscent of Clockwork Orange), but the finale doesn't really do the story justice.
The rest of the stories are either entirely forgettable or bad. (And by forgettable, I mean that even picking up the book and skimming some sentences through the story, I can't remember it.) So that's like 15 stories worth mentioning out of a book of about 45. And, frankly, only a handful of those 15 are really worth remembering. Add in Ellison's annoying essays, and I've certainly read much better (and more dangerous!) collections.
September 3, 2014
As with the first volume, there are some very good stories, some average ones, and a whole lot that made me wonder what Ellison had in his pipe when he was assembling this anthology.
I'll just talk about some of the ones I liked.
A pair of stories by Bernard Wolfe, under the collective title "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations." The first of these, "The Bisquit Position," is probably the most dangerous story in the volume, even today. Just try criticizing the military and see what happens. This story should disabuse the reader of any lingering notion that it has anything to do with honor.
"With a Finger in My I" by David Gerrold: An unsettling, surreal and funny story that takes place in a world where ideas can literally change the world. I've read this story several times and never get tired of it's wordplay and weirdness.
"█" by cartoonist Gahan Wilson: Another funny and slightly creepy story that plays with the prose format by introducing a graphical element (the title actually resembles an ink blot; the above is as close as I could come in text format.)
"The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin: A story of planetary rape that I'm pretty sure James Cameron swiped for Avatar.
"The 10:00 Report is Brought to You by..." by Edward Bryant: A satire of news media as entertainment. Not far off these days, sadly.
"In the Barn" by Piers Anthony: An inter-dimensional traveler arrives on an alternate Earth where humans are bred as farm animals. Would have been better had it not been in Anthony's typical, leering tone. (Is it me or does he always sound like he's typing with one hand down his pants?)
"In Re Glover" by Leonard Tushnet: A humorous story examining the legalities of cryogenics.
Well, those are the ones I remember best.
Looking back over these, it seems like the better stories are mostly in the first half, but it might be that I had gotten so weary of the avant garde nature of many of the entries that my patience was wearing thinner the further I got. Still, it undoubtedly would have been a much stronger collection at half its length.
I'll just talk about some of the ones I liked.
A pair of stories by Bernard Wolfe, under the collective title "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations." The first of these, "The Bisquit Position," is probably the most dangerous story in the volume, even today. Just try criticizing the military and see what happens. This story should disabuse the reader of any lingering notion that it has anything to do with honor.
"With a Finger in My I" by David Gerrold: An unsettling, surreal and funny story that takes place in a world where ideas can literally change the world. I've read this story several times and never get tired of it's wordplay and weirdness.
"█" by cartoonist Gahan Wilson: Another funny and slightly creepy story that plays with the prose format by introducing a graphical element (the title actually resembles an ink blot; the above is as close as I could come in text format.)
"The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin: A story of planetary rape that I'm pretty sure James Cameron swiped for Avatar.
"The 10:00 Report is Brought to You by..." by Edward Bryant: A satire of news media as entertainment. Not far off these days, sadly.
"In the Barn" by Piers Anthony: An inter-dimensional traveler arrives on an alternate Earth where humans are bred as farm animals. Would have been better had it not been in Anthony's typical, leering tone. (Is it me or does he always sound like he's typing with one hand down his pants?)
"In Re Glover" by Leonard Tushnet: A humorous story examining the legalities of cryogenics.
Well, those are the ones I remember best.
Looking back over these, it seems like the better stories are mostly in the first half, but it might be that I had gotten so weary of the avant garde nature of many of the entries that my patience was wearing thinner the further I got. Still, it undoubtedly would have been a much stronger collection at half its length.
February 15, 2025
I enjoyed Dangerous Visions quite a bit, so I was excited to get into its followup, Again, Dangerous Visions. A lot of the stories in this collection were on the same level as DV's best, so why didn't I like this one as much? Quite simply, the length. My copy of DV is 33 stories spanning 666 pages (no joke), and A,DV is 46 stories that go on for 1141 fucking pages. The experience of reading A,DV is like going hiking in the mountains. Sure you'll get the gorgeous peaks, but the slog of climbing up and down them wears on you, no matter how enthusiastic a hiker you are. I think a big part of the length is due to the issues mentioned in the finally-released The Last Dangerous Visions (yes I read ahead to see the excellent Ellison Exegesis - a true story so powerful it made me take my mental health a thousand times more seriously). Simply put, Ellison lost his abilities as a curator and accepted so many stories that the necessity of writing a lovingly detailed intro to each was a more and more daunting task, so when A,DV was finally released, it was a mammoth of a book and TLDV was slated to be a four-goddamn-book-affair with how many stories Ellison still had in the chamber. As good as the stories are in this collection, there's a lot of chaff that could have been sifted through more discerningly to bring the book down to a much more manageable length.
So, enough grumbling, time to talk about a few of my favorites in this collection, and there are some real doozies here.
The Word for World is Forest - Ursula K LeGuin
Yeah, I'm a LeGuin fan, but this one's regarded as one of her best stories for a reason. The plot of human loggers coming to a forest planet to harvest timber for the spreading galactic colonies, only to find a race of sapient alien beings with a mystical connection to the woods that make their logging difficult without violence might sound familiar to modern readers, but the trick here is how fleshed-out the alien "creechies" are, and how the act of fighting a war introduces a new word and concept to their culture, for better and worse. Essential LeGuin, and an essential sf short story of its time. The kind of thing the DV project was designed for.
Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson
(about your deepest sexual fantasies) "Is the picture once again flickering before your eyes? If it is, then this time look at it, long and hard. Examine it as if it were a masterpiece of art...For it is the one thing in the universe that you have made for yourself alone, and not to impress someone else..." This passage might be one of the most powerful things in the entire book for my money. A kinda-woo-but-fun-woo story about exploring your past lives through the power of hypnotized masturbation.
The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By... - Edward Bryant
One of the grimmer, meaner stories in the collection. Crime is filmed live for entertainment by hovering drones, and in the worst cases planned in advance between gangs and studios. An obvious commentary on news media and its obsession with lurid events, but one that hits with a punch through its terse, snappy writing style.
Stoned Counsel - HH Hollis
Prosecutors, defense attorneys, and defendants share an LSD trip to tease the details of a crime out the head of the suspect, deciphering the deeply-layered symbology as they go. Fascinating and (of course) trippy.
With a Finger in my I - David Gerrold
Maybe the story with the most relevance to our current moment of subjective reality. People's subconscious beliefs manipulate reality, and because so many of them are contradictory, the world is constantly melting and shifting. The world is pear-shaped because the inhabitants of a certain country collectively believe they're the biggest country on earth, and the globe warps to accommodate that belief. "Anyone can get up and speak for his cause - any group can believe in anything they choose - indeed we can remake the world if we want to! And in our own images!" The marketplace of ideas taken to its natural conclusion.
at the fitting shop - James Sallis
A funny little story about a guy trying to find the right department in a colossal department store in order to get a new penis fitted. Some stories in this are groundbreaking and mind-expanding, and some of them are goofy little larks, and this is one of the better larks.
Eye of the Beholder - Burt Filer
An artist creates sculptures that defy the laws of physics by speaking them into reality, and the CIA absolutely must know how his impossible creations take shape so they can somehow harness that ability.
A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village - Dean Koontz
When technology to perfect the brain's empathy centers and make all people a perfect brotherhood emerges, those whose brains reject the implants are left to rot in nursing facilities for the rest of their lives, and one of these Stunteds attempts an escape on the bus that visits his home.
Getting Along - James Blish with Judith Ann Lawrence
Another one of the funny little larks. A romp about a woman traveling to find a suitable partner throughout style parodies of 9 famous authors.
With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama - Richard Lupoff
The most love-it-or-hate-it story in the collection, and it'll largely come down to how well you can stand dialect written-as-spoken. Later collected into a novel called Space War Blues, Boomer Boys tells the story of future space colonies at war - namely New Alabama (who are as racist and terrible as you'd expect) and New Haiti, who are stretched too thin to wage a proper war, but when a means to stitch together and resurrect corpses left after space battles is discovered, New Haiti decides to brand it as a new form of voodoo and hopes to turn the tide of the war with an undead army. While it never really goes anywhere with its excellent concepts (and the consensus on the final novel echoes that sentiment), the journey is colorful and wild and well worth taking if you can stand the style.
Last Train to Kankakee - Robin Scott
When a man dies from a brain aneurysm, his body is cryogenically preserved against his wishes until it can be revived. When he wakes up, the technology of the future can preserve his life indefinitely, and he remains incapable of dying...
Ozymandias - Terry Carr
Long after the nukes fall, the mutants of the far future lead hypersuperstitious raids on the vaults left by the rich and powerful. Fascinating in how sketched out the apocalyptic culture is and how simultaneously strange and ominous the whole thing feels.
So, enough grumbling, time to talk about a few of my favorites in this collection, and there are some real doozies here.
The Word for World is Forest - Ursula K LeGuin
Yeah, I'm a LeGuin fan, but this one's regarded as one of her best stories for a reason. The plot of human loggers coming to a forest planet to harvest timber for the spreading galactic colonies, only to find a race of sapient alien beings with a mystical connection to the woods that make their logging difficult without violence might sound familiar to modern readers, but the trick here is how fleshed-out the alien "creechies" are, and how the act of fighting a war introduces a new word and concept to their culture, for better and worse. Essential LeGuin, and an essential sf short story of its time. The kind of thing the DV project was designed for.
Time Travel for Pedestrians - Ray Nelson
(about your deepest sexual fantasies) "Is the picture once again flickering before your eyes? If it is, then this time look at it, long and hard. Examine it as if it were a masterpiece of art...For it is the one thing in the universe that you have made for yourself alone, and not to impress someone else..." This passage might be one of the most powerful things in the entire book for my money. A kinda-woo-but-fun-woo story about exploring your past lives through the power of hypnotized masturbation.
The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By... - Edward Bryant
One of the grimmer, meaner stories in the collection. Crime is filmed live for entertainment by hovering drones, and in the worst cases planned in advance between gangs and studios. An obvious commentary on news media and its obsession with lurid events, but one that hits with a punch through its terse, snappy writing style.
Stoned Counsel - HH Hollis
Prosecutors, defense attorneys, and defendants share an LSD trip to tease the details of a crime out the head of the suspect, deciphering the deeply-layered symbology as they go. Fascinating and (of course) trippy.
With a Finger in my I - David Gerrold
Maybe the story with the most relevance to our current moment of subjective reality. People's subconscious beliefs manipulate reality, and because so many of them are contradictory, the world is constantly melting and shifting. The world is pear-shaped because the inhabitants of a certain country collectively believe they're the biggest country on earth, and the globe warps to accommodate that belief. "Anyone can get up and speak for his cause - any group can believe in anything they choose - indeed we can remake the world if we want to! And in our own images!" The marketplace of ideas taken to its natural conclusion.
at the fitting shop - James Sallis
A funny little story about a guy trying to find the right department in a colossal department store in order to get a new penis fitted. Some stories in this are groundbreaking and mind-expanding, and some of them are goofy little larks, and this is one of the better larks.
Eye of the Beholder - Burt Filer
An artist creates sculptures that defy the laws of physics by speaking them into reality, and the CIA absolutely must know how his impossible creations take shape so they can somehow harness that ability.
A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village - Dean Koontz
When technology to perfect the brain's empathy centers and make all people a perfect brotherhood emerges, those whose brains reject the implants are left to rot in nursing facilities for the rest of their lives, and one of these Stunteds attempts an escape on the bus that visits his home.
Getting Along - James Blish with Judith Ann Lawrence
Another one of the funny little larks. A romp about a woman traveling to find a suitable partner throughout style parodies of 9 famous authors.
With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama - Richard Lupoff
The most love-it-or-hate-it story in the collection, and it'll largely come down to how well you can stand dialect written-as-spoken. Later collected into a novel called Space War Blues, Boomer Boys tells the story of future space colonies at war - namely New Alabama (who are as racist and terrible as you'd expect) and New Haiti, who are stretched too thin to wage a proper war, but when a means to stitch together and resurrect corpses left after space battles is discovered, New Haiti decides to brand it as a new form of voodoo and hopes to turn the tide of the war with an undead army. While it never really goes anywhere with its excellent concepts (and the consensus on the final novel echoes that sentiment), the journey is colorful and wild and well worth taking if you can stand the style.
Last Train to Kankakee - Robin Scott
When a man dies from a brain aneurysm, his body is cryogenically preserved against his wishes until it can be revived. When he wakes up, the technology of the future can preserve his life indefinitely, and he remains incapable of dying...
Ozymandias - Terry Carr
Long after the nukes fall, the mutants of the far future lead hypersuperstitious raids on the vaults left by the rich and powerful. Fascinating in how sketched out the apocalyptic culture is and how simultaneously strange and ominous the whole thing feels.
Read
April 8, 2009http://nhw.livejournal.com/987086.html[return][return]This is the famous follow-up volume to the even more famous Dangerous Visions; an anthology of 41 stories, mainly by the leading lights of sf as it was in 1972, with vast amounts of prefatory material by editor Harlan Ellison and an afterword from each author, and nice art from Ed Emshwiller introducing each story.[return][return]But what is striking is how unmemorable and self-indulgent most of the stories are (also true of Ellison's long-winded prefaces). The three best are definitely Ursula Le Guin's "The Word for World is Forest", Joanna Russ's "When it Changed", and James Tiptree Jr's "The Milk of Paradise"; interestingly all three have the same basic plot, of an unspoilt planet being wrecked by us humans. Many of the others are just silly, Kurt Vonnegut being particularly proud of Using Rude Words To Be Grown-Up. In fact, the only other one I enjoyed was James Blish's erotic pastiche "Getting Along", which parodies numerous High Gothic writers - I particularly liked his riff on The Moon Pool.[return][return]But four memorable stories out of 41 is a very poor strike rate. I couldn't in all conscience recommend anyone to spend money on this collection, and I am wondering, heretically, if it is really such a shame that the third volume of the series never appeared.
December 24, 2024
I thought I had read this book before, and maybe I did, but I didn't recognize any of the stories in it, so I think I meant to, but didn't. I should have.
Again, Dangerous Visions contains some great stories - some of the best I have read. It also contains some stories that I think were silly, bits of fluff not worth inclusion. For some reason, Harlan Ellison decided this book should be even bigger than the first one, and I'm not sure his decision making in regards to what were "dangerous visions" rather than "what Harlan likes" was as keen as the first anthology.
Regardless, this is a book that any science fiction fan should read. You're certain to find some stories that you like. The collection of talent is simply too great for otherwise to be true.
My personal tastes may be different than yours, but my favorites were:
"The Word for World is Forest" by Ursala K. Le Guin
"For Value Received" by Andrew J. Offut
"In the Barn" by Piers Anthony
"Bed Sheets are White" by Evelyn Lief
"When It Changed" by Joanna Russ
"Totenbuch" by Albert Parra
"The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree Jr.
Your mileage may vary...
Again, Dangerous Visions contains some great stories - some of the best I have read. It also contains some stories that I think were silly, bits of fluff not worth inclusion. For some reason, Harlan Ellison decided this book should be even bigger than the first one, and I'm not sure his decision making in regards to what were "dangerous visions" rather than "what Harlan likes" was as keen as the first anthology.
Regardless, this is a book that any science fiction fan should read. You're certain to find some stories that you like. The collection of talent is simply too great for otherwise to be true.
My personal tastes may be different than yours, but my favorites were:
"The Word for World is Forest" by Ursala K. Le Guin
"For Value Received" by Andrew J. Offut
"In the Barn" by Piers Anthony
"Bed Sheets are White" by Evelyn Lief
"When It Changed" by Joanna Russ
"Totenbuch" by Albert Parra
"The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree Jr.
Your mileage may vary...
July 23, 2016
This book has stories from several of my favorite authors- so it pains me to say that it was absolutely awful.
Harlan Ellison's introductions are snarky, pompous, and condescending; and he wrote several page intros for each one. I was thinking about reading some of his own books after this, but now I'm not so sure.
Everything about this sounds like it was written on panes of acid; and not in a good or fascinating way. The stories in here were previously unpublished, and it's clear why. All good authors have throwaway stories....and Ellison has conveniently collected them in one giant volume.
I'm sorry, Kurt and Ray; I never thought I would dislike- so much- anything that you guys were involved in. I need an SF palate-cleanser
Harlan Ellison's introductions are snarky, pompous, and condescending; and he wrote several page intros for each one. I was thinking about reading some of his own books after this, but now I'm not so sure.
Everything about this sounds like it was written on panes of acid; and not in a good or fascinating way. The stories in here were previously unpublished, and it's clear why. All good authors have throwaway stories....and Ellison has conveniently collected them in one giant volume.
I'm sorry, Kurt and Ray; I never thought I would dislike- so much- anything that you guys were involved in. I need an SF palate-cleanser
September 2, 2019
Note: Goodreads has merged my review of "When it Changed" by Joanna Russ with the larger anthology in which it once appeared.
Russ says it best in her afterword: stories about societies of women are often either power-mad, sexually insatiable male fantasies or boring, unrealistic utopias. Here Russ is mindful of the fact that women are people, and people build homes and families, make art, make love, get drunk and fight on Saturday night, piss off their neighbors, shelve their dreams to pay the bills, and every other activity on the spectrum of human possibility. And that human texture fuels a very interesting first contact story about two cultures with very different assumptions.
Russ says it best in her afterword: stories about societies of women are often either power-mad, sexually insatiable male fantasies or boring, unrealistic utopias. Here Russ is mindful of the fact that women are people, and people build homes and families, make art, make love, get drunk and fight on Saturday night, piss off their neighbors, shelve their dreams to pay the bills, and every other activity on the spectrum of human possibility. And that human texture fuels a very interesting first contact story about two cultures with very different assumptions.
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