Almost every aspect of Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology of science fiction tales, Dangerous Visions , disrupted the status quo. Unlike other anthologists, Ellison insisted on brand new stories for his book —in stark contrast to the time-honored tradition of collecting works that had already appeared in magazines. This proviso created, in turn, economic disruption for both Ellison and the publisher, because they had to pay more for new stories than for recycled ones. Ellison was even more daring in his choice of contributors, aiming to bring in both leading literary heroes of avant-garde fiction, famous genre writers and the very best of the up-and-coming sci-fi authors.
But the most disruptive aspect of the project came with the instructions Ellison gave his contributors. He really wanted dangerous visions, stories that broached themes and subjects too hot for the science fiction magazines of the day. He insisted that the tales in the book confront taboos, break down barriers and challenge prevailing attitudes and values.
See also: Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream (reviewed by Ted Gioia)
Ellison did not achieve all his goals. He failed to secure an adequate advance from his publisher, and was forced to draw on his own money to pay his authors. One of the contributors, Larry Niven did the same, lending $750 to cover some of the publication costs. Ellison also ran into obstacles in his choice of writers. He successfully enlisted many of the best science fiction authors of his day for his project, but his hopes of snagging the leading literary lions from the counterculture proved ill-founded.
His initial list of possible contributors included Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Terry Southern, Kingsley Amis and Thomas Berger. The mind reels at how they would have responded to Ellison's request for dangerous visions. But none of these writers participated in the project. I lament their absence, but still can’t find fault with a final roster that includes Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Theodore Sturgeon, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch, as well as an introduction from Isaac Asimov (who refused to offer a story on the grounds that he was "too sober, too respectable, and, to put it bluntly, too darned square ").
Ellison lived up to his promise of violating taboos. I suspect that this willingness to offend, and risk the opprobrium of censors and the censorious, created much of the buzz around the book. Certainly sales were brisk. Dangerous Visions has stayed in print, and also spurred a high-profile sequel ( Again, Dangerous Visions ), as well as a proposed third volume slated for release in 1973, but still in publishing limbo. (A few years ago, Jo Walton reviewed this oft-discussed but never-seen anthology, The Last Dangerous Visions , as an April Fool's Day joke. As recently as 2007, Ellison was still claiming that he wanted to publish the work, but griping: "It’s this giant Sisyphean rock that I have to keep rolling up a hill, and people will not stop bugging me about it.")
Strange to say, the dangerous parts of Dangerous Visions have not aged especially well. It's hard to find anything shocking nowadays, not just in fiction but in any other form of narrative. And the few taboos that survived into the modern age are just as predictable as moral injunctions —no surprise there, since they are mirror image of each other—and readers can easily guess which subjects will show up even before they open this book. So we get a big dose of cannibalism, a smattering of incest, lots of sexual experimentation and kinky fetishes, some serial killers, etc. etc.. In other words, the usual suspects when people are asked to violate the inviolable. Alas, if this were enough to create great literature, Jerry Springer would be a Nobel judge.
That said, a few contributors stood out for the very vehemence with which they pursued the transgressive. Ellison’s single story in the volume, a futuristic reworking of the Jack the Ripper meme, presents more vivisection details than a coroner’s report. And Theodore Sturgeon not only serves up a story about incest, but offers a spirited treatise in defense of the same. Even Robert Heinlein, who p ut his hero Lazarus Long o n a time machine so the character could have an affair with his own mom , never went quite so far.
Some of the finest stories in this book ignored Ellison's mandate to embrace 'dangerous' visions, and succeed through plain old-fashioned storytelling. J.G. Ballard and Fritz Leiber both contributed atmospheric horror stories. Ballard's reticence is especially surprising, given the outrageous and repulsive subjects in his other works of this period. Yet his tale of a traveling circus that arrives in town with cages for the animals, but apparently no creatures inside them, is darkly poetic, and saves a pleasing Kafkaesque twist for its conclusion. Leiber's contribution is a macabre fairy tale about a gambler getting into a high stakes dice game with the grim reaper. The story is unsettling, but more in the manner of Ambrose Bierce than New Wave sci-fi— and with a pleasing dose of Leiber's trademark flippancy and irreverence. I’m not surprised that it won the Hugo for best novelette.
Ellison makes a big deal about Philip K. Dick’s 'dangerous vision' —and hints that the story was written under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug. Frankly, I’m not sure I could tell the difference between Dick’s output on drugs and the stories he wrote cold-sober. They all are pleasingly weird. But "Faith of Our Fathers," his contribution to Ellison's anthology, is one of his best—it also earned a Hugo nomination (losing out to Leiber's story). Narcotics do play a prominent role in the plot, but with an ingenious twist: in Dick's universe, the citizenry all experience the exact same hallucinations when drugged, but while they are clear-headed, their perceptions of reality vary in inexplicable ways. Dick takes this provocative concept and incorporates it into a dystopian account of space aliens and global conquest straight out of the Golden Age of sci-fi.
Perhaps the most famous story in this book is also the longest. Philip José Farmer's "The Riders of the Purple Wage" was initially a 15,000- word tale, but after he had finished revisions, it had expanded into a rambling 30,000 word short novel. Ellison lavishly praised the work in his introduction, claiming that it was "easily the best" piece in the anthology. Certainly, many others agreed. Farmer also got a Hugo for his efforts—part of the Dangerous Visions landslide victory at the 26th World Science Fiction Convention in Berkeley. This Joycean pastiche is certainly one of the most audacious pieces in the collection, both for its prose style and the copious amounts of sex and violence in its plot. But the story constantly hints at more than it actually delivers. Farmer lays out the foundations for a penetrating satire of politics, art and culture, yet never pursues any of these promising paths with much vigor. And instead of moving towards a resolution of the plot, he merely builds up to a huge pun—one so over-the-top that even Joyce, that master punster, would have groaned in dismay at it.
Now, I must turn to the biggest surprise of this book—namely that many of the most impressive stories in Dangerous Visions came from little-known and mostly-forgotten authors. "The Doll-House" written by James Cross—a pseudonym for career academic and government worker Hugh Parry (1916-1997)—presents a very appealing mixture of ancient mythology and modern psychodrama. But just try to find more information about this author, even with the help of all-knowing Google! I also enjoyed stories by Larry Eisenberg and Jonathan Brand, stylish authors who never achieved much fame but proved their mettle in this anthology. But best of all is David R. Bunch, the only writer to contribute two stories to Dangerous Visions . These are, in my opinion, the most ambitious and well-written stories in the whole book, drawing on a poised but unconventional prose style that is not a pastiche, in the style of Farmer’s piece, but a brilliant reconfiguration of language perfectly suited to avant-garde science fiction. Bunch’s work is like a blend of Flann O’Brien and Italo Calvino, leavened with the technology acumen of Isaac Asimov. I was saddened to learn that this author’s writings went out-of-print soon after they were published, and now command outrageous prices for tattered old paperback copies. Some enterprising publisher needs to rectify this situation!
But the star of Dangerous Visions remains Harlan Ellison, and though he contributed just a single story, his introductions to the book and each of the tales are what set this work apart from the other anthologies in the field. In a different time and place, Ellison might have written suppressed political manifestos, screeds that would have set off rioting in the streets and the toppling of regimes. Instead, he aimed at spurring a revolution in fiction, with an inflammatory zeal that no one else of his generation could match. He often took more risks in his intros to the stories than the authors did in their narratives, and I can only imagine how much behind-the-scenes prodding and nagging he devoted to making this cantankerous book, and its sequel, a reality. Ellison clearly possessed dangerous visions, and it is to his credit that he was able to get a whole cadre of sci-fi legends, near-legends, and should-be-legends to march to his beat. A half-century later, when the forbidden topics in this book are no longer prohibited and more than a few have entered the mainstream, Ellison's strident stances and extravagant expostulations can still captivate readers. So even if the dangers embodied in Dangerous Visions today seems less perilous, let's give some of the credit for that sea change to the visionary behind the visions, who helped tame them for posterity.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is currently working on his ninth book, Love Songs: The Hidden History , which will be published by Oxford University Press.