Again, The Last Dangerous Visions

[calimac]

bluejo wrote an April Fool's review of The Last Dangerous Visions, the infamous SF anthology that's been sitting around unpublished in editor Harlan Ellison's closet for ... yes, it's close on forty years now. Wow. I thought I was a procrastinator, but I bow to the master.

It seems to me that bluejo missed a bet here. She wrote imaginary descriptions of real unpublished & unseen stories, but, as I noted in comments, enough of the contributors, tired of waiting years or decades to see print, have withdrawn their stories and published them elsewhere to make a hefty reprint collection by now, and I'd like someone to publish that collection. (It would be titled, of course, The Last Dangerous Visions.) There's a list in wikipedia, but I'm not sure whether to trust it on such a fraught and contentious topic.

Instead of making up the unpublished stories, if one reviewed the real withdrawn stories, one might get a sense of what LDV's impact would have been had it been published as originally scheduled in 1972 or 73. I've seen Ellison's defenders say that it's his book, and it's nobody else's business whether he publishes it or not, but that is complete nonsense. It's his anthology, but it's other writers' stories. They submitted to him in good faith, which he repeatedly played on by announcing imminent publication, pressuring his contributors not to withdraw, and he whipped up public expectation too. This response is Christopher Priest's argument in The Book on the Edge of Forever. Priest points out that the writers have been denied income and a portion of their professional reputations, and the readers have deprived of the stories.

And the SF field has been deprived of the impact and influence of those stories. It's too late now: it's been forty years and the field has moved on in LDV's absence. If the book appeared now, it'd be historical, a might-have-been.

Or imagine what would have happened if it had been LDV's predecessor, the already mammoth Again, Dangerous Visions, that Ellison had frozen up over. Imagine if we'd gone the last four decades without being able to read Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest or Russ's "When It Changed" or Tiptree's "The Milk of Paradise" or Terry Carr's "Ozymandias" - the last less known, but in my opinion one of the most powerful SF stories ever written, and the one I point to whenever I'm asked why I am not attracted to cryonics.

Harlan Ellison has perpetrated a crime on literature, and I think that needs to be stated explicitly, in preference to making April Fool's jokes about it.