Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories (1967)

When I was a kid (decades ago) my dad got me a library discard of "Again, Dangerous Visions". I remember reading it and really liking it. I had been a Golden Era science fiction kid and devoured all those short stories from Asimov, Clarke, et al, eventually Heinlein, and so on. I can't say this book opened me up or anything, I don't remember anything about it, but the fact that I actually READ the book. I also had a book of Ellison's TV columns from an LA paper (if I recall) called "The Other Glass Teat" - I really liked those columns, but again I was a kid. Ironic that both of those were second collections but I had never read the first collection of either.

Anyway, Ellison dies and I think oh yeah I never read this definitive collection that changed sci-fi, supposedly. So I bought this.

Well, time *has* passed. For one thing, books with tiny type like this old edition are not particularly inviting even with bifocals. For another, perhaps our tolerance of or interest in "crazy" fiction has changed. Certainly my has. Outlandish and boundary-pushing for the sake of being boundary-pushing is not that engaging.

I did not like this book. I skipped many of the stories; if I couldn't tell what was happening, I gave up and moved on. I mean, if I did persist then the payoff was usually pretty slight, so that didn't encourage me to keep going on the tough ones.

Some people seem to really hate this collection, and others seem to love it, so your mileage may vary. It was mostly a reminder to me that some things have changed for me over the decades! ( )

I don't know the state that sci-fi was in when this book was published but from a 2020 perspective is extremely dated, most of the stories were predictable, a lot of the times the twist was shocking I imagine at the time but now a protag being gay is not even worth a mmmm, only 3 or so stories still hold their weight and the other 90% of the book is boring. ( )

A classic collection for a reason! This is the SF anthology by which all other SF anthologies measure themselves. ( )

Disappointing child
quiet, an easy target
conserving his wrath.


Lord Randy, My Son
has the best illustration
they have plans for you. ( )

"Evensong," by Lester del Rey (1967): 8
- Frankly, pretty difficult to move beyond the prose here (although, in retrospect, was even that part of the gambit for the twist?!). Yet, gotta say, ending worked [think we're getting the story of some distant cosmic race war, but actually just a retelling of the first chapters of Genesis] and does make me rethink the opening. And it does work, although not as a rebelling, but as a strange extension, Gods indifferent response to his now world-bestriding creation.

"Flies," by Robert Silverberg (1967): 8.75
- This is one of those strange genre stories where the value, the punch, comes primarily from the execution rather than from the conceit, or from the turning-ideas-and-scenarios-over-and-over-in-one’s-mind aspect undergirding the logic of a story. Because, here, we have nothing too sensational -- a man, resurrected by powerful, curious aliens, is sent back to Earth to report on human emotions. First time they send him, he's unnaturally callous and causes suffering; next time, he's overly open and prone to gargantuan suffering. Not un-original, but not lighting the world on fire either, and I've no reason to think it did in the 60s either. Nonetheless, what works are those first turns towards bland cruelty in him, and the bland, straightforward way in which they're depicted (making his first wife OD, killings his seconds pet, and causing the miscarriage of his third). In the context of the story, it comes out of nowhere and redirects what seems to be on a very different trajectory up to that point.

"The Day the Martians Came," by Frederick Pohl (1967): 7
- A clumsy, if well-intentioned minimal morality tale, this small-scale story of alien contact from the point of view of a motel owner in the vicinity and his slowly dawning realization that racism's racism and the Martian'll just be eventually subsumed into the established racial hierarchy, as evidenced by the cacophony of racial jokes throughout, as these are the signal for the conceit of the story. A little canned, but eh. I guess this drastically distanced perspective difference here -- unimportant small business owner rather than secretary of defense or something -- WAS quite the shakeup for late 60s SF, but falls flat in its dotage here.