Last Dangerous Visions Table of Contents
Advance reading copies of Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions anthology are going out and book marketing platform Edelweiss has posted screenshots of the table of contents:
The book goes on sale October 1, 2024 from Blackstone Publishers. The marketing copy says:
An anthology more than half a century in the making, The Last Dangerous Visions is the third and final installment of the legendary science fiction anthology series.
In 1973 celebrated writer and editor Harlan Ellison announced the third and final volume of his unprecedented anthology series, which began with Dangerous Visions and continued with Again, Dangerous Visions. But for reasons undisclosed, The Last Dangerous Visions was never completed.
Now, six years after Ellison’s passing, science fiction’s most famous unpublished book is here. And with it, the heartbreaking true story of the troubled genius behind it.
Provocative and controversial, socially conscious and politically charged, wildly imaginative yet deeply grounded, the thirty-two never-before-published stories, essays, and poems in The Last Dangerous Visions stand as a testament to Ellison’s lifelong pursuit of art, uniting a diverse range of science fiction writers both famous and newly minted, including Max Brooks, Edward Bryant, Cecil Castellucci, James S. A. Corey, Howard Fast, Patricia Hodgell, Dan Simmons, Robert Sheckley, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mildred Downey Broxon, and Cory Doctorow, among others.
The historic publication of The Last Dangerous Visions completes the long-awaited final chapter in an incredible literary legacy.
J. Michael Straczynski’s vision for The Last Dangerous Visions set in 2021 explains the book that now exists:
…There was no one thing that stands as Harlan’s version of TLDV. It never existed because it was always in a state of flux. It was going to be whatever it was on the day when he finally finished with it. THAT was to be TLDV, not something frozen in amber that only reflected the70s. Which is why he continued buying stories all through the 80s and into the 90s (including from folks like Stephen Dedman) because he saw the book as a living document that would have to grow and change to stay relevant with changing times. It wasn’t supposed to be static until it actually came out…and he was the first to say that some stories would have to be trimmed to make room for ones that were more current.
Further to the point: no publisher in their right mind is going to put out a 700,000 word anthology that follows on books that came out in the 70s. The risk is too great. A reasonable sized book, yes. A behemoth, no. And the whole point of the exercise is to put the work of the best of the original DV writers, and those new voices Harlan wanted to continue to see, out where the mainstream world could see it…not as a limited edition sold to the already-faithful, not as an Ebook or a print-on-demand…but something to be published from a major company that would receive the kind of critical attention in the press that these stories and Harlan’s work deserve….
To carry out his vision Straczysnki pursued new stories by contemporary and marketable authors. James S. A. Corey, Max Brooks, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cecil Castellucci and Cory Doctorow are in the new book. There is also a story by Kayo Hartenbaum, the winner of a competition Straczynski ran to fill one slot.
COMPARE AND CONTRAST. That said, fans still want to know how the Blackstone anthology resembles the version Ellison projected in the 1970s?
Locus reported in 1979 that Last Dangerous Visions had been sold to Berkley Books and ran a table of contents listing 113 stories. (However, Ellison would acquire several more in the 1980s.[*])
As of mid-2023, at least forty stories purchased for Last Dangerous Visions have been published elsewhere (Wikipedia list).
The Blackstone anthology contains 13 stories that definitely were on the 1979 table of contents. Whether to count two more authors’ work is unclear. D.M. Rowles, who has eight “Intermezzos” in the Blackstone version had a single story by another title on the 1979 table of contents. Also, Howard Fast had a story announced in 1979 but the one in Blackstone has a different title [**]. Fast died in 2003, so whether or not it’s the same story, it would not be one of those commissioned by Straczysnki.
The following titles in red from Blackstone’s table of contents were on the list announced in 1979:
Last Dangerous Visions – stories per digital ARC:
- “Assignment No. 1” by Stephen Robinett
- “Hunger” by Max Brooks
- “Intermezzo 1: Broken, Beautiful Body on Beach” by D. M. Rowles
- “None So Deaf” by Richard E. Peck
- “War Stories” by Edward Bryant
- “Intermezzo 2: Bedtime Story” by D. M. Rowles
- “The Great Forest Lawn Clearance Sale—Hurry, Last Days!!” by Stephen Dedman [*]
- “Intermezzo 3: Even Beyond Olympus” by D. M. Rowles
- “After Taste” by Cecil Castellucci
- “Leveled Best” by Steve Herbst
- “The Time of the Skin” by A. E. van Vogt
- “Rundown” by John Morressy
- “Intermezzo 4: Elemental” by D. M. Rowles
- “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart)” by Cory Doctorow
- “The Malibu Fault” by Jonathan Fast
- “The Size of the Problem” by Howard Fast [**]
- “Intermezzo 5: First Contact” by D. M. Rowles
- “A Night at the Opera” by Robert Wissner
- “Goodbye” by Steven Utley
- “Primordial Follies” by Robert Sheckley
- “Men in White” by David Brin
- “Intermezzo 6: Continuity” by D. M. Rowles
- “The Final Pogrom” by Dan Simmons
- “Intermezzo 7: The Space Behind the Obvious” by D. M. Rowles
- “Falling from Grace” by Ward Moore
- “First Sight” by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- “Intermezzo 8: Proof” by D. M. Rowles
- “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum
- “Dark Threshold” by P. C. Hodgell
- “The Danann Children Laugh” by Mildred Downey Broxon
- “Judas Iscariot Didn’t Kill Himself: A Story in Fragments” by James S. A. Corey
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