Dangerous Visions

by Harlan Ellison, J. G. Ballard (Contribution by), Larry Niven (Contribution by), Frederik Pohl (Contribution by), Isaac Asimov (Foreword by)

Overview

WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY PATTON OSWALT

Dubbed “the most significant and controversial SF book” of its generation, Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking collection launched an entire subgenre: New Wave science fiction. With contributions from legendary authors and multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Dangerous Visions returns to print in a stunning new edition perfect for new and returning fans alike.

A landmark short story collection that put the more character-based New Wave science fiction on the map, Dangerous Visions won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many others. This now-classic anthology includes thirty-three stories by thirty-two award-winning authors, over half of whom have won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Contributing authors include: Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and Ellison himself.

As relevant now as it was when first published, Dangerous Visions is a phenomenal collection that deserves a place on every bookshelf.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798212613743
Publisher:	Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sales rank:	71,372
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) wrote and edited more than 120 books and more than 1,700 stories, essays, and articles, as well as dozens of screenplays and teleplays. He won the Hugo Award nine times, the Nebula Award four times, the Bram Stoker Award six times (including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America twice, the Georges Méliès Fantasy Film Award twice, and was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by PEN, the international writer’s union. He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2006.

J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) was an English writer of short stories and novels. Several of his best-known works were adapted into successful movies, including Crash, and Empire of the Sun. A continual recipient of critical acclaim, the Times included him in their 2008 list of The 50 Greatest British Writers. 

Larry Niven is the multiple Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award–winning author of science fiction short stories and novels, including the Ringworld series, as well as many other science fiction masterpieces. His Footfall, coauthored with Jerry Pournelle, was a New York Times bestseller.

Frederik
Pohl (1919–2013) won the National Book Award in 1980 for his novel Jem. From about 1959 until 1969, he edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine, If, winning the Hugo Award for it three years in a row. His writing also won him four Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula
Grand Master in 1993. In 2010 he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, based on the writing on his blog, “The Way the Future Blogs.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) was born in the Soviet Union and came to the United States in 1923. He earned his PhD in chemistry in 1948, and in 1958 became a full-time writer. His writings include the Foundation Trilogy; I, Robot; Tomorrow’s Children; and numerous works of nonfiction touching on a range of scientific topics. Among his accolades are six Hugo awards, a SFWA Grand Master Award, and high praise from such luminaries as Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, and Gene Roddenberry.

Samuel R. Delany, winner of multiple Nebula and Hugo awards, is an acclaimed writer of speculative fiction. In 2002, he was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2010, he was awarded the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its thirtieth Grand Master in 2013. For his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay literature, he was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award.

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) was one of the most prolific and popular writers in science fiction. He won the Hugo Award seven times and the Nebula Award three times, as well as many other awards, including the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America for a lifetime of distinguished achievement. With a degree in physics and a wide knowledge of other fields of science, he was noted for building stories on a solid foundation of real science, as well as for being one of the most skilled creators of fast-paced adventure stories. He was author of over one hundred novels and story collections, several hundred short stories, and several mysteries and nonfiction books.

Robert Silverberg’s first published story appeared in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia University. Since then, he has won the prestigious Nebula Award five times and the Hugo Award five times. He has been nominated for both awards more times than any other writer. In 1999 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2004 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him their Grand Master Award for career achievement. He remains one of the most imaginative and versatile writers in science fiction.

Roger Zelazny (1937-1995)
was an American author of science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as many short stories. Known for including both mythological characters of different origins as well as elements from real history, Zelazny is perhaps best known for The Chronicles of Amber series. He was awarded the Nebula award three times and the Hugo award six times.

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) published thirty-six science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned toward deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2007 the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Date of Birth:

May 27, 1934

Date of Death:

June 28, 2018

Place of Birth:

Cleveland, OH

Place of Death:

Los Angeles, CA

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION: YEAR 2002

by Harlan Ellison

What a long, strange, jam-packed eventful trip it has been, I said to Mike Moorcock the other day. It wasn't d�j� vu, not exactly; but it was resonant of the days in London when we strolled from Ladbroke Grove to the tandoori restaurant we frequented. "What a long, strange, jam-packed eventful trip it has been," I said to Mike as we walked along like Mutt and Jeff, that huge bearded talent who had almost singlehandedly created what was to become known as the New Wave in fantastic literature, and the 5'5" upstart Yank just coming into his Warholian 15 minutes of Fame. That was more than thirty years ago. And the other day I said the same thing to Mike.

All so strange and exhausting, this journey. So filled with good and evil, friends and enemies, achievements and failures, deadlines met and deadlines missed (some by decades).

Friends still--like Mike and Bob Silverberg and Carol Emshwiller and Norman Spinrad and Phil Farmer, to name just a few to be found in this book and still in this world as I sit here writing on my Olympia manual typewriter--and friends so heartbreakingly gone--Bob Bloch and Roger Zelazny and Ted Sturgeon and Henry Slesar and Lester and Phil, Howard, John and John, Kris, dear old Fritz and Ray Lafferty and Damon, Poul and all the others who were smiling and writing and kicking ass when I first said what I said to Mike on Portobello Road. More than thirty years ago.

This book is one of the successes. It was a dream I'd had long before I actually did the job. A dream I had offered to another anthologist, when I was editing a lineof paperbacks in Evanston, Illinois in 1961 ... and she had shined it on. Same dream I discussed with Norman in my treehouse in Beverly Glen in 1965; same dream I saw coming through the anal constriction of the genre like the Super Chief in amber, as Mike and his compatriots kicked out the chocks with New Worlds. A dream of "our thing" standing crystal mountain tall beside mimetic, naturalistic fiction, proffering visions and answers and what-ifs that no Faulkner or James Gould Cozzens or Edna Ferber ever thought possible. Oh, that was a great deal taller than a 5'5" dream.

And had I known how tough a job it would be, had I known the vast shitstorms that would gulleywash me, I have no doubt that I'd have done it anyway. Not because I'd be any dopier or foolhardy than has been my style all these years, but because this dream is now celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary, and it is still the all-time bestselling anthology of speculative fiction ever produced. It has been in print continuously since 1967, and the awards and individual story reprints it has amassed are unparalleled. So the opprobrium has been worth it.

For those of you who came into the movie late, you'll turn a page or three and find the original Forewords to the book written by Isaac (who was too uncharacteristically and idiotically humble to write a story for the book, on the wholly bogus grounds that he was a geezer, couldn't write "the new thing," and didn't want to embarrass himself) (of all the people I've known in my strange, long, jam-packed life, I can't think of any I adored more than my pal Isaac, but I tell you--as I told him--the demur was horseshit), and there--after you'll find my own original, long-winded Introduction. You'll know what's what and understand DV's place in the literary landscape by the time you emerge on the other side. Then begins the book. This terrific book.

This dream, this success, was intended to be a miracle; and it came to pass. Then. And now. And thirty-five years in between. Many of the boys and girls who first read it in high school are now, themselves, stars of the genre of the phantasmagoric. To those kids, the name DANGEROUS VISIONS has the snap, crackle & pop of the sense of wonder about which we all prattle.

Muhammad Ali once quieted the rabble chiding him for his braggadocio by smiling and telling them, "Ain't no brag if you can go out there and do it!"

If this 21st Century intro to a watershed literary event of the 20th seems surfeited with an asphyxiating hubris, well, I admit to not doing humility very well, yet nonetheless there are things in one's life that are enshrineable, and even the most flatulent braggart may be permitted a hoot or two when speaking of such peaks of greatness. Ain't no brag.

I once met John Steinbeck. I don't think we exchanged a word, I was a kid, he was a god; but I met him. I marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in one of the pivotal events of Our Time, and though I was a mere molecule in that wave, I am eternally proud because I was there. I can count among my closest friends Asimov, Leiber and Bloch, three of the most wonderful men who ever walked this earth, and they liked me. In this way I know I am worth-while, if not righteous. Such men would not be friends with a creep.

Editorial Reviews

Harlan was not just a great fantasist and/or science fiction writer; he was a great writer, period. When he was at the top of his form, from the late 60s through the 70s and well into the 80s, there was no finer short-story writer in all of English literature.”

George R. R. Martin

A furiously prolific and cantankerous writer [who] looked at storytelling as a ‘holy chore,’ which he pursued zealously for more than sixty years. His output includes more than 1,700 short stories and articles, at least 100 books, and dozens of screenplays and television scripts…ranked with eminent science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.”

New York Times

You see Ellison’s unswerving social conscience throughout his fiction and critical essays…forcefully and eloquently—and at some length—lamenting the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and railing against the scourge of misogynistic ‘knife-kill’ films.”

RogerEbert.com

“You should buy this book immediately, because this is a book that knows perfectly that you are seething inside".

Pilgrim Award Winner for Lifetime Achievement in S Algis Budrys

An original and valuable writer…A twentieth-century Lewis Carroll.”

|Los Angeles Times

Harlan Ellison was, after all, one of the most interesting humans on Earth. He was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction writers alive. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, lectured to college kids, visited with death row inmates, and once mailed a dead gopher to a publisher. Ellison brought a literary sensibility to sci-fi at a time when the entire establishment was allergic to any notion of art. To say he was one-of-a-kind would be trite, and he would likely hate that. What he was, was a legend.”

NPR

Feisty, furious, yet extraordinarily kind and generous; Harlan Ellison was one of a kind.”

Leonard Maltin

You should buy this book immediately, because this is a book that knows perfectly that you are seething inside.”

winner of the Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achieveme Algis Budrys

Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, stand aside. Harlan Ellison is now a better short-story writer than you will ever be again during the rest of your lives.”

Ray Bradbury

Harlan Ellison—terrific prose, razor-sharp intellect, pulp gut punches and invention when needed, terse poetics…An original.”

Guillermo del Toro

The words—there is an attention to the words. There is an attention to the sound of the words. You’re reading them in your head, and they sing.”

Neil Gaiman

In his stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things that horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives…Most of all, we sense outrage and anger—as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic.”

Stephen King

The spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind.”

New York Review of Books

Categories are too small—even the catch-all category of science fiction—to describe Harlan Ellison. Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, one-line comedian, purveyor of pure horror and of black comedy; he is all these and more.”

Washington Post

The incredible Harlan Ellison writes as if an inner fuse is about to blow before he can get all the words on his pages.”

Anne McCaffrey

There’s a real power to the way he uses the language and how he draws pictures in your mind.”

Ron Moore

He doesn’t write like anybody else. What emerges is a surprising, eclectic, almost protean series of visions, often disturbing, always strongly felt.”

Michael Crichton

Dangerous Visions is a landmark in science fiction, one that can proudly stand against those literary snobs who look down their nose at the genre—Antony Jones, SFBOOKREVIEWS blog

From the Publisher