Dangerous Visions [Paperback]

First off, I am not one of those "pretentious readers" who disdain speculative fiction. In fact, I love it and enjoy very cutting edge material. So, with all the hoopla surrounding this book, I rushed to get it only to find the stories laughably bad and amateurish. Or perhaps that was the intent of the writers? To write such bad fiction and then pass it off as "way out there"?

There is no craft evident in any of these stories. I've seen stoned readers at Open Mic nights exhibit more control over their writing. Take for instance, the supposed "Avant-Garde" and Hugo Award-winning "Riders of the Purple Wage" -- an overblown exercise on wordplay and silly scenarios that could've come out of a high school freshman's notebook. How such a mess won a Hugo is beyond me then again Philip K. Dick won for "Man in the High Castle" -- a novel ballooning with stereotypes and I. Ching ramblings.

"If All Men Were Brothers" is another over-written joke. You trudge through reams of pages containing long, pointless dialogue until reaching the "Revelation." Okay, I admit the author's theory is interesting, but my question remains: WHERE'S THE STORY??? I don't know why so many Sci-Fi writers feel that just putting forth a "theory" can substitute for story. Need one be reminded of the old adage: "Show don't Tell"?

"Evensong" is another one of those pieces that relies on a twist ending. Written in a classic turgid style, e.g. -- "And cold horror curled thickly around him.", it also places far too much emphasis on a "shocking revelation" which actually is not all that shocking nor original.

One last example -- "The Day After the Day the Martians Came." I suppose Pohl expected us to be bowled over by the "twist," the supplanting of racial hate? Give me a break. The story is concocted in such amateurish fashion -- guys at poker tables cracking jokes and all -- that it is completely bereft of any power. Also, his idea is asinine -- the idea that hatred towards some other life-form is better. Because HATE, I "hate" to tell you, is STILL HATE.

Well, I could go on, but I won't. I just cannot understand all the praise for this book. It's like praising a Sunday comic strip as the "8th Wonder of the World." If this collection was truly "avant-garde" in 1967, then all I can say is people must've been living in caves in 1967.

My suspicion is that Harlan Ellison intended to "revolutionize" SF with this book, but all he wound up doing was showing that revolutions start with ideas, not declaring "Revolution!". The irony was that a "Golden Age" author, Leiber, wrote the only quality story in this anti-"Golden Age" book.

The true key to this compilation is the editing work of Harlan Ellison, whose sarcastic and caustic personality shines through almost every page, even though he only wrote one of the stories himself. (That isn't self-glamorization, because his submission is an endorsed sequel to Bloch's story.) Ellison's introductions to each story combine the best in praising and roasting, and he certainly located many fascinating writers. Here we can see up-and-comers who later went on to greater things, along with intriguing unknowns who encourage where-are-they-now speculation. Another groundbreaking aspect of this collection is Ellison's use of afterwords by each author to comment on their own stories. This is usually successful except for a few cases of self-aggrandizement by the writers, and at least one attempt to explain a sub-par story (J.G. Ballard). Aside from a few minor clunkers, there is just one story that may have once been dangerous but is now a flop. That's the 70-plus-page novella from Philip Jose Farmer, which has aged wretchedly with an overload of creaky 60's politics and an unreadably faddish writing style. That's about the only story here that's not still capable of opening new horizons all these decades later.