Dangerous Visions

(Did you mean a LA bookstore?)

Dangerous Visions was a very influential anthology series edited by Harlan Ellison. The first volume, Dangerous Visions, was published in 1967 and was an anthology of stories with themes and/or content which was "dangerous" by contemporary sf standards. It included major introductions by Ellison, which were alone probably worth the price of the book. It was followed in 1972 by Again, Dangerous Visions with Last Dangerous Visions as a projected third volume.

The Last Dangerous Visions

An anthology projected to be the third book in the influential Dangerous Visions series. It was never published and became a bone of contention between Ellison and nearly everyone else.

The LDV would have been massive -- an announced contents list from 1979 ran to 113 stories -- and along with Ellison's traditionally enormous introductions (probably never written) may well have been unpublishable. By the late ’70s, phrases like "When The Last Dangerous Visions is published...." had become approximately equivalent to "When pigs fly," particularly since Ellison continued to insist that it would be published.

Another critique of LDV was that the stories in it might have been "dangerous" when commissioned in the early ’70s, but had been left behind by the evolution of the field (in some part pushed by Dangerous Visions itself) and had been turned by time into curiosities or even embarrassments.

Christopher Priest published a critique of the affair in the late 1980s as Last Deadloss Visions, which was published in a new edition in 1994 as The Book on the Edge of Forever (a play on the title of Ellison's famous Star Trek episode "City of the Edge of Forever"). Ellison was not at all pleased.

Finally...?!

Blackstone Publishing announced in 2022 that The Last Dangerous Visions will be released September 1, 2024.

Blackstone announced the acquisition in April 2022 at the London Book Fair, J. Michael Straczynski, the executor of Ellison’s literary estate, said they had bought the rights to republish Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, as well as the unpublished collection The Last Dangerous Visions. The original announcement, however, said the final book would be out in 2023.

Blackstone will publish all three of the anthologies both individually and as a unified edition.

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Publication

1967—2024

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