"Aye, and Gomorrah" (1967)

Samuel R. Delany is a unique figure not just in science fiction but more generally in American literature. Born and raised in Harlem, he is among the first to explore the Q in LGBTQ, before there was ever a Q, before there was even LGBT. Harlan Ellison's anthology finds Delany relatively early in his career, in his mid-20s. He had already published several novels but this is his first published short story. In many ways, Ellison back-loaded the end of this collection with ringers to finish strong: younger writers already with some reputation, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, and, for the very last, Delany. Like many of the stories in this collection, this can feel more like straining for effect than dangerous. And if its ideas don't seem that surprising now, it's still surprising to find them in a science fiction story, a genre that to this point hewed close to red-blooded heterosex when it involved sex at all. In this future time, it has turned out that space travel involves passing through a band of radiation that leaves astronauts sterilized. The result ultimately is that desexualizing medical procedures before puberty are the optimal approach if a person wants that career. "Spacers"—recognizable by the uniforms they wear on visits to Earth—are nonsexual and ambiguously gendered. In turn, in line with Internet Rule 34, spacers become sexually fetishized objects for a segment of Earth's population. These people are known as "frelks," a neologism from their psychological condition, known as "free-fall-sexual-displacement complex." It seems like a stretch in terms of projecting slang and jargon, but projecting slang and jargon is never easy anyway. I like the view that humans are so consumed with their own sexualities that this is the kind of thing we'd be likely to see in the circumstances. Spacers earn extra money by prostituting themselves to frelks, though doing so stigmatizes them among other spacers. What I think Delany pulls off really well here may be a small matter. But a scene involving a female frelk who is obviously uncontrollably turned on in the presence of a spacer is remarkable. You feel the shame of them both behind the dialogue, and the woman is close to lapsing into incoherent moments of something like talking dirty. "Go back to the moon, loose meat," she says, closing her eyes, in a fever of desire because the spacer's price is too high, or he's just playing with her. Ellison talks about including Delany like it was a coup, the story won a Nebula award, and it finishes the anthology on a high note to a wildly uneven ride.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Auto-da-Fe" (1967)

Roger Zelazny was just coming into his own in science fiction around the time of the Dangerous Visions collection, but much about his appearance here feels perfunctory, including the story. Ellison's main point in his introduction to the story is that Zelazny comes last in most alphabetical lists. He's not last in this list for a reason Ellison will explain in his introduction to the last story, which is next. Meanwhile, Zelazny's story is a kind of elaboration on a pun. In this future society, entertainment is provided by bullfighter-like contests between a man known as a "mechador," and what appears to be robotically operated cars. At least no one appears to be driving the cars, which are on the order of Pontiacs and Chevrolets. "Auto-da-fe," you see, is a term from the Spanish Inquisition, bringing it full circle back to Spain. It means a punishment of death by burning. As bullfighting in 1967 was still reasonably popular, I'm not sure how all these dots connect, but there's not much to this anyway. It's a description of a bullfight but the bull is a series of cars. I guess bullfighting involves a series of bulls. Whatever. The fight is described. Something untoward happens to the mechador, but as he is no one of any consequence it's just a shrug at plot. I'm not much impressed with this story, but it doesn't mean I'm ruling out Zelazny. I've been aware of him, believe I even met a partisan somewhere once. But this feels pro forma. Editor of anthology to rising writer: "Like to do a story for my book?" Rising writer: "Sure, why not?" It might be interesting to speculate how much this story from 1967 has to do with J.G. Ballard's novel Crash from 1973, given that Ballard is in the Ellison collection too. Probably not much. Ballard's novel was similarly preoccupied with automobiles, but he took it further and in much more interesting directions. Zelazny's story is entertaining—vivid images all plotted out by the terms of the fight and its resolution in terms of the overriding pun. It's made comical partly because in the future society it's possible to bring people back from death. In fact, this is the mechador's third death. So basically no harm no foul. That's the driving principle. Get it?

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Carcinoma Angels" (1967)

Norman Spinrad appears to be a controversial and anarchic element in science fiction's New Wave of the '60s, which the Dangerous Visions collection edited by Harlan Ellison helped bring to term. I vaguely know Spinrad's name—have never read him, and don't know his reputation even. He appears to enjoy offending the conventional. I thought "Carcinoma Angels" was pretty good. It reminded me of Philip K. Dick more than anyone, in all good ways, though it probably started with the drugs and drug-taking the story features. Our hero, Harrison Wintergreen, is ridiculously successful at everything he tries. He's a gazillionaire by the time he's 25—his route there, starting with cornering parts of the baseball card market, is entertaining and inspired, not to mention prescient. Then he becomes a great humanitarian, and finally a great inventor. At the age of 40 he contracts incurable cancer. Undeterred, he sets out to cure cancer. Once again his route to that is entertaining and inspired. His final step is a drug regimen that effectively imposes total sensory deprivation, plus amphetamines so he can't fall asleep. And morphine, so it doesn't hurt. Once fully isolated within himself, he goes to battle, literally with the disease, represented as a kind of gang of motorcycle-riding outlaws. Spinrad is extraordinarily good at fencing in the sense of thought and thinking that goes on beyond sense input and even language. If it's perhaps too busy with the biker gang it also delivers an ending that is surprising and horrifying. Like Dick, Spinrad is good at getting inside your head, at least in this story, and reminding you he's there. I'm almost afraid to look into his other stuff, which is partly Ellison's strange introduction to Spinrad and the story. Ellison plainly doesn't know what to make of Spinrad. He praises him, but also harshly slags some of his work by name as "unreadable." This is the introduction! It's quite possible Ellison was jealous that Spinrad was competing for the same bad boy corner of science fiction he wanted to dominate. It's also possible, from Ellison's and others' descriptions, that a fair amount of Spinrad's work operates in gray areas bordering pornography. In this story the narrative voice is intimidatingly intelligent, or at least sure of its intelligence. It makes me suspect Nietzschean superman fantasies motivate him. Yet the story is also very effective at all the things it's doing. Some great writing here too: "A thousand false pains and pressures tore at him, as if his whole body had been amputated"—I love that "whole body." One of the best in the collection.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Test to Destruction" (1967)

Keith Laumer's long, action-packed, and confusing story features an alien technology that can tune into and manipulate a person's interior thoughts. Our hero, Mallory, is some kind of revolutionary who is run to ground by human agents in the first part of the story. His captors immediately begin torturing him for information. At that point, a passing alien spaceship picks up the activity as their probes detect the strength of Mallory's resistance, which impresses them. The torture device appears to be human in origin. "It creates conditions within the subject's neural system conducive to total recall, and at the same time amplifies the subvocalizations that accompany all highly cerebral activity. The subject is also rendered amenable to verbal cuing," explains the human torture master. The short version is that it induces vivid nightmares with a traumatizing personal edge. So we go through a few nightmares—not bad, they're pretty horrible. Meanwhile the aliens hovering overhead are fascinated by Mallory's resistance. They've never seen anything like it. It's not entirely clear, but appears they actually begin to step in with their own technology to amplify the torture. They want to understand the limits of this strange new phenomenon via "test to destruction"—i.e., increase intensity by degrees and make a note of when and how the mental resistance finally yields. It's all cold and clinical, as the point seems to be that science is an unfeeling thing. That might be fair enough when you consider things like the cold clinical approach taken for animal testing. People say things like "I'd rather save people with cancer than animals in cages." I probably would too, for that matter, but think how it would sound coming from the aliens. So we get a hit of double-bleak in this story: first, as humans, we are still busy with rancorous infighting and torture. And second, the first encounter with intellectually sophisticated aliens from outer space—a momentous occasion in any civilization's history, one would think—turns out to be as hapless subjects in the noble pursuit of higher knowledge. That is some biting bitter cynicism so kudos to Laumer on that score. I also appreciated that for once religion is left out of it. In his introduction to the story, series editor Harlan Ellison praises Laumer for managing his heavy concept within the frame of "the time-honored form of the chase-action-adventure." I'm much less impressed with that side—paradoxically perhaps, the more action, as here, the more boring it tends to be for me—but I like the mordant existential view quite a bit.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Judas" (1967)

By the title of John Brunner's story it's apparent it's another from the Dangerous Visions collection edited by Harlan Ellison that looks to religion for its dangerousness (as opposed to just danger). It also works a familiar Pygmalion theme. Humans build robots that are superior in every way and go on to declare themselves gods. Humans respond by worshiping them. TV's Battlestar Galactica had a lot of this. Take the robotics out and the story even looks forward a little to The Planet of the Apes. Brunner is a transitional British science fiction writer, starting up in the '50s with Golden Age influences but slipping into New Wave themes in the '60s. His beat was more or less environmental dystopia, and he also had a literary bent. Ellison mentions Brunner's "straight novels" and Wikipedia talks about the influence of John Dos Passos. So "Judas" is well-written, that devastating insult. But it doesn't feel very inspired. But let's look again for a minute at the impulse to religiosity. It might be easy to forget that my distance from it puts me in a tiny minority in the world even today. Most people on this planet believe strongly in higher powers intervening regularly in all our daily affairs. I would not classify myself as outright nonbeliever, but at best I'm tepid. So maybe the insistence on religion by all these science fiction writers in 1967 is more on the order of a warning from them to us, a reminder to their natural audience that religion is an element of danger, if not the danger itself. I'm more open to that idea now, in this day and age, 50 years on. I'm not always so sure of the insights but I appreciate they could be signaling through flames. Brunner's vision of a robot-worshiping religion most obviously apes Christianity. In fact, I thought it was Christianity at first, but the details are off. Instead of a cross, for example, the primary iconic symbol is a wheel. That subtly nagging disharmony with Christianity is probably the best element about this story, which involves a confrontation between a human and robot god and which is so overdetermined it has no space to breathe. As well-written as it is, it's equally suffocating.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"The Recognition" (1967)

J.G. Ballard's story probably has to count as one of the best in the Dangerous Visions collection, if only because it's so artfully done in terms of setting and maintaining a mood (not to mention Ballard's subsequent reputation). But ultimately I think it fails by being a little too smugly ambiguous. It's summer solstice time and a small town in the vague country is visited by both a traveling fair and a circus. The circus arrives after the fair and must set up on "waste ground." It's a small circus, with some half-dozen cages occupied by animals we never see. It arrives late in the day, sets up, and people are told it is leaving in the morning. Most of the townspeople go to the fair and only a few visit the circus. Not many even know it's there. Those who do can't quite make out the animals, and occasionally a maddeningly familiar smell is in the air. At the end of the story our first-person narrator has had "the recognition" of what that smell is and what that circus is all about. It might be gauche to say, but I wish Ballard had spelled it out a little more, so I could have a recognition too. Still, there's a wonderfully mordant air about this one. Ballard really captures the fascinating sense of so many carnival scenes (and/or elements such as clowns) as sick, wrong, mysteriously depraved. Really this story is hardly science fiction at all but feels more like something on the order of a fairy tale. For what it's worth, Ursula K. Le Guin and to a lesser extent Ray Bradbury were also good at pulling this off. Checking in with the internet, I found a plurality agreed with me the story is slightly underdone. Others had ridiculously easy answers ("the smell is humanity," whatever that means). Still others pointed out details that seem significant. At least one of the cages, for example, locks from the inside. This could well be a story that improves with careful rereading, or discussion. And that's fine—even makes the case for Ballard as transcending his home genre, which is a case often made for him. I haven't read much of him beyond this and the novel Crash but I'm starting to think I need to read a little more. Still, even taking it just in terms of what's in the story, it seems designed to annoy. The narrator is so pleased with himself that he calls the story "The Recognition" and then declines to name whatever it is he recognized. Sure, right, I get it, "the smell is humanity"—but does that mean like outhouses, or body odor, or cooking food, or plain old spiritual malaise? Or what? And what is inside those blasted cages? This is arguably a strange and unfortunate case of not telling and not showing, but somehow it's still a pretty good story.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Land of the Great Horses" (1967)

R.A. Lafferty's story has an intriguing though maybe not particularly dangerous concept, a sort of explanation for the Romani (aka "Gypsy") diaspora from northern India some 1,500 years ago. In the story, aliens from outer space carved out a large region like a section of skin and took it away for study, leaving behind a mirage as a placeholder. This is where the story most feels like it's busy making up shit. Presumably, you can't live on a mirage, and so the worldwide scattering started. Eventually, the Romani territory is returned, the mirage deactivated, and somehow all Romani know it's time to go home again. Then the aliens go steal Los Angeles, which no one notices is missing. It's hard to see a point here. The strange life of Gypsies? The great power of aliens? Um—Los Angeles is vacuous? The latter is a live possibility. Lafferty is at great pains on the alien operation, emphasizing its shallowness: "the sliver taken [was] about ten thousand square miles ... and no more than a mile thick at its greatest." In a way, it's similar to what Kurt Vonnegut does in The Sirens of Titan, explaining monumental aspects of human history such as the Great Wall of China as absurd incidentals in larger alien projects. I dig the freeform riffing but wish it added up to something. In this collection, it should make me worried about something. Aliens chopping out giant pancakes of Earth terrain is only weird. Lafferty's afterword doesn't help much: "We are all Romanies, as in the parable here, and we have a built-in homing to and remembrance of a woollier and more excellent place, a reality that masquerades as a mirage. Whether the most excellent place is here or heretofore or hereafter, I don't know, or whether it will be our immediate world when it is sufficiently animated; but there is an intuition about it which sometimes passes through the whole community." Fair enough, but I still don't know where the Gypsy stuff comes from. Lafferty was strictly an American Midwest guy, born in Iowa, living most of his life in Oklahoma. Maybe something was singing in his blood, except you don't catch much of that here. Odd duck of a story.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"From the Government Printing Office" (1967)

Kris Neville is another obscure part-time science fiction writer (full-time scientist) who crossed paths with Harlan Ellison as Ellison was putting together the Dangerous Visions collection. In this story the terrible dystopia revolves around education and career choices for individuals in the future. They evidently don't have much say in it, as formalized testing in the first four years of life determines a person's course. Then some kind of horrible medical procedure locks it in. Our 3-year-old hero in this story has been slated to be a scientist, which his parents support and push him toward. His parents are awful to him, calling him a filthy shit. Their abuse is the worst thing going on here, as far as I can see. The story attempts the point of view of the child, but I was skeptical, partly because I have no memories myself of being that age. Personalities are still being worked out at that point—that's pretty much scientific (child developmental) understanding, now and when the story was written. In a way I envy the kid. I've spent a lifetime second- and third-guessing my career choices. For that matter, a scientist sounds like a better life than others. If this future society has given up, say, slavery in exchange for assigned middle-class careers, it sounds closer to utopia overall to me. The title is perhaps the main giveaway that this story is little more than received antigovernment farting. Because of the age I lived in, I'm still quicker to believe evil corporate conspiracies over government versions, but either way it's all a little tired. Junior may well be losing some precious spark of human individualism, but I'm not sure the first years of life are the most effective or convenient time to snuff it out. Ultimately, I did think there was a good sense of the child's fear here—the point of view is actually pulled off. But partly as a result, the fears and concerns feel more childish. As a kid, he doesn't have that much credibility for his plight. Babies are well known for crying all the time about everything. You're frequently trying to calm them down over things like a loud noise. Maybe his terrors are well-founded and it's cruel to force him to be something he isn't. On the other hand, isn't the testing intended to look for what he is? At the same time, his parents are monsters. I'm not sure how it's all supposed to add up.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Encounter With a Hick" (1967)

Once again, in Jonathan Brand's story for the Dangerous Visions collection, we see "dangerous" equated to a challenge to religious convention. And once again I am thinking about the "Is God Dead?" cover of Time magazine. Brand is among the most obscure writers in the collection. I can't find much about him on the internet. It sounds like he was some kind of graduate student who wandered into the right science fiction convention at the right time, with this story in hand. They liked it. They really liked it. And it's not bad—lively, fun, and sharply written. It's on the short side and does have the familiar problem of explaining concept while advancing plot. As it comes into focus, it involves terraforming corporations in a far future. A brochure describes the six-day process—you can guess where that's headed. At least it leaves the literary sledgehammer alone for resting on the seventh day. It's a bit unnerving, or "dangerous" (and certainly impressive), for the way it seamlessly yokes a fundamental creation myth with the glad-handing air of corporate sales. Someone in the story—the hick in the title, actually—hears it as we would, through our cultural filter, and of course finds it blasphemous. It's not really necessary, in fact it's overkill, but the encounter is practically the only thing that happens in the story. Everything else is concept. Actually, that's not true. There's another story about the scions of two terraforming companies in competition arranging a marriage of their children to each other, with hopes of future corporate consolidation. That's a pretty good story in itself, but leaves no good way to get the brochure in, which is more or less the point and dangerous part of the story. I find myself slipping dangerously myself now toward second-guessing workshop mode, tempted to kick around alternative ways to make the story work. Maybe the marrying children have a slight Romeo and Juliet thing, and reject their parents in terms of the terraforming work for some reason? Well, it's way too late now for anything like that, of course. But the story, not bad as it is, seems like it could be better somehow. Translating the first book of Genesis into jargon-riddled marketing copy (slightly dated more than 50 years on, but recognizable PR jive) is so inspired—that alone is worth a gold star. It just needs a better place to live.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"The Happy Breed" (1967)

John T. Sladek's story is full of well-used science fiction tropes: the society dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, the utopia become dystopia, robot overlords, and the paradox that rational ideals are more often delusions (Dangerous Visions editor Harlan Ellison writes in his introduction to the story that it's the second he included without knowing anything about the writer, the other being James Cross's "The Doll-House"). In an unimaginably distant future, the 1980s, computers have evolved into artificial intelligence overseers, with absolute power to care for people. The priority is happiness and safety. The result, perhaps not surprisingly, is emotional retardation and helplessness. Your door locks if you attempt to leave home barefoot. Sedation and other measures are applied if you attempt to drink unpasteurized milk. I admit these are not things I am likely to do or even want to do, but you see the point. Eventually the human population is infantilized and pacified, and Earth resembles a kind of nursery. The tragedy here, such as it is, is that the people seem ignorant of their own intellectual regressions. Mostly they don't care, and anyone who does can expect to encounter behavior modification drills from the machines. By the end of the story the omniscient third-person narrator refers to them with contempt, using baby names. A Dave has become a Davie. There are some parallels here with Brave New World—on the surface, it's hard to make out the horrors exactly. On the other hand, the whole robot overlord "killing them with kindness" thing, taken to one of its furthest extremes for example in the Matrix movies, clearly goes too far, so I'll give the story that. But there is also a familiar idea here that something is problematic or wrong with bliss and utopia. It's possible that's true, but my position is that I'd rather learn it the hard way. Please give me bliss and utopia and I will work on the problems arising therefrom. As for the story, it's a pretty good piece, laying out the situation with a lot of clarity, and deftly teasing out the larger concepts and themes as it goes.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird" (1967)

Sonya Dorman's story fits the general tone of extremity that anthology editor Harlan Ellison seemed to be looking for in the Dangerous Visions collection. I wish I knew more about the genesis of many of these stories, whether directly commissioned or pulled out of a slush pile from a general call, because in a way I think there has to be an interesting story behind this one beyond what Ellison and Dorman tell us in their notes. By the way, Dorman makes three women versus 29 men for the collection, which is pathetic but sadly miles ahead of most science fiction and horror collections of the time. Like some others here, Dorman is entirely unknown to me. In this story the future has become one of scarcity and cannibalism. It's a little reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The action involves a woman running with an air of desperation and remembering scenes of her past. So again we have the in media res treatment, concrete action with conceptual explanation half a step behind and kind of bogging things down. Not that meaningless action is ever that interesting, and in this case the running (presumably for her life) is not at all interesting. However, the scenes of human carcasses as butcher product are vividly imagined. They include babies, as did The Road. I'm not saying McCarthy owes her anything—his novel is infinitely better than this story. But Dorman was there first in many of these details. Ellison mentions in his introduction that Dorman was also a dog breeder, which might explain a little the cold familiarity with blunt facts of life, death, birth, and survival. And eating meat. It's a bit muddled and carried away with itself but it goes to deep and dark places. Its greatest strength is the horrors it casually imagines. However uninspired and obtuse it might seem now, it's also brave to write something like this and put your name on it. According to the internet, Dorman also wrote poetry, which reminds me, the title of this story comes from a headnote, which in turn comes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Enough said about the state of poetry in 1967. But I like the title, the loony imperative and the baby talk repetition. It's a good foreshadow of what's to come in the story.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Ersatz" (1967)

You and I may know Henry Slesar's work better than we suspect. At the time of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology he had been an "advertising man" for many years. From there he moved on to head writer for a daytime soap, The Edge of Night. And all along he wrote stories, novels, and screenplays. In fact—and this is probably my own best chance for knowing his work—he contributed lots of scripts to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and even Batman and 77 Sunset Strip. He also collaborated with Ellison on various projects, which brings us back to this collection. In his introduction Ellison says Slesar was one of the collaborators he most enjoyed working with, by way of noting how unsatisfying it often can be for both parties. "Ersatz" is a short short—Ellison not only labels it that but also notes the word count (1,100) and points out that his introduction is nearly twice as long. Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles around this joint. Slesar is obviously comfortable with the compressions, tight corners, and twist endings of the form. But the story idea itself is not that imposing or inspired. It's a post-apocalyptic future with a dwindling population and harsh conditions. Endless war and severe privation—that kind of thing. A wandering soldier finds shelter in a "Peace Station," erected systematically for the purpose as part of the war infrastructure. All the amenities found there are artificial: chemical beef, cigarettes made of "treated wool fibers," bread made from seaweed, etc. A woman serves him food but now he has a new hunger—for her. This story is a short short, it has a twist ending, and I am now about to reveal it. She is not a woman but a man in a woman costume. Thus the story ends badly dated—homophobic, transphobic, or both, we would say. Slesar is a good writer. The language is clear and brisk, setting out its ideas and concrete details with economy and clarity. But its assumptions—gay sex as a telltale symptom of a blasted and ruined society, or something like that—strike an irredeemable sour note. That makes it much more an odd story of the past than one with anything interesting to say about the future.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"What Happened to Auguste Clarot?" (1967)

Larry Eisenberg is a name I don't know. From Harlan Ellison's introduction and also Wikipedia, it sounds as if he published nearly as much in the way of limericks as science fiction. Yes, that's right, limericks. Who knew there was a market? Ellison has affection for Eisenberg, and for this story, but mostly in the way of a kind of practical joke. The story, which is very short, is more a parody of hardboiled detective fiction though all decked out with science fiction trappings. A Nobel-winning chemist disappeared without a trace one day and the news story was a sensation for a time. Now the narrator of this story, a journalist, has been assigned to revisit the case years later, a bit like the frame stories in Citizen Kane and Velvet Goldmine, and off we go. The story is dense with comic detail, which sometimes works, as with an editor who insists on communicating telepathically with his staff. They're left guessing, and don't always guess right. But the story is pointless, even as it drags around its heavy chains of detail. In many ways (and I'm not trying to conflate limericks with literature) Eisenberg writes with that inert quality so many poets bring to prose. They are so used to compressing lots of information artfully into the fewest possible words, or something like it. The story elements are so familiar I could reorient myself whenever another one came along, such as the appearance of a femme fatale, hostile encounters with authorities, a ritual beating, etc. But yes, I'm sorry to say, even in the space of six printed pages I found myself lost in thickets. Which is not to say that each paragraph, taken on its own, isn't entertaining. They are. They all are. This is like the stand-up comic portion of the variety show. It doesn't have anything to do with detective fiction. It's just using the tropes. It's even weaker as science fiction. It's a weird world, yes. People say and do and seem to believe some strange things (like the would-be telepathic editor). But there's nothing to bind or unify it beyond the formal parodies. Eisenberg reports in his afterword that the story was a satisfaction to produce. Ellison in his introduction seems a little nervous about including it at all. Makes me think there might have been something on the order of trading favors behind this story. But what do I know? It's good for a laugh.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" (1967)

Theodore Sturgeon is probably the best-known old school science fiction writer in the Dangerous Visions collection. Lester del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Poul Anderson count too, but they come up short of Sturgeon's stature. I've been talking lately about the "Is God Dead?" cover of Time magazine as a likely source of some of these stories, but Sturgeon's story looks to a very different one: Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein, of course, is on the short list of revered science fiction writers of his generation, in the '40s and '50s, with Isaac Asimov and maybe Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. With Stranger, in the '60s, Heinlein seemed to shift gears away from "hard" science fiction and conservative politics into radical proto-hippie ideas of free love. (I say "seemed" because the whole thing stinks to high heaven when you get into the details of the novel.) Sturgeon is taking those ideas another step further and into incestDanger, Will Robinson! The story is set so far in the future that the sun going nova is a plot point, leading to a human diaspora that is at least galactic, if not universal, thanks to technology. I must say, humans do not appear to have changed much in the 7.6 billion years between now and then. At any rate, as planetary civilizations have slowly reached out and connected for purposes of trade, the hero of this long story (or novella, whatever) discovers a planet with fabulous resources but one with which no one wants to trade. He is Charli Bux, a sort of roustabout traveling man living on planetary trade work. The planet is Vexvelt. The reason it is shunned it because its culture practices incest. It's not just that the natives of Vexvelt don't recognize it as a taboo, but there it is even considered a desirable norm. In a way, the story is good at forcing you to look at taboo itself, because honestly I never got far past feeling like it was icky. They are a lusty bunch, these Veltvexians—it's not just incest, but more broadly free love is how they roll. There might be a reasonable case against the concerns of inbreeding and congenital birth defects. Maybe it doesn't apply to Veltvexians? If so, that's important to mention. Otherwise the Veltvexian arguments often have the stink of someone working on a reluctant partner to put out, as if they're made with raging hard-ons. I know my response to the story is probably more like my response to the taboo. It's actually a perfectly engaging story, told with skill, about a subject that makes me squirm to think about for long. So sure, OK, let's call it dangerous. Just get it away from me.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" (1967)

Once again, with Damon Knight's contribution to the Dangerous Visions collection, we find a generally incompetent monotheistic God at the center of things, and once again I am put in mind of the 1966 Time magazine cover, "Is God Dead?" It may be too easy to speculate it made such an impression on editor Harlan Ellison and/or these writers. But a feeble and useless if not dead God does seem to be one certain epitome of a dangerous vision here, as it occurs more than once. Maybe it's even true enough, per existentialist thought and so on. Then there is the matter of Ellison's introduction to the story, which is weird. It gave me the impression Ellison didn't care much for Knight at the time, though he tries to pass it off as a joke. In turn, Knight's clipped afterword seems to confirm a strained relationship. The story itself is very short, about five pages. God and a posse of angels have returned to Earth for Judgment Day, but no one is home. Nuclear war seems the likely reason. Upon looking around for answers, God finds a sardonic message etched into a stone by those about to pass: "WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?" So it goes in the worlds of faith and faithlessness, and I'm sure I don't know what it has to do with science fiction, dangerous or otherwise. You're better off contemplating that cover of Time as far as I'm concerned. Knight's afterword, though very short, sounds familiar themes of the aggrieved science fiction writer—well, maybe more generally all writers. When he first wrote the story and tried to publish it via his agent, Knight writes, "my then agent returned it with loathing, and told me I might possibly send it to the Atheist Journal in Moscow." Ba-da-boom—Cold War times, Cold War times. I don't like the story that much either, but more because it feels kind of lazy. I'm not averse to this preoccupation with religion in self-consciously controversial work (which is maybe all that "dangerous" means after all), just surprised that it was where so many science fiction writers would think to go in 1967. I want to think it's the influence of Ellison, but then his story was not focused on religion at all. I'm telling you, it's that Time cover.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" (1967)

Carol Emshwiller's story is truly weird, an invasive sexualized peeping-tom or stalking situation with the usual gender roles reversed and some suggestion that one or both characters might actually be aliens from outer space, perhaps something like David Bowie's man who fell to earth. It is deeply and richly creepy. As described, Mr. Morrison's place is such a sty that the unnamed first-person narrator can conceal herself in the piles of dirty laundry. She is there for one reason—to see him naked, not so much for sexual reasons as curiosity. But inevitably it is sexually charged. She invades his home and sneaks about undetected. For his part, Mr. Morrison is a grossly obese middle-aged man living by himself. The narrator is attracted to him. She lives in the room below him. "He's too big to be a quiet man," she writes. "The house groans with him and settles when he steps out of bed." She doesn't mind hearing him, even enjoys it. But she wants to know who he is, "one of the Normals or one of the Others?" This is never really explained and could mean anything, from the aforementioned possibility of aliens to questions of sexuality or class. I also saw an internet synopsis that said the narrator is elderly—a clue I missed. At any rate, into the place she goes, making some close reconnoiters, as in the kneehole of a desk the man is sitting at. It's intense, but it's also hard to believe he would miss her. Is she that small? Is she not generating body heat? I think you see the problem. Maybe he would miss her under the bed or even in a pile of clothes, but really. Meanwhile, she is reveling sensuously in the experience, the smells, the sights, the textures. She's intoxicated with herself in this invasion, like a burglar prompted to a bowel movement in the act. We're inside certain nether regions of brain function here. Not to say the story isn't working, but it's just so powerfully repellent. It's like finding out someone is so attracted to a fetishized body part of yours they have masturbated near you. No harm no foul, maybe, but still. In this case, breaking and entering is involved. Now there is also some interesting play in this story with the gender reversals, subverting perhaps some predisposition to outrage because it is a woman. As with the Mary Kay Letourneau story, it's still often hard to entirely avoid a double standard, probably because cases like these are so rare. This story makes a woman the predator but her victim could control her simply by noticing her. Does that make the story comic, with or without the overlay of aliens? Or is it just an exposition of creepy—and illegal—behavior? The more I think about it the more I think it's another one that might actually qualify as dangerous.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"The Doll-House" (1967)

James Cross was a pseudonym of Hugh J. Parry (not to be confused with Hugh G. Rexion), a sociology professor who was at pains to keep his two professional lives separate. Sadly, it's hard to say now which is more obscure than the other. Neither has a Wikipedia entry—in fact, this story seems to be the only reference to him there. In his introduction to the story, editor Harlan Ellison relates that he solicited his own literary agent in the hunt for material, which yielded up this story and another. As a side note, I like how many of the writers in this collection are offbeat or unknown and not just the "usual suspects" of '60s SF. Ellison as usual sings highest praise of the story, and it's not bad. It feels like a lift from The Twilight Zone but there is little conceptual overlay to parse, always a relief. A man, Jim Eliot, is in financial straits, and he turns to a haughty and pretentious relative for help (a retired Ivy League humanities professor), who gives him a half-mocking gift: a dollhouse that is home to a Roman sibyl. Yes, that's right, an actual tiny divine creature who can predict the future if you treat her right. That's important. Even if you treat her right, her answers are cryptic. For example, asked for the winner of the World Series (the setting is 1964), she responds, "Fringillidae sunt." Eventually a Latinist and then a zoologist lead Eliot to the St. Louis Cardinals. Well, you can probably imagine how this goes, as our hero grows increasingly imperiled financially and increasingly impatient with his personal soothsayer. In his afterword, Parry emphasizes the "dangerous" aspect of his story—I appreciated that because the further I go with this collection the more I find myself worrying the concept. I often sense it in Ellison as well. In a way I like how elusive it is, but like the desperate character in this story I also want answers—ones I can understand. Parry's view of the dangerous vision in his story, if I understand him, is about challenging entrenched class structures. Eliot, who is a banker, has nonetheless married over his head, sealing his doom. Even the sibyl probably looks down on him. Actually, being divine, she probably looked down on the humanities professor too. I'm starting to think, more and more, that a lot of the dangerous visions in the best of these stories are as old as the struggle for class position: ancient and unceasing.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"The Escaping" (1967)

David R. Bunch's second story in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions collection is basically more of same, a very short story set on the war planet version of Earth called Moderan. For whatever reason, it did not make it into the recent republication of Bunch's 1971 Moderan collection (though I'm not sure it was in the original either). I have to say I'm never really sure what's going on in this story, which might be the reason. It's also not included on the comprehensive list of Bunch's stories at Wikipedia. "The Escaping" features a first-person narrator, and he seems to be pondering work, but it's also possible he is undergoing punishment, or some treatment, and/or remembering his work or a former life. Any or all of the above. On another level it's not that hard to understand—it's about a kind of dissociative state that can be achieved (see title), which helps in dealing with the privations of this culture. Moderan prizes and loves hatred above all else. These eternal soldiers are less like noble warriors such as Crazy Horse or King Arthur's bunch, and more like the monsters of varying skill you encounter in RPGs. The language is difficult—I'm not surprised Bunch was also a poet!—and if the vision is dangerous it is also maddeningly undetailed. In many of the stories in this collection the "dangerous vision," as such, involves collapses of enlightened democracies into immoral autocratic societies. In Bunch's Moderan, I have the impression you can forget the foregoing enlightenment, even if it is Earth. Arguably our enlightenment has been feeble. War and hatred are all that has ever been known. Further clarity may lay in Bunch's Moderan collection, either the 1971 version or the 2018 version, which both have dozens more stories. But I'm not inclined to push much further myself. I'd almost just rather read the screenplay treatment versions of stories like this, with these flimsy narratives thrown like loose scarves around them. For every time my mind is well and truly blown by SF concept there are 10 or 20 more where I'm only confused and impatient. Maybe somebody else will have better luck with this one. Bunch has been remarkably obscure, at least until the recent republication of Moderan, which might change that. You never know.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Incident in Moderan" (1967)

David R. Bunch is the only writer in the Dangerous Visions anthology to get two stories, probably because they're so short, but it's interesting partly because it's not a name I know at all. Bunch published mainly in the speculative genres but pursued a PhD in English and also wrote and published poetry and more traditional literary work. He remained obscure all his life and after, for the most part. He died in 2000. "Incident in Moderan" later became part of a 1971 cycle of Bunch stories, Moderan, which is now considered a significant influence on cyberpunk SF (and was actually republished in a reworked edition just last month). This very short story presents a dystopic vision of future Earth with the planet covered in plastic, a cyborg technology that has made great advances, and perpetual war. It takes place during a rare break in the war, enabling one side to repair its defenses. The first-person narrator is a cyborg, which we learn eventually through inference. The story involves an encounter with "mutant forms," which appear to be humans who have rejected cyborg technology, though they may be mutants and not human as we think of it now. Again, learned by inference, through the blizzard of oblique conceptual detail given as scenes unfold. This is how the narrator perceives one of the mutant forms talking: "Blue soft lips parted and a yellow-pink piece of gristly meat jigged up and down in wet slop ... [a] somewhat vulgar performance of meat and air." I have to admit I'm probably more fascinated now by Bunch's obscurity than his stories. He published a fair amount in his life—albeit a share of that at the level of fanzines—but his two stories in this collection were basically all that was in print until the recent rerelease of Moderan. If "Incident in Moderan" did not make much impression on me, it could be a problem like I had with Poul Anderson's story last time, just too much concept for the in media res treatment within the confines of a short story (or, indeed, short short, as this very nearly is). But Bunch's language certainly has a nice sheen of clarity, and that element of cruelty which editor Harlan Ellison has shown a consistent taste for is present as well. The story is almost very good. Looking forward to Bunch's second bite at the apple next week.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"Eutopia" (1967)

Poul Anderson's story for the Harlan Ellison collection is high on concept and low on plot interest. The concept, if I'm understanding it right, is pretty nifty, but it's still undermined by the lame story. It appears to be taking place in a reality of multiple dimensions, perhaps based on string theory, which was starting to get kicked around in the late '60s. Apparently new universes are spawned at every branch of reality that may go a different way, which effectively means they are infinite. Our home universe / reality has figured out a way to traverse and explore these other dimensions. What we find is a cacophony of human culture and scientific development, with different peoples rising to dominance. I could never tell where our hero, Iason Philippou, was located—central Europe seems most likely, though it might be North America. The region is divided into dozens or hundreds of separate small states with jealous and complicated relations. Philippou is on the run because he has committed a transgression. He excuses it to himself as a matter of ignorance about local customs. But his bad deed is actually pretty bad, kept secret until the end of the story and then revealed only obliquely. I had to look it up on the internet for further clarity. So the story is about his escape and being chased and returning home and then the reveal of his offense. But it is mostly busy with its concept, attempting to "show not tell" the details. That's the kind of thing you spend most of your time reading: "He didn't know if these words had ever been logged. Perhaps so, when white men first sailed through the Pentalimne (calling them the Five Seas) to found Ernvik where Duluth stood in America and Lykopolis in Eutopia.... But then came wars with Dakotas and Magyars." Aiyiyi—so many proper nouns, used so confusingly. For me, this is a type of science fiction writing that is mostly a chore to read—Philip Jose Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" is worse only because it's four times longer. The story is an uninspired framework on which to hang the drapery of concept, which can indeed be mesmerizing visions when pulled off properly. So, yeah, multiple dimensions, that torques my head right around with the possibilities—consider the wrinkling together of dimensions across the short time plane of Cubs and Indians, Trump and Clinton, Moonlight and La La Land, Patriots and Falcons. But the chase and the crime motivating it? Really? You can read that anywhere and it's better as true-crime. This should have been a novel, with adequate space to explain itself, or nothing at all.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison