J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the cult hit TV show Babylon 5, recently announced he will work to complete the late Harlan Ellison’s infamously delayed anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. This, assuming it pans out, will bring one of the most famous behind-the-scenes stories in science fiction to a close after almost 50 years.
Ellison (shown above in 1977) passed away in his sleep in June of 2018 at the age of 84, after a decades-long career as an award-winning writer of short stories, screenplays, essays, and critical pieces. His best-known fiction includes the original script for the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”; the post-apocalyptic black comedy novella A Boy and His Dog, which was made into a well-regarded 1975 film with Don Johnson; and the 1967 Hugo-winning short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” later made into a PC game in 1995 with Ellison voicing its antagonist. While Ellison never had a big mainstream hit with his name attached to it in his lifetime, probably because he was never much of a novelist, he had and has a devoted following among other authors. Ellison can be considered a sort of cantankerous grandfather to what modern fans call the “New Weird.” (Alternatively: he’s the Deftones of 20th-century science fiction.)
Ellison’s body of work, both during and after his lifetime, has often been overshadowed by the man himself, particularly as his creative output slowed in the 1980s. He was well-known in the science fiction community, even as a young man, for being deliberately combative and confrontational, prone to scandal and fond of lawsuits. Ellison always had a reputation for being a loyal friend and a devoted enemy, but as he got older and somehow even crankier, he collected significantly more of the latter. (What do Frank Sinatra and the Penny Arcade team have in common? Both have argued with Harlan Ellison in public.)
As his personal notoriety grew, Ellison’s creative output slowed down significantly in the 1980s, until he was seemingly filing lawsuits and appearing on convention panels more than he was writing. That process reached its arguable nadir in 2006 when, as part of what Ellison claimed was an attempt at a joke that didn’t land, he groped science fiction author Connie Willis onstage during the Hugo Awards. As a result, modern science fiction fans tend to remember Ellison more for his personal infamy than for anything he actually wrote.
One of his best-known controversies among older fans is the Dangerous Visions series, which Ellison edited. The first volume came out in 1967, with a theme of collecting daring, original, and never-before-published work from many of the best-known writers working at the time. This included Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, Philip Jose Farmer, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Robert Bloch, Norman Spinrad, and Ellison himself. It was like a rock supergroup for speculative fiction writers, and helped codify the era of sci-fi that later critics came to call the New Wave movement.
Its success led to 1972’s Again, Dangerous Visions, with short stories by Kurt Vonnegut (who submitted a memorable story entitled, and this is real, “The Giant Space F–k”), Piers Anthony, Gahan Wilson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, Kate Wilhelm, Dean Koontz, James Tiptree Jr., Ben Nova, and others. Ellison collected a special Hugo award for the anthology in 1972, and soon after, began work on a third and final book in the series.
The Last Dangerous Visions was announced in 1973 for release in 1974, and then simply failed to appear. It continued as ’70s-era “vaporware” for year after year thereafter. Compounding the issue, Ellison never voluntarily allowed the rights to the stories in the collection to revert to their authors, or offered a public explanation for the book’s continued delays. He became notorious for reacting poorly to authors or fans who asked about it, to the point of using tactics that some characterized as “bullying.”
Known writers who had sold stories to Ellison for inclusion in TLDV, several of whom died without seeing those stories in print, include Jerry Pournelle, Anne McCaffrey, Bruce Sterling, Clifford D. Simak, Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, Octavia Butler, John Varley, and Fred Saberhagen. British sf author Christopher Priest eventually pulled his story from consideration, and out of annoyance, wrote a humorous take on the drama surrounding the project that was published by Fantagraphics in 1997 as The Book on the Edge of Forever.
Ellison’s biographers Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe have suggested that the sheer size of the LDV project, compounded by health problems that Ellison suffered throughout the mid-1970s, are to blame for the anthology’s delays. Some sources suggest that the manuscript for TLDV was at least 700,000 words long, with plans that it would be published in three separate books. It’s easy to conclude here that Ellison simply bit off more than he could chew with the project, got sick halfway through, and then was too stubborn to admit defeat for the next forty-four years.
However, Ellison’s longtime friend Stracyznski–who employed Ellison as a creative consultant for the entirety of Babylon 5–suggests there’s more to the story than anyone else knew. Ellison’s widow Susan suddenly passed away earlier this year, leaving Straczynski as the executor of the Ellisons’ estate. Straczynski took to Twitter and Patreon on November 13th — because why not announce these things on Friday the 13th it’s not like this project could get unluckier — to announce that he intends to complete The Last Dangerous Visions, to tell the story of what held it up for so long (which Stracyznski calls “the greatest mystery in the field of science fiction”), and to resolve the many and varied intellectual rights issues that have historically surrounded the project.
Stracyznski currently intends to put TLDV through another editing pass, to remove stories that have since been published elsewhere or which have been “overtaken by real-world events,” and plans to add more stories from modern and new writers to “mark the importance of [TLDV’s] completion.” He further promises to open one last slot for one day for new submissions once the editing process on TLDV is complete, as well as to include a final, previously-unpublished piece from Ellison himself.
TLDV‘s completion is being funded out of pocket by Stracyznski himself, who plans to take the book to market in March/April of 2021. All royalties from the sales of TLDV are planned to go towards turning Harlan and Susan Ellison’s California home, nicknamed “Ellison Wonderland,” into a memorial library. Fans who wish to help Stracynski defray the costs of establishing the trust that will fund the memorial library are encouraged to sign up for the temporary $20/month tier on Stracyznski’s Patreon.
Source: J. Michael Straczynski/Patreon
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