Werner's Reviews > Dangerous Visions

Note, April 2, 2020: Usually, I don't do any significant editing of a review that already has "likes." In this case, however, I decided it was necessary. My evaluations of the merits of the book and the individual stories remain the same; but I've come to feel that they were sometimes expressed in language that was unkind. I've edited the review below to express the same opinions more kindly.

This was a book I started reading about a decade ago, at a time when I was interested in possibly developing a college-level course in science fiction. When that project fell through, I didn't have enough interest in this particular anthology to finish reading it; I was distinctly underwhelmed with most of the selections I did read (and with several more that I just skimmed or read partially). In keeping with some of the comments I exchanged recently with my friend Joy, though, I've decided that a statement of why I didn't finish might be helpful to some readers; and while I won't presume to rate the book or review parts I didn't fully read, this can serve as a "review" of the stories I DID read (not all of which were disappointing, by any means!).

Both avid fans of this book (among them some of my Goodreads friends!) and its most hostile detractors agree that it's an epochal work in the history of the science-fiction genre; in particular, it served more than any other single book to launch the "New Wave" movement to dominance in the genre. (Where they differ, of course, is over whether or not this was a good thing.) One can't, IMO, really understand this book without understanding that movement; and like most movements, it can't be fully understood except in relation to its historical and cultural context.

Early modern SF in the U.S., like the other speculative fiction genres at the time that the publishing industry first saw them as "genres," was shunted off into a literary ghetto in the pulp magazines, where it developed a small and insular fandom. Critics despised and ignored it. World War II, however, demonstrated that two staples of pulp SF --atomic energy and rocketry-- previously viewed as the delusions of cranks, were, lo and behold, sober scientific reality. This prompted not only a boom in the genre's popular appeal, but a re-evaluation of its merits by some critics. Suddenly, the Holy Grail of critical establishment respect and acceptance appeared reachable to SF writers. But there were still barriers to that acceptance. While both groups were largely made up of men (women in either group weren't numerous) of the secular Left, the SF ghetto in its heyday preserved the older, pre-World War I leftist tradition of populism, technophilic optimism and faith in Progress. SF editors like Gernsback and Campbell and their writers also were interested in plotted fiction with accessible elements that appealed to the average person in the general public, from which base their fans were drawn, and they weren't particularly interested in pushing things like obscenity, blasphemy and violence to their outer limits in order to achieve shock value for its own sake. The academic/critical community, over the same years, had increasingly been dominated by the Left's pessimistic, elitist wing, which had lost all faith in Progress and the Common Man, was committed to drastic cultural iconoclasm as a perceived intellectual virtue, and usually regarded accessibility and traditional plotting as disgusting literary flaws that marked their writers and readers as pathetic and juvenile. The New Wave movement, then, is probably best understood as basically the attempt of a second generation of SF writers (who came of age in the postwar period) to adapt the genre conventions to meet these kinds of critical expectations. Secondary trends that were going on at the same time, which also influenced some New Wave writers and are thought of sometimes as characteristic of it (though I wouldn't see them as core characteristics) are suspicion of political authority and militarism bred by the Vietnam War; New Left/flower-child socio-political ideas; openness to the drug culture; greater openness to women writers and concern with female perspectives; and a shift from "hard" to "soft" SF as the dominant strand of the genre. (Not all of these secondary trends were wholly negative, and some were positive.) It should also be noted that many writers associated with New Wave SF didn't write in that style all of the time; I've read works from the pen of Samuel R. Delaney, Norman Spinrad, and Theodore Sturgeon that are well-written masterpieces in the genre's best tradition. (They just aren't the selections those writers are represented with here.)

All of the selections here were originally written for this book. Not all the writers represented, nor all the stories included, are actually from the New Wave; Ellison included writers like Poul Anderson and Frederik Pohl here to give greater cachet to the anthology. All of the stories are claimed to be in some way edgy or "dangerous" in the sense of incorporating challenging or subversive ideas; but of course, they don't incorporate anything that would actually challenge or subvert elite orthodoxy in any direct way. Anderson's alternate-world gem "Eutopia" is included because it uses a story element that was still taboo in 1968 --but the story's intended effect and message is based on moral disapproval of the behavior being depicted, a fine point that probably escaped Ellison's notice. :-) Though it was written before his religious awakening, and treats God in an unconventional fashion, Dick's "Faith of Our Fathers" takes the existence of God seriously and undercuts atheism; rightly interpreted, it has a different kind of message altogether than Lester del Rey's "Evensong" or Jonathan Brand's "Encounter With a Hick," two selections which simply attack traditional religion. (Atheists or agnostics who just regard theism as misguided don't generally brim with hatred for the idea of God, because you can only hate something you consider real. That raises interesting questions about the psychology behind fiction like that of the del Rey story, which has to treat God as "real" in some sense so that He can be dethroned and imprisoned, since you can only do those things to someone who actually exists.) Some of the other good stories here are the Pohl selection, "The Day After the Day the Martians Came;" R. A. Lafferty's "Land of the Great Horses;" and Keith Laumer's "Test to Destruction" (a grim meditation on Lord Acton's dictum about absolute power). I'm glad to have read these; but I didn't think the chance of finding more treasures was worth the effort of sifting any further through as much material as there is here which consists simply of stridently written, message-driven tracts aiming mostly at shock value.