Lance's Reviews > Again, Dangerous Visions

** spoiler alert ** I won't write on everything in the collection. I wrote about "The Word for World is Forest" by Le Guin on the novella's own page, since it was so long and fantastic on its own. On an interesting side note, these stories are certainly of an era, with a good number of them concerned greatly by overpopulation and many also being environmentally focused. It makes sense, given the publication date and years during which the stories were written. Plenty also seem to comment on Vietnam, cryogenics, and other topics that were controversial or cutting-edge at the time.

Ellison's extensive intros to each piece are very hit or miss and often just feel like him bragging about how cool his friends are but mostly make me think these maybe aren't necessarily good stories, just good chances to give favors to some authors.

On an infuriating side note, the Kindle version of this collection screws you over on one piece that was meant to include, indeed shouldn't be read without, some drawings. It's a major bummer, because the story, by Gahan Wilson, is a very enjoyable horror story about a black dot that suddenly appears in a very fastidious man's home.

The first two stories, "The Counterpoint of View" by John Heidenry and "Ching Witch!" by Ross Rocklynne were good, enjoyable shorts, but nothing I care to write about extensively. Heidenry's is a very post modern, experimental short on writing and religion and more, just poking fun and asking questions of many things but offering nothing in way of answers. Rocklynne's story is a fun romp through a strange future where Earth explodes but a part-cat man survives and jets off to a new planet before it, going so fast he has a few years before this planet will know what happened. He enjoys a life there feeling like a king, as this planet loves Earth and those from it. Yet, in the end, he finds he has been lied to as he lied to them. He has been watched and around mostly beings from a third planet, who want to take him back to their planet as a pet. It's fun, but it doesn't really say much beyond portraying the levels of lies and the impacts of loneliness and isolation.

The first short in this collection I'd like to write about is "For Value Received" by andrew j. offutt. To begin, Ellison's extensive foreward to the short is as hilarious and wonderful as the story itself. offutt is a rebel against capitalism, bureaucracy, and American governance both in life and in writing. In the story, he tells of a man who puts his wife in a nice, private room for the birth of his third child. Upon time to check out, he decides he wants the bill mailed to him instead of settling it then and there. The hospital refuses, saying the patient cannot be discharged until he pays. He leaves the baby there, calling their bluff. Except they don't bluff; they keep her until she's 21 and a med school grad. She takes over her debts, works at the hospital as an intern to cover the costs of the original bill, and moves out. It appears it will work too, the hospital board happy to have a way out of the stalemate. Most speaking characters here idolize the father for sticking to his principles, calling him a hero. However, it's absurd for both a father and a hospital to refuse to bend on such small matters to such large consequences, which makes the satire. offutt tells the story with great humor throughout, reminding me of Vonnegut, one of my favorites. Both of these writers like to write satirically to question America, capitalism, and other aspects of life people usually assume are positive or neutral - if they ever consider them at all.

Next came three shorts overall titled "Mathoms from the Time Closet." Gene Wolfe writes them, and all three deal with odd timelines of some kind. First, "Robot's Story" has a time-travelling robot named Robot telling an odd story about a man landing on a grassy planet and quickly deciding to enslave himself to the first woman he meets. After the story, Robot is asked to go buy some weed for the kids he was just talking to. He's from a different time and thinking on a different level than the kids. The story he tells shows men being stupid for lust in a very predictable way. Robot himself shows similar issues but was made by man to serve. It shows how similar we are to what we make. Next comes "Against the Lafayette Escadrille," a nice little story about a hobbyist that made a nearly perfect replica of an old triplane. One day out flying it, he sees a woman in a balloon with everything perfectly replicated. He never finds her again though, so she's likely somehow time traveled. Nevertheless, he continues to dream of her. The last story is titled "Loco Parentis" and examines parenting in only script-style dialogue. The parents each question their son's reality: is he theirs? is he a genetically modified ape? is he a robot? These concerns flash forward throughout their life with him, likely the couple's shared anxiety dream. Then we're chucked back to them meeting their son. They both quickly agree that he is, in fact, fully theirs. This suggests, to me, that parents have their doubts about the alien things they raise, but just as surely take any and all signs that the child is theirs to heart, even if these signs are actually ambiguous and meaningless.

Bradbury's poem "Christ, Old Student in a New School" warrants much more time, thinking, and writing than I feel like giving it. To be as brief as I can, it's a poem in which Christ/man sees all the suffering, realizes it was done by himself/mankind, and decides to start again, renewed, in space. Something like that. A similar story follows, although not written in poetry: "King of the Hill" by Chad Oliver. Oliver's story brings us an Earth on the brink of collapse via overpopulation and environmental negligence. The richest man on Earth, though, spends years and billions finding the best place to send some animal DNA to start life somewhere else. He doesn't send humans. However, raccoons appear to begin taking humanity's place. It's somewhat hopeful for life and intelligent life, but also quite stark for mankind and even the hinted cyclical nature of life.

"The 10:00 Report Is Brought to You by..." comes next, written by Edward Bryant. It's a chilling take on how terribly humans are willing to be for money or fame or whatever enjoyment they seek. In the story, a news station pays a gang to violently destroy a town for their own ratings increase. People that work for the station do nothing. Even the guy that resigns over it asks for a job back. The men doing the violence enjoy it and the money. It's a sad little story, really.

Kate Wilhelm's "The Funeral" threw me for a loop. It's like Margaret Atwood, which means it's very good speculative fiction, often with a healthy dose of feminism. In this story, the matriarch of a school dies, aged 120 or more. She was instrumental in turning the education system into a rigid, system that actually controls most of society after some vague annihilation of the youth. The society has specific jobs that men and women are placed into by the schools. The protagonist thinks she wants to be a Lady, but later is shown what that means (presumably being used for sex). She is selected by the matriarch's protege to be a Teacher. During the extensive process of a funeral for the dead Teacher, the protagonist Carla learns more truths of society and finds a way to escape in a hidden room the same way the dead Teacher escaped from one of the annihilations. This story looks down on how we "mold" children in our own image out of our hate for them. It also suggests that young people have an innate moral compass that will guide them to rebel against adult BS no matter how strictly we attempt to control them.

Vonnegut's contribution to the collection, "The Big Space Fuck," is dark and satirical in deliciously Vonnegutian style. It's quite short, but lambastes overpopulation, pollution, materialism, and more. It's a fun one, which is strange to say because it's effectively about the end of the world due to humanity's horrors.

In T.L. Sherred's "Bounty," we get an interesting prophecy on how gun violence may finally end in America. An unnamed wealthy person or group places an ad in the paper, paying anyone that stops an armed robbery or that dies in said attempt. People start killing everyone with a visible gun. Vigilantes take over everything. Then, with a new President, guns are entirely outlawed, even for police. This seems to suggest we can end gun violence with greed and gun violence. Or something like that.

A later story in the collection, titled "In the Barn," kept me guessing. Written by Piers Anthony, the universe has multiple parallels and "Earth-Prime" - our Earth - is the only one able to go to and from these parallels. We follow an inspector's visit to #772, which is warless and also animal-less. The inspector goes into a barn, on the pretense of being a new farmhand. He finds cows and bulls of humans instead of cattle. He does the work only to finally break the rules and save a "calf" to bring back to EP. At first, I expected this to be a feminist story about women being oppressed. But the bull was male and the society also had non-cow women as well. This society drew the moral line at how terrible it would be to eat filthy creatures and decided using their own mammal kind is better, cleaner. When the inspector returns to EP, he's in a normal barn, and muses on whether or not he did the right thing and if EP is doing the better thing, subjecting a different species to tortures and slavery. The peace of the other world seems to suggest the "evils" of their domesticated-human farming system may be a better way to go than our own system. Chilling, thought-provoking stuff.

A quite short but quite thought-provoking romp was "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward" by Joan Bernott. In this one, a man lives alone with a large cat that we learn is quite intelligent and capable of speech. It takes a turn toward a sad sort of isolation though, when a girlfriend calls him, but he declines and breaks up with her, preferring to spend the evening with his cat. He avoids human love because "Somehow, this, the easier way, was also better." Another chilling one!

Gregory Benford brings an interesting survivalist and psychological thriller type story with "And the Sea Like Mirrors." In this story, a man and woman are stranded on a raft in the Pacific with alien dolphin things attacking them. It's just their young forms though. The older forms are trying to communicate with and help them apparently. In the process of surviving and meeting aliens, the characters follow their gender stereotypes. The man takes charge, stays logical, and uses violence and intelligence to survive and adapt. The woman submits, becomes "hysterical," and irrationally seems to side with the murderous aliens. It's a cool concept all around, even in execution. The end leaves the woman dead after stupidly trying to swim to an island obviously covered with the carnivorous aliens, while the man happily ignores her screams and continues toward the older forms of alien life, leaving the only human behind.

At nearly the end of the collection comes Carr's "Ozymandias." This post-apocalyptic gem of a story tickled me in all the right ways. First, the subtle world building of the short teaches us that this world has vaults that robbers dance to in order to attain tools and food and such. Later, we learn that thinkers of this tribe were all just murdered, save one thinker-in-training that was spared as he was not technically a thinker yet. Once the unique, ritualized dance-ascent was completed, the robbers made the remaining thinker pick a vault. The thinkers said all vaults were empty, but robbers disagreed. The robbers also thought picking the wrong vault can kill you (and maybe everyone), so chose this dispensable thinker. The thinker, however, knows something the robbers do not, so picks an empty vault for safety. He gets them to open a secret bottom to the vault, which contains an Immortal. The immortal wakes up, giant of a man. The thinker, who has a special empath power, feels the immortal wants to be killed, so he kills him. This short manages to damn the rich and their hyper-modern cryogenic pyramids while also pointing to a human tendency toward violence and against knowledge, when that knowledge is inconvenient.

"The Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree, Jr. ends the collection in style. Tiptree's story follows a man not named Timor and his struggles to rejoin humanity after living his first several years on a different planet with his father. Having been raised there, he learned to love and make love with these aliens, and finds humans repulsive. He is kidnapped by another human who wants to see "Paradise" like Timor describes. Timor is drugged and gives him enough information that they find it. It turns out that Timor's memory is greatly skewed by his being young and small at the time. To the kidnapper, these aliens are small, ugly gray blobs, not the tall, gorgeous beings that Timor remembers and, shortly, sees. Timor appears to then kill the kidnapper and is able to live happily from then on in "Paradise." Hidden a bit below the surface, it seems these beings may drug people with similar drugs that the kidnapper used on Timor, since their radio said something about a medical recall. It appears Timor is safe, the rest of the humans knowing enough to avoid the addictive aliens. It's a strange and delightful meditation on what true beauty and art and pleasure truly are, and how much of that is nature or nurture.