Joseph Carrabis's Reviews > Again, Dangerous Visions

Harlan Ellison was the enfant terrible of the sf/f/h industry for most of his writing life. I often viewed him as the anti-Robert Silverberg. Both flooded the market because they wrote so much and submitted so much they couldn't help but be published as often as possible. Many markets now have a "no multiple submissions" policy and I wonder how either Ellison or Silverberg would fare.
It quickly became obvious to me why many of the stories in Dangerous Visions, Again made it. They hit all the historical Ellison buttons. When Ellison was good he was brilliant, but his other mode was WTF? I scratched my head in disbelief as often as I sat back wowed by his work.
There are some massive standouts in Again, Dangerous Visions (Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest is one, Russ' When It Changed is another. A blow-me-away standout is Bernard Wolfe's two-fer Monitored Dreams & Strategic Cremations, which is a graduate course (no pun intended if you've read it) on dialogue and character development (and would probably come with trigger warnings if published today)
I'd read the first two in other anthologies so, while still entertaining and good reads, they weren't revelatory. Some stories I really wondered about. Vonnegut's entry is pure Vonnegut; amusing and (to me) only included because Vonnegut was Vonnegut when this anthology came to be and if you didn't include Vonnegut you were a fool or an idiot (several stories are from authors in this category. SF/F was making it's mainstream push at this time. Specific to Vonnegut, the industry spent lots of time and money trying to make Vonnegut fit in the sf/f author category. He didn't accept it as anything sf/fish made up only a small part of his work).
Some stories are beautifully written but don't do anything or go anywhere. I read many purely on the strength of the writing only to finish them wondering "What was this about, again?"
The other side of this is remembering what the SF/F community was like during the period this anthology came to be; seeking validity, seeking recognition, wanting desperately to reach beyond its original audience of geeks and nerds (before such terms existed), and disenfranchised, pimply-faced teenage males. An example of this is a story about a third of the way through which has the following words in its first paragraph (of only seven lines): glissando, paroxysmal, deliquesce. I'm positive these words gave many original audience members pause.
But they do go a long way to establishing some kind of effetery, don't they?
David Gerrold's With a Finger in my I was, to me, well-written dreck.
A few stories later one finds "Eye of the Beholder" by Burt K. Filer. This one story is so standout I'm not sure what it's doing in the anthology. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
The gem is, of course, James Tiptree, Jr.'s The Milk of Paradise and here I confess a bias. Everything I've ready by her is brilliant, amazing, breathtaking and The Milk of Paradise is no exception. She grabs you in the first sentence and doesn't let go or let you breathe until the end.
The book could easily have been a third shorter if Ellison didn't feel the need to introduce each story, something he recognizes in his intro to Tiptree's piece with "For those of you who hate my introductions, you'll have decided to forego them at this point, ..."
I read the stories and, as I always do when reading anthologies (including those in which my work appears), wonder what caught the editor's eye. About 4/5ths through, I began to notice an oft occurring thread of effete intelligence. Many of the stories (not all, simply a lot) were snarky smart, what I would call an in-your-face intelligent, almost an arrogance.
Yeah, well, nobody ever accused Ellison of that.
But that led me to "What was going on that such was the vogue?" and I remembered something my high school sophomore year English teacher, Mrs. Baraniak, told the class one day, "I love it when Time magazine comes in the mail because I know I'm going to have an afternoon's good reading and I'll need a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a couple of foreign language dictionaries to get me through."
Time magazine was muchly different than it is today. And she was exhilarated just from anticipating the next issue based on memories of past issues. It enlivened her. Being intellectually challenged excited her.
Such were the 1960's-70's. The world was in chaos (when isn't it? And most of it man made), we beat the Russians to the moon, we lost Jimmy and Janis, Nixon was a liar and a thief, ...
What a marvelous escape that must have been, escaping into arrogance (which is an alternate spelling of "ignorance" in my dictionary).