Dangerous Visions

by Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick, various authors, Samuel R. Delany Narrated by P. J. Ochlan, Mark Sanderlin, Bronson Pinchot, Robert Fass, Ramiz Monsef, Bradford Hastings, Steve West, Heath Miller, Natalie Naudus, Dion Graham, Suzanne Toren, James Patrick Cronin, Neil Hellegers, Feodor Chin, Vikas Adam, Tim Campbell, Shiromi Arserio, Scott Brick, Joel Froomkin, Jim Meskimen, Scott Aiello, Steven Jay Cohen, Simon Vance, various narrators, JD Jackson, Stefan Rudnicki, Mara Wilson, John Pirhalla, Neil Shah, Edoardo Ballerini, Thom Rivera, Joe Hempel, Grover Gardner, Johnny Heller

Overview

WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY PATTON OSWALT

Dubbed “the most significant and controversial SF book” of its generation, Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking collection launched an entire subgenre: New Wave science fiction. With contributions from legendary authors and multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, Dangerous Visions returns to print in a stunning new edition perfect for new and returning fans alike.

A landmark short story collection that put the more character-based New Wave science fiction on the map, Dangerous Visions won several prestigious awards and was nominated for many others. This now-classic anthology includes thirty-three stories by thirty-two award-winning authors, over half of whom have won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Contributing authors include: Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, and Ellison himself.

As relevant now as it was when first published, Dangerous Visions is a phenomenal collection that deserves a place on every bookshelf.

Editorial Reviews

|Los Angeles Times

An original and valuable writer…A twentieth-century Lewis Carroll.”

NPR

Harlan Ellison was, after all, one of the most interesting humans on Earth. He was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction writers alive. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, lectured to college kids, visited with death row inmates, and once mailed a dead gopher to a publisher. Ellison brought a literary sensibility to sci-fi at a time when the entire establishment was allergic to any notion of art. To say he was one-of-a-kind would be trite, and he would likely hate that. What he was, was a legend.”

Leonard Maltin

Feisty, furious, yet extraordinarily kind and generous; Harlan Ellison was one of a kind.”

winner of the Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achieveme Algis Budrys

You should buy this book immediately, because this is a book that knows perfectly that you are seething inside.”

Ray Bradbury

Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, stand aside. Harlan Ellison is now a better short-story writer than you will ever be again during the rest of your lives.”

Guillermo del Toro

Harlan Ellison—terrific prose, razor-sharp intellect, pulp gut punches and invention when needed, terse poetics…An original.”

Neil Gaiman

The words—there is an attention to the words. There is an attention to the sound of the words. You’re reading them in your head, and they sing.”

Stephen King

In his stories of fantasy and horror, he strikes closest to all those things that horrify and amuse us (sometimes both at the same time) in our present lives…Most of all, we sense outrage and anger—as with the best Ellison stories, we sense personal involvement, and have a feeling that Ellison is not so much telling the tale as he is jabbing it viciously out of its hiding place. It is the feeling that we are walking over a lot of jagged glass in thin shoes, or running across a minefield in the company of a lunatic.”

New York Review of Books

The spellbinding quality of a great nonstop talker, with a cultural warehouse for a mind.”

Washington Post

Categories are too small—even the catch-all category of science fiction—to describe Harlan Ellison. Lyric poet, satirist, explorer of odd psychological corners, moralist, one-line comedian, purveyor of pure horror and of black comedy; he is all these and more.”

Anne McCaffrey

The incredible Harlan Ellison writes as if an inner fuse is about to blow before he can get all the words on his pages.”

George R. R. Martin

Harlan was not just a great fantasist and/or science fiction writer; he was a great writer, period. When he was at the top of his form, from the late 60s through the 70s and well into the 80s, there was no finer short-story writer in all of English literature.”

Ron Moore

There’s a real power to the way he uses the language and how he draws pictures in your mind.”

Michael Crichton

He doesn’t write like anybody else. What emerges is a surprising, eclectic, almost protean series of visions, often disturbing, always strongly felt.”

New York Times

A furiously prolific and cantankerous writer [who] looked at storytelling as a ‘holy chore,’ which he pursued zealously for more than sixty years. His output includes more than 1,700 short stories and articles, at least 100 books, and dozens of screenplays and television scripts…ranked with eminent science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.”

RogerEbert.com

You see Ellison’s unswerving social conscience throughout his fiction and critical essays…forcefully and eloquently—and at some length—lamenting the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and railing against the scourge of misogynistic ‘knife-kill’ films.”

Pilgrim Award Winner for Lifetime Achievement in S Algis Budrys

“You should buy this book immediately, because this is a book that knows perfectly that you are seething inside".

From the Publisher

Dangerous Visions is a landmark in science fiction, one that can proudly stand against those literary snobs who look down their nose at the genre—Antony Jones, SFBOOKREVIEWS blog

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159189004
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION: YEAR 2002

by Harlan Ellison

What a long, strange, jam-packed eventful trip it has been, I said to Mike Moorcock the other day. It wasn't d�j� vu, not exactly; but it was resonant of the days in London when we strolled from Ladbroke Grove to the tandoori restaurant we frequented. "What a long, strange, jam-packed eventful trip it has been," I said to Mike as we walked along like Mutt and Jeff, that huge bearded talent who had almost singlehandedly created what was to become known as the New Wave in fantastic literature, and the 5'5" upstart Yank just coming into his Warholian 15 minutes of Fame. That was more than thirty years ago. And the other day I said the same thing to Mike.

All so strange and exhausting, this journey. So filled with good and evil, friends and enemies, achievements and failures, deadlines met and deadlines missed (some by decades).

Friends still--like Mike and Bob Silverberg and Carol Emshwiller and Norman Spinrad and Phil Farmer, to name just a few to be found in this book and still in this world as I sit here writing on my Olympia manual typewriter--and friends so heartbreakingly gone--Bob Bloch and Roger Zelazny and Ted Sturgeon and Henry Slesar and Lester and Phil, Howard, John and John, Kris, dear old Fritz and Ray Lafferty and Damon, Poul and all the others who were smiling and writing and kicking ass when I first said what I said to Mike on Portobello Road. More than thirty years ago.

This book is one of the successes. It was a dream I'd had long before I actually did the job. A dream I had offered to another anthologist, when I was editing a lineof paperbacks in Evanston, Illinois in 1961 ... and she had shined it on. Same dream I discussed with Norman in my treehouse in Beverly Glen in 1965; same dream I saw coming through the anal constriction of the genre like the Super Chief in amber, as Mike and his compatriots kicked out the chocks with New Worlds. A dream of "our thing" standing crystal mountain tall beside mimetic, naturalistic fiction, proffering visions and answers and what-ifs that no Faulkner or James Gould Cozzens or Edna Ferber ever thought possible. Oh, that was a great deal taller than a 5'5" dream.

And had I known how tough a job it would be, had I known the vast shitstorms that would gulleywash me, I have no doubt that I'd have done it anyway. Not because I'd be any dopier or foolhardy than has been my style all these years, but because this dream is now celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary, and it is still the all-time bestselling anthology of speculative fiction ever produced. It has been in print continuously since 1967, and the awards and individual story reprints it has amassed are unparalleled. So the opprobrium has been worth it.

For those of you who came into the movie late, you'll turn a page or three and find the original Forewords to the book written by Isaac (who was too uncharacteristically and idiotically humble to write a story for the book, on the wholly bogus grounds that he was a geezer, couldn't write "the new thing," and didn't want to embarrass himself) (of all the people I've known in my strange, long, jam-packed life, I can't think of any I adored more than my pal Isaac, but I tell you--as I told him--the demur was horseshit), and there--after you'll find my own original, long-winded Introduction. You'll know what's what and understand DV's place in the literary landscape by the time you emerge on the other side. Then begins the book. This terrific book.

This dream, this success, was intended to be a miracle; and it came to pass. Then. And now. And thirty-five years in between. Many of the boys and girls who first read it in high school are now, themselves, stars of the genre of the phantasmagoric. To those kids, the name DANGEROUS VISIONS has the snap, crackle & pop of the sense of wonder about which we all prattle.

Muhammad Ali once quieted the rabble chiding him for his braggadocio by smiling and telling them, "Ain't no brag if you can go out there and do it!"

If this 21st Century intro to a watershed literary event of the 20th seems surfeited with an asphyxiating hubris, well, I admit to not doing humility very well, yet nonetheless there are things in one's life that are enshrineable, and even the most flatulent braggart may be permitted a hoot or two when speaking of such peaks of greatness. Ain't no brag.

I once met John Steinbeck. I don't think we exchanged a word, I was a kid, he was a god; but I met him. I marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in one of the pivotal events of Our Time, and though I was a mere molecule in that wave, I am eternally proud because I was there. I can count among my closest friends Asimov, Leiber and Bloch, three of the most wonderful men who ever walked this earth, and they liked me. In this way I know I am worth-while, if not righteous. Such men would not be friends with a creep.

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