The Last Dangerous Visions


The Last Dangerous Visions is an unpublished sequel to the science fiction short story anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, published in 1967 and 1972 respectively. Like the first two, it was scheduled to be edited by American author Harlan Ellison, with introductions provided by him.
The projected third collection was started but, controversially, has yet to be finished. It has become something of a legend in science fiction as the genre's most famous unpublished book. It was originally announced for publication in 1973, but has not seen print to date. Ellison came under criticism for his treatment of some writers who submitted their stories to him, who some estimate to number nearly 150. Many of these writers have since died. On June 28, 2018, Ellison died, with the anthology still unpublished. The fate of the anthology, and the stories submitted for it, remains unknown.
British author Christopher Priest, whose story "An Infinite Summer" had been accepted for the collection, wrote a lengthy critique of Ellison's failure to complete the LDV project. It was first published by Priest as a one-shot fanzine called The Last Deadloss Visions, a pun on the title of Priest's own fanzine, Deadloss. It proved so popular that it had a total of three printings in the UK and later, in book form, as the 1995 Hugo Award for Best Related Work-nominated The Book on the Edge of Forever by American publisher Fantagraphics Books. The essay is available online at the of the original site.

Contents

The contents of The Last Dangerous Visions were announced on several occasions beginning in 1973, with stories sometimes being added, dropped, or substituted between each announced version. The most complete version was announced in 1979; listed were 113 previously unpublished stories by 102 authors, to be collected in three volumes.

1979 contents list

It was announced in the April 1979 issue of Locus that the anthology had been sold to Berkley Books, which planned to publish the 700,000 words of fiction in three volumes. The following tables of contents were published in the June 1979 issue of Locus. Story titles are followed by an approximate word count. Also note that the totals given for each book do not exactly match the published list.
Authors marked with a '†' are known to have died since submitting their work to Ellison.

Book one

34 authors, 35 stories, 214,250 words.
32 authors, 40 stories, 216,527 words.
36 authors, 38 stories, 214,200 words.
The following eight stories were listed in previous published contents lists, or were known to have been submitted to Ellison for inclusion, but were not listed in the 1979 contents.
Thirty-two stories purchased for Last Dangerous Visions were eventually published elsewhere.
  1. Perhaps the first was Christopher Priest's "An Infinite Summer", which appeared in Andromeda 1, edited by Peter Weston and published in 1976.
  2. "Ten Times Your Fingers and Double Your Toes" by Craig Strete
  3. "Universe on the Turn" by Ian Watson
  4. Michael Bishop's story "Dogs' Lives" was published in the Spring 1984 issue of The Missouri Review. It was subsequently reprinted in the 1985 edition of Best American Short Stories.
  5. "Signals" by Charles L. Harness
  6. "Dark Night in Toyland" by Bob Shaw
  7. "The Swastika Setup" by Michael Moorcock
  8. "What Used to be Called Dead" by Leslie A. Fiedler
  9. "Living Alone in the Jungle" by Algis Budrys
  10. "A Journey South" by John Christopher
  11. "Himself in Anachron" by Cordwainer Smith was published in the 1993 collection of Smith's short fiction, The Rediscovery of Man. Ellison threatened to sue the New England Science Fiction Association for publishing "Himself in Anachron," sold to Ellison for the anthology by Smiths widow. He later reached an amicable settlement, with a writer in Ansible guessing that Ellison had consulted the contract and discovered that he had let the rights to the story lapse because of TLDV continued delays.
  12. "Mama's Girl" by Daniel Keyes
  13. Nelson Bond's contribution, "Pipeline to Paradise", saw publication in 1995 in the anthology Wheel of Fortune, edited by Roger Zelazny. It was reprinted in 2002 in Bond's second Arkham House collection, The Far Side of Nowhere. Ellison publicly acknowledged soliciting the story from Bond, who at the time had retired from writing.
  14. "The Bones Do Lie" by Anne McCaffrey
  15. In 1999, DAW Books published an original anthology entitled Prom Night, edited by Nancy Springer, which contains Fred Saberhagen's LDV story, "The Senior Prom".
  16. "Precis of the Rappacini Report" by Anthony Boucher
  17. "The Names of Yanils" by Chan Davis
  18. Bob Leman's "How Dobbstown Was Saved" was published in Leman's 2002 collection Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories.
  19. "Among the Beautiful Bright Children" by James E. Gunn, published in Gunn's collection "Human Voices"
  20. "A Dog and His Boy" by Harry Harrison
  21. John Varley's "The Bellman" was eventually published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in 2003 and has since been reprinted.
  22. In 2004, Haffner Press published a coffee-table retrospective of the works of Jack Williamson, Seventy-Five: The Diamond Anniversary of a Science Fiction Pioneer, which contains his LDV story, "Previews of Hell".
  23. In 2005 Haffner Press published a large reprint collection of Edmond Hamilton's two "Star Kings" novels and Leigh Brackett's three stories starring Eric Stark, called Stark and the Star Kings. The title story is the long-lost tale by both writers which should have been published in Last Dangerous Visions.
  24. Joe Haldeman's "Fantasy for Six Electrodes and One Adrenaline Drip" was published in his 2006 collection A Separate War and Other Stories.
  25. Steven Bryan Bieler's story "Where Are They Now?" appeared in the Spring 2008 online magazine Slow Trains.
  26. In 2008, Orson Scott Card published "Geriatric Ward" in his collection of short fiction, Keeper of Dreams.
  27. "The Sibling" by Kit Reed
  28. "At the Sign of the Boar's Head Nebula" by Richard Wilson
  29. "Childfinder" by Octavia E. Butler
  30. "The Accidental Ferosslk" by Frank Herbert
  31. "I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up In the Air" by Clifford D. Simak
  32. "Love Song" by Gordon R. Dickson, published in "The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, Volume 1"