This is a story nearly a third of a century in the making, which is to say as old as Jesus ever got to be. I write that with the sense that my subject here, the author Harlan Ellison, might enjoy such an analogy. He was ever irreverent, ever ribald, not because he didn’t care but because he cared so much. He considered writing less a job than a vocation, a role he took on as a gesture of faith.
“I sell my books. I am a mendicant. I sit out on the curb every day. I pray for alms. You have to pay me alms,” he told me in 2011, on one of the last occasions the two of us were together. I remember this because I was recording him. I had driven up from the Mid-City flats—the “plains of id,” Reyner Banham called them in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies—to Ellison Wonderland, his aerie on the San Fernando Valley side of Mulholland Drive. He’d bought the compound for $34,000 in the 1960s, after his first success writing for television.
Coincidentally, I was also in Southern California during the 1960s: Long Beach, to be specific, where I attended first grade while my father spent a year as an orthopedic fellow at Rancho Los Amigos, a rehab hospital near the South Bay. It was during this period that he introduced me to Star Trek, for which Ellison wrote the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which, with its time travel motif and message of nonintervention, is often regarded as the finest in the original show’s three-year run. I remember watching it in our small apartment with my father, stunned by the ruthlessly moral denouement that offered my first exposure to what would later be commonly known as the butterfly effect. Ellison received both a Hugo and a Writers Guild of America Award for the teleplay; it became so identified with him that in 1987 a British writer named Christopher Priest would adapt its title for a takedown essay about The Last Dangerous Visions, an anthology Ellison never completed or published. For Priest, this was “The Book on the Edge of Forever,” promised and promised again. The fate of the collection has long been a source of controversy.
Now, six years after Ellison’s death in 2018 at 84 and more than half a century after it was first announced, The Last Dangerous Visions has at last appeared, the third volume in a trilogy—following Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972)—that, depending on how we look at it, may be the defining achievement, or miss, of his career.
Looking for a Ghost Book
I first raised the idea of writing about The Last Dangerous Visions in 1998, only to have Ellison rebuff me. And why not? As early as 1979, it was already a legendary ghost book, confirmed, most recently in an afterword by Ellison’s literary executor, J. Michael Straczynski, to have “exploded into three massive volumes featuring 108 writers and 120 stories.” Nearly 20 years later, it had become an albatross, a white whale, spawning not only Priest’s essay but also a group known as Enemies of Ellison, composed primarily of writers he had alienated or otherwise disappointed, many of them frustrated contributors to the book. In the wake of Ellison’s death, his friend George R.R. Martin would write, “Most people, as they go through life, make an enemy or two along the way.… Harlan was the only one I’ve ever known who had so many enemies that they actually formed a club.”
For Martin, it appeared, this was something of a badge of honor, yet Ellison hadn’t felt that way. Instead, he responded to my suggestion with a groan, as if he had been sucker punched. “Why,” he asked, “would I want to talk about that?”
I regret to say I didn’t understand his reticence. To my mind, the subject was fascinating—a writer and editor who appeared to have bitten off too much—and also might offer an opportunity for Ellison to answer, or at least engage with, his critics, to address the elephant in the room. The first Dangerous Visions, with 33 stories by, among others, Robert Silverberg, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Carol Emshwiller, and Theodore Sturgeon, had been a revelation, a collection that, in the most literal way imaginable, reimagined science fiction as a form. Again, Dangerous Visions brought together 46 additional works by writers including Ray Bradbury, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, and Ursula K. Le Guin; among its standouts was Kurt Vonnegut’s last short story, a saga of artificial insemination on an intergalactic scale titled “The Big Space Fuck.” I admired these books almost beyond comparison: their range, their ambition, their scope. Even then, I understood on some level that Ellison was not only making a statement but also defining an aesthetic, raising the stakes of contemporary speculative literature almost as an act of will. I was as awed by the bulk of the books as I was by the writing. The first volume had come in at more than 600 pages, and the second was nearly twice that long. Had the final installment grown so unwieldy out of Ellison’s desire to surpass himself? If so, it would be hard to fault such an ambition, regardless of the writers he’d left stranded, their stories accepted but still unpublished, in a limbo of the lost.
By 1998, Ellison and I already knew each other. We’d had our first encounter six years earlier, not long after I arrived back in California, when a friend and I sent out a call for submissions to a journal we were editing. We’d published two small issues and were planning a sizable expansion for the third: an oversize paperback, 8½ x 11 inches, 160 pages, perfect-bound. I can see now—cannot help but see now—how this if not mirrored then to some extent echoed Ellison’s aspirations for The Last Dangerous Visions. As it happened, our project would become an encumbrance of its own.
At the time, however, we were excited. We had acquired a directory of celebrity addresses that included many authors, and we meant to use it, to break out of our group of friends and acquaintances and raise the profile of the magazine. Among the writers we approached was Ellison, who was alone in neither ignoring us nor sending back a generic dismissal. Instead, he responded with a call. It was a Saturday, just after lunch. I answered without any idea who might be on the line.
“Hello?” I said into the receiver.
“This is Harlan Ellison,” came the fast, high-pitched reply.
“What?” I said or thought or maybe just imagined. Then he mentioned our solicitation letter, and I began to understand that this was really him.
I knew about Ellison’s reputation for sharp elbows. The stories were legion. He was “an ogre,” according to a colleague at the alt-weekly where I was working; she had run afoul of him while reporting a story, and he had screamed at her. He had sued director James Cameron to get him to add Ellison’s name to the credits of The Terminator, acknowledging the influence of an early teleplay. Once, it was said, he had leapt across a conference table to take a swing at Irwin Allen, then a television executive and later the producer of disaster films including The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Most memorably, he’d tangled with Ol’ Blues Eyes one evening in a Beverly Hills club. The encounter was captured by Gay Talese in his 1966 Esquire profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
“Look, is there any reason why you’re talking to me?” Ellison said to Sinatra after the singer made fun of his boots.
“I don’t like the way you’re dressed,” Sinatra answered.
“Hate to shake you up,” Ellison snapped back, “but I dress to suit myself.”
On our phone call, he was animated but also gentle. Or perhaps he wanted to hear himself talk. He spent a few minutes complaining about editors who asked him to contribute without understanding what he wrote.
“I’ve been reading you since I was a kid,” I answered, mentioning his 1967 Hugo Award–winning story, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”
He didn’t seem to hear me, or perhaps he didn’t care. Either way, he went on to tell me about one editor who requested a story only to dismiss it as “not his dish of tea.”
“Not his dish of tea,” Ellison repeated, voice rising. “Not his fucking dish of tea. Can you believe that?”
“It won’t happen with us,” I reassured him. “We know your work.”
“Here’s what I’ll do,” he said, again talking past me. “Someone else has asked for a story, so I’m going to write one. After you reject it, I’ll send it to them.”
Three and a half hours later, I received, by fax, 10 neatly typed pages, a set of fragments that connected its narrator’s life from childhood to contemporaneous events. The title was “The Pale Silver Dollar of the Moon Pays Its Way and Makes Change,” and you can read it in Ellison’s 1997 collection, Slippage. “Doves have built a nest in a tree just outside the front door of my home,” he writes. “When I go out to put garbage in the cans, the mother bird sits among the cactus, watching me. I smile and try to reassure her that she’s safe.” There’s a tenderness to the writing, the sensibility—perhaps more than in anything else of his that I have read.
I called him back and said I was sorry to disappoint him, but we wanted the story for our magazine.
The moment is one I still muddle over, because of how its meaning has changed for me. As a young writer trying to figure out how to make my way, I imagined it as an emblem of resilience, of Ellison’s burning productivity. Hadn’t he published all those books and scripts and essays? (That included a television column, the Glass Teat, written for the Los Angeles Free Press.) He had composed this story in an afternoon. Even at my most efficient, such a feat might take a month or more. Not only that, but he was a person of his word. Once the story was accepted, he agreed to let us publish it—although, he cautioned, no edits were allowed. Eventually, it became part of our third and final issue, which appeared in 1996, after many difficulties and delays.
The Retrenchment
And yet, I’ve come to realize, there is much here that feels like a façade. The bluster, the gamesmanship, the endless talking—what drove it? What sat at its core? Even before he and I met, Ellison was well into what we might refer to as his retrospective years, “The Pale Silver Dollar of the Moon” to the contrary. This part of his career continued for as long as he and I remained in touch. In that regard, Slippage was an outlier: one of the few volumes of previously unavailable material to be published in the last three decades of his life. During this time, he busied himself with recapitulations, including the Edgeworks and Edgeworks Abbey series, which sought to gather more than 30 of his titles in uniform omnibus editions, although, not unlike The Last Dangerous Visions, both projects were left incomplete.
“Compared to the continuous flow of fiction in the first half of his career,” Michael Dean wrote in an obituary for the Comics Journal, “his later years seem like a half-hearted trickle…and the ratio of new, original stories to recycled ones began to favor the reprints.” In part, this had to do with the control he thought he needed, which was also the source of his dictum about edits.
As Straczynski, the literary executor, recalls, “Harlan had gotten tired of dealing with editors and mainstream publishers, because he always had very specific ideas of how his books were to be done, and editors didn’t always want to do that. So he began doing these self-published situations.” At the same time, Ellison’s approach here signaled a retrenchment, what I have come to imagine as a turning from the world. “You had to know how to find them,” the executor elaborates. “They weren’t in bookstores. He was selling them to the same group of fans.”
Here, too, is where The Last Dangerous Visions becomes important. For Straczynski, it is the most visible element of a new initiative, intended not only to reanimate this ghost book but also to burnish (or, more accurately, refashion) Ellison’s legacy. Its publication marks the culmination of four issues and reissues, which include new editions of Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions and began in March with the release of Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits. Edited by Straczynski, the latter gathers 19 pieces of short fiction, which together span the author’s career. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” “The Deathbird,” “Jeffty Is Five,” “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”: These are the stories on which I grew up, the ones that turned my head around. Particularly gratifying is the inclusion of Mefisto in Onyx, a novella published in 1993 in a limited edition and later collected in Slippage. It is, perhaps, Ellison’s last great effort, the story of a telepath tricked into saving a serial killer whose ancient and undying soul has animated so many others like him across the centuries: Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Bathory, Jack the Ripper, Albert Fish, Ed Gein, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy.
The turn at the end is signature, as is the novella’s mix of empathy and virulence, its portrait of a character ultimately destroyed by his desire to do right—dichotomies that center Ellison’s most essential work. “I had said for years, ‘You should really do a best-of collection,’” Straczynski told me. “He was afraid that if he did that and pulled the anchors out, there would be no reason to buy the main books.”
Am I alone in perceiving in that reticence some aspect of these oppositions also, the contrasts and contradictions that underscored Ellison’s life?
Harlan Ellison’s House
Straczynski and I met one afternoon in early August. As I had on earlier visits to Ellison Wonderland, I drove Benedict Canyon to Mulholland—passing, along the way, Cielo Drive, where Sharon Tate and four others had fallen prey to the darkness, the ugly spirit, channeled by Mefisto in Onyx. Then I turned south, parking on the slope above Ellison’s house. The exterior was as I remembered: the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, a construction with a wall of hieroglyphs (Ellison had used them, he once confided, to post pointed messages to his neighbors in an invented language none of them could decode); the row of gargoyles, half a dozen of them, modeled on Watergate conspirators, abutting the entryway. “Never mind the dog, beware of the owner,” read a small brass plaque screwed into the wall next to the door. Inside, Straczynski ushered me to the kitchen, where a triad of Superman plates, one reproducing the cover image of Action Comics No. 1, were displayed above the sink beside a 12-piece set of Disney dishware, each with a character representing a zodiac sign. On a cabinet over the stove, a Spider-Man action figure dangled, as if primed to leap. Figurines and tchotchkes covered every surface. It was like stepping inside a mausoleum or a monument. Or better yet, Ellison’s very own wonder cabinet.
“Harlan didn’t just create his own personal ecosystem, his own terrarium,” Straczynski said in reference to the home. “He created a work of art that needs to be preserved. One of his favorite movies was Lost Horizon, and in Shangri-La were kept all the things that gave you joy. All the great art, all the great music. As you wander through this house, you will see those things.”
We sat at the semicircular table in the breakfast nook to continue our conversation. Atop the glass surface was Ellison’s typewriter. Part of the plan, Straczynski went on, was to restore the house, so visitors might “have a chance to walk into Harlan’s brain.” I laughed at that, because I had often imagined the place in just these terms. Everything was here: the collectibles, many kept since childhood; the manuscripts and books and files. It was an obsessive’s lair, facing the mountains while turning a blind eye to the street. The feeling was as if, in this place, recollection had been rendered three-dimensional, as if it were a memory palace where everything might be preserved. The ethos was one of self-protection; there was a reason why nearly all of the half dozen or so encounters I’d had with Ellison had taken place inside this house. The exception had been the last time, in 2013, at a publication party for a small-press reissue of his earliest short fiction, rough stories about juvenile delinquents, originally published, for the most part, under pseudonyms. The event had begun at a 1950s-style barbershop in Hollywood, at which Ellison arrived in the back of a period hot rod. He was manic that day, as if playing a part in public, posing for photos while brandishing a switchblade, complaining about the ubiquity of smartphones. “The great curse of coming out and appearing in public is that everything you say will end up on one of those disgusting handheld devices,” he declared.
Ellison Wonderland had represented a refuge from all that; protected by its walls, he could occupy a universe of his own. For a speculative writer and futurist, he was also a Luddite, a position his work often reflects. “On the third day,” he writes in the 1965 story “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman,” “we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carcasses of ancient computer banks.” Reading that sentence now, I am struck by the grim satisfaction it affords. Even in later life, after all, Ellison had no real digital fingerprint. “He was comfortable with that,” Straczynski said, laughing. “He liked the physical sensation of the key hitting the paper, that the story was being told in front of him and slammed out letter by letter. That dynamic really appealed to him.” Ellison gave this his own spin during our 2011 conversation. “I’m old; I’m not senile,” he insisted, with no small degree of triumphalism. “I still work on a manual typewriter. It’s not even electric because electric can’t keep up with me. I only use two fingers, and I go 120 words a minute. I have a landline. I’m not on Facebook. I’m not on Twitter. I don’t use the internet hardly at all. I can use a keyboard, but I can barely make a computer work.”
Even so, as time progressed, the dynamic of Ellison’s writing, its momentum, began to wane. The subject is one Straczynski addresses in a long piece called “Ellison Exegesis,” which appears at the start of The Last Dangerous Visions. There, he reveals not only his own story, and how he became literary executor, but also that by the mid-1970s, Ellison was finding it increasingly difficult to focus owing to undiagnosed bipolar disorder. The condition, Straczynski suggests, was one reason for his drop in productivity, as well as for the chaos already surrounding the unfinished anthology. The manuscript sat in Ellison’s office—a sprawling two-story space on the other side of the house behind an elaborately carved child-size wooden door—where “a waist-high freestanding wooden shelf…[lay] covered almost entirely by the hundred-plus short stories he [had] purchased…a total of nearly seven hundred thousand words.… Just the essays and introductions Harlan planned to write for the book would constitute at least one hundred thousand additional words.” It had come to represent, the executor adds, “the Mount Everest of his long career.”
There’s no way to read such a description without becoming anxious, without feeling overwhelmed. Add the fact that this was not a project being put together in private but one already under contract, the third volume in a trilogy eagerly awaited by the speculative fiction world, and the pressure must have seemed insurmountable. It could have only grown more so as Ellison’s creative stasis metastasized.
“The phrase he used a lot,” Straczynski told me, “was ‘like a monkey with his fist around a nut in a jar,’ who can’t pull it out and won’t let go. That was the ultimate problem. He had the nut in his hand, but he couldn’t pull it out and wouldn’t let it go. As year after year passed and the bipolar got worse, people pulled their stories out. That was understandable, but it was also a blow. People say, ‘It was an amazing collection.’ Well, two-thirds of the stories have been published now.”
Maintaining the integrity of the collection became one more challenge in completing the book, a task, Straczynski told me, that Ellison had asked him to see through. “He’d been talking,” he recalled, “about doing The Last Dangerous Visions in the last year or two of his life and was starting to make moves in that direction.” With Ellison’s death—and that, two years later, of his widow, Susan—the responsibility fell to Straczynski. The first step was to return to the initial two volumes and consider how they might be built upon. Next was to determine what stories remained available and whether they were relevant. The process was like restoring a silent movie. Or no, not restoring, since it was still a work in progress and a lot had changed in 50 years. More accurate, then, to describe the process as one of reshooting and recutting, of remaking the film from scratch.
A Living Document
Ultimately, The Last Dangerous Visions would come in at a tidy 450 pages and feature 32 never-before-published pieces, the majority of which had been selected by Ellison at different times in his drawn-out process. Straczynski solicited and selected the remainder, as he writes in his afterword, to “explore what constitutes a dangerous vision in 2024.” As to what that means, he elaborates: “Harlan had always seen The Last Dangerous Visions as a living document. He didn’t want [it] to be an archaeological curiosity, a dry and dusty artifact of another age, with no bearing on the present. He wanted it to be raw and relevant and absolutely of the moment.”
The writers added to the book include Max Brooks, David Brin, Cory Doctorow, Cecil Castellucci, and Kayo Hartenbaum, the latter of whom had never been published before. The result is—how could it be otherwise?—a grab bag, astonishing and anticlimactic by turns. As a reader once stunned by Ellison’s ambition, I felt a little let down by the book’s less-than-epic shape. All the same, I understood, maybe more than I cared to know, the difficulty of finishing. Wasn’t the fate of The Last Dangerous Visions, after all, akin to my experience? I had wanted to write about it for nearly as long as I’d lived in California, but my attempts, such as they were, had been mercurial or fraught. In the 1990s, Ellison had turned me down, and our 2011 interview had failed to yield a piece. Then, of course, there was the magazine, the third issue of which had taken four years to produce.
We never did a fourth.
What I’m saying is that all of us have projects that get away from us. Projects and people, both. We do what we can, but sometimes all that’s left to do is persevere. Ellison understood that. By Straczynski’s account, his last years were harrowing, particularly after he was incapacitated by a stroke in 2014. As for me, I choose to remember an earlier version of him, that of the writer who called me one afternoon in 1992 and let me talk him into writing a story I could use. Two years later, I was invited for the first time to Ellison Wonderland, which I mentioned to Straczynski as we moved out of the kitchen and into Ellison’s office, stooping as we passed through that irregular wooden doorway. To step in was like entering the landscape of a fairy tale, a place of memory and myth. On the other side, everything was as I recollected: pool table covered with clippings and papers, movie posters lining the ceiling and the crossbeams, great racks of books and records rising to the rafters from the floor.
I don’t want to say I could feel his presence. But I kept thinking about that initial visit, with some friends from another small magazine Ellison had championed and my wife, Rae, who was four and a half months pregnant with our first child. Ellison was cooking chili that afternoon, which was a specialty of his, as I recall. When he learned Rae was a vegetarian, however, he went out of his way to prepare a separate batch without meat. There’s a manic intensity to such an act, and it is true that he went on to spend the afternoon regaling us with various dramas, screening a video in which he had been interviewed, talking over the soundtrack in a real-time echo of himself. Here, though, is what I remember most. Just before we left, he began to talk about his lemons, asking Rae if she would like to take some home. She demurred, but he would not take no for an answer, and so we followed him out into the yard, where, with a citrus picker, he plucked enough lemons to fill a grocery bag. I couldn’t tell you what we did with the citrus; it’s another narrative I can’t complete. No, all I have is this, just one last and lasting image: Ellison in Wonderland, pulling, like some sort of gleeful madman, all those lemons from the trees.•
