Reviews

Again, Dangerous Visions 2 by Harlan Ellison

dee9401's review against another edition

2.0

The final piece, by James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Hastings Bradley), “The Milk of Paradise”, was the only great story. Her works are always interesting and often the best around. Without this, I’d have given this volume one star without hesitation. The piece by Ben Bova, “Zero Gee”, was okay. The rest was just horrific. Volume one of Again, Dangerous Visions, was also a collection of mostly awful stories with a few stellar pieces (Russ, Wilhelm & Le Guin).

kundor's review against another edition

3.0

Avoid reading Ellison’s intros or the authors’ afterwords. It can be difficult, particularly with the afterwords, which follow directly after the story with no break. Half of these consist of the authors complaining that they ended the stories where they wanted to, and anything else is superfluous and destroys the experience they constructed, and the other half are superfluous and destroy the experience of the story. In the book’s introduction (which you may also skip)
Ellison acknowledges that not every reader might want to have the stories flattened and explicated into banality, and says people “should skip over them.” Have you tried not reading something which follows right after stuff you are reading, Mr. Ellison? It’s not always easy. And it’s unpleasant having to jump around and avert your eyes all the time.

The stories:

• Soundless Evening (Lee Hoffman): I have to assume the author has no children, or the idea that babies take up little space and are a very small drain on the world's resources wouldn't wash. Who'd change all those diapers for no payoff?



• Splotch (Gahan Wilson): Amusing.



• The Test-tube Creature, Afterward (Joan Bernott): Awful. "Tom looks at art. Tom plays chess with his cat. Tom turns down a date. Tom imagines killing his cat." WHO CARES.



• And the Sea Like Mirrors (Gregory Benford): Good. Unusually alien aliens are interesting.



• Bed Sheets Are White (Evelyn Lief): Juvenile.



• Tissue (James Sallis): Just stupid.



• Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon (Josephine Saxton): This is readable, and set in a consistent world, and has some point (making three major improvements over "Tissue.") Kind of like "Harrison Bergeron."



• Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home (Ken McCullough): Not sf. Just a story about a pet tick that gets really fat and dies.



• Epiphany for Aliens (David Kerr): Pretty good.



• Eye of the Beholder (Burt Filer): Also pretty good. Suffers from the delusion that understanding something somehow makes it less poetic.



• Moth Race (Richard Hill): Wow it's the Hunger Games



• In re Glover (Leonard Tushnet): Worthwhile—a reasonable prediction of the contortions of the legal institutions if cryogenics takes off. It's more like an extended abstract than an actual story, though.


• Zero Gee (Ben Bova): Unfortunately, although this book purports to showcase the greatness of new works by unknown writers, it mostly confirms that the old standbys really are better. This story and the Gregory Benford story are the best of the lot so far.



• A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village (Dean Koontz): Wait, Dean Koontz?



• Getting Along (J Blish): The joke is that the lady likes to have sex



• Totenbüch (A. Parra (y Figuerado)): One of the many things I thought was stupid about Plato was the idea that, just as consuming rotten food is bad for your body, reading bad stories is bad for your mind. “New ideas can’t make you worse,” I said. Well, perhaps I was wrong: reading “Totenbüch” damages you.



• Things Lost (Thomas Disch): Pretty good



• With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama (Richard Lupoff): The beginning is extremely off-putting. I very nearly gave up on reading this story, on the grounds that anyone who thinks that making their prose indecipherable makes it worthwhile by the very labor the reader is forced through is doubtful to say anything actually worthwhile. But I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did. The language changes section by section, with most of it quite readable, and even the horrible N’Alabaman dialect eventually clears up: you pick up the cadence after a while. In this case, there actually IS a story worth the effort of reaching it: don’t give up!



• Lamia Mutable (M. John Harrison): Oh geez terrible



• Last Train to Kankakee (Robin Scott): Amusing.



• Empire of the Sun (Andrew Weiner): This does not make a big impression. A 5-page “meh.”


• Ozymandias (Terry Carr): Actually good. And the afterword (you won’t succeed in skipping them) is interesting and avoid destroying the story, for once.



• The Milk of Paradise (James Tiptree, Jr): OK, in the intro (I didn’t succeed in skipping all the intros either) Ellison says “Tiptree is the man to beat this year. Wilhelm is the woman to beat, but Tiptree is the man.”
  What? How can…what? Either Ellison was being really obtuse, or just being a jerk, but either way, I can’t figure out why you would say that.
  
  As to the story itself: decent! We end on a strong note.
  
  Like many of the afterwords, this one focuses on how it shouldn’t be there, and puts it well: “Reading an afterword is like watching a stoned friend sail onto an interstate expressway. One can’t help looking and one is seldom made happy.”

flying_monkey's review

1.0

I probably first read this a long time ago, but if so, I forgot how utterly atrocious this collection is. With the exception of Ursula Le Guin's superb novellette, The Word for the World is Forest, and the odd interesting story (Tiptree Jr.), this successor to the far superior Dangerous Visions represents everything that was bad about 'boundary-pushing' science fiction of the late 1960s and early 70s. Just as prog-rock provides the obvious rationale for punk and new wave, so this kind of the science fiction provides the explanation (and indeed the necessity) for the emergence of cyberpunk, feminist SF and a whole lot more. The main 'danger' provided by the stories seems to be either self-indulgence or heterosexual white men fantasizing about being able to get away with even more of what heterosexual white men get away with. It's made infinitely worse by the editor's interminable, blokey, inside-jokey, and altogether insufferable introductions to each story - he's great friends with all the authors and admires all their lovely, perky wives, don't you know? - and the introduction to the book itself, which basically expounds upon Harlan Ellison's favourite subject - himself and how brilliant he is - at even greater length. I'm not generally in favour of book burnings, but if all existing copies of this book happened to fall into a pit of fire, the world would lose nothing.