Jerry's Reviews > Again, Dangerous Visions

I read this collection a long, long time ago, as a teenager, checking it out of a very small-town public library. Harlan Elllison’s bragging about providing a place for things that couldn’t be published elsewhere because it’s too intelligent for hicksville libraries, the mass of fandom, and the publishers who cater to them is no worse than it was in the first Dangerous Visions. But it’s a lot more annoying because along with his praising of the pieces in the first volume that received awards from fandom, he also raves about a piece that shows up in the back which, after it had been accepted for Again, Dangerous Visions was the target of a bidding war by said publishers.

The fact that when I first read this, I checked it out as a minor from a rural library is just icing on the cake.

The one story I remember is Piers Anthony’s In the Barn but that probably has as much to do with the effect of the conflicting prurience of the story on my teenage male mind as with the quality of the writing. It’s a very good story, as are most of them here. That this is the only one I remember may give Ellison some support for his bragging; unlike the previous collection’s stories, I don’t recall reading any of these in other, later collections, though I’m sure some of them must have been collected. They are good.

I have a suspicion James Cameron read this book and forgot about all the stories as well: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest is strikingly similar to Cameron’s Avatar.

Ellison is right, I think, on saving the James Tiptree story for best-for-last, though his praise for the story is retroactively humorous (for that, see Julie Phillips’s fascinating James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of). Milk of Paradise is a sad and touching story slightly reminiscent of Lovecraft’s The Quest of Iranon.

A strong case could be made for Dean R. Koontz’s A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village as the best of this book, too. It’s a semi-horror story about one of the few people for whom the telepathic enhancements that the rest of the world got didn’t take. The government tries to take care of this stunted minority and fails as badly as they did with disciplinary problems in the schools Koontz worked in.

In general, while the book doesn’t live up to its hype, there are some very good stories in here. And Ellison, when he’s not ranting about how hard it is to publish stories like these, has great anecdotes about the authors. His introductions, as in the first book, are a large novella in themselves.