wot i red on my hols by alan robson (periculosus ultissimus)

Last At Last

I never thought I’d live to see the day when I could write a review of The Last Dangerous Visions. But the book has actually been published at long last (!), and so, much to my surprise, I can finally review it. It appeared in the shops on 1st October 2024. I read it immediately and impatiently. Goodness me!

If you are already familiar with the history of the various Dangerous Visions books, you might want to skip the next section and join me again after the break...

In 1967 Harlan Ellison edited and published Dangerous Visions, a collection of 33 previously unpublished stories which Harlan claimed were far too "dangerous" to have been printed in more mainstream publications. This claim was largely Harlan’s usual hyperbole of course – many of the stories have subsequently been republished in other mainstream collections which suggests that maybe they weren’t all that dangerous after all. But, of course, that idea might be a product of the wisdom of hindsight. Certainly there is no doubt that when the book first appeared in 1967 it was seen as controversial, dangerous, visionary and ground-breaking.

Reviewers and critics alike, both then and later, have noted that the anthology helped to introduce the ideas of the British "new wave" of SF to an American audience. So to that extent there might be some truth in Harlan’s claim that the stories really were (unpublishably) dangerous, given the perceived unfamiliarity of the new wave to American readers. It must have taken a lot of unwary readers a little bit by surprise.

Harlan’s anthology was not the first American publication to concentrate on the new wave (Judith Merril’s England Swings SF can probably claim that honour) but it was certainly the most influential. Both American and, to a lesser extent British, science fiction and fantasy publishing were irrevocably changed by Dangerous Visions. Perhaps it can legitimately be said that the stories actually paved the way for their own later acceptance by the mainstream, though that might be such a circular argument that it would probably not pay to examine it too closely! As far as I can tell, Dangerous Visions has been continuously in print since 1967, and that fact speaks for itself.

By the standards of the day it was a truly massive tome. My copy of the first British paperback edition was published in three volumes. Each story had an introduction by Harlan putting the story in its literary / historical context. Furthermore, each story also had an afterword by the author giving some information about how the story came to be written. Harlan’s essays and, to an extent, the authors’ afterwords were insightful and often quite funny. Some people have claimed that they were much more entertaining than the stories themselves! Certainly they were often considerably longer that the stories they discussed.

In 1972, Harlan returned to the idea with Again Dangerous Visions. This collection contained 45 stories. Again, all were introduced by Harlan and again each story had an afterword by the author. Unlike the first volume, some authors had more than one story in the book – Gene Wolfe had three stories, and Bernard Wolfe (no relation) and James Sallis had two stories each. The book was perhaps a little less influential than its predecessor, but that was mainly because the times had moved on and much that had once seemed controversial was now commonly accepted.

Both the Dangerous Visions collections have won several awards in their own right and many of the individual stories have won awards as well. By any measure that you care to use, the books were extraordinarily successful.

I  must admit that even when the books first appeared, I never thought of the stories as being particularly dangerous in and of themselves. To an extent that was because I’m simply not a pearl clutcher – I really don’t get offended by stories that stray outside of the societal norms. Indeed, I’m not even sure just what the societal norms might actually be in any given context, so it’s rather hard for me to feel involved with them. Trigger warnings are completely wasted on me. Absolutely nothing in fiction triggers me. It’s a story, it isn’t real life. I can tell the difference, but it seems that not everybody can.

Furthermore, when the Dangerous Visions books were published I, being British, was already very familiar with the new wave and as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t a particularly new fangled thing at all. All that the new wave writers were doing was applying already tried, true and tested literary techniques from the mainstream of literature to a genre that had, up until then, largely ignored them. Because I was already quite well read in the literary mainstream I was more than happy to accept unreliable narrators, multi-layered stream of consciousness and stylistic experimentation when they started to creep into my SF. New wave SF began to insist that it was much more interested in inner space that it was in outer space. Engineering was giving way to psychology, a progression that I found quite admirable. All of these things meant that I didn’t find anything at all controversial in the visions that Harlan was presenting me with. On the contrary, I was very much in favour of it, very supportive.

That’s not to say that I ate everything that was served up on my literary plate with the same gusto, of course. "Riders of the Purple Wage" by Philip Jose Farmer (in Dangerous Visions) and "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" by Richard A. Lupoff (in Again Dangerous Visions) are so stylistically weird as to be almost impossible to make sense of. And if you do manage to break on through to the other side of the stylistic strangeness they both turn out largely to be made up of rather routine thud and blunder. Does that make them dangerous? Does style invariably trump substance? Who knows? Certainly not me…

In Again Dangerous Visions Harlan announced that the Dangerous Visions experiment would be completed with the publication of a third collection to be called The Last Dangerous Visions. The world sat back and waited with bated breath. And waited, And waited. And waited some more…

Harlan kept making promises of imminent publication, but nothing ever appeared. Harlan published several (mutually contradictory) tables of contents for The Last Dangerous Visions in various fanzines. Stories that Harlan bought for the anthology came to the end of their contractual life and the authors re-claimed them and published them elsewhere. Harlan bought new stories from other authors to replace them. Many authors died, their Dangerous Visions stories still unpublished. Harlan bought more stories. New writers began to make reputations for themselves. Harlan bought stories for The Last Dangerous Visions from them. And still the anthology remained unpublished. Meanwhile Harlan kept buying stories...

Christopher Priest sold a story called "An Infinite Summer" to Harlan but as the years passed and The Last Dangerous Visions failed to appear he, rather acrimoniously, withdrew the story and wrote a lengthy, and at times quite vicious, critique of Harlan’s failure to complete the project. This was published in 1987 as The Last Deadloss Visions. It proved to be so popular that two more editions were produced each containing more material taken from other people’s interactions with Harlan over The Last Dangerous Visions. In 1994 Christopher Priest further expanded the book and re-titled it as The Book on the Edge of Forever. Ironically this last version was actually nominated for a Hugo Award.

On 1st April 2010 Jo Walton published a review of The Last Dangerous Visions, making up a semi-spurious table of contents and reviewing each story. She complained that the book had come out over budget and ten years late. She claimed that it would never have appeared at all if Roger Elwood (sic) hadn’t stepped in to do the heavy lifting on Harlan’s behalf. It’s an eerily prescient joke which got so much almost completely correct that it will doubtless confuse future humourless and innumerate literary historians who can’t read dates. Jo must have been working from one of Harlan’s many tables of contents because some of the stories she "reviews" did actually appear in the real edition when it turned up fourteen years after her clever joke was published. Unsurprisingly, the actual stories bear little resemblance to her descriptions of them. This too, I feel, will serve to confuse the literati...

Jo clearly felt herself to be on very safe ground with her clever review because The Last Dangerous Visions continued to remain unpublished. Harlan was still busy buying stories...

Harlan Ellison died on the 28th of June 2018 with The Last Dangerous Visions still unpublished. Almost to the end, he continued to buy stories for the anthology.

On November 13, 2020, the Ellison estate's literary executor J. Michael Straczynski announced that he would oversee the project to publish the book. He was as good as his word and The Last Dangerous Visions finally appeared on the 1st of October 2024 more than fifty years after the first announcement of its imminent publication…

And now we return you to our main programme:
wot I red on my hols

The Last Dangerous Visions contains 31 stories by 24 authors. Eight of these stories (referred to as Intermezzos in the table of contents) are a series of rather pointless vignettes by D. M. Rowse. They are scattered randomly throughout the text.

It turns out that one of the major stumbling blocks on the road to publication was that Harlan Ellison simply couldn’t bring himself to write the editorial introductions that he felt were such an integral part of the Dangerous Visions concept. In all the years that he worked on the project he only managed to complete one of these – the introduction to "War Stories" by Edward Bryant.  Straczynski himself has written the (very brief) introductions and afterwords to all the other stories. Consequently, in this volume the stories are really left to speak for themselves, uncluttered by Harlan’s editorial material. I suspect that this might be a strength rather than a weakness.

Some of the stories are from Harlan’s original purchases and some are stories commissioned later by Straczynski. As the years passed Harlan lost control over a lot of the original stories that he purchased because the contracts lapsed and authors re-claimed their material. Obviously there was no way that Straczynski could include these stories in the collection. Many stories that the project still owned were rejected, sometimes by Harlan himself, when he was still actively working on the book, and later by Straczynski. They felt that time and circumstance had caught up with those stories so that they no longer seemed to fit into the theme.

And then there was the sad case of Vonda N. McIntyre. Vonda had sold a story to Harlan for The Last Dangerous Visions. As the years passed she deliberately refused to re-claim her story. She really, really, really wanted to be a part of the Dangerous Visions project. Vonda died in 2019 with her story still unpublished. When J. Michael Straczynski approached Vonda’s literary executors they refused to give him permission to publish her story which, of course, directly contradicted her often expressed wishes. Poor Vonda. I don’t suppose we’ll ever see her Dangerous Visions story now…

By far the longest (and most interesting) piece in the book is "Ellison Exegesis" by J. Michael Straczynski himself. This is a long essay describing Straczynski’s close personal relationship with Harlan. It tells us about the real Harlan Ellison as opposed to the public persona that most of us knew him by and it analyses the reasons for the long delay in publishing The Last Dangerous Visions. Harlan, Straczynski tells us, spent his whole life struggling with his mental health. He suffered from bipolar disorder which increasingly made it harder and harder for him to concentrate on anything for very long. By the time that he needed to start working seriously on The Last Dangerous Visions his attention span was so short that he was almost incapable of writing anything of any great length. If he couldn’t write it in a day or two, he simply couldn’t write it at all. The editorial effort of constructing introductions to all of the stories that he’d bought was a massive project that would have taken him many months. It was completely beyond him.

I think that the revelations about Harlan’s mental health explain a lot about his career. He wrote one or two (not very good) novels in his younger days, but his fame rested on the large number of brilliant short stories (and the occasional novella) that made up his life’s work. I asked him once why he didn’t write novels, why he seemed to be content with just working at much shorter lengths. He pulled a face and said something about novels just being padded out short stories so why not make your point in a short, pithy story rather than rambling on at longer lengths? There was enough artistic truth in that statement that I was happy to accept it from him, but clearly, in light of  Straczynski’s revelations, there was a lot more than that going on. In his response to my question Harlan was both recognising and rationalising his own limitations. Full marks to him for that, but what a shame that he chose to accept his condition and consistently refused to seek treatment for it.

Harlan’s mental health continued to deteriorate as he grew older and Straczynski relates several bizarre anecdotes which show how Harlan was slowly beginning to lose touch with reality. More and more he failed correctly to read the social cues in the situations in which he was involved. Consequently he started to behave in odd, irrational and sometimes very offensive ways. Straczynski tried to explain to Harlan just why his behaviour was becoming unacceptable but he says that Harlan simply didn’t understand what he had done wrong and was completely surprised at the suggestion that he might have overstepped the mark. This increasingly erratic behaviour culminated in an incident at the 2006 Hugo Award ceremony when Harlan openly groped Connie Willis’ breast on stage in full public view.

Connie has never really said anything publicly about the incident. I suspect that she might have recognised that Harlan was struggling with his mental health and she didn’t want to say anything that might have made that struggle harder for Harlan to cope with. I have absolutely no evidence for this, but I have met Connie and she struck me as being a very understanding, warm and empathic person, so I would not be at all surprised if this was indeed the case.

Straczynski’s long essay is often quite hard to read because of the way that it exposes Harlan’s real personality and frailties to the world. For the first time that I am aware of, this essay provides an explanation for the contradictory nature of the man who was Harlan Ellison. And it tells us the reasons why the largest and most important project he ever embarked upon ultimately defeated him. It’s a sad and and yet at the same time strangely moving tale.

But what of the stories in The Last Dangerous Visions? When all is said and done, it is the stories that define this collection, rather than Harlan’s efforts to bring it together. As always, for reasons I have already explained, I remain unconvinced that the stories in the collection are as dangerous as the theme suggests. I’m not even sure that some of the stories are actually stories at all. They seem to be more like outlines than like actual stories or perhaps they are best seen as meditations on a motif – style taking the place of substance once again; a common trope of the new wave. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy the collection. I did enjoy it. I enjoyed it a lot. But I can’t help thinking that I’d have enjoyed it a lot more fifty years ago when the stories really would have stood head and shoulders above the competition. Now it’s just another story collection, albeit a rather good one. It’s no longer as special as it would have been once upon a time.

Neal Stephenson’s new novel Polostan represents a bit of a departure for him. It is a perfectly straightforward historical novel with no fantastical elements in it whatsoever. He’s never written anything quite like it before. Several reviewers have remarked on this, only to find themselves shouted down by internet idiots who point to Cryptonomican and The Baroque Cycle and say, "So there!" in tones of deepest satisfaction as if they have just proved a point. I can only assume that either the internet idiots have not actually read Cryptonomican and The Baroque Cycle or they have read the books but have completely failed to understand the text that flowed in through their eyeballs. Certainly those novels are historical novels (in a very broad sense), but the historical aspects of the stories are layered over the top of a foundation of fantasy that itself provides the motivation for the surface events. For those who doubt me, I suggest that you go and re-read those novels, paying particular attention to the episodes involving Enoch Root, and then think carefully about what they mean and just who Enoch Root might possibly be. It is those episodes that disqualify Cryptonomican and The Baroque Cycle from consideration as straightforward historical epics.

Let me say it again, Polostan is a historical novel with no fantastical elements at all. It’s also bloody brilliant and I am eagerly anticipating the next few books in the series.

Polostan is the first instalment of what it is claimed will eventually be a trilogy of novels that have the overall title of Bomb Light. It will trace the development of the atomic bomb by concentrating on the social, political and scientific attitudes of the early to mid decades of the twentieth century which made the development of the bomb both necessary and possible. A summary like that makes the novel sound rather dull, but nothing could be further from the truth – the story is exciting, thoughtful, action packed and stuffed to overflowing with fascinating ideas and colourful characters. In short, it’s a novel by Neal Stephenson.

At the centre of the story is Dawn Rae Bjornberg. She was born in America to a mother who was a part of a clan of cowboy anarchists in Montana (if you can imagine such a thing), and a Russian father who is an enthusiastic Leninist. For ideological reasons, the family move to Russia at the start of the Russian revolution. Dawn herself is raised in Leningrad and her father re-christens her Aurora, naming her after the battleship that fired the opening shots of the revolution when the Winter Palace was stormed. Over the course of the novel we watch Dawn / Aurora evolve from a wide-eyed idealistic child of the revolution to a hardened, world weary and cynical KGB operative. It’s quite a transformation.

The early years of Aurora’s life are brilliantly evoked as she soaks up the heady atmosphere of post-revolutionary Russia where utopian dreams contrast sharply with brutal realities. The narrative is peppered with harsh and vivid details that make the struggle to create the world’s first perfect society feel utterly authentic.

But just as Aurora and her family are learning to live with the daily hardships of the revolution, her mother falls ill and the family returns to America. Dawn spends her teenage years in 1920s Montana where, as a kind of homage to Bonnie and Clyde (who were all the rage at the time), she finds herself embroiled in the last gasp of the Wild West as she takes part in bank robberies and (believe it or not) learns how to play polo.

But the spectre of her father's revolutionary past is never very far away, and soon enough she is drawn deeply into the tumultuous world of Depression-era radical politics where various left wing / socialist / unionist / communist groups form a loose alliance with the aim of fomenting revolution in the streets of Washington D.C. They have a rather mixed success...

On the run from the forces of law and order, Aurora / Dawn returns to the Soviet Union. By now it is a very different place from the one she remembers from her childhood. The original revolutionary zeal is largely dead, though lip service is still paid to it. It has been replaced with the paranoia, cynicism and doublethink of the Stalinist dictatorship. Every conversation is laden with a potentially deadly subtext as the government consolidates its power and the bureaucracy strangles free thinking. You must toe the party line or you simply don’t survive.

Following a severe interrogation, Aurora / Dawn is recruited into what will eventually come to be known as the KGB. She returns to America as a Soviet spy though, being very much a creature of two worlds, it’s hard to say exactly where her loyalties really lie. Doubtless we’ll learn more about that in the later novels…

Polostan is crammed with fascinating detail and digressions that later turn out to be very important indeed. Pay careful attention to Stephenson’s lectures on the minutiae of polo strategy – believe it or not, the information is vitally important. After all, the clue is right in front of your eyes, hiding in plain sight in the title of the book – the title is (of course) a reference to the Red Army’s women’s polo team. Now there’s a surreal image if ever there was one. Why does the Red Army need a women’s polo team?

Woven in and out of the text are lots of detailed discussions about early 20th century physics and along the way we meet some of the physicists who were starting to turn more traditional scientific thinking on its head as the century progressed. This too will become very important as the development of the atomic bomb starts to loom large in later volumes.

The prose is dense, erudite, and absolutely stuffed with very sly humour. Stephenson is particularly good at bringing historical figures to life with just a few brief words. His pen portraits of the dangerous mad men Lavrentiy Beria and Joseph Stalin (in Russia) and George S. Patton (in America) are gloriously creepy and menacing.

The novel doesn’t quite have the traditional cast of thousands, but a very large number of characters do come and go. It’s rather hard to keep track of them and it’s equally hard to know whether or not you need to. Will one or more of the dozens of minor players who appear for only a scene or two before vanishing from view come back later in more important roles? For example, at one point Dawn meets a physics student, named only as Dick in the text, with whom she has a brief affair and who takes it upon himself to explain some of Niels Bohr’s more esoteric ideas to her. He seems to be just an authorial mouthpiece, there only to give more context to some fairly abstract thinking about physics. But it is quite clear from context that he is actually Richard Feynman and he will certainly have a major role to play in future instalments. I suspect that similar things may well be true of other "minor" characters that I failed to identify from context.

While Polostan is presented as just (just? Ha!) a work of historical fiction, it's actually a lot more than that, much deeper than simply a dramatisation of the events that defined the shape of the twentieth century. It is a very layered narrative, full of meditations on the nature of power, how power manifests itself and what motivates those who actively seek it out. Are they idealists or self-serving pragmatists? Is there really a difference between those two things and, if there is a difference, what makes the one change so often into the other?

Polostan is a remarkable achievement. It’s a novel that manages to be a gripping page-turner on the surface with a serious work of literature hiding beneath the words and the actions. As a result, it is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally satisfying.