Episode 55.4 transcription - "Dangerous Visions", vol. 3, part 2 (1967)

(listen to episode on Spotify) 

(music: space ambiance)

John Brunner - "Judas" 

JM:

Hello, and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature/history podcast.

I am JM, and I’m here with my wonderful co-hosts Nate and Gretchen, and we are back discussing "Dangerous Visions".

You can find us on your favorite podcasting platforms, Apple, all that good stuff, YouTube as well. And of course, we have our Blogspot, chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com, where you can find translations of mostly Russian and Spanish works and also some never-before-properly-digitized works that we have and will cover on the podcast in the future.

You can write us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com, and we are also on Twitter at @ChrononautsSF.

And we are indeed back to talk about "Dangerous Visions" for the fourth and final time. So we are going to discuss the final stories in Volume Three of "Dangerous Visions". We’ve had to split everything up because there is a lot of content and a lot of stuff to go through.

So thanks to Nate for all the hard work assembling all this material.

So we will be talking about the final stories, and then at the end we’ll have some reflections and remarks. And there will be a lot to say because this has been a hell of a journey.

So buckle up, and here we go.

All right, next we have "Judas" by John Brunner.

Okay, so I’ve got a little bit of familiarity with John Brunner. I’ll just make a few comments here and do a little bit of bio because I think Brunner is somebody that I’ve considered bringing up on the podcast at different points. Thought about "Stand on Zanzibar", at least.

So yes, "Judas" by John Brunner.

So John Brunner was born in Oxfordshire in 1934. He’s one of our English writers. He had a start when he was quite young, made his first American sale under a pen name in 1953, I believe. And essentially early on, he was doing a lot of kind of space-opera-type stuff. I’ve read a little bit. I read the book "The Atlantic Abomination", which I would say, even though it has a lot akin to a B-movie creature feature, I quite enjoy it.

But I guess most people would agree that later on in the ’60s is when he kind of developed his true style. And he wrote these books that some people would consider masterpieces. They were quite experimental, definitely part of the so-called New Wave. 

Although Brunner, being an English writer, apparently wasn’t that well respected by his peers over there because they viewed his themes and settings as being too American. So I don’t know. That’s kind of interesting.

He’s kind of like the opposite of John Sladek, because John Sladek was an American who went to England and earned his respect there among that little "New Worlds" crowd. But they didn’t seem to have a lot of time for Brunner.

But his novels, basically starting with "Stand on Zanzibar", which was published in 1968 and won the Hugo Award in 1969, is basically concerned with overpopulation and uses sort of a kind of fragmentary technique.

I think I described it once as sitting in a dim hotel room late at night, possibly on coke, channel surfing. All these really tiny short scenes intercut with lots of world-building.

And apparently he was influenced by the "U.S.A." trilogy by John Dos Passos, which I don’t really know anything about. 

He essentially wrote four books in this kind of style. The next one was "The Jagged Orbit", and that was concerned with weapons development and race relations in the U.S.A. "The Sheep Look Up", which deals with pollution and ecological destruction. And "The Shockwave Rider", which was published in 1975, and which I also read, and has to do with his ideas about what was happening with computing and the development of computer networking and stuff. In this book he coined the term "worm", basically creating the concept of computer viruses about ten years before it actually happened. So I would say maybe a precursor to cyberpunk, definitely, I guess.

Now, something happened to Brunner after that. Apparently he was always a sort of a difficult person to work with and didn’t get along well with his publishers. He had this idea that he could break into more mainstream-type writing, and he spent five years working on this massive historical-fiction work called "The Great Steamboat Race". During the time he was working on this, both the editor that bought the book and his agent died. When he finally did manage to get it published in 1983, it pretty much just sank without a trace.

It’s sad that he spent so many years working on this one project that it basically drained his finances and took a toll on his health. And it seemed like he never really recovered fully from that. He did write a few other things, including some other non-genre works.Like soon-to-be-discussed Samuel R. Delany, he did have some pornographic works published under pen names.

Essentially his death seems pretty sad. Robert Silverberg wrote extensively about this in his column "Reflections" in "Asimov’s Science Fiction". And he wrote a tribute to both Roger Zelazny and John Brunner in March 1996. And those two died within a couple months of one another, and they were both quite young. I believe John Brunner was 60 and Roger Zelazny was just 58.

While he describes Roger Zelazny as a happy man who experienced many triumphs, he portrays a very kind of sad picture of John Brunner. Brunner had made a convention appearance some years earlier where he pretty much—Silverberg said it was astonishingly sad. He basically described how his career had come to an end, and that he was hoping for some proofreading work so he could help pay the bills. Silverberg tried to kind of get some of his fellow writers and fans to try to help out Mr. Brunner, and nothing too much came of it. Actually he died in 1995 while attending the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, from a stroke.

In any case, he did this kind of to himself because he was on medication for his blood pressure, but apparently it interfered with his thinking. He was really trying to get started on writing again, and he wanted to make another big entry into science fiction and sort of try and get his career back on track. And it never happened.

So it is really sad because I can say for sure that "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Shockwave Rider" are pretty interesting, original and cool books, both kind of prescient and experimental. I quite like the "Traveller in Black" stories as well, at least what I read of them.

But this story, "Judas", is another kind of religiously themed story.

I thought this one was okay. What do you guys think of this?

Nate:

Yeah, that was decent. This is my first encounter with Brunner. I’ve always heard "Stand on Zanzibar" is supposed to be really good, but I’ve never read it.

So have you guys seen "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"?

Gretchen:

Yes.

Nate:

Yeah.

So there’s one scene—I guess spoilers if you’re listening and you haven’t seen the film, though I’d imagine among the movies that we’ve talked about, it’s, like, the most acclaimed film of its genre.

So I imagine most people would have seen this at some point.

But if you haven’t, skip ahead for 30 seconds or so to avoid the spoilers.

But one scene where this one guy is catching up with Tuco and gives a long monologue about how he’s going to get revenge for how he’s been wronged in the past, and Tuco just shoots him and says, "If you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk."

And that’s pretty much the scene that came to mind when I read this story.

JM:

Interesting.

You know what came to mind for me?

Nocturnus, the band.

Nate:

Yeah.

Yeah, Mike Browning just died. Did you hear about that?

JM:

Yeah.

Shooting Christ with a laser gun.

RIP Mike Browning. Not my favorite drummer, but still, Nocturnus was pretty, pretty cool.

But yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, I really liked the Morbid Angel stuff he was on too.

But yeah, I was listening to "The Key" and "Abominations of Desolation" earlier today.

Yeah, really, really good records.

But yeah, release the droids.

JM:

Yeah, his drumming is not very good.

I remember having a lot of disagreements with Nin back in the day about how Morbid Angel tightened up and picked up their speed when Mike Browning left.

But yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, I’d actually agree with Nin on that one. I really like Mike Browning as a drummer.

But yeah, that’s neither here nor there.

JM:

But anyway, back to the story.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I thought the story was okay.

I have also heard some really good things about "Stand on Zanzibar".

And I also had forgotten that he did "The Sheep Look Up", which is one that I remember hearing about quite a while ago and being interested in it.

And I think I would really prefer those works, just because it sounds like they seem to be embracing some of the experimental stuff that we’re seeing evolving in this anthology.

But this one just felt like just an average story for me. I don’t think it was incredible. I feel kind of neutral about this one. Again, I’ve mentioned it before, but the religious stories just kind of don’t do as much for me. I just think that they maybe don’t have as much substance for me as some of the other works that are tackling some other topics.

But yeah, it was all right. I don’t dislike the story, but it’s probably not a favorite.

Nate:

Yeah, this one for me felt more like second-rate PKD than somebody trying to make any, like, serious allegorical commentary on religion.

So I guess that’s why I didn’t really mind it as much either.

I’d say this is probably in the B range for me. Like, definitely not an A-list story, but I think it’s higher than a C.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I would say, yeah, it’s not C-worthy. I would say it’s probably a B, pretty flat B. I do think that having the title give away everything that’s going to happen, you know, kind of, like, spoils the buildup a little bit.

But other than that, I don’t really have any issues with this story.

It was an all-right read.

JM:

Yeah. For me, this is C, but it’s an enjoyable C. But there are better Cs as well. Yeah, it’s complicated.

It was cool, a little piece. I kind of wonder sometimes, because there’s a lot of variance in the length of these stories, right? You get really short ones like this, but you also get long ones like "Riders of the Purple Wage" and "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?", et cetera.

Now Gretchen, maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong because I didn’t read all the intros in "Again, Dangerous Visions". But the one thing Ellison does not explain is, when he solicited these authors—I mean, he didn’t really solicit them all personally, but he, like, pretty much said, hey, I’m making this anthology, I want contributions—did he have a preference for longer or shorter stories from certain authors?

I mean, I know, like, you know, "Again, Dangerous Visions", Ray Bradbury sent him a poem. I’m just kind of thinking, was he like, that’s all I get? A poem?

Like, because "Stand on Zanzibar" was still a couple years away at this point. I’m just kind of thinking I would have expected Brunner to be more dangerous because, I mean, those books tackle some pretty serious subjects even now. Even if you don’t like the way they do that, they still kind of confront things head-on. I would have thought that he would do something more like that and not a religious-theme story.

And it just feels like—I feel like almost anybody could have written this, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

I expected something a little more dangerous from Brunner at this time.

Now granted, he wasn’t always writing stuff like this. He’s kind of like Silverberg, where the beginning of his career kind of feels more like pulpy space opera and stuff. And that’s good. But this is somewhere in the middle, I guess. It feels like that. It feels kind of middling. And it is a shock to me how little some of these stories work. Like, I kind of—I’m not sure I was really expecting that. I mean, I don’t know if I really expected there to be so many religious-themed stories either. But again, it’s the ’60s. Maybe it’s part of the zeitgeist or whatever at that time. I can’t believe I just said that. 

But I feel like he could have done something else that would have been really cool. I kind of had high hopes for Brunner in this anthology, and it didn’t quite deliver.

So yeah, I mean, it’s fine.

Gretchen:

This is also, I know, Nate, you had mentioned the same thing, like, my first exposure to Brunner. So I think that even though I knew a bit about his other work, I hadn’t really experienced it. So I think going in with, like, no expectations into the story led it to be like, oh, this is just an average story. So I guess if you were familiar with Brunner, and especially some of his later work, this might come off as a bit disappointing.

JM:

Yeah, I thought there would be some serious social commentary in here. That’s kind of what I thought it was going to be like, heavy social commentary. I guess, I mean, it is kind of interesting how you figure that this person who helped to create the android that’s now been proclaimed God is trying to destroy God. Now that’s going to be incorporated into the new mythology. I thought that was kind of neat.

But again, like, it’s just so short. There’s a little bit of world-building touches, but not much.

And there’s a story coming up soon, the one by Zelazny, oddly enough, where I also feel that there’s not very much background, but it kind of just feels more, more fun, I guess, even though I’m sort of confused about where he’s coming from.

I kind of appreciated the chrome and steel as God kind of thing. Like, it made me think of, oh, it’s like this was a commentary on the Gernsbackian science fiction kind of stuff. But again, it wasn’t really developed enough.

Nate:

Almost reminded me of the opposite of the Sandrelli story that we covered last time.

Gretchen:

Oh yeah.

Keith Laumer - "Test to Destruction" 

JM:

So next we have "Test to Destruction" by Keith Laumer. I know I read a little bit of Keith Laumer in the past, but not too much. I think there’s a couple of short stories or something like that. I saw a mention of his novel "A Plague of Demons", and I feel like I might have read that at some point, like, a long time ago, but I’m not really sure.

Keith was born in 1925 in Syracuse, New York, where I’ll be heading in a couple of weeks. Keith Laumer spent a long time in the U.S. Air Force. I believe he attained the rank of captain. He did more than one tour of duty. So it wasn’t just World War II military service for him. He also served in the Foreign Service as a diplomat, I believe mostly in Burma, now Myanmar.

And whatever he did with his pre-writing career obviously must have made him a fair chunk of money, unlike people like John Brunner, because it seems like he actually moved to Florida and bought a small island on a lake where he lived the rest of his life.

He was a big model-plane enthusiast.

Apparently his designs have been published in lots of magazines and stuff like  that, British and American aviation-enthusiast magazines. And he’s got, like, cool gas-powered, really charming model designs. And he’s got one called the Twin Lizzie and a number of other things that he got involved in.

But he did a lot of sci-fi writing in the ’60s, and he was quite prolific for a short time.

He’s got this series that actually does involve an interplanetary diplomat. It’s apparently quite lighthearted, comedic, I guess. He’s got some other kind of adventure-type sci-fi stuff. 

Finally, he suffered a stroke in 1971, which severely slowed down his writing career. And apparently he never listened to his doctors and he had some weird self-treatment thing going on that didn’t work. So supposedly his last works were not as held in high regard, but I don’t really know much about them, so I can’t really comment on that.

This one was—I kind of enjoyed it, but it didn’t really seem to fit in with the anthology very much.

See what you guys think first, and then I’ll say a couple of things, because I did kind of like this, but I had some, like, a couple caveats there where maybe it’s not really that great, but I kind of liked it anyway.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I think at this point in the anthology—I read this anthology straight through within, like, about a week and a half or two weeks, was, like, when I did a vast majority of the work.

And I think that was part of why, when I got to this story, it took me quite a while to actually get into it. I don’t know exactly why that was, if it was, like, just the way the story was written. 

I do think that the end of the story, the final moments, are kind of a nice payoff. But I would say that I do kind of enjoy the story. I don’t think it’s an incredible story, but still, by the end of it, I did get something out of it.

Nate:

Yeah, this one definitely felt like the most pulpy in here.

JM:

Absolutely, 100 percent the most pulpy. By far.

Nate:

Just gorier. Like, that’s him writing for Harlan Ellison. He just, like, makes it really, really gory in parts.

Sometimes I don’t know what to expect with this anthology.

Gretchen:

I can’t really say this is out of place necessarily, just because, like, there are several entries that you could point to and say they do feel out of place.

I think that it wasn’t horrible.

I think by the end I had a bit of fun with it, and I think I like the final twist that you get at the end. The story is saying something. There is something interesting you could say about power and power corrupting and stuff like that, which is pretty neat.

JM:

Yeah. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Nate:

The twist is a great twist from, like, a pulp angle too.

Like, it’s a very pulpy twist.

JM:

Yeah, so this is the only story in the whole anthology where you get awesome "Starcrash"-y dialogue, like, "Let him die! No one defies me with impunity!"

Nobody else reads like that in this book.

It was kind of trippy, in a way, in how, like, the alien kept testing him and sort of putting him through all these things.

And it was, like, very dreamlike because it felt like they were using elements of things that had happened to him in, like, the very recent past and then, you know, kind of taking things, like even from scenes that we already saw, and just twisting them just ever so much to make it, like, this great test of his, I guess.

It almost seemed like—even though it wasn’t exactly—but it was like a test of his moral fiber and stuff like that. But I don’t really think that they were actually interested in that. In fact, I’m not really sure why they were doing all this exactly.

But I did enjoy the kind of alien thought process whenever you went to the ship. I always kind of, like, heard it in some kind of voice, like maybe a Dalek voice or something like that. It was just this very choppy description of this, I guess, hive-mind organism made up of these tiny worms who were all, like, linked together.

In the end he gets thrown into a torture interrogation machine by the world dictator. The world dictator is, like, trying to figure out—get him to talk and name his accomplices and all that—and the aliens get him at the same time.

So it’s this, like, mind-battle-conflict-type thing going on. And they’re like, oh no, he’s so powerful, how is he breaking our machine? Like, and that’s when the world dictator starts saying the "Starcrash"-y lines.

I had a funny feeling about him from the start because, kind of like—not sure whether it was just a facet of the writing or whether, like, maybe he was just too detached.

Like, throughout the entire story he’s calling his kid "the child", and it takes for his wife to show up at the last scene for the kid to actually get a name. He never thinks of it as a person with a name or anything like that. I think he does name his wife, but I’ve actually forgotten what her name is.

But maybe he’s not so selfless. Maybe it’s not just the power getting to him. Like, maybe he was always going to be that way. Maybe. I don’t know.

There’s a lot of that weird kind of dialogue too at the beginning, where it’s like you have his assistant or friend or whatever being like, well, if only so-and-so hadn’t become world dictator, you would be in a position of power right now.

And it’s like, yeah, you’re right. Okay. It’s, like, a weird way to do it in dialogue. And yeah, it feels very like this story could have been written 20 years before "Dangerous Visions".

I mean, yeah, honestly, I don’t think it fit, but I did kind of enjoy it in a weird way. It was, like, sort of refreshing in its pulpiness, I guess, and, like, unashamedly I’m going to just make it like that. And yeah, it does have this message at the end, I guess, about power and corruption and all that. It’s pretty chilling because at the end you’ve got to feel like, yeah, he’s gonna get rid of his wife now. Like, because she’s starting to question him, and nobody can question him now because he’s the new world dictator. Now he has this really tiny but vastly powerful spaceship at his command that basically just hovers around him all the time and freaks everybody out.

Again, I kind of enjoyed it. It was long, or one of the longer ones, but I kind of just raced through it, turning the pages, like, what’s gonna happen? What’s gonna happen?

Like, yeah, I guess that’s the point of that kind of writing, really. That seems to be his bread and butter, is both the comedic and the kind of adventure stories, which this was definitely one of those. It was quite a bit of action, especially in the beginning, when he’s, like, running through the city and jumping off roofs and stuff like that.

And it kind of felt very cinematic, like it could have been in some blockbuster movie or something like that.

He did a good job of that.

So yeah, it’s a C story for me, but a little bit of a higher C, I think, just because I don’t think it was shooting for anything particularly special or dangerous.

I think everybody knows that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s got no message, really. It just exists for its own sake, and it’s kind of fun.

Nate:

Yeah, I could—this one, B.

I had fun with it.

It is kind of dumb, but it was really—to get a dumb story like this that is just a lot of pulpy fun, that’s over the top.

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Yeah, I think I would also give this one a B.

When I was starting it, I wasn’t really into it, but I think once I started to sink into the story it was just a fun, fun read.

So yeah, I think I would give it a B.

JM:

Cool.

We got one coming up by Norman Spinrad.

Nate:

Yeah.

Norman Spinrad - "Carcinoma Angels" 

Nate:

So this is one of the ones that I chose to expand out a little bit more.

So this is Norman Spinrad’s "Carcinoma Angels".

Norman Spinrad was born on September 15th of 1940, and he seems to be quite the character.

And he describes himself as both an independent conservative radical, but also an anarchist and a syndicalist, and every time I see the words anarchist and syndicalist together, my mind automatically jumps to that classic scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

He is fortunately still with us, so we hope that is true for the decades to come. And he tells quite a lot about himself in an autobiographical piece for "Contemporary Authors".

He grew up in the Bronx and spent most of his adolescence hanging out in Greenwich Village, where he says he saw a very young Bob Dylan in 1959 and an early incarnation of the band who would later become the Fugs. He was very much plugged into the Beatnik scene, where he’d smoke weed and take the occasional peyote trip, and his early literary influences reflect that Beat scene: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki. The Burroughs he was into was William, not Edgar Rice.

He was largely unaware that there was a science fiction subculture until after he was a published author, saying, quote, "I read a lot of SF, Sturgeon, Bester, Dick, Bradbury being early obsessions, but I was just as deeply into Mailer, Kerouac, William Burroughs and their precursor Henry Miller."

He first started submitting stories to "Playboy", who rejected them, but kept writing and kept submitting stuff to various places until something stuck. The first one that did was "The Last of the Romany", which he sold to "Analog" in 1962.

He says he had a powerful vision of himself being a famous science fiction writer while peaking on mescaline after finishing up the magazine serialization of "Dune", which is just a fantastic image.

He decided to make his way out west to San Francisco, and on the way there he was invited to the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference in Milford, Pennsylvania, by Damon Knight. And it was here that he met Harlan Ellison, who he describes as, "dressing and bullshitting like the Hollywood star writer". The two hit it off so well that he went to L.A. first before going to San Francisco and ended up staying at Harlan’s house. Harlan convinced him to stay in L.A., where Spinrad stayed for six months, where he wrote an outline for "The Men in the Jungle", which is what he initially wrote for "Dangerous Visions", and also where he wrote "Carcinoma Angels", which was actually submitted and published in "Dangerous Visions".

JM:

Yeah, so it seemed like the two of them were hanging out with Ted Sturgeon a lot too, or the three of them just running around and getting into trouble with writing stuff together.

Yeah, not quite together, but yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah.

Must have been an interesting bunch, for sure.

Yeah, but yeah, he’s definitely been quite prolific.

He has around 25 novels, spanning "The Solarians" from 1966, which Ellison describes as, "so bad it cannot be read".

And I have to admit that Ellison’s description there piques my interest a little bit.

But his most recent one is "The People’s Police" from 2017.

JM:

Wow. 

Nate:

So he’s still currently writing.

JM:

That’s cool.

Nate:

Yeah, within the last ten years, anyway.

JM:

I read some short stories before. My only added novel-length work that I read from him was "The Iron Dream", which has this internal novel, "Lord of the Swastika".

And it’s essentially—I think I mentioned it before—but it’s a book purported to be by Adolf Hitler, the science fiction writer, who went on from illustrating pulp magazines after he immigrated to America to writing science fiction.

And "Lord of the Swastika" is his, "masterpiece". It includes all this material, like fake biographical material about Hitler and an afterword that’s supposedly by an academic. It’s basically a maybe 20-page joke that goes on for over 200 pages, so it’s just kind of a little bit excruciating to read. But he did a pretty good job of writing a book that feels like a sci-fi novel that Hitler might have written.

So if that sounds entertaining to you and you want to play a drinking game to it, go ahead. I kind of see what he’s getting at.

But Nate, you said he didn’t really know a lot about SF fandom and culture in the early days, and I kind of wonder if his coming to it later colored his idea that, like, oh, there’s a lot of, like, fascism in Golden Age science fiction, right?

He’s kind of commenting on that by writing this book and being like, see, this isn’t much different from your E. E. "Doc" Smith or whatever, right?

Nate:

Right.

JM:

I’m not sure how strong that thesis really is.

I mean, honestly, I guess it’s something that could be looked into more thoroughly, and maybe it’s an uncomfortable thing that some of us, including me, are perhaps not that willing to admit.

But that was Spinrad’s idea.

So yeah.

Nate:

Yeah.

Well, I’d certainly like to cover E. E. "Doc" Smith on the podcast at some point, so maybe we’ll find out for ourselves.

But yeah, the only one I’ve read previously was "The Big Flash", which closes off the "World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970" anthology.

And I would really like to revisit this anthology now due to all the reading that we’ve done for the podcast, as some of those stories didn’t really stick initially and I knew almost none of the authors at the time.

But now I’m familiar with almost all of them.

And while most of the stories in the anthology are definitely fuzzy in my mind, the Spinrad was one that stuck out in a major way because it was, like, totally over the top and ridiculous, involving a rock band and nuclear weapons.

Pretty cool.

Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, it’s ridiculous.

I’m not sure I would have called it good at the time, but I think now I’d have more of an appreciation for that flair of the ridiculous in genre writing, which certainly presents itself in the story tonight.

And Harlan says of him that, "I think he writes like a lunatic", which is pretty apt.

But yeah, he’s got a bunch of short stories, as well as some TV work, including "The Doomsday Machine" for "Star Trek".

JM:

Oh yes.

Nate:

Definitely an author I would like to check out more because I really, really liked the story.

It had a nice flair for the ridiculous and over the top, as we’ll see.

So I don’t know. What do you guys think?

Gretchen:

I really enjoyed this one.

I know we had said about the Laumer that it was—we’re kind of getting a bit of a fun little group of stories here. I think that this one is also just a really fun, fast-paced—it almost feels like a second wind when I was reading these stories, of like, oh, we’re getting in some easier stories. There is a subject in here that could be dark, but it’s just portrayed in such a way that it’s more absurd and really just a great read here.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, I like how it’s the biography of this guy’s life in miniature, and this kind of going through all the things that he tried and everything that he did.

I had no idea where it was going, right? Okay, this guy’s getting rich really, really fast, and he’s doing all this stuff. Where can this possibly go? Like, is he gonna destroy the world?

Yeah. It kind of went in a direction I wasn’t expecting. It’s kind of cool. It ends in a lot of drug-taking, and it kind of has this thing that I think everybody who’s had psychedelic experiences, maybe especially early on when they had those kind of experiences, is afraid of. That being that whatever state of mind they’re in, they’ll never be able to leave. They’ll never be able to come back. Like, it’s like this forever now, right? You start by thinking, oh, this is awesome, I’m having a great time. And then you’re like, okay, but is this ever gonna be over? What if it’s not, right? What if it’s not? What if it doesn’t end? I’m like this all the time now. I’ve permanently screwed myself. This actually happens to this guy, right?

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Eventually you kind of realize, well, if I’m just, like, kind of calm and not freaking out, or at least I can separate the part of my mind that freaks out from the part that’s not freaked out, then everything will be fine eventually, right?

But there’s that fear: what if I permanently drop some barrier in my head and it’s never gonna come back up? And now I perceive the world this way and I have to learn to deal with it like this forever. 

Yeah, I think this guy—I’m sure that all the drugs that he took together would probably have killed him.

It’s very haphazard. Like, I’m just gonna try everything. It was what it turned into, this kind of—this—I don’t know.

Nate, you probably want to summarize the story first, though.

Nate:

Yeah.

So yeah, Harrison Wintergreen is the ultimate Mary Sue.

From getting the baseball cards as a kid, to academics, to being a ladies’ man in college, then becoming the richest man in the world, there is nothing Harry can’t do.

Money gets boring, so he decides to become a philanthropist and improve the world for the better, which he of course does.

There’s just one problem.

He develops an incurable form of cancer, and after researching all the forms of medicine and spirituality, Harry builds the best computer in the world for $100 million, which probably still wouldn’t be as powerful as today’s iPhones.

Through this he realizes the cause is internal, and like the greatest of yogis decides to tackle the problem from within. He doesn’t seem to be great at internalizing his mental state through normal means, however—perhaps the one thing he’s not able to do.

So instead, he looks to a concoction of the most drugs, which would definitely kill the greatest of psychonauts.

What he takes is described as:

"Into his largest syringe he decanted the following: Novocain; morphine; curare; vlut, a rare Central Asian poison which induced temporary blindness; olfactorcain, a top-secret smell-deadener used by skunk farmers; tympanoline, a drug which temporarily deadened the auditory nerves, used primarily by filibustering senators; a large dose of Benzedrine; lysergic acid; psilocybin; mescaline; peyote extract; seven other highly experimental and most illegal hallucinogens; eye of newt and toe of dog."

And it’s a resounding success.

The drugs allow him to turn his psyche inward, inside of his own body. He tracks down the cancer cells, who manifest themselves like biker gangs, real masculine tough guys that he kills one by one in a series of elaborate battles before slaying the final boss, which is just an absolutely fantastic sequence of ridiculous, over-the-top scenes. Certainly one of the highlights of the entire anthology for me. Just a lot of fun.

But there’s another big problem, and that’s that the drugs don’t wear off. Or if they do, Harry is permanently stuck inside of his own body, unable to get out, where he spends the rest of his life catatonic in a sanitarium.

But his body is cancer-free.

So yeah, definitely really like this one.

I mean, it’s just a lot of over-the-top fun.

Interesting commentary on the Mary Sue-type figure, which I’m sure at this time was a common trope in a lot of the less-regarded science fiction stories.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

Even though the formal term doesn’t really come into play until, yeah, probably after this time.

When was the Mary Sue fan-fiction thing? That was, like, in the ’70s sometime?

JM:

It was a little bit after this.

Gretchen:

I feel like it would probably be, like, either right on the cusp of 1970 or a little after.

JM:

Right, but that was just when a name was given to it. I mean—

Gretchen:

Right.

JM:

Yeah. It was like, oh yeah, that’s that character, right? That character had really existed for a long time in some way.

Gretchen:

Speaking of the pulp era, that is quite a bit of it. Sometimes you have this character who’s, like, the wish fulfillment of any man who’s reading the story. He has all this money, he can get any woman he wants, he’s charismatic and rich and charming.

And then it doesn’t end up too well for him, unfortunately. Kind of gets bested by his hubris here.

JM:

So I guess, like, again, Spinrad is commenting on science fiction in a way. I guess he’s also talking about this crazy super-rich person. It’s interesting to think about how this story would have been written now.

Like, I mean, in a way you’re like, well, this guy wasn’t so bad because, yeah, at least he tested all the narcotic cocktails on himself, right?

Nate:

Right.

Yeah, well, we’ve had the world’s first trillionaire now, so I don’t know. The clean substitution of the two personalities, I don’t think, would work in the same way.

JM:

Yeah. 

Nate:

It’d be interesting if that story with the current trillionaire was—

JM:

Yeah.

I do remember Spinrad writing—again, talking about "Asimov’s" magazine. I used to read that, like, around the time—well, like, yeah, ’95, ’96. A bit earlier than that. I think I got my first issue in, like, 1990 or something like that.

I was pretty young at the time. It was a lot. It was a lot. I was not used to reading some of the stuff in there. Just like, okay, I’m game for it. Spinrad had some pretty crazy stories even then. A lot of, like, drug-taking and stuff like that, which again, from nine, ten years old, I’m like, yeah, I’m not really used to this. This is kind of crazy, right?

But he also had a book-related column. I think it was an alternating column between him and some other guy who did, like, more regular book reviews, but Spinrad was more just, like, commenting on science fiction in general.

And I think at the time I kind of skipped a lot of those columns because I didn’t really understand the context and history of a lot of what he was talking about, and I, like, read the regular book reviews.

But his kind of, like, commentary on science fiction, historical perspective and something like that—which I guess is something he became interested in a little later in life—just sort of passed me by at the time. Now I wish I’d paid more attention, honestly.

But yeah, this was definitely fun. I love the battle with the Hell’s Angels. Again, it felt very, like, crazy cinematic. It’s definitely one of the images that you would remember from the anthology.

Now there is—yeah, illustrations for each story, right? I think. Does this one get a cool picture?

Gretchen:

There is. And I think they were in the original.

JM:

Yeah. So that’s something we haven’t even talked about yet, actually.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, we should have talked about that from the beginning.

But I kind of—I mean, I would have looked them up, but not being able to see them, I just kind of forgot about them. 

Gretchen:

The illustrations that are in the copy that I have, SF Masterworks, are by Leo and Diane Dillon. And I believe that these are ones that I think Ellison did have in the original book.

There’s, like, one illustration that’s at the beginning of every story, like right before the introduction, right?

JM:

Right.

It’s a couple. Ellison was really excited to get them on board.

Gretchen:

And I looked up some of their other work, and they have illustrated quite a number of sci-fi novel covers around this time.

The style of the illustrations in "Dangerous Visions" is just, like, a single illustration at the beginning, so they’re pretty minimalist, done just in black and white, obviously.

But the style of their novel covers is also really interesting.

Nate:

Yeah. Looking at it now, the image for "Carcinoma Angels" is pretty abstract, like a fair amount of them are.

But yeah, I like this one a lot. I would definitely give this one an A. One of the standouts of the anthology for me, for sure.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I would also give this one an A.

Yeah. Really fun read. Some really great imagery.

Yeah. And also, as we were saying, a nice little subversion of some of the tropes that we may have seen in past sci-fi. So yeah, I like this one a lot.

JM:

Yeah, I think this is an A story too—is it really a dangerous vision?

I guess, like, all that drug-taking. I mean, I don’t know. That’s definitely dangerous.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah.

There’s quite a shortage of hot leather guys on motorcycles in the anthology, so we really need some of that, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah.

And of course, as Ellison says in the introduction, what’s really edgy about the story? It’s a funny story about cancer. You can decide whether or not that makes this particularly dangerous.

Nate:

And Spinrad quotes Henry Miller in the afterword, who I still haven’t read. But apparently he gets pretty dangerous at times too.

JM:

Yeah. And it did remind me of—I don’t remember if it was a "Deep Space Nine" episode or something like that. I think, ironically, it might be Dr. Bashir or something like that.

And they’re wandering around inside a hallucination created by his mind, and he’s got this evil thing sitting in his mind because—I can’t remember what it is exactly.

But it’s kind of like you get to personify the disease and personify the carcinoma, right?

It’s fun and evil and a little twisted.

Yeah. It’s just a collection of cells. It’s really not, like, a living, thinking—

But what if you could talk to a virus and you could treat it like an enemy from a sword-and-sorcery story or something like that? It’s trippy too because he’s impersonating all these different types of warriors from history and the future and stuff like that. One minute he’s this crazy barbarian wielding a sword. The next minute he’s, like, flying an airplane and shooting his machine gun and dropping bombs and stuff like that. You kind of feel like, yeah, this really could go on forever.

I kind of wasn’t quite sure where it would go up till the very end, but I kind of thought, well, what if he finds that there’s always something, some force to crush in his own body, and he just does this forever? And he just, like—he’s always in Valhalla now, basically.

Maybe he could create his own form of cancer cells that aren’t cancerous, but he’s, like, hanging out with his white blood cells and stuff like that, having a party over all their slain enemies and stuff like that.

It did it really well, I thought. Kind of got you thinking about all the other scenarios because it was only a few pages, but you got the idea that this went on for, like, days and days, right?

Roger Zelazny - "Auto-da-Fé" 

JM:

Okay, we’re almost through this sucker.

We have two more stories to go, and then I think we’re just going to wrap up by maybe going over some general thoughts again. But we’ve got Roger Zelazny now with "Auto-da-Fé", and I believe the title is a pun, of course.

Nate:

Yeah. I didn’t get the pun at first. I was confused at what was going on, but then I got the pun. Like, oh, okay. That’s—yeah, okay.

JM:

So Roger Zelazny was born in 1937 in Euclid, Ohio, and he started developing an interest in writing pretty early on.

And he was the son of a Polish immigrant. His father died when he was not a kid, but he was just kind of getting started with his writing career, and he seemed to feel like, I don’t know, his father would have been interested in seeing how things developed and stuff like that.

Getting started pretty early on, he had this weird progression of writing where he deliberately started off writing nothing but really, really short stories and progressed into the novelette, and into the novella, and then into the novel. All this time he continued to write short stories and stuff, but that was kind of the way he did things.

He went to university at Western Reserve University and also got his master’s at Columbia University in New York, specializing in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

His first story that really got noticed was "A Rose for Ecclesiastes". That was in the November 1963 issue, I believe, of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction".

That was certainly one of the first places I became aware of Zelazny. Not the magazine, but I believe it was the first volume of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame", which was supposed to collect earlier science fiction—mostly American, almost all American. Except Volume Two does include "The Time Machine" from Wells and "The Machine Stops", actually. It’s supposed to collect what the Science Fiction Writers of America thought were the best pre-Nebula science fiction stories. So there was a lot of good stuff in those books, and that kind of introduced me into a lot of, I guess, the Golden Age sci-fi, but also some other things. 

That was in there. There was "The Marching Morons" and "The Little Black Bag" from Kornbluth, were in two different volumes. There was "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum. There was quite a lot of good stuff in there.

But anyway, there was also the story "Permafrost", which again I came across when I was probably far too young to be reading something like that, in some kind of best-of-the-year science fiction. I think it was a couple years later when I got it, but it was, like, 1987 or something like that. It was a kind of a messed-up story about a broken relationship, and there was some, like, supernatural ghostliness going on.

So Zelazny was a writer of fantasy and science fiction, and a lot of his science fiction and fantasy does deal with mythological concepts and ideas about borrowing different things from the world’s religions and stuff like that. Zelazny himself was not religious. He was born into Catholicism, and he said at one time he did claim to be a Catholic, but he’s no longer a member of any organized religion.

I feel like that should have a bearing on this particular story, but I don’t think it does. But it’s kind of funny.

So he’s also a practitioner of martial arts. He taught aikido and had a black belt in that. One of the members of SAGA, the Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America, along with people like Leiber and Vance. It’s kind of a loosely knit, informal group they had going on there. I believe Poul Anderson was also a member.

Yeah, we like Roger Zelazny. Wwe were talking about reading "Lord of Light" for our Hawkwind episode, but we didn’t, which I think is good because I think it’s a little too much to talk about in an episode about a rock band. "The Black Corridor" kind of had the right vibes. Whereas, yeah, if we’re going to do "Lord of Light", I think definitely Gretchen should be here and it should be just a dedicated episode.

Yeah. Gretchen and I, for sure, have also read "A Night in the Lonesome October", which is a really awesome tribute to the horror genre and, like, just so much fun. I think it was probably the last book that he wrote, if not the second-last.

He did die in 1995 as well due to cancer, and sounds like it was pretty rough until then.

Yeah, really cool writer. Very witty humor, I think, is a huge part of his stuff. Definitely one of the other novels I read, "Doorways in the Sand", is probably one of the funniest science-fiction-adjacent books that I know of. I put it right up there with Douglas Adams and stuff like that, but probably a bit more enjoyable to me now because I kind of wore out those "Hitchhiker’s" books when I was quite young. I don’t know that they’re something that I could ever revisit now.

But yeah, like, kind of one of those great science fiction humorists, I guess you might say. Like Robert Sheckley maybe could be in that category as well, and maybe a few other writers. Doesn’t always work, but I think in the hands of somebody like Zelazny it could be quite fun.

I do remember "The Chronicles of Amber". I didn’t get very far with that. But I first remembered hearing about that in my days of trolling Internet Relay Chat channels that were metal-related, and, like, all these guys, they’d read these weird fantasy books that I’d never heard of and stuff like that. Like, oh, who the hell’s Clark Ashton Smith? Who’s Roger Zelazny? Oh, okay, this is interesting.

So I think the only reason I haven’t pursued "Amber" is it’s, like, ten books or something like that, and one of these big fantasy sagas. And yeah, it’s different from the nowadays ones. The books are, like, averaging maybe about 200 or 300 pages rather than 1,200 like they do now, and, like, basically reading a fantasy series for the rest of your life. Not quite like that. But I still, I guess, sometimes have a bit of an aversion to tackling really long things like that that are of that nature. But I think I would probably get into it now pretty well.

Of course, a lot of people know "Damnation Alley". That one was made into a movie. Book is way different, but yeah, that’s kind of like a post-apocalyptic road novel almost.

Like, yeah, it’s pretty fun.

And Hawkwind made a song about that too.

So yeah, "Auto-da-Fé". Interesting little piece. What do you guys think of this weird story?

Gretchen:

I don’t know how both of you feel, but I think this was probably the most fun I had reading. Like, I loved "Carcinoma Angels", but there is something, like, so endearing to me about this story.

I think besides "A Night in the Lonesome October", this is, like, the only other Zelazny that I’ve read. I mean, I love "A Night in the Lonesome October", so that may have also been my bias for Zelazny coming out.

JM:

Yeah, I get that.

I didn’t even mention "Creatures of Light and Darkness", which is probably one of the wildest science fiction books I ever read. One of the most experimental and wild. Just, yeah, wow. He really went all out with that one.

And he dedicated it to Samuel Delany, so it makes sense.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

This one, I don’t think it’s a dangerous vision, and I don’t have too much of, like, substance to say about it, which was one reason I didn’t, like, choose it at all.

But I think it’s a pretty fun story.

I really enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Nate:

Yeah, I like this one a lot too.

This is a B story for me, I think, but a high B for sure.

This is my first time coming to Zelazny. I definitely always wanted to check out his stuff, and I’m sure we’ll cover at least something else by him on the podcast for sure.

But yeah, definitely a lot of fun. It reminded me of, like, "Death Race 2000", and could easily be some sleazy mid-’70s exploitation movie like that. I just had that kind of vibe going for it, and I thought it was definitely a lot of fun to read.

Especially once, you know, I got what he was doing, which took a little bit longer than normally probably should have. 

Gretchen:

But yeah, I feel like it does take a minute to really process the scene. It is really interesting too, the way this is just throwing in these world-building elements, but it’s mostly focused on this one moment, this one scene that’s happening.

I really like that style.

It does maybe take you a second to pick up what is happening, but when it does, it’s—it’s just really fun. It’s just a fun little recognition of what’s going on. And it has the term "mechador" in it, and yeah, I think that’s such a fun little thing.

I finished this right before going to work, and I told my coworkers. I was like, this is a really fun story.

Yeah, I think that I actually—I’ll give this an A. I wouldn’t say it’s super-high A. It’s not a piece that I think has the most to talk about. There’s not as much maybe meat relating to, like, the topics that’s being covered. But it’s just so fun. I think the story rocks.

JM:

Okay, so I actually do want to slow down for a second and talk about this just a little bit more.

So what do you think this is about? What do you think is going on? I’m curious. You guys can tell me what you think is really happening with this weird story.

Nate:

You mean, like, him being a matador except with cars?

JM:

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so Zelazny did love puns, for starters.

They do feature in a lot of the stories. Sometimes it’s, like, usually at the end.

I actually think he used the pun "gone fission", at one point—F-I-S-S-I-O-N—to describe some kind of nuclear meltdown.

And he just loved that kind of stuff. Now this one is "Auto-da-Fé", which is something out of the Spanish Inquisition, basically, in inquisitorial times, where it’s like an act of faith or penance. And it has to do with the Inquisition and the punishment of, I guess, mostly Jews and Muslims who ended up having to convert to Christianity.

I mean, this story just seems like this weird dream Zelazny had, and he’s like, what if cars all became autonomous and they were, like, basically—we had a bullfight, and we had these guys whose whole thing is to, like, fight cars?

Isn’t that amazing?

It totally makes me think of some crazy ’70s exploitation movie or something like that, where it’s like a variation on, like, "Death Race 2000" or something like that, where the cars, like, just kind of do their own thing and these guys are out there trying to, like, stop the cars.

But it’s almost like this ritualistic thing of the bullfight, right? I gotta be honest, I haven’t read a lot of Ernest Hemingway yet, but I kind of picture, like, him writing a story like this.

Nate:

He definitely wrote about bullfighting. There’s one of his most famous novels, it’s about—

I’m kind of mixed on Hemingway, to be honest with you.

JM:

Yeah, that’s fine.

It’s just—all that I mean is something that I can imagine him writing a story like this, except obviously it’s not cars. You know what I mean?

Nate:

Right.

Yeah. 

JM:

It’s a real matador experience, right?

Have either of you read the Stephen King story "Trucks", or seen the movie "Maximum Overdrive"?

Nate:

Yeah, I’ve seen "Maximum Overdrive". I haven’t read the Stephen King story.

Gretchen:

Yeah, same.

Same here. I’ve seen the film, but I haven’t read that story.

JM:

Well, okay. Yeah, I haven’t actually seen the movie, but I have read the story.

Nate:

Yeah, there’s just so many movies based on Stephen King stories.

Yeah, I think there’s, like, a Wikipedia article. There’s just, like, so many movies that are based off of Stephen King stories that are directly tied to the title, and so they’re not obviously, like, Stephen King stories.

JM:

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah, it’s a lot more like Stephen King’s vision than "The Lawnmower Man", the movie, is like the story "The Lawnmower Man", which doesn’t resemble that story at all, to the point where Stephen King demanded that his name be taken off the credits of the movie.

But "Maximum Overdrive" was actually directed by Stephen King. Apparently he was so coked up that he doesn’t even remember making it.

Yeah.

It’s basically just a crazy version of this story called "Trucks", where these guys are holed up in a diner somewhere and all the trucks that have stopped at the truck stop suddenly become animate. It also reminds me of the Theodore Sturgeon story "Killdozer!", which was also made into a movie, which is about a killer bulldozer, literally, right?

The machine gets some kind of alien presence inside it and becomes, like, a haunted machine that just wants to kill people. And this was kind of like this other take on it. Like, this completely different kind of take on it.

Whereas, like, okay, for some reason there’s a line at the end of the story where the protagonist is like, okay, well, I’ve seen the ritual, I’ve seen the fight, now I’m gonna get on my horse and go home, right? Or something like that.

Yeah. It doesn’t say it’s a horse, but it’s some kind of creature with hoofs, right? So that’s his transport. That’s how he gets around. Not a car. Cars are, like, evil now, I guess. Or they’re, like, not evil, but wild. They’re wild cars and trucks and stuff.

Realistically, we know it’s going to go a lot different. We’re not afraid of our vehicles becoming truly autonomous. We’re afraid of basically becoming slaves to Tesla or something like that. It’s different. Things have developed in a different way.

I worry a lot less about autonomous artificial intelligence than I worry about stuff being used for agendas we don’t really understand or know about or necessarily want to support. The interests that are definitely not to benefit us are a lot more concerning to me than robots becoming self-sufficient and intelligent and basically "Cars"-ing humanity.

But I also don’t think Zelazny was taking that concept very seriously. Like, it’s not like the John Sladek story where you’re like, oh, the robots have basically become the monsters under the bed, right? They’re, like, coming out at night and injecting you with drugs and, like, messing up your whole life.

Here it’s like, oh no, like, they’re just wild and we can tame them. Like, well, kind of—not really tame them, but train them enough that they’re still absolutely killers and they’ll still mess somebody up, but we keep them penned in.

I’m just kind of wondering if, like, in some version of this there’s the outlands where there’s the wild cars that are actually seriously dangerous and people are wandering around.

And Zelazny did kind of write some weird stuff like that, post-apocalyptic stuff. He has a book with Philip K. Dick called "Deus Irae", "The Wrath of God", and that’s another weird, crazy post-apocalyptic thing, and it has creatures. There’s definitely, in "Damnation Alley", there’s armored tanks and stuff like that.

It’s fun because it feels very—I don’t know—Roger Corman movie almost. But at the same time it’s, like, Zelazny, so it’s, like, super-clever and interesting. Like Gretchen said, I feel like, yeah, a bit of a predisposition towards him as well, just wanting to appreciate what he’s doing.

So yeah, it’s an A for me as well.

I think that it’s maybe not the most profound thing, and I don’t know if it’s really a dangerous vision, but I thought it was fun and quite endearing too.

Yeah.

Samuel R. Delany - "Aye, and Gomorrah..." 

JM:

All right. Last one.

We have our friend Samuel R. Delany.

Gretchen:

Yes, we have covered Delany before on the podcast, discussing his book "Babel-17" as part of an episode on sci-fi books about linguistics, so you can check that episode for some more biographical information on him.

The story here in "Dangerous Visions", "Aye, and Gomorrah...", won Samuel Delany a Nebula and has also been reprinted in numerous anthologies after it first appeared in this one. And also, like, this is the one story from "Dangerous Visions" that I actually, like, really knew by name.

JM:

Interesting, yeah.

Gretchen:

Obviously, going into this I had read a lot and I had known even more of the authors that are here, but this is the story that I knew about.

JM:

So, okay, I read it in "The Big Book of Science Fiction" as well. 

Gretchen:

I had not read it before, so going into this I hadn't read it, but I knew of this story.

So I was quite interested to see what it was like.

But what do you both think about the story?

Nate:

Yeah, I really liked it a lot.

It's creepy, and it just kind of gets in that feeling of being fetishized.

And while he doesn't go into, like, a lot of explicit detail here, he kind of just—I don't know—he manages to capture a feeling which he might have personally felt himself, trying to navigate the world as a gay man who was still, I believe, in the closet at this time.

I don't believe he was out in 1967.

JM:

Yeah, I thought this story was successful. I didn't like it as much as the other Delany that I've read. Well, except maybe, like, something like "Hogg", which is kind of impossible to like. But I think I didn't like this as much as "Nova", for example, which I read fairly recently and really loved. I didn't like this as much as "Babel-17", but it did work pretty well.

I think it almost just felt like a snapshot. Delany is so good at the background. He's so good at, like, building the continuum around his characters, of the world, that you really, really are fascinated by it and believe in it.

And I think, like, especially in "Nova", and probably "Dhalgren", even though I haven't read that—especially in "Nova", and "Babel-17" too, where they're at with all the crazy subcultures and the tattoos and all that—it just feels really vibrant and alive. And it's Samuel Delany, so even if he doesn't say the word, you just know he loves pirates, like, so much. The pirate man, loving his pirates.

I felt like it was very effective at depicting a certain state. I don't know if it really went anywhere as a story, but I think that's okay. I mean, you know, when you're in here with David Bunch and, like, all these people, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

Definitely some parallels with some of the other stories in this.

And I did like it. I just didn't feel like—almost like there wasn't enough there. Like, it needed a little more something. Maybe I could have imagined this as, like, part of one of his longer works, like part of a novel or something like that. There's just him kind of putting it in there.

I thought it was interesting, but as a depiction of a sexual proclivity among the "normal" people, and—I don't know how you can say it—like, a quality of the spacers, I thought I got all that and it was pretty effective at that.

But I maybe just wish that something profound had happened as a result of that. Or I kind of just felt like it was just a description of a state of being and some encounters that this person had.

And that's fine. I'm not really complaining about that. I don't know. Maybe it's just kind of like how the anthology starts with the del Rey story. I just kind of thought it was, like, wistful and melancholy. And this one kind of felt, even though the stories aren't very similar, it kind of felt like that. Like, this is here specifically at the end, and Ellison even said, he put this at the end for a reason. I don't really know if I see the same reason that he does, but I do kind of feel like I can see how this is a fitting end for the anthology. 

That being said, the sexual relationships sound non-dangerous by default because you just have to walk away from them. I don't know what you guys think of that. It's weird. It's an interesting thing he's hypothesizing. Like, they're all asexual, as in the non-sexual, not the old meaning of asexual, but, like, society has kind of picked up on that and actually finds that erotic, I guess.

And it's an interesting way to handle this. I liked the idea, I guess, but it just felt like just an idea almost, right? Rather than a story.

Gretchen:

Personally, I really enjoyed this story. I do think, JM, you are kind of right in that it is more of a glimpse into this person's experience, into the narrator's life.

It doesn't necessarily have a plot in the traditional sense of there's something—there's, like, any sort of climax to the story.

I think that that really works for the subject of the story.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, it has to be an anti-climax.

It's just, okay, well, we walk away now. That's what happens, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah.

I think that this story has some really interesting stuff to say about just desire in general. Like, this idea that there are just certain desires that people have that can never be satisfied.

JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

And I think that having a story where you aren't satisfied by the end, I think, really drives that point home.

JM:

So it fits with the story, basically, that I might not be satisfied.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

I think that it really fits the theme of what Delany is saying here. And we've gone through this anthology and have seen a lot of portrayals of queer and trans identities, a lot of them not so good. So I think that I really enjoyed the sort of complexity that Delany brings to it here.

Nate:

Yeah. It comes from lived experience and not just taking it in a sensational, exploitation way.

JM:

So I have to kind of question that, actually. Gretchen, you were reading quite a bit of biographical material for Delany, right?

Gretchen:

I mean, I more so had read from doing the "Babel-17" episode, but I know quite a bit about Delany.

Nate:

He remarked that this story was his, like, coming-out moment, in a way, which I thought was interesting.

JM:

Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, Ellison had a weird comment to make in the foreword.

Nate:

Well, he makes a lot of weird comments about sexuality.

JM:

Yeah.

Yeah, Delany himself, he's talking about a homosexual experience, basically describing—

Now, I can't remember if this is in the mouth of one of the characters. Maybe it's the woman toward the end, where she's like, homosexuals are looking for a mirror, right?

And, like, he just kind of says it like it's a given, for the most part. I think even a heterosexual relationship can be—you can say, well, somebody's just looking for somebody that's just like a mirror of yourself, right?

Like, I don't think that has anything to do with that. I'm just wondering if Delany was still kind of figuring stuff out or something like that at this time. I'm curious about it because I didn't really understand that comment, like, in particular. I didn't know what place that was coming from.

None of my experience have the people who have good relationships, at least, just been looking for a mirror of themselves to be in a relationship with. I mean, I think that could happen with a gay or a straight couple or anything, really. And I think that it's usually a bad thing, right? I don't know. What do you guys think about that?

I thought that was kind of weird.

Gretchen:

So for that comment specifically, I think that we are hearing it from a person who is fetishizing the narrator.

So I feel like some of it we're not really supposed to take at face value when she's saying that.

I think that there are points being made in both of their dialogue about desire, but I think that there are certain things that are said that are more reflecting the fetishizing nature of just anyone who falls outside of sexual and gender norms.

JM:

Yeah, well, that makes sense.

Nate:

I largely agree.

He basically figured out that he was gay pretty early in life. Definitely would have had the lived experience at this point, for sure. And I don't think he was, like, repressed in any way as far as, like, himself goes, though I don't know how out he was.

I mean, I know his wife knew that he was gay, like, pretty early on into their marriage, or even before, which must have been an odd relationship to be in to begin with.

JM:

I think I said a lot of what I had to say before Gretchen even summarized the story, so maybe if you want to get into that, we can kind of give our final thoughts.

Gretchen:

So the story starts with the narrator's group of friends in Paris being approached by someone who calls them spacers, drawing their attention to the police watching them and advising them to leave.

When the narrator asks if the man is a frelk, he replies that he isn't, unfortunately. The narrator looks as though once they might have been a man, but now they have nothing for him.

Next, the group is in Houston, where it all started, as one of them says, and gets a ride from a couple who bring up the good work the spacers do "up there on them planets."

One spacer asks the narrator if the couple might be frelks.

Next, having landed in Istanbul, one of the spacers, Kelly, plans on finding a rich frelk while there. Another tells a story about two people impersonating spacers to pick up frelks themselves. The narrator departs from the other spacers and runs into a woman who they identify as a frelk, and who has no money to pay them. She remarks that it's sad that spacers have to go through the alteration. If they didn't, there wouldn't be frelks like her.

When the narrator tells her to choose not to be one, she argues that she can't help her perversion: the substitute for a normative love, something that is unattainable. She desires spacers because they don't desire her. She does convince the narrator to come back to her place, where she intends to bring some other frelks around to meet them.

The narrator leaves, though, when they realize they are not going to get anything from her in exchange. They meet up with the other spacers, Kelly bragging about the amount of money he got from a frelk, before they must take off from Earth once again.

Nate:

Yeah. Really good story.

Like I said, it's creepy. Like, creepy in the sleazy sense, not creepy in, like, the 19th-century weird-fiction sense.

Definitely really good story.

Really powerful statement to close the anthology on, I think.

So this is an A story for me.

JM:

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm saying it's a B story for me as well.

Interestingly, one of the reviews that I read of the anthology—and again, it was just—

I'll reiterate what I said in the opening episode. And I guess we're getting towards our closing thoughts here because we are in the last story of the anthology and we're about to close the book on this super, super long adventure. But what really struck me was the divergence of opinions. Everybody agrees that this is a mixed-bag anthology, but interestingly, not everybody agrees on what are the good stories, and the opinions of that actually vary a huge amount.

This one usually gets some praise, but some person said that he thought the first several pages of this story were unnecessary, and that even though it was good, he kind of wished that it was just the final encounter, I guess. 

And I kind of feel the opposite. I wanted to see more of the gang flying around the world just raising hell, basically, and you slowly figuring out what was up with them, and maybe one reason why they felt the need to raise so much hell in a different way than most people, I guess, would raise hell. Because there's often this sexual connotation and all that. These guys are kind of like—I don't know—they act almost like children. They're causing some chaos and stuff.

And if I can talk for a minute about "Nova", I read that earlier this year, and it was kind of my second reading of it, but the first one was, like, a really long time ago. My friend Starr and I read it together—sort of together anyway, like, more or less at the same time. I think she didn't really like it all that much for the reasons that I kind of liked it. Because ostensibly the story is about this space captain who recruits a crew of people to help him basically go inside of a star and remove this material that's, like, really essential. And, like, even a little tiny bit of this material, this mineral, whatever, can power a space fleet. But there's so little of it that it's, like, intensely hard to grab, and you have to catch a star in the middle of a nova and actually travel, like, as close to it as you possibly can without getting vaporized.

So that's the ostensible heart of the story. But really the story's not that much about that. It's actually—the core of the book, at least, is a flashback into an earlier time for this space captain and describing why he has these rivals, or these rich guys who run this corporation. Another part of the book, there's, like, this really, really long section where they have a tarot reading on the ship, and it, like, goes into all this different stuff. There's another section where we see the childhood of one of the other characters. 

There's so much of this stuff that it kind of just takes away from the story of the space captain looking for the star material, which is only, like, a really small portion of the book overall. I think, like, that's the kind of thing that you would maybe expect to see from a blurb, a basic blurb-type description. And the book is not at all that. It's all about this creation of this world, and Delany does it so well. He's also getting into his characters and what makes them tick and stuff like that, and doing it in really creative ways. Like having an entire, like, 30-something, 40-page chapter dedicated to reading tarot cards on a spaceship.

Yeah, I mean, why not? It kind of works, right?

I feel like this story wasn't able to do a lot of the Delany things that I like, and I think that's why I didn't really connect with it that much. But I agree with you guys that it is a very fitting way to end the anthology, and I did quite like it.

Did I also give del Rey a B? I might have. I'm not sure.

But this was better than that.

I think you gave that one a C, actually.

Nate:

Yeah, you did.

JM:

Okay.

Yeah, I didn't enjoy this—I just kind of, I guess, having read two longer Delany works recently, this maybe wasn't quite enough to satisfy me.

But again, maybe that's how I should feel after reading the story, right? That's kind of appropriate, I guess.

But no, I don't agree with that person talking about one of the weaknesses of the anthology being that Ellison was a poor editor and that he didn't know how to point his authors in the right direction, or what parts should be cut out, or whatever.

I don't know. I don't really agree with that. I mean, he does talk sometimes about talking with his writers about the work. I believe it's in "Again, Dangerous Visions" he talks about Piers Anthony and how he gave him some pointers as to how he thought the story should go. Anthony was, like, happy to kind of take some of that on, but not so happy about other things. Basically, with all respect, Harlan, fuck off. And Ellison was kind of pleased by that.

For the most part, I feel like he took a hands-off approach. But I also feel like some of these stories are more consequential than others, and some of them maybe are the perfect length, and some of them are like, yeah, maybe I wish this was longer. Or maybe I don't wish it's longer, but, like, it's too short to really be of consequence anyway.

This one, I just feel like it belonged somewhere where it could be more.

But the way it is, you accept it. Okay, you want more? Read more Delany. That's what we should all do anyway because he's pretty awesome.

So yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I've read three Delany works that are longer works before reading the story. I've read "Dhalgren", "Babel-17" for the podcast, and I've read "Empire Star". And "Empire Star" is, like, more of a novella. It's not too long, but it's still quite a bit longer, obviously, than this story.

JM:

Yeah, I'm definitely interested in reading that.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it's really good.

I've enjoyed all the Delany that I've read so far, but I personally like seeing Delany use this approach of the short story and maybe be a little more economical. I definitely agree that those initial scenes deserve to be in here. I think that it's where you really establish the world before you get into the discussion, which is the point of the story.

JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

I think that it really works well, that structure of, you know, you get the world-building, you piece together what is happening, and then you get to why Delany is writing this world.

JM:

Didn't Delany say in the afterword that he thought this was a horror story?

Gretchen:

Yeah. At the very last paragraph of Delany's afterword, it's, "At the risk of pulling my punch, let me say that this is basically a horror story. There is nothing they can do. Except go up and down."

I agree with that.

I also agree with you, Nate, that it is just, like, very creepy, as in very sleazy and uncomfortable. It's about the experience of fetishization. And also because of these references to these characters being like children and taking on these childlike qualities in the eyes of other people, there is a bit of an infantilization of them as well.

I think that exploring it in this kind of fashion, and maybe having it be such a short length, I think it also makes it very—it does kind of pack a punch here.

So I think I would give this one an A.

JM:

Yeah, I do kind of get a Clive Barker vibe, almost.

Nate:

Yeah, I could see him doing something like this.

I've only read two things by Barker, and one of them was his entry for "The Dark Descent", which I thought was pretty excessive. But I really liked "The Hellbound Heart" a lot.

He's another one that I would like to read more of, in addition to Delany, which I'm sure we'll come back to him on the podcast at some point.

Gretchen:

I've also only read those two Barkers, "In the Hills, the Cities" and "The Hellbound Heart".

I can definitely see some connections with him.

JM:

Yeah, I think it's the embracing of the monstrous, like, as something that's positive, I guess, in a way. Or maybe not even positive, but, like, well, that's just—we are what we are. That can be a beautiful thing. Barker does take it a couple of times, like in a couple of the "Books of Blood" stories. I think especially "Sex, Death and Starshine" and "In the Hills, the Cities". I think he's able to convey this kind of weird beauty in the monstrous and in something that appears very twisted by normal reckoning, maybe.

And I feel like Delany touches on a bit of that here, but he doesn't go as far with it as Barker does. But to be fair, Barker was writing most of his stuff in the '80s, and a few things have happened by then. And maybe Barker, as another queer writer, maybe had also figured out things a little more by the time he was writing this.

Now, I will say I prefer Delany as a writer. His fiction feels more experimental to me than Barker's does a lot of the time, and I like that a lot. So I'm not saying that Barker's better than Delany or anything like that. But I feel like he's able to take it a little further, both with the sexuality aspect, but also the kind of revelation that, well, maybe we can't actually live like this.

Maybe this is actually just the way we need to be, right? I always feel like, yeah, Barker has some pretty dark horror stories, but some of his stories are kind of positive in a way.

They feel a little bit affirming, I guess, in their darkness.

Even—not "Hellraiser", though. That's just—yeah.

closing reflections 

JM:

But yeah, we have officially finished "Dangerous Visions" then, haven't we?

Nate:

Yeah, that's the end.

So to calculate the scores that we gave out: JM, you gave out ten A's, ten B's, ten C's and three D's.

JM:

Wow. That's very evenly spaced.

I didn't even realize.

Yeah, except for the D's, of course. Not many stories got a D in here, which is good, right?

That's a pretty good anthology right there.

Nate:

Yeah.

I gave out seven A's, sixteen B's, six C's and four D's.

And Gretchen, you gave out nine A's, thirteen B's, nine C's and two D's.

And we all agreed that three stories were A's: "Faith of Our Fathers", "Incident in Moderan", "Carcinoma Angels".

We agreed on three B's: "The Malley System", "The Jigsaw Man", "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison".

No unanimous C's.

And we all agreed that "Ersatz" by Henry Slesar was a D.

So that's only seven stories out of the 33 that we are in total agreement on. The rest, we were kind of across the board.

JM:

Yeah, which was great, in my opinion.

That's cool.

That's what I was complaining about when we were doing the international one. It was like, we all agree on everything. It's so boring, right?

Nate:

Yeah.

But yeah, it seems like everybody else got different stuff out of this too, reading reviews online.

So I think we all agree that there's something here worth reading, but we might not be totally agreed on what that is at all times.

But I think, yeah, overall this is a positive experience.

JM:

I think we all kind of agreed on what were the worst ones, more or less.

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

But it's kind of in the better categories where we're sort of like, maybe unsure.

Maybe even I'm vacillating a bit on a couple of them, but I had to make a decision, right?

It's interesting.

And talking about the stories, it definitely helped a lot.

I think—I feel kind of like this was the biggest thing we've taken on for Chrononauts because this feels like it's been going on forever.

But I'm not regretting it. I'm happy about it.

But this was a lot. And there's a lot of stories to talk about. And even some of the ones that we didn't choose to focus on directly, there ended up being quite a bit to say in the end. Some of our fellow podcasts, they did do whole episodes on some of these stories, if not all of them.

A couple of them didn't finish the anthology because they were having a rough time with it. I know "Wheel of Genre", I think they covered every story. I haven't heard all the episodes.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they did.

I haven't personally listened to all of them, but while I was listening to some, I'm pretty sure I saw an entry for each story.

JM:

Yeah.

Yeah, I did listen to quite a few, especially the ones that I thought would be, like, controversial, because I wanted to see what their take on it was.

And I had enjoyed the ones they did on Jean Ray and "A Voyage to Arcturus" and stuff.

So yeah, I mean, they were a little harder on the anthology, I think, than we were, but they appreciated some of the same stories, for sure. I do think PKD often gets put on top, and I guess I won't begrudge him because, I mean, I gave the story an A too. And it's just me and the PKD thing where I'm, like, fighting against the phenomenon a little bit.

Sometimes I feel like I have to, but I'm not really wholeheartedly committed to it. I still think he's cool. I still want to read more of his books and stuff like that. I discovered a couple new writers.

What about you guys? Did you make any great new discoveries because of "Dangerous Visions"?

Nate:

Yeah, David Bunch was definitely the surprise of the anthology for me.

I definitely want to read more of his stuff.

And it was nice to get a second look at Norman Spinrad, for sure.

There's definitely a lot of authors that I want to read more of in general in here. I said even the Slesar story—he has good stuff elsewhere.

So I think it is pretty much a collection of who's who of genre writing at the time.

And even more so if you combine it with the second anthology, "Again, Dangerous Visions", and the unpublished, semi-published, whatever state of publishing we're calling it, third "Dangerous Visions" entry.

So many people made their way through here.

And even the stories that I didn't like sound like they have interesting biographies. And at the very least, they all have an interesting place in the history of science fiction. As we mentioned, this is still the best-selling science fiction anthology of all time, so it made quite a splash when it came out and certainly captured a lot of new authors who, at the time, would go on to be more famous and write their best works further down the road.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Yeah, I can definitely say that after reading this collection and then picking up "Moderan" because of it, if I were to submit a letter to a fan column in one of the sci-fi pulp magazines, I would be a Bunchophile. I think that he definitely was one of my favorites that I got to in this collection.

But I think that there are very few authors in this anthology that I wouldn't want to at least try out some more from.

Like even authors that may have had some stories I didn't care for. As you were saying Nate, Slesar, I still would be interested in reading some of their stuff. And these are all very prominent authors anyways, for the most part, that I would have really liked to have gotten around to anyways.

And I think reading some of these stories has made me want to speed up that process.

JM:

Yeah.

For me, I've decided to commit to reading a lot more from a few authors that I kind of knew a little bit, but maybe not all that well.

John Sladek being the perfect example, only having read "Tik-Tok" before and liking that one quite a bit. But it was really hard to find his stuff for a while, and still is as far as I know. But, I mean, I did find e-book copies of several of the things, including a couple short-story collections and most of the science fiction novels.

But also others, like Sonya Dorman, was new to me. I'd definitely be into checking out more.

Like I was saying in episode one, I did kind of read most of these stories before.

But Miriam deFord—I think we all had issues with "The Malley System", but it was kind of an interesting story that made me kind of want to find out more about what she had done and maybe read some of her crime fiction and stuff.

Kris Neville was completely new to me, and I know I'm kind of the odd one out on this just a tad bit, but I really loved "From the Government Printing Office". And definitely looking into some of his stuff has been interesting in the last little while. So I've read a couple of stories and also quite liked his voice and the way these were.

And so a few other cases where I'm just like, yeah, I gotta read more of that.

I was surprised a little bit by the quality of some stories and less so by others.

Like I was saying, I expected a little more from Brunner. I didn't really know what to expect from Farmer and thought I was gonna have a really tough time and kind of procrastinated on reading the story for, like, a really long time because I'm just like, oh, I don't know, it's so long and the style is so weird. But I ended up having a good time with it after all, in the end. Even though, yeah, I mean, there were things about the story that weren't perfect. But I still give it top marks for just going for it and just really, really trying to be a cut above in terms of just style and the way it was told. Even if it didn't 100 percent succeed, the world-building was great. So I would be into reading more Farmer at some point.

I don't know. Reading about and hearing about "To Your Scattered Bodies Go", his Hugo-winning novel, and just reading about that kind of made me reluctant. Like, I was a little bit like, yeah, I'm not sure. Like, I don't think I'm gonna put that at the top of my reading list. But I might go to it a little sooner now.

I mean, I don't know. I had a really great time. I had a great time. Even the stories that I didn't like, most of them were short enough that it didn't really put me off too much. If I had hated "Riders of the Purple Wage", that would have been a thorn in my side because that story is the longest by far. And given all the reviews that were, like, trying to negatively predispose me toward the story, I'm like, yeah, you know what? It wasn't that bad. I got on with it okay. A little nasty in parts, but it's fine. It's fine. I kind of liked it.

So at the end of the day, this was nothing but a good experience. We wrapped up a big chapter in our history, I think, by doing this anthology.

Gretchen, do you want to talk for maybe two minutes about "Again, Dangerous Visions"?

I don't know if we're ever going to do that on the podcast, but it was published a few years after, I believe five years after, and Ellison was really hyping it up even during the second printings of the first one, where he did separate introductions to Volumes Two and Three.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

So I got around to reading several stories from the collection. It is even longer than "Dangerous Visions", with 46 original stories.

JM:

Yeah, it's huge. 

Gretchen:

It's big.

And funny enough, like right after we started recording episodes for this "Dangerous Visions", I ended up purchasing a physical copy of "Again, Dangerous Visions" that my friend was selling. The "Dangerous Visions" that I have, I think, is like 550 pages or something. That copy is 800 pages for "Again, Dangerous Visions".

So I only have read a couple of stories in it so far. One of the highlights so far being—and I'm not surprised by this—but the Le Guin story, "The Word for World Is Forest".

JM:

Yeah, I haven't read that one yet.

Gretchen:

I really enjoyed that one.

It's a story I've been meaning to get to for a while because I do love Le Guin, and I have heard a good amount about that story.

Yeah, so far that has been my favorite.

I've also read a couple of the other stories. Joanna Russ is in that collection. There's Kate Wilhelm, as I think we may have mentioned during the Damon Knight section, does get to be in "Again, Dangerous Visions", so Ellison did get his wish there.

And there is Ross Rocklynne.

Nate:

Yeah.

Yeah, that's funny that he pulled him.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Much better than "The Moth", I will say that.

Yeah, I did enjoy that one more.

And also I did read a couple of stories by authors that I haven't heard too much of their other works.

I'm trying to think—"The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward".

I don't remember the author.

Nate:

Joan Bernott.

Gretchen:

That's it.

Yes.

So I have read a couple of other stories by some of the less recognizable names, such as her.

That one does have a fun introduction by Ellison where he basically is like, I didn't like her as a person, so you know that her writing is good if I decide to still put her in the anthology.

So yeah, there's quite a bit of really fun, really interesting works that I've read in there so far.

Nate:

Yeah, I definitely want to check that out at some point in time.

Maybe give the third one a shot that J. Michael Straczynski just published, which I think is, like, a very small fraction of what was initially intended for the third "Dangerous Visions".

But it's, like, a mixture of what was intended as well as new stories that were commissioned.

JM:

A very small percentage of what was in that prospective table of contents. That is just an incredible assortment of authors, some of whose stories might even just be made-up titles. I don't know. Like, honestly.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I had been looking into it to see just how many aren't included in the final anthology, and there are so many stories. Luckily, a good amount of them have been published in other collections. The authors were able to just get the rights back and publish them in different collections and stuff.

But it is a little sad to see some of the stories that were mentioned as being potential works in the anthology that have not been released anywhere, if they do exist. Hopefully someday they'll see the light of day.

Nate:

Yeah, it would really be cool if that happened. I mean, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately. But yeah, it is kind of wild how much unpublished stuff there is just floating around in copyright hell, right?

JM:

Possibly quite a lot, right?

And this is the thing that Christopher Priest and them were kind of really ganging up on Ellison about. But it's fair. Like, why wasn't he publishing this? He apparently bought all these stories from these writers.

And we kind of said some of the stories in the first "Dangerous Visions" anthology, we're not really sure if they totally belong there. This is, like, almost the authors were just, all right, all right, I'll just submit something, right?

But you kind of get the feeling that, well, I mean, that anthology was so popular and it stirred up so many things, positive and negative, that probably if there was a sequel, authors would be like, oh, it's "Dangerous Visions". That's serious. I gotta put in some serious effort here and actually deliver something that'll kick people in the arse.

I read so far a few of the "Again, Dangerous Visions" stories. I read the Joanna Russ story, which I thought was really interesting. And I read the Piers Anthony story, which was kind of simplistic but kind of cool, I guess. I don't know. It's, like, kind of how I pictured Piers Anthony because he was really popular when I was a teenager. Slightly over-sexed stuff that a lot of teenage boys would read. I think that was kind of the feeling that I had at the time and kind of was willing to go along with it for a little bit. But I can't say I read a book by him since, like, the mid-'90s or something like that. But he ended up in "Again, Dangerous Visions", and him and Harlan, there was some mutual respect going on there.

I read that one. I read Josephine Saxton. I've really become interested in her work since reading her story in "The Big Book of Science Fiction", "The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky". And the story in "Again, Dangerous Visions", "Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon", is cool. I didn't like it as much as some of the other stuff she's written, but it made sense that this was in "Dangerous Visions" number two. There's other stories that I liked from her more. And that is the case with some of the authors in the first anthology too, where I kind of feel like they're not really delivering their best work here, maybe.

But it's still cool, right? The Lafferty story—I really, really like Lafferty, and I was always going to talk about that story.

But then I thought, you know what? I want to talk about John Sladek because I think that's a more memorable story in some ways. It just deserves to be talked about. And we already talked about Lafferty, and then there might be a chance to talk about him some more in the future. 

And I've really had fun going down the Josephine Saxton rabbit hole. She's a really interesting personality, and her writing just—yeah. She has a book called "Little Tours of Hell: Tall Tales of Food and Holidays", and it's literally—that's what it's about. And most of the stories are about food, but, like, they're all aspects of food, including how it comes out the other end. It's, like, really awkward and intimate. And just, like, these stories about dinner parties where we're supposed to be so cultured or whatever, but they're just literally talking about shit. And just—it's the most awkwardly hilarious thing. 

I guess I'm kind of cheating because she's a new writer I kind of discovered through "Again, Dangerous Visions" a little bit, even though I first came across her in "The Big Book of Science Fiction". But, like, at that time I could not find anything that much that she had written.

So now it seems to be easier. There's at least e-book editions of a bunch of stuff. So we're getting there. We're getting to that time when all these, like, weird classics that only a few people read nowadays are digitized and available.

But depending on your method of reading, I unfortunately have no choice but to read digital books.

So that's a whole other story.

But, well, the legacy of "Dangerous Visions" has been a long one. I think it's pretty well over with now, but I definitely do think that people should continue to look at this anthology and evaluate it from the present context. I think that a lot of the stories do actually hold up in really interesting ways. And even when they don't, it's interesting to talk about how our perceptions of things have changed. I definitely started noticing how the perception of politics has changed since the time when these stories were written and how, like, especially as it comes to government and stuff.

Of course, again, you can't escape the fact that a lot of these stories are pretty U.S.-centric. There's a few authors that made an effort to not be that way. But, I mean, in general, that was both the writers and the audience, so I mean, I guess it makes sense. But you have some questions about how things are in the rest of the world.

We kind of had that when we were talking about, for example, "Native Tongue", where it was never quite clear to me if everybody just kind of adopted this. Towards the end of the book she just casually name-dropped Switzerland, and we're like, oh, okay, so this was happening in Switzerland. Okay.

There's kind of a little sense of that in "Dangerous Visions", where inevitably perhaps focusing a lot on the American experience. We have a couple of British writers, but their stories—neither Brunner nor Ballard really managed to set out all that much. Am I forgetting somebody? I think those are the only two British writers, right?

Gretchen:

Aldiss.

Nate:

Yeah, Aldiss is British, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Okay.

And Sladek, because—American expatriate, but he ended up spending a good part of his writing years in London, and seemed to be embraced by the community there, ironically unlike Brunner.

Nate:

But certainly all native English speakers and no translated science fiction.

Gretchen:

Yeah, a very different experience from our last episode.

Nate:

Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, it'd be interesting to see what "Dangerous Visions International" would look like.

JM:

That would have been amazing.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

I forgot to mention this, but John Brunner was actually a fluent French speaker, and he did translate one of Gérard Klein's science fiction novels, "The Overlords of War", and produced the English version.

And, like, Donald A. Wollheim was publishing European science fiction anthologies. And a couple of others. I believe David G. Hartwell had one that was, like, in his "The Science Fiction Century". I believe he included a lot of non-English works. Like, he's probably one of the first people to do that. But I definitely think the anthology could have benefited from more perspectives. And perhaps, again, if it had become an ongoing series, maybe it would. But then again, I also think that Ellison was really interested in tackling specifically American taboos a lot.

For that reason too, I question why some of the things were and were not in "Dangerous Visions". Like, okay, why aren't there more race-relations-motivated stories in here, right? Like, you would think that would be a big thing. Yeah, it does come up a bit, and there's the Pohl story. 

Generally the authors seem to be mostly staying away from that, which is interesting. I'm not saying it's a total negative against the anthology. I'm just saying it's interesting that nobody really focused that much on that, maybe except Pohl. It seems like this anthology came out shortly before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, right? And he even referred to "The Triple Revolution" document, which Farmer talks about extensively in "Riders of the Purple Wage".

It feels like there's some missed opportunities here. Even though I think a lot of the authors, they did get on their soapbox. Some of them don't have one, like Keith Laumer. He has no agenda. He just wants to tell you a crazy pulpy story about worm aliens and mind control and crazy maniacal world dictators and stuff like that.

Certain other writers, like Larry Niven, for example, definitely have an agenda, and they're definitely pushing something. You can feel it. You can feel the way they're doing it. It's just—it's so, wow, it's so righteous. It's interesting to see how things have gone.

I feel it a bit from Sladek too, but I feel like Sladek is maybe a little world-weary. It seems like, this is the way things are going. Like, I'm not really as angry about it as I could be, but I'm gonna poke at it a little bit and be satirical. And, like, it's interesting.

Interesting really seeing a mixed bag of not just the story quality, but the authors and their points of view. Like, we have some more left-leaning-type writers, but we also have some kind of conservatives in here, and we have different political persuasions. It's not all pushing the same thing, even though Ellison was like, yeah, break some boundaries, bust some stuff up. They're all like, okay, yeah, we'll try. It's just so interesting to see how everybody came at that slightly differently.

Okay, well, wow. We've babbled for so long about this anthology, I think it's time to close the book. But what have we got next on Chrononauts?

Gretchen:

We were talking a little bit earlier about how this anthology has inspired us to want to read a little bit more of the writers that are in this anthology.

And even though I think we can all agree that it may not have been his best that is included in "Dangerous Visions", I am a fan of every other Sturgeon story that I've read, and I really enjoy his work.

And so I think for the next pick I decided to go with "More Than Human".

JM:

Wow. Okay, cool.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely looking forward to returning to him.

And he's been a constant link throughout the last couple episodes.

This story, I believe, appeared in "Más Allá", and we covered him in the "Galaxy" episode, and of course in this episode. So he's kind of got four in a row, which is cool, to be digging more into his work because I really like him as a writer.

JM:

And the one we did in the anthology, we had issues, but it was quite a discussion.

So yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

So I think that it seems like Sturgeon, even when he isn't at his best or he writes a story that I'm not particularly fond of, it's still enough to prompt a lot to say.

So I am really looking forward to reading an actual novel by him.

JM:

Me too.

Awesome.

All right, well, I think then we've closed this massive book, and now our state has collapsed, and our parents are crying, and our religious institutions are at war, and our pastors and priests are about to shoot themselves. So I think we've achieved everything we need to achieve here on Chrononauts for a while.

I'm going to take a break. Maybe a nice cold shower.

And yeah, we'll be back to discuss more Ted Sturgeon.

You have been listening to the Chrononauts. We all hope you've enjoyed this long excursion into "Dangerous Visions". See you next time.