DISPATCHES FROM THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS: BEYOND THE AFTERWORD

 

Took me the better part of this batshit year to finish The Last Dangerous Visions. I read other stuff in between and got distracted a lot. I mostly liked it. There were a few pieces that I really enjoyed, and some that were just okay, in my humble opinion. And I had questions. 

The afterword answered them. 

Harlan’s problem, besides being bipolar, was his incredible imagination. He could imagine several helluvalots beyond what is possible. It can be frustrating. I know from personal experience.

And after a point, imagination, like talent, becomes dysfunctional. I know about that, too.

Then there’s the whole idea of dangerous visions. It changes, the way society does. 1975, 2025. Two very different worlds. 

These days, most readers (if we can trust the publishers) want cozy reading. Even thrillers, horror, and dystopias reassure us of the delusions that we live by.

But we do need to look beyond what we feel comfortable with. It’s survival. And why we have art and literature.

The table of contents isn’t quite the boy’s club that the first two volumes were. I can attest that as late as the 1980s female genre writers were rare. Really.

A lot of the writers are dead. Worse yet forgotten. For some it was one of the only times they were published. 

We aren’t treated well. Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be writers . . .

There weren’t any with the life-changing impact on me like Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” or Richard A. Lupoff’s “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys in Little Old New Alabama.” The world still isn’t ready to consider that high-tech socialism could be fun, or that racism could be possible on a galactic scale. There were some close calls, but . . . maybe I’ve become grotesquely jaded in my old age.

Some say that you can’t write dangerous stuff in our society where offending is considered a capital offense. Nonsense. You can write anything you want. It's getting published that’s the problem.

I find that to be dangerous, all I have to do is be myself.

I could have been in TLDV. 

Shortly after I moved in with Emily in Arizona, Harlan called my parents—the phone number was on a flyer I had sent him. Things were crazy, and I was hard to track down. He never caught up with me, so I have no idea what it was about. At the time, I thought that TLDV was a done deal and was never going to happen. He may have heard of my reputation as the notorious author of “The Frankenstein Penis." Or maybe he just wanted to say hi. We’ll never know.

Maybe it’s all for the best. I’m causing enough trouble as it is.

And oh, what a dangerous world we’ve made. Dangerous visions may be that only way out.

Thank you, Harlan.

And you, too, J. Michael Syraczinski. 

Stay dangerous, my friends.