Science Fiction | Books | Poetry

Harlan Ellison, The Last Dangerous Visions, and a Usenet War

Never start a war with Harlan…

Long ago, in 1998, there was the Internet (capitalized) but no World Wide Web, no Facebook, no Twitter. So where could people go to post messages on various topics, then fight about it? Usenet, a distributed network of discussion groups that anyone with access to a news server could use. And we used them.

I’m a fan of science fiction, and one of my favorite writers was Harlan Ellison, a brilliant writer and editor who everyone either loved or hated. He could be…opinionated. One of the books he edited was a groundbreaking speculative fiction (Harlan’s term for science fiction and fantasy) anthology called Dangerous Visions. The stories in it had a profound effect on the sf world, and he edited a sequel: Again, Dangerous Visions. This also was groundbreaking, and the stories in it won numerous awards. So Harlan announced he was going to edit The Last Dangerous Visions, and started buying stories for it. Then the project stalled, and stopped.

Many fans were outraged, because they wanted to read the stories. The anthology became a frequent topic to argue about on Usenet, particularly in groups like rec.arts.sf. I happened on one of these, where several people were arguing about what Harlan should do. I came down on the side that the writers involved were professionals, this was a business arrangement, and if Harlan wasn’t going to…