mtvessel | Not So Shocking

Mar 2024
Dangerous Visions - ed. Harlan Ellison – Blackstone Publishing, 2024
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This collection, first published in 1967, is credited with dragging SF kicking and screaming out of the golden age and into the new wave. Ellison solicited and got stories that the mainstream SF publications of the late sixties would not have touched - visions too political, too violent, too sexy. Of course, time will have tempered their edges, but I wanted to see if they still retained their bite. On the whole, I have to say - no, they haven't. Though there are a few good ones.

Most of the stories, as you might expect, deal with sex or religion, and almost all of them have lost their shock value. The horror-inflected tales generally still work - Robert Bloch's "A Toy for Juliette", Carol Emshwiller's "Sex and/or Mr Morrison" - as do the singular visions - Roger Zelazny's "Auto-da-Fé" (despite it being entirely based on a weak pun), R.A. Lafferty's "Land of the Great Horses", Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels". But these are the stories that are closest to traditional science fiction, based around a single interesting idea or observation. The stories that try to be shocking through the use of adult or taboo themes are less effective now, though I did enjoy Philip José Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" for its inventive use of language.

Part of the difficulty is that SF writers and editors are more of their time than they care to admit (as Isaac Asimov admirably admits in his introduction when explaining why he refused to submit a story), so values that we have come to regard as normal in modern fiction are present only in their most embryonic forms. The selection of stories is notably light on female writers and female viewpoints (no Joanna Russ, no Ursula Le Guin) and some of the depictions of women verge on outright misogyny (Fritz Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones" is particularly poor). LGBTQIA people are used as the "shocking" punchlines to stories rather than being portrayed sympathetically (in the afterword to his story "Aye, and Gomorrah", Samuel R. Delaney describes his depiction of asexual astronauts and their admirers as a horror story, which to me is more offensive than anything else in the book) and the settings mostly have a narrow Anglo-Christian feel. The religious blasphemies used in several of the stories seem tame compared to what, say, Monty Python did a few years later. So no - this book is an artefact of its times and should be approached as such. Though we can be grateful that it sowed the seeds for some of the more sophisticated and interesting stories that have come since.

Not So Shocking

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