![]() To be entirely frank, I’ve never been a fan of either writer, some of whose other stories set my teeth on edge. Both of these stories are as powerful today as they were forty years ago, because the problems remain. Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest,” a piece that merges environmentalism and racism in such a talented way that it’s as hard to read it as, Le Guin says in her afterword, it was easy for her to write it and Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” one of the best feminist science fiction stories, posting a world where the men died off and the women did what they had to do to continue, then the ramifications of being “rediscovered” by the rest of humanity. But in the preparation of the second volume, Ellison took on much more than a simple championing role-he became a dangerous vision of himself.īut before I get to the real criticism of this volume, let me note that it still contains a couple of the greatest short fiction stories ever published: Ursula K. It is true that the first anthology did seem to set a fire under a number of writers, both old and new, to experiment and try new things, and it happened because Ellison championed it. ![]() Perhaps in those four years, he started to believe his own hype. Sometime between the first Dangerous Visions anthology and the second, Harlan Ellison jumped the shark. ![]()
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