I got a notice the other day that Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions was finally being published. So I just now ordered a copy. I kinda figured it would take his dying before Last was ever published. It’ll be interesting to see their take on why he never got it out.

It was originally announced for publication in 1973. Over the decades, like the Flying Dutchman, Last Dangerous Visions had become a legendary ghost book. Sightings would occasionally be reported but eventually all were found to be mirages. This lead to more than perpetual fan disappointment. The writers who submitted to this collection did so on the basis of how fantastic the previous two were, and they gave Ellison their best stories…never to be seen again due to the contract they signed preventing them from publishing elsewhere before Last Dangerous Visions was published. Ellison eventually, so I’m told, released some of them from that contract after decades, but it created a lot of bad feelings. Not that Ellison was ever afraid of creating bad feelings. But some of those writers have since died.

I have the first two volumes and I’m really interested to read what’s in this one. Finally. But even more so to understand what the hell happened.

I should add to this, something I posted on Facebook that I neglected to post here after Ellison passed away, about why I like the works of Harlan Ellison, “controversial” and infuriating though he could be. This is the closing narration from the Twilight Zone version of Paladin Of The Lost Hour, a story that’s also part of his Angry Candy short story collection. It is a story he said, capped his preoccupation with themes of friendship, ethics, courage, responsibility, and the gaining of wisdom.

“Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment. A blessing of the 18th Egyptian dynasty: ‘God be between you and harm in all the empty places you walk.'”

That could pass for a good epitaph for Harlan Ellison. Yes I’m quite sure he earned much of the anger directed at him in his life, but also the love. None of us are of a single weave of thread. And those of us who have walked in those empty places knew after we’d read him, that we were not alone. He walked there with more bravery and clarity than most of us could bear, so we could find our way. He could stare down Nietzsche’s abyss, and the abyss would blink first.