beyond The Last Dangerous Visions

Of the over 100 stories that Harlan Ellison collected for The Last Dangerous Visions, the anthology he keep announcing but never publishing for some 45 years until his death in 2018, over 40 were at some point withdrawn by their authors (or their estates) and published elsewhere.

When a book with that title finally appeared last year, edited (though not by name) by J. Michael Straczynski, it included some 17 of the remaining 50-plus stories. (In a couple cases it's not clear if the story published is the same as the one Harlan had been listing.) JMS promised to return all the remaining stories to the authors (or their estates) along with the rights, for them to do with as they liked.

So John Grayshaw of Amazing Stories decided to check up on their plans with as many of these authors (or their estates) as he could get hold of. He wrote to 56 of them, and here's his results. (h/t F770)

Of those 56, 9 have already been published in English and 2 only in French, which in most cases Grayshaw could have learned from the ISFDB. He did not hear from 34 of the authors (or their estates), leaving 11 that sent him replies. 5 said they have no plans to publish (Grant Carrington, Raylyn Moore, Edgar Pangborn, Joseph F. Pumilia, Bruce Sterling), 2 estates don't have copies of what in both cases were multi-part stories (Russell Bates's sister is looking for them; George Alec Effinger's widow thinks they were lost in a fire long ago, and Grayshaw suggests asking JMS; someone else reports having been reminded of their story by receiving it from JMS); and just 4 say some form of "maybe sometime" (Gordon Eklund, John Jakes, Robert Thom, Lisa Tuttle); no enthusiastic "yes" answers.

Of course there's all those "no reply" entries, plus another half-dozen on various proposed contents lists whom Grayshaw didn't write to, but remember that these are the half of the contributors who didn't withdraw their stories. Either they don't really care or else, like Carrington and possibly some others, they feel what was a dangerous vision half a century ago has lost its savor and best remains buried.

A few more may trickle out, and the latest to have done so on Grayshaw's list is "XYY" by Vonda N. McIntyre, one of the authors whose absence from JMS's contents list has been most regretted by reviewers. It's in a new retrospective anthology of her short work, Little Sisters and Other Stories, and I'll be getting that.