Again, Dangerous Visions, published in 1972, was the follow up to the successful anthology Dangerous Visions. Each story has an introduction written by Ellison and an afterword written by the author. In some cases, the introduction and afterword are longer than the story itself.

In many of the introductions, Ellison tells us a third anthology in the series titled The Last Dangerous Visions is going to be published soon, and even shares the names of some of the authors who will appear. Alas, this third volume was never published during his lifetime. I get the impression Ellison wanted to include every prominent science fiction author of the time in these three volumes, but wasn’t able to pull it off since new writers kept coming along. (Ellison’s executor, J. Michael Straczynski, announced plans to publish a slimmed-down version of The Last Dangerous Visions in 2020, but it still hasn’t seen the light of day as of this writing.)

With 46 stories, each with its own introduction and afterword, Again, Dangerous Visions is quite a hefty volume. The stories were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s and certainly show their age, especially in how female characters are treated. Male authors outnumber female authors about 5 to 1. The Dangerous Visions series was meant to showcase stories which couldn’t get published in traditional venues due to shocking content, however, with a few exceptions, these read like normal sci-fi stories you could read anywhere. Maybe they were shocking by 1970s standards?

There’s a lot of big name writers included. Some were big names at the time and others became big names later. I personally rank 17 of these stories as above average, 7 as average, and 22 as below average, but of course, your own rankings will vary. I won’t review all 46 stories, just the ones that stood out to me.

One of the worst stories in the collection is “In the Barn” by Piers Anthony. A man travels to a parallel universe in which human woman are milked like cows. Our “hero” even has non-consensual sex with one of them. Charming.

Another of the worst stories is “And the Sea Like Mirrors” by Gregory Benford. A man and woman are adrift on a life raft surrounded by alien creatures in the water. The man routinely beats the woman for being stupid but he’s supposed to be the hero of the story.

In his introduction to “Bed Sheets are White” by Evelyn Lief, Ellison tells us Lief was a writing student of his. After she wrote a bad story, he threatened to beat her and shove the story up her ass if she wrote another horrible story like it. She left the room crying and immediately wrote this story, which was so good he bought it. Was Ellison trying to be funny by telling us this or does he think threatening writing students is the best way to get them to write better? Ellison looks bad either way.

In Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s contribution, Earth is doomed due to pollution, overpopulation, and many extinct species. Swearing is no longer considered bad and everyone does it. The people of Earth fire a rocket full of jizzum into space in order to continue the human race. In this world, children can sue parents for not raising them right. It’s kind of funny, I guess, but it reads like it was written by a twelve-year-old. Definitely one of the subpar stories in this collection.

K. M. O’Donnell’s “Still-Life” focuses on the domestic problems of an astronaut. He has non-consensual sex with his wife and assaults the babysitter, but neither of these acts is portrayed as a bad thing. Overall, an average story.

Another average story, Leonard Tushnet’s “In Re Glover”, at least made me think. The Supreme Court tries to decide if a cryogenically frozen man should be considered alive or dead, but the case is rendered moot when a power outage kills him. I can’t help wondering what would happen if this came up in real life. Should a person in suspended animation be considered legally dead or not?

Ben Bova’s “Zero Gee” is another average story in which an astronaut assigned to go to space with a photographer is looking forward to being the first man to have sex in zero g. However, he first has to deal with a second woman assigned to the mission who might stand in his way. It didn’t end up being as bad as I thought it would be.

“Ching Witch!” by Ross Rocklynne was a fun story. The only man to survive the destruction of Earth travels to the planet Zephyrus where he’s an instant celebrity. He doesn’t tell them Earth has been destroyed, just that Earth doesn’t hold a grudge against them anymore. The teenagers of the planet want to know the latest Earth slang and dances. They ride low gravity brooms for fun. There’s a lot of funny parts. It’s a bit creepy that he’s into teenage girls, though.

“Time Travel for Pedestrians” by Ray Nelson is one of the few stories a traditional outlet wouldn’t have published due to its sex, violence, cussing, and sacrilegious nature. I didn’t think much of it until the end which made me like it. It’s a reincarnation story. The narrator lives several lives. Mary Magdalene expressed the interesting idea that if Jesus wanted a book written about him, he would have written it himself. There’s no need for a book when God can speak directly to us. Those who love a book more than God are able to justify committing all manner of atrocities.

H. H. Hollis is a lawyer and his story “Stoned Counsel” has a science fiction legal setting. The narrator’s opponent is defending a company responsible for pollution. Hallucinogens are used in court to learn the truth. Opposing lawyers share a hallucination full of trippy images. Fascinating.

Bernard Wolfe provided two stories. “Biscuit Position” isn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather literary fiction. In it, a war reporter flirts with a married woman and discusses the Vietnam War at a dinner party. A dog dies a gruesome, drawn-out death which will stick with you for a while. The characters exchange witty repartee throughout, but I thought it was poor taste when the narrator said something witty about the dead dog.

His second story, “The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements”, features a creative writing teacher who has trouble relating to his stoner student who wants to write rock lyrics. Their discussions are reminiscent of the dialog in Philip K. Dick’s Through a Scanner Darkly. It’s really fun. Two characters have the ability to influence each other’s dreams when they sleep in proximity to each other (I think a machine is also involved somehow). The author claims this isn’t a science fiction story even though it clearly is. (What’s realistic about two different people sharing the same dream?) In his afterword, the author bad mouths scientists and science fiction authors for being slaves to capitalism. It seems strange to bad mouth sci-fi in a sci-fi anthology.

I quite liked “Eye of the Beholder” by Burt K. Filer in which a sculptor’s artistic work is used to achieve weightlessness. Art gets turned into science, which is a neat idea.

In “Moth Race” by Richard Hill, people are able to vicariously experience what celebrities eat and drink. They can even experience sex vicariously, but it’s not exactly the same as the real thing. People take pills that keep them happy and also keep them from being prejudiced. Everyone in the world has enough to eat, a sexual partner, and a comfortable life, but not everyone gets to have children. Normal people’s food is not as good as what celebrities get. People compete in a death race for a chance to become a celebrity, but only one man has ever lived through it. A good story.

James Blish (with Judith Ann Lawrence) wrote “Getting Along” which details the erotic adventures of a woman who visits various relatives who turn out to be a vampire, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, a Lovecraftian horror, etc. It’s funny in places.

In his introduction to “The Milk of Paradise” by James Tiptree, Jr., Ellison says he saved the best story for last. (It’s the last story in the collection, however I’m reviewing them out-of-order, saving my favorite stories for the end of my review.) Ellison says Tiptree is the man to beat, a shoo-in for the Hugo Award. (He didn’t know at the time that Tiptree was a pseudonym for female writer Alice Sheldon, which amuses me.) The story itself is about a man raised by aliens who is disgusted by humans. However, he finds going home isn’t what he remembered either. It’s a pretty good story.

The title for Gahan Wilson’s story is a picture of a spot or inkblot. A man discovers a stain in his house that disappears when you stop looking at it, but reappears somewhere else, bigger than it was before. It appears to be two dimensional, but actually has depth. Spooky.

“Chuck Berry, Won’t You Please Come Home” by Ken McCullough has a narrator who keeps bugs as pets. He once walked a wasp around on a thread which started a fad at his school. In the present, he’s feeding a tick he named Chuck Berry from a cadaver which gave him a wink. He gives the tick drugs and it grows big. His writing style reminded me of William S. Burroughs.

I was surprised to find Dean R. Koontz had a story in this collection. It’s titled “A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village”. In the story, empathy circuits installed in the brain make everyone telepathic, except for a few who are called Stunted. Even in utopia, some unfortunates will fall through the cracks and get discriminated against. It’s really well written.

“Ozymandias” by Terry Carr is another one of the good stories. To protect against grave robbers, cryogenically-frozen people are placed in tombs rigged with traps. Superstitious grave robbers think they need to dance in a certain way to avoid the traps. Great world building.

In “The Funeral” by Kate Wilhelm, 14-year-old Carla has never seen a male before and has no last name. She is considered property of the state. She is a student in a school, assigned to become a teacher. This story has really impressive world building, revealing how things work a little at a time. Creepy. In her afterword, Wilhelm complains that store clerks and soda jerks serve middle-aged people before teenagers who were waiting longer. I hadn’t realized discrimination against teenagers like this was a thing.

Earthlings colonize a planet called New Tahiti in “The Word for World is Forest” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Many animals back on Earth have gone extinct and the colonists are cutting down trees and making animals go extinct on this new planet. Evolution on New Tahiti happened similarly to how it happened on Earth, but the humans died out on this planet. Green monkeys called creechies are the closest thing this planet has to humans. The creechies are used for slave labor and sex. They don’t require sleep because they dream while they’re awake. The story alternates between different points of view: a human in favor of colonization, a creechie, and a human opposed to colonization. Le Guin does a great job of writing from different points of view. The principle conflict, that humans don’t have lumber on Earth, doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I suppose lumber is just a stand in for resources in general. One of the best stories in this collection. Despite Ellison predicting a different story in this collection would get the award, this story won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.

“When it Changed” by Joanna Russ won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. In the introduction to this story, Ellison admits that he was a male chauvinist in the past, calls out a fellow sci-fi writer for being a chauvinist, and declares “the best writers in sf today are the women.” (Which makes you wonder why he included so few women in this collection.) He also praises the women’s lib movement and declares, “I see more kindness and rationality in the average woman than in the average man.” This surprised me, since nearly every story in Ellison’s collection I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream was quite sexist. Although, to be fair, that was written a few years before this.

Russ’s story takes place on a planet in which all the men died 30 generations ago. The women live in a steam-powered, agricultural, honor-based society in which duels are common. A group of men from Earth arrive and want to reintroduce men to the planet. The narrator feels small for the first time in her life since the men are bigger than her. The men are clearly sexist, but claim sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. This story has great characterization. I loved this line: “When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome.” In her afterword, Russ mentions that men get served on airplanes before women. It’s easy to forget how many ways society has progressed over the years.