The Last Dangerous Visions finally hit shelves on October 1, 2024, fifty years after Harlan Ellison first promised it to readers. Blackstone Publishers released the book as the closing volume of Ellison’s Dangerous Visions trilogy, credited to Ellison with estate executor J. Michael Straczynski listed alongside him. Anne McCaffrey’s story “The Bones Do Lie,” one of roughly 120 pieces Ellison acquired for the anthology over four decades, never made the final cut.
Ellison built his reputation on the first two volumes. Dangerous Visions in 1967 gathered original stories from Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, and Samuel R. Delany, published amid the science fiction New Wave movement of the 1960s. Again, Dangerous Visions followed in 1972. Ellison announced the third volume in the January 1973 issue of the fanzine Alien Critic. By 1979, Locus magazine published a table of contents listing 113 stories from 102 authors, sold to Berkley Books for three volumes totaling 645,000 words. The book never arrived.
