J. Michael Straczynski Just Freed Decades of Authors From Harlan Ellison’s Rights Grip

Dangerous Visions is more than the standard anthology. When Harlan Ellison published it in 1967, it became, by most accounts, the single most significant science fiction anthology ever released, 33 stories from 32 authors that effectively launched the New Wave movement in American SF, pushing the genre toward character-driven, formally daring fiction rather than the pulpier tradition that came before it. Contributors included Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Fritz Leiber, and Philip José Farmer, and several of the individual stories went on to win Hugo and Nebula Awards. Ellison followed it up in 1972 with Again, Dangerous Visions, an even larger 46-story collection featuring Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe, and Dean Koontz, which won the 1973 Locus Award for Best Original Anthology. A planned third volume, The Last Dangerous Visions, became one of the genre’s most famous unfinished projects, promised repeatedly by Ellison for decades and never delivered in his lifetime.

Here’s the detail that made this week’s announcement necessary: when Ellison bought the stories for these anthologies, he didn’t negotiate the standard reprint terms most anthology editors use. Most anthologies acquire rights for a limited window, typically a year or two, after which the rights revert to the author, freeing them to sell the story again to other collections, “Best Of” compilations, or their own retrospective volumes. Ellison instead bought exclusive rights in perpetuity, meaning those stories could never legally appear anywhere else, not in other anthologies, not in “Best Of the Year” collections, not in the authors’ own single-author retrospectives, for as long as Ellison or his estate held the rights. At the time, that arrangement served a specific purpose: it helped fund Ellison’s own livelihood as an anthologist and writer. But it also meant that for decades, dozens of major genre authors, and eventually their estates, were locked out of any additional income from some of the most acclaimed short fiction of their careers.

Ellison died in 2018. J. Michael Straczynski, the veteran writer and showrunner best known for Babylon 5, took over as literary executor of Ellison’s estate and spent years finally assembling The Last Dangerous Visions, which Blackstone Publishing released in October 2024, alongside new special editions of the original two anthologies.

That publication is what triggers the change Straczynski just announced. Posting on X, he laid out the new policy in full:

“I originally mentioned this way back in fall ‘24 and have subsequently alluded to it on several occasions, but I’m putting the word out here because there are still some folks we can’t reach and/or who just haven’t gotten the word. When Harlan bought stories for Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions, he bought exclusive rights; the stories could not appear elsewhere. And while he was still with us, that made sense in terms of Harlan wanting to provide for his livelihood. But it meant that those stories could not appear in other anthologies or “best of” collections, denying income to the authors and/or their estates. Since the issue of livelihood no longer applies, I said previously, and I’ll say it again here for all those whose estates have shut down or families we haven’t been able to find that this has changed. As executor of the estate, the new rule is that 3 years after the publication of the new editions, all the authors/estates for stories printed in DV/ADV will have nonexclusive rights to sell those stories elsewhere, as long as it’s not to a directly competing anthology (meaning it has something close to the DV/ADV titles, which seems kinda unlikely). This will free up all those stories to be picked up by Best Of anthologies and generate income in addition to the DV/ADV royalties that still continue to be paid. We’ve done our best to track down the relatives/estates of those writers, but there are still a number we haven’t been able to find, so if anyone in the SF world knows someone who needs to hear the news, please pass it on. It’s the right decision, and I think Harlan would approve.”

The mechanics are straightforward: three years after the 2024 republication, authors and their estates regain nonexclusive rights to sell those stories elsewhere, with the sole restriction being they can’t go to a directly competing anthology carrying something close to the Dangerous Visions name. The original DV/ADV royalties keep being paid on top of whatever new income those authors or estates can now generate. Straczynski has apparently been saying versions of this since 2024, but he’s reiterating it publicly now specifically because the estate still hasn’t been able to locate a number of the original authors’ surviving relatives or estate representatives, some of whom may not even know this right exists to claim.

This is a good outcome, and a fairly rare one in publishing, where rights disputes after an author’s death usually trend toward more restriction, not less. Straczynski didn’t have to give this up. Nothing legally compelled the estate to release exclusivity once the anthologies stayed in print and kept generating royalties under the original terms. He’s doing it because the reason for the restriction, funding Ellison’s own life, no longer applies, and holding authors’ estates hostage to a decades-old business arrangement after the person who needed it has been gone for years isn’t something he apparently wanted attached to Ellison’s legacy. For the families of contributors who may be struggling to track down income from relatives’ literary estates, or for still-living authors who could finally sell a story that’s been locked out of “Best Of” collections for fifty-plus years, this is real money and real recognition finally becoming available again.

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