Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2023 December 11

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December 11

The Last Dangerous Visions

Just what is it that Harlan Ellison didn't get around to doing for forty years? It's not as if he had to write the stories. —Tamfang (talk) 03:34, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

Harlan Ellison#The Last Dangerous VisionsHas a little bit more information on this. Ellison was a bit of a character... Alien878 (talk) 08:50, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

The preceding anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, had included substantial critical material by Ellison (and others) addressing the genre, and by Ellison profiling each writer and introducing each story: completing this material for TLDV seems to have become a stumbling block. Additionally, the already lengthy delays meant a steady churn of writers withdrawing their stories for timely publication (and hence payment) elsewhere, and Ellison both replacing them and augmenting the anthology with further authors/stories (requiring yet more editorial writing), which made delivery of a finalised manuscript of a physically publishable length increasingly difficult.

On his publisher Doubleday's side, repeated increases in the intended length of the book would have forced repeated redesigns of the intended volume(s) – much more laborious in pre-computer compositing days – and prolonged uncertainty of delivery would have made scheduling and publicising the publication of the work a nightmare (I speak as a former bookseller and book editor). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.199.215.44 (talk) 16:20, 11 December 2023 (UTC)