Dangerous Visions

Dangerous Visions, a collection of transgressive speculative short fiction edited by Harlan Ellison, is not just one of the most awarded genre shorts volumes of all time with three Hugo nominations (two of them winners), a pair of Nebulas, and a special citation from the World Science Fiction Convention. It also marks the beginning of a famously quixotic series. Ellison collected dozens of stories from famous writers to continue the series, yet many of those stories went unpublished, and their authors went unpaid. But perhaps the most significant contribution of Dangerous Visions to Sci-Fi’s history are its groundbreaking explorations of queerness in a genre now famous for literary visions of worlds accepting of LGBTQIA+ people as people, deserving of happiness and happy endings. Particularly illustrative of this phenomenon is Samuel R. Delany’s Aye, and Gomorrah…, which addresses issues of gender transformation and asexuality that have only recently entered mainstream conversations.