Tetelestai!: Harlan Ellison’s “The Last Dangerous visions”.

So now done with "The Last Dangerous Visions", third and final installment of Ellison's Dangerous Visions series!

This is one is decent, but nowhere near as good as the other two that I've previously read. Most of the stories are either good or just average, though there are still some big names in it like A.E. Van Vogt, Dan Simmons, Robert Sheckley and James S.A. Corey of "The Expanse" fame.

There is only one introduction that Ellis wrote for one story, that being "War Stories" by Edward Bryant. Most of the introductions included in it are short and sweet. Out of all the stories in this collection, the ones I really like are the ones written by Sheckley, Van Vogt and James. Even the really short intermezzo pieces that are written by D.M. Rowles.

There is the also the "Harlan Exegesis" that appears at the beginning along with the short introduction. Written by J. Michael Straczynski, who was one of Harlan's closest friends who also manage to get some of his stuff published through Black Stone publishing, detailing Ellison's struggles with his inner demons in the form of manic depression and bi-polar disorder that went largely un-diagnosed. A pretty gut wrenching read, given with what Ellison himself had to go through for a good portion of his life.

The afterword at the end takes on a different tact. In it Straczynski talks about the reasons why "The Last Dangerous Visions" was never published for over 50 years. And those reasons include from him purchasing a large number, with some of them not being a good quality, and sometimes returning them if the author had passed on, to the creative inertia that would plague him. I've seen Ellison's original hand typed table of contents for the initial version he had in mind. And that version is huge! Three volumes with 120 stories from 108 writers; probably would've been the largest one he ever did if he managed to have it published!

This isn't exactly the best of the trilogy, but the stories are passable with at least a few truly good ones in it. If I'm going to at least get a collection of Ellison's short stories, more than likely I'll start out with Herald Classics book "The Best of Harlan Ellison". Now the other collections that he published in his lifetime are going to be tough to get a hold of, as they've either been out of print or had limited runs, and I'm very likely to be rummaging in used book stores to see if one, or at least two, turn up. Or, and this probably would be better, check some online stores also. That I might eventually do sometime.