Dangerous Visions

Anthologies helps to provide a focus for what passes for literary movements in the sf field. There are many groundbreaking examples. Dangerous Visions is one such volume, in which the introduction and afterwords by Ellison and the collected authors proclaimed revolution - the collection certainly is a manifesto and a deliberate attempt to break taboos. Sex, for one, was a taboo of the sf pulp tradition, and so too miscegenation and incest, the latter, for example, treated magnificantly in Theodore Sturgeon's "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"

There are, of course, many timeless classics: "Riders of the Purple Wage" by Philip Jose Farmer; Samuel R Delaney's "Aye, and Gomorrah; Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels"; "Auto-da-Fe" by Roger Zelazny; and Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man", to name but a few.

This collection is a landmark, stories chosen with consummate skill for their besterial colour, experimental verve and violent energy. A mammoth anthology, one of the greatest in the history of sf.