Again, Dangerous Visions (ed. Harlan Ellison, 1972)
This collection contains some standout stories from my beloved girls, and yet, it is much worse than Dangerous Visions. Part of the reason is that there is, I regret to say, a real eau de male backlash about many of these stories.1 To stroll through a few examples: A woman offers herself to be fucked to death (?) as atonement for the sins of humankind. A guy gets stuck on a raft with a female reporter who is a simpering coward who can barely talk. Kurt Vonnegut fantasizes about sending a rocket full of freeze-dried sperm to space. A man hooks up with a woman; the fade-to-black here goes: “Those endless legs closed, on him, all urge, going like the legs of the napalmed.”2 That one is part of a diptych and its counterpart is about a guy who refuses to sleep with a woman younger than himself because he’ll find it emasculating to have a muse.3 Then we have the entry by Piers Anthony, which is about an alternate Earth where women are used as…
