Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions has been one of the world’s greatest unreleased pieces of art for half a century. Against all odds, it is finally finished thanks to his close friend and literary executor, J. Michael Straczynski. It as good as hoped for, and it also serves as the eulogy for science fiction’s most misunderstood author.

Harlan Ellison was a rising star in the 1960s speculative fiction literary scene thanks to his intensely personal essays and stories. He eschewed the lofty idealism of folks like Robert A. Heinlein and got down in the dirt with his prose. The future as seen through Ellison’s eyes was always gritty and bleeding, and here in the year 2024 it’s very hard to argue he didn’t have a point.

In 1967 he released Dangerous Visions, an anthology that gathered the brightest and the best of the speculative fiction world. Almost as riveting as the stories were Ellison’s introductory commentaries, some of which were short story length themselves. He followed it up with Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, another hit and cultural milestone. Ellison gleefully announced an end to the trilogy, which would be a three-volume masterpiece.

And then, mostly silence for 50 years. It was one of the enduring mysteries of the literary world. Why had Ellison simply never finished his anthology, a project for which dozens of authors cashed checks, many of whom died never seeing their contract with Ellison fulfilled?

Straczynski steps forward in Last Dangerous Vision as speaker for the dead. Appropriately, his introduction, “Ellison Exegesis,” takes up an eighth of the book’s pages. In it, Straczynski lays bare Ellison’s long history with untreated bipolar disorder, something that illuminates the strange behavior the author exhibited throughout his life.

To outsiders, Ellison seemed like a whirling dervish of fights and stunts. He famously wrote short stories in store windows like a performing circus animal, fought for civil rights and fair treatment like a gladiator, groped Connie Willis onstage, and had to have a gun wrestled out of his hand when he threated suicide. What a cutup, right?

Yeah, no. Straczynski, who studied psychology in college, spent years gently trying to nudge Ellison toward therapy and treatment. As a close friend, he witnessed the degradation of Ellison, sitting despondently in his office, unable to write, the manuscripts of Last Dangerous Visions glaring down from a shelf like the judging eye of God.

Straczynski’s description of Ellison here, stripped of his urban legends and notorious reputation, show a man whose brain was robbing him of joy and the ability to create. By the 1990s, Ellison was barely capable of more than very short stories. Longer works brought on waves of depression, including the anthology that his fans clamored for. Only at the very end of his life did he finally enter treatment, but he still would not finish Last Dangerous Visions before he died in 2018. Only one intro was completed, that for Edward Bryant’s “War Stories.”

The rest was left to Straczynski, who has worked full time at it since. The result is probably not exactly what Ellison envisioned but is inarguably a great representation of what Ellison was. Some of the stories are Ellison’s original acceptances (at one point the number of stories was over a hundred), and some are new acceptances by Straczynski.

Yet despite that, the work is oddly timeless. Straczynski made the bold decision to write every author bio in the present tense, including for those who died waiting to see the publication. “He will die in 2014, having written numerous celebrated works,” that sort of thing. It gives the collection a kind of endless present-tense where death is merely another state of being, much as Ellison lives again through the book itself.

Unsurprisingly, many of the stories deal in death. One can hardly blame Ellison or Straczynski for being in a morbid state of mind. Juggling the mechanics of cessation, both speculative and biographical, make Last Dangerous Visions the perfect punctuation mark on Ellison’s life. There are enough new talents that Ellison’s plan to focus on where fiction was going is realized, while also giving readers the pieces of science fiction’s past milestones that were missing for decades.

Was it worth waiting for? That’s beside the point. The terrible journey Ellison walked as he fretted over the unfinished collection is as much of a vision as any of the stories. He lives and dies as a character here, and that would probably have pleased him immensely.

Last Dangerous Visions is on sale now from Blackstone Publishing. $27.99.