If the kaleidoscopic audacity of pieces like Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” and the hallucinated layering of Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” grabbed you, Brunner’s montage of headlines, ads, dossiers, and street chatter will feel like a novel-length high. In Stand on Zanzibar, Donald Hogan and Norman House navigate a hyper-saturated future where form is as punchy as the ideas—much like the way Ellison’s anthology smashed convention to make you feel the future in your nerve endings.

Did the biting wit of John Sladek’s “The Happy Breed” or the swaggering send-ups in “Riders of the Purple Wage” make you grin and wince at the same time? Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan skewers destiny and faith with Malachi Constant’s cosmic pratfall and the stranded robot Salo’s quietly absurd mission. It’s the same razor of humor Ellison’s lineup used—funny until it hurts, and then sharper still.

If Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones” and Norman Spinrad’s “Carcinoma Angels” thrilled you with their uncanny, reality-warping turns, Annihilation will sink its spores in. The biologist’s descent into Area X—the living “tower,” the phosphorescent script, the impossible Crawler—delivers that same eerie, head-fog sensation of brushing something vast and indifferent, the way Ellison’s most haunting entries did.

If the anthology’s sharp shocks—like Robert Bloch’s “A Toy for Juliette” paired with Ellison’s own “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World”—hooked you on compact transgressions, Ballard’s collage of micro-chapters will feel like a controlled detonation. The Atrocity Exhibition riffs through media, celebrity, and violence in splinters, each fragment landing with the taboo-busting jolt you came to Dangerous Visions for.

If James Blish’s unsettling “If All Men Were Brothers…” or Larry Niven’s “The Jigsaw Man” provoked you to weigh ethics in uncomfortable light—and PKD’s “Faith of Our Fathers” sent you spiraling into metaphysics—Exhalation offers that same crystalline, humane rigor. From the air-driven anatomist dismantling his own mind in “Exhalation” to the branching-morality tech of “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” Chiang makes the big questions feel intimate and inescapable.