Dangerous Visions: The Dolomite Affair

General Off-Topic Discussion
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Does anyone here have a copy of Dangerous Visions, the sci-fi anthology edited by Harlan Ellison that was published in 1967? If so, you might be able to help me.

I think that possibly I’ve fallen into a parallel universe, or that I’m simply losing my mind.

I bought a copy of this book from Amazon in 2019. It was the SF Masterworks edition with a teal and yellow cover. For some reason I don’t have it anymore, and there was one story I wanted to re-read. I couldn’t remember the name of the story or the author, so I looked through the list of included stories on Wikipedia. None of them rang a bell, so I described the story to ChatGPT. I couldn’t remember the content of the story at all, only that it had a fast-paced, zany tone that was quite unlike anything else in Dangerous Visions. The AI very quickly identified the story as The Dolomite Affair by Bert Grossman, a very silly cold war espionage parody. It even wrote me its own pastiche of the story which was actually quite funny, and very close in style and content to the story I remembered.

I asked ChatGPT if the author had written anything else, but apparently Bert Grossman was either a pseudonym or the The Dolomite Affair was his one and only foray into fiction. I did a little digging online and came up with the theory that the author might have been Robert Grossman, an artist who designed the poster for Airplane among other things and also wrote comics. ChatGPT thought my idea had merit and speculated that I might well be the first person to have made that connection.

But here’s where it gets weird - the story isn’t actually in the anthology. It’s not in the list of stories on Wikipedia, and, even weirder, it’s not in the list of contents for the SF Masterworks edition I originally purchased in 2019 - I checked on Amazon and also on AbeBooks and World of Books. Googling “Bert Grossman” and “The Dolomite Affair” draw a complete blank.

Now one possibility, the most likely possibility, is that ChatGPT has hallucinated both the title and the author’s name. But its own pastiche of the story was very close to what I remembered. I didn’t tell it about the cold war spy thriller setting, because I’d forgotten, and I could only remember the tone. But as soon as I read the pastiche, I knew it had identified the right story.

If someone has a copy of Dangerous Visions, and has a moment or two, can you please identify the story I’ve described and tell me the real author and title?

If there is no such story in the anthology, then I might not be in the same universe I was living in in 2019. It’s Bearenstain, and Mickey Mouse doesn’t wear braces, right?

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My 35th Anniversary Edition has no such story. Lots of juicy stuff to read, though. I’ve never actually read the anthology, but love so many of the authors.

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Could I ask you to look through the stories and see if there’s a goofy spy parody among them?

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I’ll give it a shot.

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There was also a sequel anthology, Again, Dangerous Visions – the author name and title aren’t there either, so that sure seems like ChatGPT ChatGPTing, but possibly that might be part of the mix-up?

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One thing I am sure of is that I had the first one in the series. I did check the Wikipedia pages for the others just in case.

I do remember that I looked up the author of the story at the time, and that it seemed as though they hadn’t written anything else. I was hoping to re-read the story without purchasing another copy of the book, but it looks as though I’ll have to.

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Also “The Last Dangerous Visions”, which according to Wikipedia is a complicated beast.

Anyway, I can’t find Bert Grossman in any of the three editions, nor “The Dolomite Affair”. None of the titles in the first volume seem likely to be a “goofy spy parody”, and to be honest writing “Ellison” and “goofy” on the same page invites a server crash.

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Yeah, I would bet money that this is a pure hallucination. The point of ChatGPT is to give helpful responses to questions, and hallucinating a title and author is more helpful than saying “no such thing exists”.

It’s the same reason asking it “can I contact you via text message” would (previously) spit out some random schmuck’s phone number instead of “no, I don’t have an SMS interface”. They had to add a specific safeguard for that one after one particularly unfortunate person got inundated with messages from people who thought he was ChatGPT.

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Yes, I’m going to put this down to pure AI hallucination, compounded by my own misremembering. I’ll buy another copy of the book and I’m sure the story I’m thinking of will jump out upon re-reading. Thank you for your help everyone, especially @rileypb

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Posted a reply that got eaten by the outage.

Based on the description—espionage pastiche, Ellison anthology—it’s not in any of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, but are you maybe thinking of “Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R.” from The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World?

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