Dangerous Visions 1 - [Anthology] Edited By Harlan Ellison

Today—on the very day that I write this—I receive a phone call from the New York Times. They are taking an article I mailed them three days ago. Subject: the colonization of the Moon.

And they thanked me!

Leaping Luna, how times have changed!

Thirty years ago, when I started writing science fiction (I was very young at the time), the colonization of the Moon was strictly a subject for pulp magazines with garish covers. It was don’t-tell-me-you-believe-all-that-junk literature. It was don’t-fill-your-mind-with-all-that-mush - literature. Most of all, it was escape literature!

Sometimes I think about that with a kind of disbelief. Science fiction was escape literature. We were escaping. We were turning from such practical problems as stickball and homework and fist fights in order to enter a never-never land of population explosions, rocket ships, lunar exploration, atomic bombs, radiation sickness and polluted atmosphere.

Wasn’t that great? Isn’t it delightful the way we young escapers receive our just reward? All the great, mind-cracking, hopeless problems of today, we worried about twenty full years before anyone else did. How’s that for escaping?

But now you can colonize the Moon inside the good, gray pages of the New York Times; and not as a piece of science fiction at all, but as sober analysis of a hard-headed situation.

This represents an important change, and one which has an immediate relationship to the book you now hold in your hand. Let me explain!

I became a science fiction writer in 1938 just at the time John W. Campbell, Jr., was revolutionizing the field with the simple requirement that science fiction writers stand firmly on the borderline between science and literature.

Pre-Campbell science fiction all too often fell into one of two classes. They were either no-science or they were all-science. The no-science stories were adventure stories in which a periodic word of Western jargon was erased and replaced with an equivalent word of space jargon. The writer could be innocent of scientific knowledge, for all he needed was a vocabulary of technical jargon which he could throw in indiscriminately.

The all-science stories were, on the other hand, populated exclusively by scientist-caricatures. Some were mad scientists, some were absent-minded scientists, some were noble scientists. The only think they had in common was their penchant for expounding their theories. The mad ones screeched them, the absent-minded ones mumbled them, the noble ones declaimed them, but all lectured at insufferable length. The story was a thin cement caked about the long monologues in an attempt to give the illusion that those long monologues had some point.

To be sure, there were exceptions. Let me mention, for instance, “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum (who, tragically, died of cancer at the age of thirty-six). It appeared in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories—a perfect Campbellesque story four years before Campbell introduced his revolution.

Campbell’s contribution was that he insisted that the exception become the rule. There had to be real science and real story, with neither one dominating the other. He didn’t always get what he wanted, but he got it often enough to initiate what old-timers think of as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

To be sure, each generation has its own Golden Age—but the Campbellesque Golden Age happens to be mine, and when I say “Golden Age” I mean that one. Thank goodness, I managed to get into the field just in time to have my stories contribute in their way (and a pretty good way it was too, and the heck with false modesty) to that Golden Age.

Yet all Golden Ages carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and after it is over you can look back and unerringly locate those seeds. (Lovely, lovely hindsight! How sweet it is to prophesy what has already happened. You’re never wrong!)

In this case, Campbell’s requirement for real science and real stories invited a double nemesis, one for the real science and one for the real stories.

With real science, stories came to sound more and more plausible and, indeed, were more and more plausible. Authors, striving for realism, described computers and rockets and nuclear weapons that were very like what computers and rockets and nuclear weapons came to be in a matter of a single decade. As a result, the real life of the Fifties and Sixties is very much like the Campbellesque science fiction of the Forties.

Yes, the science fiction writer of the Forties went far beyond anything we have in real life today. We writers did not merely aim for the Moon or send unmanned rockets toward Mars; we streaked through the Galaxy in faster-than-light drives. However, all our far-space adventures were based on the way of thought that today permeates NASA.

And because today’s real life so resembles day-before-yesterday’s fantasy, the old-time fans are restless. Deep within, whether they admit it or not, is a feeling of disappointment and even outrage that the outer world has invaded their private domain. They feel the loss of a “sense of wonder” because what was once truly confined to “wonder” has now become prosaic and mundane.

Furthermore, the hope that Campbellesque science fiction would storm upward in an increasingly lofty spiral of readership and respectability somehow was not fulfilled. Indeed, an effect rather unforeseen made itself evident. The new generation of potential science fiction readers found all the science fiction they needed in the newspapers and general magazines and many no longer experienced an irresistible urge to turn to the specialized science fiction magazines.

It happened, therefore, that after a short-lived spurt in the first half of the 1950s, when all the golden dreams seemed to be coming true for the science fiction writer and publisher, there was a recession and the magazines are not more prosperous now than they were in the 1940s. Not even the launching of Sputnik I could stay that recession; rather it accelerated it.

So much for the nemesis brought on by real science. And real story?

As long as science fiction was the creaky medium it was in the Twenties and Thirties, good writing was not required. The science fiction writers of the time were safe, reliable sources; while they lived, they would write science fiction, since anything else required better technique and was beyond them. (I hasten to say there were exceptions and Murray Leinster springs to the mind as one of them.)

The authors developed by Campbell, however, had to write reasonably well or Campbell turned them down. Under the lash of their own eagerness they grew to write better and better. Eventually and inevitably, they found they had become good enough to earn more money elsewhere and their science fiction output declined.

Indeed, the two dooms of the Golden Age worked hand in hand to a certain extent. A considerable number of the Golden Age authors followed the essence of science fiction in its journey from fiction into fact. Men such as Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, and Clifford D. Simak took to writing science fact.

They didn’t change, really; it was the medium that changed. The subjects they had once dealt with in fiction (rocketry, space travel, life on other worlds, etc.) shifted from fiction to fact, and the authors were carried along in the shift. Naturally, every page of non-science fiction written by these authors meant one page less of science fiction.

Lest some knowledgeable reader begin, at this point, to mutter sarcastic comments under his breath, I had better admit, at once and quite openly, that of all the Campbellesque crew, I possibly made the change most extremely. Since Sputnik I went up and America’s attitude toward science was (at least temporarily) revolutionized, I have, as of this moment, published fifty-eight books, of which only nine could be classified as fiction.

Truly, I am ashamed, embarrassed and guilt-ridden, for no matter where I go and what I do, I shall always consider myself as a science fiction writer first. Yet if the New York Times asks me to colonize the Moon and if Harper’s asks me to explore the edge of the Universe, how can I possibly refuse? These topics are the essence of my lifework.

And in my own defense, let me say that I have not entirely abandoned science fiction in its strictest sense either. The March 1967 issue of Worlds of If (on the stands as I write) contains a novelette of mine entitled “Billiard Ball”.

But never mind me, back to science fiction itself....

What was science fiction’s response to this double doom? Clearly the field had to adjust, and it did. Straight Campbellesque material could still be written, but it could no longer form the backbone of the field. Reality encroached too closely upon it.

Again there was a science-fictional revolution in the early Sixties, marked most clearly perhaps in the magazine Galaxy under the guidance of its editor, Frederik Pohl. Science receded and modern fictional technique came to the fore.

The accent moved very heavily toward style. When Campbell started his revolution, the new writers who came into the field carried with them the aura of the university, of science and engineering, of slide rule and test tube. Now the new authors who enter the field bear the mark of the poet and the artist, and somehow carry with them the aura of Greenwich Village and the Left Bank.

Naturally, no evolutionary cataclysm can be carried through without some pretty widespread extinctions. The upheaval that ended the Cretaceous Era wiped out the dinosaurs, and the change-over from silent movies to talkies eliminated a horde of posturing mountebanks.

So it was with science fiction revolutions.

Read through the list of authors in any science fiction magazine of the early Thirties, then read through the list in a science fiction magazine of the early Forties. There is an almost complete change-over, for a vast extinction had taken place and few could make the transition. (Among the few who could were Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson.)

Between the Forties and the Fifties there was little change. The Campbellesque period was still running its course and this shows that the mere lapse of ten years is not in itself necessarily crucial.

But now compare the authors of a magazine in the early Fifties with a magazine today. There has been another change-over. Again some have survived, but a whole flood of bright young authors of the new school has entered.

This Second Revolution is not as clean-cut and obvious as the First Revolution had been. One thing present now that was not present then is the science fiction anthology, and the presence of the anthology blurs the transition.

Each year sees a considerable number of anthologies published, and always they draw their stories from the past. In the anthologies of the Sixties there is always a heavy representation of the stories of the Forties and Fifties, so that in these anthologies the Second Revolution has not yet taken place.

That is the reason for the anthology you now hold in your hands. It is not made up of stories of the past. It consists of stories written now, under the influence of the Second Revolution. It was precisely Harlan Ellison’s intention to make this anthology represent the field as it now is, rather than as it then was.

If you look at the table of contents you will find a number of authors who were prominent in the Campbellesque period—Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, and so on. They are writers who are skillful enough and imaginative enough to survive the Second Revolution. You will also find, however, authors who are the products of the Sixties and who know only the new era. They include Larry Niven, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny and so on.

It is idle to suppose that the new will meet universal approval. Those who remember the old, and who find this memory inextricably intertwined with their own youths, will mourn the past, of course.

I will not hide from you the fact that I mourn the past. (I am being given full leeway to say what I want, and I intend to be frank.) It is the First Revolution that produced me and it is the First Revolution that I keep in my heart.

That is why, when Harlan asked me to write a story for this anthology, I backed away. I felt that any story I wrote would strike a false note. It would be too sober, too respectable, and, to put it bluntly, too darned square. So I have agreed to write a foreword instead; a sober, respectable and utterly square foreword.

And I invite those of you who are not square, and who feel the Second Revolution to be your revolution, to meet examples of the new science fiction as produced by the new (and some of the old) masters. You will find here the field at its most daring and experimental; may you therefore be appropriately stimulated and affected!

Isaac Asimov

February 1967

<<Contents>>

* * * *

FOREWORD 2—

HARLAN AND I

by Isaac Asimov

This book is Harlan Ellison. It is Ellison-drenched and Ellison-permeated. I admit that thirty-two other authors (including myself in a way) have contributed, but Harlan’s introduction and his thirty-two prefaces surround the stories and embrace them and soak them through with the rich flavor of his personality.

So it is only fitting that I tell the story of how I came to meet Harlan.

The scene is a World Science Fiction Convention a little over a decade ago. I had just arrived at the hotel and I made for the bar at once. I don’t drink, but I knew that the bar would be where everybody was. They were indeed all there, so I yelled a greeting and everyone yelled back at me.

Among them, however, was a youngster I had never seen before: a little fellow with sharp features and the livest eyes I ever saw. Those live eyes were now focused on me with something that I can only describe as worship.

He said, “Are you Isaac Asimov?” And in his voice was awe and wonder and amazement.

I was rather pleased, but I struggled hard to retain a modest demeanor. “Yes, I am,” I said.

“You’re not kidding? You’re really Isaac Asimov?” The words have not yet been invented that would describe the ardor and reverence with which his tongue caressed the syllables of my name.

I felt as though the least I could do would be to rest my hand upon his head and bless him, but I controlled myself. “Yes, I am,” I said, and by now my smile was a fatuous thing, nauseating to behold. “Really, I am.”

“Well, I think you’re—” he began, still in the same tone of voice, and for a split second he paused, while I listened and the audience held its breath. The youngster’s face shifted in that split second into an expression of utter contempt and he finished the sentence with supreme indifference, “—a nothing!”

The effect, for me, was that of tumbling over a cliff I had not known was there, and landing fiat on my back. I could only blink foolishly while everyone present roared with laughter

The youngster was Harlan Ellison, you see, and I had never met him before and didn’t know his utter irreverence. But everyone else there knew him and they had waited for innocent me to be neatly poniarded—and I had been.

By the time I struggled back to something like equilibrium, it was long past time for any possible retort. I could only carry on as best as I might, limping and bleeding, and grieving that I had been hit when I wasn’t looking and that not a man in the room had had the self-denial to warn me and give up the delight of watching me get mine.

Fortunately, I believe in forgiveness, and I made up my mind to forgive Harlan completely—just, as soon as I had paid him back with interest.

Now you must understand that Harlan is a giant among men in courage, pugnacity, loquacity, wit, charm, intelligence—indeed, in everything but height.

He is not actually extremely tall. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he is quite short; shorter, even, than Napoleon. And instinct told me, as I struggled up from disaster, that this young man, who was not introduced to me as the well-known fan, Harlan Ellison, was a trifle sensitive on that subject. I made a mental note of that.

The next day at this convention I was on the platform, introducing notables and addressing a word of kindly love to each as I did so. I kept my eye on Harlan all this time, however, for he was sitting right up front (where else?).

As soon as his attention wandered, I called out his name suddenly. He stood up, quite surprised and totally unprepared, and I leaned forward and said, as sweetly as I could:

“Harlan, stand on the fellow next to you, so that people can see you,”

And while the audience (a much larger one this time) laughed fiendishly, I forgave Harlan and we have been good friends ever since.*

Isaac Asimov

February 1967

* IMPERTINENT EDITORIAL FOOTNOTE: While I am fully aware it is unbecoming for a young man to disagree publicly with his elders, my unbounded admiration and unflagging friendship for the Good Doctor, Asimov, compels me to add this footnote to his second Foreword —strictly in the interests of historically accurate reportage, an end to which he has been determinedly devoted for at least twice as long as I’ve been living. There is an unsavory tone inherent in the remark I am alleged to have made to Dr. Asimov, noted above. This tone of contempt was by no means present at the time, not at any time before or since. Any man who would speak to Asimov or about Asimov with contempt is, himself, beneath contempt. My recollection of the incident, however, is perhaps a bit fresher. (Only a cad would remark on the faulty memories and colored nostalgia of our aging Giants In The Field.) I didn’t say, “— you’re a—nothing!” I said, “You aren’t so much.” I grant you, the difference is a subtle one; I was being an adolescent snot; but after reading all those Galaxy-spanning novels about heroic men of heroic proportions, I had been expecting a living computer, mightily thewed, something of a Conan with the cunning of Lije Bailey. Instead, here was this perfectly wonderful, robust, Skylark-shaped Jew with a Mel Brooks delivery and a Wally Cox bowtie. I have never been disappointed by an Asimov story, and I have never been disappointed by Asimov the man. But on that initial occasion, my dreams were somewhat greater than the reality, and the remark was more reflex than malice. Incidentally, Napoleon was 5’ 2”. I am 5’ 5”. This is the first time, I believe, that Dr. Asimov’s facts have been in error. I hope he will be able to live with this; I’m able to live with my height.

—Harlan Ellison

<<Contents>>

* * * *

INTRODUCTION

THIRTY-TWO SOOTHSAYERS

What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution.

This book, all two hundred and thirty-nine thousand words of it, the largest anthology of speculative fiction ever published of all original stories, and easily one of the largest of any kind, was constructed along specific lines of revolution. It was intended to shake things up. It was conceived out of a need for new horizons, new forms, new styles, new challenges in the literature of our times. If it was done properly, it will provide these new horizons and styles and forms and challenges. If not, it is still one helluva good book full of entertaining stories.

There is a coterie of critics, analysts and readers who contend that “mere entertainment” is not enough, that there must be pith and substance to a story, a far-reaching message or philosophy or superabundance of superscience. While there is certainly merit in their contentions, it has all too often become the raison d’être of the fiction, this sententious preoccupation with saying things. While we can no more suggest that fairy tales are the loftiest level to which modern fiction should attain than that the theory should dwarf the plot, we would be forced to opt for the former rather than the latter, were we chained down with the threat of bamboo shoots under the fingernails.

Happily, this book seems to hit directly in the mid-target area. Each story is almost obstinately entertaining. But each one is filled with ideas as well. Not merely run-of-the-pulps ideas you’ve read a hundred times before, but fresh and daring ideas; in their way, dangerous visions.

Why all this chatter about entertainment versus ideas? In an introduction of some length, to a book of even greater length? Why not let the stories speak for themselves? Because ... though it may waddle like a duck, quack like a duck, look like a duck and go steady with ducks, it need not necessarily be a duck. This is a collection of ducks that will turn into swans before your very eyes. These are stories so purely entertaining that it seems inconceivable the impetus for their being written was an appeal for ideas. But such was the case, and as you wonderingly witness these ducks of entertainment change into swans of ideas, you will be treated to a thirty-three-story demonstration of “the new thing”—the nouvelle vague, if you will, of speculative writing.

And therein, gentle readers, lies the revolution.

* * * *

There are those who say speculative fiction began with Lucian of Samosata or Aesop. Sprague de Camp, in his excellent Science Fiction Handbook (Hermitage House, 1953) offers Lucian, Virgil, Homer, Helidoros, Apuleius, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and calls Plato “the second Greek ‘father of science fiction’.” Groff Conklin, in The Best of Science Fiction (Crown, 1946), suggests the historical origins can be traced without difficulty from Dean Swift’s Gulliver, from Frank R. Stockton’s “The Great War Syndicate,” from Richard Adams Locke’s “The Moon Hoax,” from Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” from Verne, from Arthur Conan Doyle, from H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe. In the classic anthology Adventures in Time and Space (Random House, 1946), Healy and McComas opt for the great astronomer Johannes Kepler. My own personal seminal influence for the fantasy that is the basis of all great speculative fiction is the Bible. (Let us all pause for a microsecond in prayer that God does not strike me with a bolt of lightning in the spleen.)

But before I am accused of trying to wrest notoriety from the established historians of speculative fiction, let me assure you I offer these establishments of roots only to indicate I have done my homework and am thus entitled to make the impertinent remarks that follow.

Speculative fiction in modern times really got born with Walt Disney in his classic animated film, Steamboat Willie, in 1928. Sure it did. I mean: a mouse that can operate a paddle-wheeler?

It’s as sensible a starting place as Lucian, after all, because when we get right down to the old nitty-gritty, the beginning of speculative fiction was the first Cro-Magnon who imagined what it was out there snuffling around in the darkness just beyond his fire. If he envisioned it as having nine heads, bee-faceted eyes, fire-breathing jaws, sneakers and a tattersall vest, he was creating speculative fiction. If he saw it as a mountain lion, he was probably just au courant, and he doesn’t count. Besides, he was chicken.

No one can sanely deny that Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in 1926 was the most obvious ancestor of what today, in this volume, we call “speculative fiction”. And if this be accepted, then obeisances must be offered in the direction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. E. Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Ed Earl Repp, Ralph Milne Farley, Captain S. P. Meek, U.S.A. (Ret.) ... that whole crowd. And of course, to John W. Campbell, Jr., who used to edit a magazine that ran science fiction, called Astounding, and who now edits a magazine that runs a lot of schematic drawings, called Analog. Mr. Campbell is generally conceded to be the “fourth father of modern speculative fiction” or somesuch, because it was he who suggested the writers try putting characters inside their machines. Which brings you and me up to about the Forties, with the gadget stories.

But it doesn’t say much about the Sixties.

After Campbell, there were Horace Gold and Tony Boucher and Mick McComas, who pioneered the radical concept that science fiction should be judged by the same high standards as all literary forms. It came as one whale of a shock to most of the poor devils who had been writing and selling in the field. It meant they had to learn to write well, not merely think cute.

With which background we now come trudging knee-deep through awful stories into the Swinging Sixties. Which has not really begun to swing. But the revolution is at hand. Bear with me.

For twenty-odd years the staunch fan of speculative fiction has been beating his chest and wailing that the mainstream of fiction does not recognize imaginative writing. He has lamented the fact that books like 1984 and Brave New World and Limbo and On the Beach have received critical acclaim but have never been labeled “science fiction.” In point of fact, he contended, they were automatically excluded on the simplistic theory that “They’re good books, they can’t be that crazy fictional-science crap.” He seized upon every borderline effort, no matter how dismal (e.g : Wouk’s “The Lomokome Papers,” Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Hersey’s White Lotus, Boulle’s Planet of the Apes), just to reassure himself and strengthen his argument that the mainstream was pilfering from the genre, and that there was much wealth to be divvied in the ouvrage de longue haleine that was science fiction.

That rabid fan is now out of date. He is twenty years behind the times. He can still be heard gibbering paranoically in the background, but he’s now more a fossil than a force. Speculative fiction has been found, has been turned to good use by the mainstream, and is now in the process of being assimilated. Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Cat’s Cradle, Hersey’s The Child Buyer, Wallis’ Only Lovers Left Alive and Vercors’ You Shall Know Them (to name only a recent scattering) are top-flight speculative novels, employing many of the tools honed by science fiction writers in their own little backwash eddy of a genre. Not an issue of a major slick magazine passes without some recognition of speculative fiction, either by reference to its having foretold some now common-place item of scientific curiosity, or by openly currying favor with the leading names in the field via the inclusion of their work alongside the John Cheevers, the John Updikes, the Bernard Malamuds, the Saul Bellows.

We have arrived, is the inescapable conclusion.

And yet that highly vocal fan, and all the myriad writers, critics and editors who have developed tunnel vision through years of feeling themselves ghettoized, persist in their antediluvian lament, holding back the very recognition for which they weep and moan. This is what Charles Fort called “steam engine time”. When it is time for the steam engine to be invented, even if James Watt doesn’t do it, someone will.

It is “steam engine time” for the writers of speculative fiction. The millennium is at hand. We are what’s happening.

And most of those wailing-wall aficionados of fantasy fiction hate it a lot. Because allofasudden even the bus driver and the dental technician and the beach bum and the grocery bag-boy are reading his stories; and what’s worse, those johnny-come-latelies may not show the proper deference to the Grand Old Masters of the field, they may not think the Skylark stories are brilliant and mature and compelling; they may not care to be confused by terminology that has been accepted in s-f for thirty years, they may want to understand what’s going on; they may not fall in line with the old order. They may prefer Star Trek and Kubrick to Barsoom and Ray Cummings. And thus they are the recipients of the fan-sneer, a curling of the lips that closely resembles the crumbling of an old pulp edition of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

But even more heinous is the entrance on the scene of writers who won’t accept the old ways. The smartass kids who write “all that literary stuff,” who take the accepted and hoary ideas of the speculative arena and stand them right on their noses. Them guys are blasphemers. God will send down lightning to strike them in their spleens.

Yet speculative fiction (notice how I cleverly avoid using the misnomer “science fiction”? getting the message, friends? you’ve bought one of those s—e f—n anthologies and didn’t even know it! well, you’ve blown your bread, so you might as well hang around and get educated) is the most fertile ground for the growth of a writing talent without boundaries, with horizons that seem never to get any closer. And all them smartass punks keep emerging, driving the old guard out of their jugs with frenzy. And lord! how the mighty have fallen; for most of the “big names” in the field, who dominated the covers and top rates of the magazines for more years than they deserved, can no longer cut it, they no longer produce. Or they have moved on to other fields. Leaving it to the newer, brighter ones, and the ones who were new and bright once, and were passed by because they weren’t “big names”.

But despite the new interest in speculative fiction by the mainstream, despite the enlarged and variant styles of the new writers, despite the enormity and expansion of topics open to these writers, despite what is outwardly a booming, healthy market...there is a constricting narrowness of mind on the part of many editors in the field. Because many of the editors were once simply fans, and they retain that specialized prejudice for the s-f of their youth. Writer after writer is finding his work precensored even before he writes it, because he knows this editor won’t allow discussions of politics in his pages, and that one shies away from stories exploring sex in the future, and this one down here in the baseboard doesn’t pay except in red beans and rice, so why bother burning up all those gray cells on a daring concept when the louse-bug will buy the old madman-in-the-time-machine shtick.

This is called a taboo. And there isn’t an editor in the field who won’t swear under threat of the water torture that he hasn’t got them, that he even sprays the office with insecticide on the off-chance there’s a taboo nesting in the files like a silverfish. They’ve said it at conventions, they’ve said it in print, but there are over a dozen writers in this book alone who will, upon slight nudging, relate stories of horror and censorship that include every editor in the field, even the one who lives in the baseboard.

Oh, there are challenges in the field, and truly controversial, eye-opening pieces get published; but there are so many more that go a-begging.

And no one has ever told the speculative writer, “Pull out all the stops, no holds barred, get it said!” Until this book came along.

Don’t look now, you’re on the firing line in the big revolution.

* * * *

In 1961 this editor...

. . . hold it a second, I just thought of something that had better get said. You may have noticed a lack of solemnity and reserve on the part of the editorial I. It stems not so much from youthful exuberance—though there are legions who will swear I’ve been fourteen years old for the past seventeen—as from a reluctance on the I’s part to accept the harsh reality that the I who is all writer has abrogated a wee portion of the auctorial gestalt to become An Editor. It strikes me as odd that of all the wiser heads in the field, ail the men who are so much more eminently suited to bring forth a book as important as I like to think this one is, that it fell to me. But then, on reflection, it seems inevitable; not so much from talent as from a sense of urgency and a dogged determination that it should be done. Had I known at the outset that it would take over two years to assemble this book, and the heartache and expense involved—I’d have done it anyhow.

So in exchange for all the goodies herein, you will have to put up with the intrusion of the editor, who is a writer like all the other writers here, and who is delighted to be able to play God just this once.

Where was I?

Ah. In 1961 this editor was engaged in putting together a line of paperbacks for a small house in Evanston, Illinois. Among the projects I wanted to put on the assembly line was a collection of stories of speculative fiction, by top writers, all original, and all highly controversial in nature. I hired a well-known anthologist, who did what many might have called a good job. I didn’t happen to think so. The stories seemed to me either silly or pointless or crude or dull. There were some that have since been published elsewhere, even a few ‘best’ stories among them. By Leiber, and Bretnor, and Heinlein, to remember just three. But the book did not excite me the way I felt a collection of this sort should. When I left the firm, another editor tried it with a second anthologist. They got no further. The project died a-borning. I have no idea what happened to the stories these anthologists gathered together.

In 1965, I was entertaining author Norman Spinrad in my itty-bitty Los Angeles tree-house, coyly called “Ellison Wonderland”, from the book of the same title. We were sitting around talking about this and that, when Norman began bitching about anthologists, for one reason or another that now escapes memory. He said he thought I should implement some of the rabble-rousing ideas I had been spreading about “the new thing” in speculative fiction, with an anthology of same. I hasten to point out my “new thing” is neither Judith Merril’s “new thing” nor Michael Moorcock’s “new thing”. Ask for us by our brand names.

I smiled inanely. I’d never edited an anthology, what the hell did I know about it? (An attitude many critics of this book may voice when they finish. But onward ...)

I had, shortly prior to this, sold Robert Silverberg a short story for a forthcoming anthology he was assembling. I had beefed about some minor matter or other, and received a reply, part of which follows in Silverbob’s own inimitable style.

Oct. 2nd, 65. Dear Harlan: You’ll be glad to know that in the course of a long and wearying dream last night I watched you win two Hugos at last year’s Worldcon. You acted pretty smug about it, too. I’m not sure which categories you led, but one of them was probably Unfounded Bitching. Permit me a brief and fatherly lecture in response to your letter of permission on the anthology (which I’m sure will startle the sweet ladies at Duell, Sloan & Pearce)...

At which point he launched into a scathing denunciation of my attitudes toward accepting some piddling amount for anthology reprinting of a second-rate story he should have known better than to include to begin with. There then followed several paragraphs of chitchat intended (unsuccessfully, I might add) to mollify me; paragraphs which are hilarious, but which bear little import for here and now, and so you’ll have to read them in the Syracuse University archives sometime in the future. But now we come down to the pee and the ess, which read thus and so:

“Why don’t you do an anthology? HARLAND ELLISON PICKS OFF-BEAT CLASSICS OF SF, or something. ...”

He signed the letter “Ivar Jorgensen”. But that’s another story.

Spinrad nuhdged me. Edit, edit, mein kind. So I got on the phone longdistance (this is one word, I learned it from my Yiddish grandmother, who blanched every time you suggested making one). To Lawrence Ashmead, at Doubleday. He had never spoken to me before. Had he but known what new horrors! new horrors! awaited him because of his common civility, he would have dropped the offensive instrument out of the eighth-story window of the Ministry of Truth-style building on Park Avenue where Doubleday keeps its Manhattan offices.

But he listened, I wove golden magic threads of spidery-illusion. A big anthology, all new stories, controversial, too fierce for magazines to buy, top writers, headliners from the mainstream, action, adventure, pathos, a cast of thousands, a parsnip in a pear tree.

Hooked. On the spot, hooked. The silver-tongued orator had struck again. Oh, was he bagged on the idea. On October 18th, I received the following letter:

Dear Harlan: The consensus of the editors who have looked at your prospectus for DANGEROUS VISIONS is that we need something more definite to go on. ... Unless you can find out exactly what is available in original stories and can supply me with a fairly definite table of contents, I don’t stand a chance of getting approval on this project from our Publishing Committee. Anthologies are a dime a dozen these days and unless they are special, they just don’t justify a large advance. In fact, it is my policy to limit anthologies (unless they are “special”) to authors who regularly contribute novels to the Doubleday list. So, if you can insure most of the contents of DANGEROUS VISIONS with some definite commitments ... and I know this is tantamount to the situation of the Butterscotch Man who can’t run until he is warm and can’t get warm until he runs, but. ..

Now a piece of historical information. Traditionally, anthologies have been composed of stories already first published in serial, or magazine, form. They can be purchased for hardcover anthologization for a fraction of their original cost. The profit for a writer is made from subsequent sales, paperback reprint, foreign rights, etc And since he has been paid once for the piece already, it is gravy. Thus, a fifteen-hundred-dollar advance against royalties paid to an anthologist means the editor can cop half the bread for himself and stretch the seven hundred and fifty dollars remaining over eleven or twelve authors, and have a pretty good-sized book. This book, however, was conceived as an all-original collection, which meant the stories would have to be written specifically for the book (or, in rare cases, be those stories already long since written and rejected by all the available markets on grounds of taboo, of one sort or another; these latter possibilities were, obviously, far less appealing, for usually, unless a story is exceeding hot, it can be sold somewhere; if no one had bought them, there was a better chance that they were simply gawdawful, rather than too controversial; I was to find out all too soon that my thinking was correct; stories of a controversial nature are often bought by editors not so much because they shock and startle, as because they are by “name authors” who can get away with it; the less well known writers have a much harder time of it; and unless they develop a more prominent name later, and go back to dig these “hot” stories out of their trunk, the stories never get seen).

But for a writer to do a story for the book, my price on acceptance would have to be competitive with the magazines that would offer him first sale. This meant the standard fifteen-hundred-dollar advance would not be enough. Not if this was to be a big, wide-ranging and representative project.

The extra three cents a word for magazine publication looms large to the free-lancer making his living strictly from the genre magazines.

So I needed at least three thousand dollars, double the advance. Ashmead, who is not allowed by Nelson Doubleday to dole out more than fifteen hundred dollars, would have to go to his Publishing Committee and he didn’t think they would be too keen at this stage of the game. They didn’t want to spring for the first fifteen hundred.

So the cadmium-throated orator once again took to the telephone lines. “Hi, Larry sweetheart pussycat!”

What emerged finally was the greatest boondoggle since the Teapot Dome scandal. Ashmead was to give me the first fifteen hundred dollars advance, out of which I would only buy, say, thirty thousand words of the proposed sixty thousand. Then I would send the stories in to him and say I needed another fifteen hundred to complete the project, and if things shaped up as well as we anticipated, there would be little difficulty going to the Committee and asking for the balance.

Now, two hundred and thirty-nine thousand words and nineteen months later, DANGEROUS VISIONS had cost Doubleday three thousand dollars, myself twenty-seven hundred dollars out of pocket (and no anthologist’s fee), and author Larry Niven seven hundred and fifty dollars, which he put into the project to see it done properly. Additionally, four of the authors herein have not yet been paid. Their stories came in late, when the book was ostensibly closed; but having heard about the project, and being fired with it, they wanted to be included, and have agreed to delayed payment, which comes out of Ellison’s share of the profits, not the authors’ royalties.

This introduction has almost run its course. Thank the stars. Many of the incredible incidents that happened in the course of its birthing will have to go untold here. The Thomas Pynchon story. The Heinlein anecdote. The Laumer Affair. The Incident of the Three Brunner stories. The last-minute flight to New York to insure the Dillon illustrations. The Kingsley Amis afterword. The poverty, the sickness, the hate!

Just a few last words on the nature of this book. First, it was intended as a canvas for new writing styles, bold departures, unpopular thoughts. I think with only one or two exceptions each of the stories included fits that intention. Expect nothing, remain wide open to what the authors are trying to do, and be delighted.

There are many authors familiar to readers of speculative fiction whose work is not included here. This was not intended as an all-inclusive anthology. By the very nature of what they write, many authors were excluded because they had said what they had to say years ago. Others found they had nothing controversial or daring to contribute. Some expressed lack of interest in the project. But with one exception this book was never closed to a writer owing to editorial prejudice. Thus, you will find new young writers like Samuel Delany side by side with established craftsmen such as Damon Knight. You will find visitors from other fields such as TV’s Howard Rodman beside veterans of the s-f wars such as the charming (and in this instance frightening) Miriam Allen deFord. You will find traditional writers like Philip José Farmer. Only the new and the different was sought, but in some cases a story was so... so story (as a chair is very much chair), it forced itself to be included.

And last, it has been a privilege to do this book. After the assault of bombast, that may strike the reader as awshucks Jack Paar-style phony humbleness. All that can be offered is the editor’s assurance that the word “privilege” is mild. To have seen the growth of this very lively and arresting volume was to have a peephole not only to the future but to the future of the field of speculative writing.

From which peeping, as these thirty-two soothsayers told their tales of tomorrow, this editor was able to conclude that the wonders and riches he saw in the form, when he was first starting to learn his craft, are truly there. If there be any doubt, move on to the stories themselves. None of them has seen print anywhere before, and for the next year at least, none of them will appear anywhere else, so you have bought wisely; and have rewarded the men who had these dangerous visions.

Thank you for your attention.

Harlan Ellison

Hollywood January

1967

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