Introduction to
TIME TRAVEL FOR PEDESTRIANS

Recently, here in Los Angeles, and I presume all around our vital, healthy country, drive-ins and local neighborhood movie theaters played a charming double-bill. The upper, or A feature, was something called I Suck Your Blood; the lower half of the bill, the B feature, was I Eat Your Skin. After the hysterical convulsions pass, kindly note these two bum flicks were coded GP, which means kids can see them, but only with the consent and accompaniment of an adult. At the same time, a sex film titled 101 Acts of Love was being shown in the area, with an X rating, meaning if you're a Catholic and go to see it, you'll burn in eternal hellfire. Kids strictly forbidden.

This is hardly an original thought I'm about to lay on you, but doesn't it seem strange to anyone else out there that it's okay for kids to see people having their necks bitten, their flesh eaten and their bodies used for fertilizer, but it is considered corrupting for them to watch two people having sex?

Where I'm going with this is toward Ray Nelson, but I'd like to make a couple of conversational stops on the way.

You see, DV (and surely A,DV will see a repetition of the problem) had some acceptability problems with certain libraries, with some bookstores, and when it was reprinted in the Science Fiction Book Club a number of scoutmasters and outraged mommies and common garden-variety guardians of public morality (like Keating, the head wimp of the Citizens for Decent Literature, on whose squamous skull a curse of succotash!) fired the book back with bleats of horror that their delicate children were being sent such mind-rotting filth that would obviously pollute their precious bodily fluids. In the general introduction I quoted one lady who wrote me directly. She was not alone in her vehemence.

It is to Doubleday's and Larry Ashmead's eternal glory that never once did they warn me away from "controversial" material, either in subject matter or treatment or language. The same has held true with this volume. They said, in fact, get it on, and do what has to be done. As a result, this book contains stories like Ray Nelson's that I'm sure will bleach white the hair of librarians and others invested with the fraudulent chore of protecting delicate young minds.

To simply state that Ray's story is a zinger and needs no further defense than its quality would be the wise course for me here, but as I have never been known to exist in a territory of wisdom, I'll go on and make a few comments about censorship, about protecting those who need no protection, about hypocrisy, and about "dirty" language.

Those of you who've heard these things need not attend. The test afterward only counts for half your grade.

In any case: having traveled around the country a good deal these past few years, lecturing at colleges and high schools, I've found that while people under-thirty are no less susceptible to slogans and simplistic answers than their over-thirty counterparts, on the whole they don't have the same hangups about language and topics of forbidden discussion to which their elders subscribe. When I was nineteen I was still a virgin, but when I pass a high school now, and see the fifteen, sixteen and seventeen year old girls, I am struck by the resemblance to a casting call for Irma La Douce, and I am hip to the fact that young people are getting it on sexually much earlier than when I was their age. I think that's all to the good. Times have changed. The Pill and mass communications dissemination of hygienic information have made most of the restrictions against premarital sex invalid and outdated. Young people are reaching each other in some very natural, normal ways that were verboten to generations past, and along with that tacit acceptance of the body and its many uses, comes an acceptance of language. It is, for instance, virtually impossible today to shock kids by a discussion of masturbation. Everyone knows guys masturbate, and so do girls. If it comes up in conversation it's an accepted, like television or the jumbo jet. They grew up with it, and all the taboos about even owning up to the fact that you play with yourself strike them as pointless and hincty.

Which, perforce, brings me to Ray Nelson, "Time Travel for Pedestrians" and the hypocrisy of protecting those who need no protection. Ray's story deals, in small part, with the concept of masturbation as a triggering device for time travel. Its inclusion here, as well as publication of the stories by Piers Anthony, Richard Lupoff and Ben Bova, not to mention just the title of the Vonnegut story, promise trouble with bluenoses. Understand please, these stories are not to me "dirty" or "offensive" in any way. My contention is that nothing should be forbidden to a creator in the pursuit of an idea. But I am not fool enough to think these stories will slip by unnoticed when the hawklike eyes of the NODL and Citizens for Decent Everything get their white sheets on.

We had some of this, as I've said, with DV. In fact, for almost three years we could not get an edition contracted in Great Britain, because the publishers kept turning the book down as "unpublishable." In the light of subsequent books released with ease in England, this now seems wholly ridiculous, but when we first acquired an English publisher, Leslie Frewin, we insisted the book be published as it stood, in its entirety, without deletions or concessions to censorship. Frewin agreed, but when the book was about to go to press, I learned that they were dropping the Theodore Sturgeon story because it dealt with incest, the Philip K. Dick story because it postulated God as a Chinese Communist, my own story because it used the word "fuck" and because it was clinically descriptive of a slaying by Jack the Ripper, and several others, including a story by Miriam Allen de Ford—on grounds I've yet to be able to name. Naturally, they were enjoined to cease publication, and the book was yanked away from them.

Fortunately, a more reliable and (one would presume) daring publisher in London, David Bruce & Watson, bought the rights and have published Dangerous Visions in two handsome volumes. But this was not the only instance of outright fear on the part of reprint houses to pick up the book. In Germany we were stuck with a wretched house, Heyne, who not only dropped stories without permission, but cut all the prefatory material, altered titles, changed copy beyond the normal considerations of translation into German, and in all botched DV hideously. (I have taken steps to insure there will be no repetitions of this with A,DV, but a pending lawsuit against Heyne is the residue of lack of foresight initially.)

I report all this in the (probably) vain hope that those who have nothing better to do with their time than worry that someone else will read what he wants to read, will think twice before pulling A,DV from library shelves or lobbying against it in their Saturday afternoon purity meetings.

For the rest of you, who can be shocked only by Calleys and Mansons and repression and violence, when you read this story you will more than likely say, "What the hell was all the shouting about? It isn't offensive. Is this Ellison on the hype again?" To you I say, these words were intended for the backward, the frightened, the sexually and emotionally constipated who exist in vast numbers out there.

And I'm sure this long preamble will surprise Ray Nelson, who never thought his story would be a bone of contention. Which brings me, at long last, to Radell Faraday Nelson himself, and his personal statistics, herewith proffered in his own words:

"When I was about fifteen years old I remembered being born. I didn't know that's what I was remembering until much later. There were no words in the memory, just the feeling of being squeezed rhythmically again and again. It wasn't unpleasant.

"I was born in a hospital in Schenectady, N.Y. on Oct. 3, 1931 at (for those who are astrologically inclined) 2 a.m. I was the fruit of the union of mixed RH factors, and my head was too big for my body. I looked like, they tell me, one of those beings from the distant future, from a time when the body has all but wasted away from disuse. But I lived. I have one brother who lived, too. And many sisters who were stillborn.

"Sometimes I think my sisters are near me, whispering things to me, guarding me from harm. I picture them covered with fine soft womb hair, all hunched over with their noses on their knees, floating just at the edge of my field of vision so that I can almost see them but not quite.

"As a child I was carried from place to place by my parents, not seeing the world around me too much, but talking to beings that only I could see. We traveled from one state to another, following my father's work, and as I ran, dreaming, along a stone wall on the edge of the Grand Canyon, I struck my head against a branch and almost fell over the cliff. I still have the scar, just above my left eyebrow.

"The best scar on my body, however, is on one side of my lower stomach (the right side) where my appendix was removed. I had had a bellyache for a long time but I was very brave about it and as a result almost died in the last minute operation that was performed on me after I collapsed on the basketball court at high school. I couldn't do anything rough for over a year after that for fear I might open up again, so I discovered reading. I read science fiction and Little Literary Reviews, neither of which left any visible scars, at least on my body.

"That was how I became a science fiction fan and hippie, though that was before the word hippie had been invented. I was deeply religious and everybody hated me because, when one of my classmates stole a ballpoint pen in a drugstore, I went back and paid for it. They left many little scars all over my torso, particularly the ass. There's another interesting scar on my left forearm, while we're on the subject.

"That's where, after I graduated from college and was working as a silk screen printer in Oakland, California, I held a candleflame under my arm and cooked the flesh until it turned black, in order to show that the spirit need not be troubled by the sufferings of the flesh. Fortunately the friends of mine who were present had promised in advance not to turn me over to the mental authorities. It was interesting to watch the scab form and then, a few months later, crumble and fall away to reveal the image of a perfect egg in white skin on a field of tan.

"There are many other marks on my body . . .such as the little brown dots of various shapes all over me. I never noticed them until I dropped acid. Can you imagine that? Here I was, covered with little brown spots and I didn't even know it, then I expanded my consciousness and there they were. It was then that I noticed that my skin was also covered with a network of tiny diamond shaped lines, as if I were made of crystal, and that my flesh was everywhere touched with subtle blending shades of color, like coral. I don't know anything else about myself to speak of, since most of the things I've done have not marked my flesh and thus I can't be sure that they aren't false memories, like the events upon which the story, Time Travel for Pedestrians' is based, according to my analyst."

He may not know anything more of himself to speak of, but Your Dauntless Editor, up to his gunwales in Nelsonia, has a few more vitalistics. First, he is the co-author with Philip K. Dick of a novel titled The Ganymede Takeover, he had an absolutely sensational story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction a few years back, called "Turn Off the Sky," and he has written full volumes of material for amateur magazines, not to mention his cartoons which were a staple item of "fanzines" during the years he was a science fiction fan.

And Ray is a classic example of how science fiction, the only kind of fiction that does this, brings up its own new generations of writers from the ranks of amateurs. The list of Big Name SF Writers of today, who started out as fans is endless—Silverberg, Brunner, Benford, Hoffman, Bradbury, Lupoff, Carr, Asimov, Knight, Pohl, Blish, Tucker, White—and both A,DV and The Last Dangerous Visions will showcase many of them.

A discussion of fandom is here improper, yet a few words from Nelson of the days when we were both fans, seem nostalgically appropriate, so once again:

"I remember a little café just outside Detroit.

"You and I were there, and George Young and all those other truefans, and we were all underage and we were all (except you, who don't drink) drinking beer and playing the electric bowling machine, and the manager came around and started asking for I.D. cards, and you had on a suit and tie and a large, literary-looking pipe, and when they came to you, you said, 'They're all right. I'll vouch for them.' And they didn't ask you for your I.D., though I believe you were the youngest one there.

"You just stood there drinking ginger ale and smoking and looking like our legal guardian.

"That's what we really are, Harlan. Feuds, the National Fantasy Fan Federation, letters to the prozines, mimeo ink under the fingernails, dreams of the Hugo while high on corflu (which you actually have gotten, at last, old superfan), articles typed straight on stencils, frightful poems and worse fannish imitation pro fiction, costumes at cons and musical beds, hateful monster movies that we just can't resist, Seventh Fandom, talking philosophy all night in greasy spoons, and that whole wild scene.

"I'm not just me, and you're not just you.

"Whenever I open my trap, the little microcosm that produced me is speaking through me, as if I were a ventriloquist's dummy. If you look down my throat you'll see, way back by the tonsils, the tiny figure of Claude Degler proclaiming in a piping voice, 'Fans are Slans.'

"So write anything about fandom, anything at all, and that will also be about me."

And so that future historians, coming to this book as a reference, will have all the facts, Ray Nelson . . .

Is a graduate of the University of Chicago (1960) where he majored in liberal arts and received his B.A. He has an Operation and Wiring Certificate for IBM machines from the Automation Institute (head of the class, 1961) and is familiar with the IBM 514, 522, 077, 403, 407, 604 and 632. He is presently employed as a Machine Accountant Assistant with the University of California.

He was a translator and administrative assistant to a French author named Linard in Vesoul, France from 1957 to 1960. He has held jobs as a silk screen printer, sign writer, cartoonist, IBM machine programmer and operator, Great Books salesman, fork-lift truck operator, beatnik poet (one slender book of poems published, entitled, Perdita: Songs of Love, Sex and Self-Pity) (named for his first wife), movie extra, Abstract Expressionist, interior decorator (with a paint mixing stick in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other), Dixieland banjo player, folknik guitar player and singer, bum, and etc.

He briefly attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Sorbonne, has lived in or visited all the states in the original 48, plus Canada, Mexico, England, and all the nations of free Europe. He is married to a beautiful Norwegian girl named Kirsten, whom he met while living in Paris. They have a son named Walter and they live in El Cerrito, California.

Married, speaks fluent French, student at The Sorbonne, a father . . .now I ask you, censors and trembling uptights of the world, is this the sort of man who could write a dirty story? Shit, no!