Harlan Ellison
IF ALL MEN WERE BROTHERS, WOULD YOU LET ONE MARRY YOUR SISTER?
Theodore Sturgeon
WHAT HAPPENED TO AUGUSTE CLAROT?
Larry Eisenberg
Henry Slesar
Sonya Dorman
John T. Sladek
Jonathan Brand
FROM THE GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
Kris Neville
R. A. Lafferty
J. G. Ballard
John Brunner
Keith Laumer
Norman Spinrad
Roger Zelazny
Samuel R. Delany
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If you missed volumes 1 and 2, gentle reader, go out and buy them, get them read, then come back to here. If you pass Go, you collect two-thirds of a work of love and you can free yourself from the jail of moribund mainstream writing. (I’ll assume you went, did, and are back.)
Hello.
It’s May of 1969 as I write this. Don Bensen of Berkley tells me the first two volumes of this vivisected Dangerous Visions are selling nicely, thank you. Well no one doubted that they would. All you have to do to ensure success is get thirty-two of the finest writers who ever came down the pike, turn them loose; let the Dillons illustrate them, and wrap them adoringly in copious introductory and addenda matter, and wait for the good folk to discover the joys therein contained.
So well have these joys been discovered that there will be a companion volume of Dangerous Visions. I have been working on it for almost a year as I write this. Title will be Again Dangerous Visions.
More writers, and different writers. None of whom were represented in this first book. And a strange, wonderful thing, in the new book. New writers. People of whom you may never have heard. Names like Hank Davis, and Josephine Saxton, and Greg Senford, and Evelyn Lief, and Ed Bryant.
Oh, there’ll be names you recognize, too. Names like Piers Anthony, and Ben Bova, and Terry Carr, and Kate Wilhelm and Bernard Wolfe. But there are stories being written for this new book that will make you think Dangerous Visions was merely warm-up time.
Thirty thousand words by Richard Lupoff titled “With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama,” absolutely fresh and different novelettes like Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians”, Kate Wilhelm’s beautiful “The Funeral”, Piers Anthony’s gut-wrenching “In The Barn”. And firm, original voices like Graham Hall, N. John Harrison, James Sallis.
Because Dangerous Visions did its work well, friends. It started a flood. Damn the “Waves” of old or new speculative fiction, this is the wave, babies, it’s the flood. A tidal surge of young writers showing their old masters where it’s at. For when Dangerous Visions was in its preparatory stages, too many writers didn’t believe the ballyhoo. They didn’t believe they could really pull out all the stops and go. But Fritz Leiber believed it, and so did Phil Farmer, and Phil Dick, and Sonya Dorman, and Carol Emshwiller, and Chip Delany. They could dig it, and they worked heavy. Now everyone believes it, and I urge you not to miss the companion volume some time next year. A bigger book, bigger than Dangerous Visions, with writers who are not represented here. For Dangerous Visions taught us all a great lesson.
Next time out, we’re not going for merely revolution: we’re going to change the entire face of the genre.
We’re going to use the stars for stepping-stones!
HARLAN ELLISON
Los Angeles
May 13th 1969
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