Dangerous Visions (2 page)

This book has stood the test of time. It has been a peak and a beacon and a pattern for quite a lot of what followed in the next thirty-five years. And now, it comes again, in new format, bright and shiny (with three different covers for those who enjoy buffet style) and ready to bedazzle a new generation of readers, and to quicken the hearts of those who read it three and a half decades ago when it came off the presses growling and pawing the ground.

Now, if you'll indulge me for a moment longer . . .

I had intended to include in this new edition an update supplement that would fill in the career gap between 1967 and today. The books these people wrote, the movies they inspired, the awards they'd won, the major events in their lives . . .a brief but detailed gazette of who'd gone where and who'd done what.

I did much of the initial research myself, then hired David Loftus to do the rest. I wrote many of the bio updates and was sure I'd have it all ready for the publisher by June 1st of 2002.

I wrote . . .

POUL ANDERSON died of prostate cancer on 31 July 2001. ISSAAC ASIMOV died of kidney and heart failure on 6 April 1992. ROBERT BLOCH died of cancer of the esophagus and kidneys on 23 September 1994. JOHN BRUNNER died of a heart attack while attending a science fiction convention in Glasgow, Scotland on 25 August 1995. HENRY SLESAR, in the best of health, went into a Manhattan hospital for a routine hernia procedure and bled to death just three months ago as I write this, 2 April 2002. FRITZ LEIBER died of a stroke on 5 September 1992. RAY LAFFERTY died in an institution for the aged and helpless just a month or so ago. DAMON KNIGHT . . .dead. MIRIAM ALLEN deFORD . . .dead. And others. Friends gone. Biographies terminated.

I gave it up, folks.

I just, hell, I just
gave it up
.

So you don't get that batch of new little mini-bios. You get their testament: some of their best writing, the best parts of all of us, what's on the page.

I apologize. But it's been a long, strange, jam-packed eventful trip, now a sad trip as it has come to an end for so many of the stars who shine here. I tried, I promise you, I tried. But they're gone, and I miss them, and the job just broke my heart, so I said fuckit.

This was a book and a time unrepeatable. It is now a book that lives and breathes on its own, even though some of its parents have gone away. It isn't a snarling brat now, it's a stately, serious, academically-noted tome of significant writing that altered the world for a great many readers.

Now it's your turn.

From those of us still standing, and those of us gone our way, we wish you an eventful yes even a long, strange, highly whacked and weird trip.

Nice book. Please enjoy it.

HARLAN ELLISON
Los Angeles
27 July 2002

Today—on the very day that I write this—I received 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 received 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 a sober analysis of a hardheaded 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 thing 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 life-work.

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 changeover 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 changeover, 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 changeover. 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.