Dangerous Visions (3 page)

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

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 flat 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 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 now 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

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 every story, a far-reaching message or philosophy or super-abundance of superscience. While there is certainly merit in their contentions, it has all too often become the
raison d'être
for 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 then the latter, were we chained down with the threat of bamboo slivers 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. (Though, actually, a trope rather than a parameter.)

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, Heliodoros, 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, USA (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 some-such, 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
Nineteen Eighty-Four
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 paranoiacally 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 commonplace 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.