Dangerous Visions Read online

  Dangerous Visions

  by

  edited by Harlan Ellison

  Table of Contents

  DANGEROUS VISIONS

  Edited by Harlan Ellison®

  Copyright © 1967 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, 1995 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  DANGEROUS VISIONS: 35th Anniversary Edition. Copyright © 2002 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Foreword: Year 2002 by Michael Moorcock. Copyright © 2002 by Michael Moorcock. Introduction: Year 2002 by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 2002 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  DANGEROUS VISIONS is an Edgeworks Abbey Offering in association with ereads.com. Published by arrangement with the Author and The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  Harlan Ellison and Edgeworks Abbey are registered trademarks of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  This edition is copyright © 2008 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved.

  SKU: ERBAEN0065

  Front Cover Illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon. Copyright © 1966 by Leo & Diane Dillon. Renewed, © 1994 by Leo & Diane Dillon.

  First E-Reads publication: 2009 www.ereads.corn

  Harlan Ellison website: www.harlanellison.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical-including photocopy, recording, Internet posting, electronic bulletin board or any other information storage and retrieval system, or by any other method, means or process of embodying and/or transmitting information, text or the spoken word now known or hereafter devised without permission in writing from The Kilimanjaro Corporation, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio, television or in a recognized on-line journal. For information address Author's agent: Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 171 East 74th Street, New York, New York 10021, USA.

  All persons, places and organizations in this book—except those clearly in the public domain—are fictitious and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons, places or organizations living, dead or defunct is purely coincidental. These are works of fiction.

  NOTE: Editor and Publisher have expended sustained and exhaustive efforts attempting to locate the current agents of record, estates' executors and/or heirs to missing or deceased contributors in this anthology. In the event of error, omission, or oversight, the Editor urges any authorized party of record to CONTACT US DIRECTLY by Registered Mail c/o HERC; Post Office Box 55548, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413 or by e-mail addressed to the Webmaster at www.harlanellison.com. This is an ongoing concern.

  The compassionate learn from wiser others what they know of themselves, of the world in which they must live, and of the world in which they would like to live.

  This book is dedicated with love, respect and admiration to

  LEO & DIANE DILLON

  who painstakingly, out of friendship, showed the Editor that black is black, white is white, and that goodness can come from either; but never from gray.

  And to their son, LIONEL III, now known as Lee, with a silent prayer that his world will not resemble our world.

  FOREWORD: YEAR 2002

  by Michael Moorcock

  Yes, there was a particular moment in the history of imaginative fiction that changed everything for the better and forever. We came from the West and we came from the East. We met at Damon Knight's house in Milford, Pennsylvania and we discussed a revolution. That was before Judith Merrill had taken umbrage at what she believed to be an unflattering portrait of herself in a TV show written by Harlan Ellison. We were a few very aggressive friends determined to haul science fiction and fantasy into adulthood and make them stay there. I had just started the slick, Arts Council-backed New Worlds; Merrill was an anthologist and publicist who did THE YEAR'S BEST SF; Knight was editing an original anthology series called ORBIT; and Ellison was publishing fiction that was so startling in its eloquence and invention that it set a new standard overnight. But this demonstration of what could be done wasn't enough for Ellison. Not content with setting a standard by his own talent and dynamic, he wanted to make a showcase of work so varied, so novel and so vital, so visionary and so dangerous in what it had to say, that speculative fiction—call it what you like—would never be the same again. And of course there was only one title for such a showcase. DANGEROUS VISIONS.

  What Ellison did next was the hard bit. By any means he knew—by challenging, by cajoling, by flattery and by confrontation—he persuaded the most brilliant Anglophone writers to raise their own standards and offer the world their personal best. He paid them top dollar for it, too—exceeding his publisher's budget and reaching deep into his own pockets. And he didn't stop there. He wrote a commentary, beginning with an introduction and running through the whole book, talking about his contributors, their talent and their potential. Single-handedly he produced a new benchmark, demanding that in future nothing anyone of any ambition did should fall below that mark. He did what we had, as visionaries, wanted to do. He changed our world forever. And ironically, it is usually a mark of a world so fundamentally altered—be it by Stokely Carmichael or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Lyndon Johnson, or Kate Millett—that nobody remembers what it was like before things got better. That's the real measure of Ellison's success.

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  Santa Monica, California

  26 July 2002

  INTRODUCTION: YEAR 2002

  by Harlan Ellison

  What a long, strange, jam-packed eventful trip it has been, I said to Mike Moorcock the other day. It wasn't déjà vu, not exactly; but it was resonant of the days in London when we strolled from Ladbroke Grove to the tandoori restaurant we frequented. "What a long, strange, jam-packed eventful trip it has been," I said to Mike as we walked along like Mutt and Jeff, that huge bearded talent who had almost singlehandedly created what was to become known as the New Wave in fantastic literature, and the 5'5" upstart Yank just coming into his Warholian 15 minutes of Fame. That was more than thirty years ago. And the other day I said the same thing to Mike.

  All so strange and exhausting, this journey. So filled with good and evil, friends and enemies, achievements and failures, deadlines met and deadlines missed (some by decades).

  Friends still—like Mike and Bob Silverberg and Carol Emshwiller and Norman Spinrad and Phil Farmer, to name just a few to be found in this book and still in this world as I sit here writing on my Olympia manual typewriter—and friends so heartbreakingly gone—Bob Bloch and Roger Zelazny and Ted Sturgeon and Henry Slesar and Lester and Phil, Howard, John and John, Kris, dear old Fritz and Ray Lafferty and Damon, Poul and all the others who were smiling and writing and kicking ass when I first said what I said to Mike on Portobello Road. More than thirty years ago.

  This book is one of the successes. It was a dream I'd had long before I actually did the job. A dream I had offered to another anthologist, when I was editing a line of paperbacks in Evanston, Illinois in 1961 . . .and she had shined it on. Same dream I discussed with Norman in my treehouse in Beverly Glen in 1965; same dream I saw coming through the anal constriction of the genre like the Super Chief in amber, as Mike and his compatriots kicked out the chocks with New Worlds. A dream of "our thing" standing crystal mountain tall beside mimetic, naturalistic fiction, proffering visions and answers and what-ifs that no Faulkner or James Gould Cozzens or Edna Ferber ever thought possible. Oh, that was a great deal taller than a 5'5" dream.

  And had I known how tough a job it would be, had I known the vast shitstorms that would gulleywash me, I have no doubt that I'd have done it anyway. Not because I'd be any dopier or foolhardy than has been my style all these years, but because this dream is now celebrating its thirty-fifth ann
iversary, and it is still the all-time bestselling anthology of speculative fiction ever produced. It has been in print continuously since 1967, and the awards and individual story reprints it has amassed are unparalleled. So the opprobrium has been worth it.

  For those of you who came into the movie late, you'll turn a page or three and find the original Forewords to the book written by Isaac (who was too uncharacteristically and idiotically humble to write a story for the book, on the wholly bogus grounds that he was a geezer, couldn't write "the new thing," and didn't want to embarrass himself) (of all the people I've known in my strange, long, jam-packed life, I can't think of any I adored more than my pal Isaac, but I tell you—as I told him—the demur was horseshit), and there- after you'll find my own original, long-winded Introduction. You'll know what's what and understand DV's place in the literary landscape by the time you emerge on the other side. Then begins the book. This terrific book.

  This dream, this success, was intended to be a miracle; and it came to pass. Then. And now. And thirty-five years in between. Many of the boys and girls who first read it in high school are now, themselves, stars of the genre of the phantasmagoric. To those kids, the name DANGEROUS VISIONS has the snap, crackle & pop of the sense of wonder about which we all prattle.

  Muhammad Ali once quieted the rabble chiding him for his braggadocio by smiling and telling them, "Ain't no brag if you can go out there and do it!"

  If this 21st Century intro to a watershed literary event of the 20th seems surfeited with an asphyxiating hubris, well, I admit to not doing humility very well, yet nonetheless there are things in one's life that are enshrineable, and even the most flatulent braggart may be permitted a hoot or two when speaking of such peaks of greatness. Ain't no brag.

  I once met John Steinbeck. I don't think we exchanged a word, I was a kid, he was a god; but I met him. I marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in one of the pivotal events of Our Time, and though I was a mere molecule in that wave, I am eternally proud because I was there. I can count among my closest friends Asimov, Leiber and Bloch, three of the most wonderful men who ever walked this earth, and they liked me. In this way I know I am worth-while, if not righteous. Such men would not be friends with a creep.

  So I trumpet and caper and puff up like (one of my favorite phrases, written by Richard L. Breen for the film Pete Kelly's Blues) "a banjo player who had a big breakfast." On account of this: I did it, muthuhfuggahz. 5'5" out of Ohio, and I did what no one else had done. I was playing in The Show with Moorcock and Knight and Healy&McComas and Groff Conklin. I dreamed it, and I did it. Ain't no brag.

  DANGEROUS VISIONS was a milestone. Not because I say it was such, but because everyone else from James Blish—who was likely the smartest one of us all—to the most severe critics working at that time—Damon Knight, Algis Budrys, and P. Schuyler Miller (who said, "DANGEROUS VISIONS . . .does introduce the Second Revolution in speculative fiction") dubbed it so.

  There were, of course, those who chose to see the contents of this book as the thunderclap of the End Days. They chose either to dismiss as delusional, or to denigrate as adolescently rebellious, that need in many of us to write fresh, to write new, to write better. They chose to see an upstart snottiness in what we hungered to do, saw it as disrespect for the elders and traditions of the genre. Well, to the former, absolutely not! To the latter, damn skippy! We revered those who had gone before, some who may have been past their prime at that time, others who had years of important work yet to come—and some of them were in this book, thereby putting the lie to disrespect right out of the gate. They chose to belittle and ridicule what DANGEROUS VISIONS was trying to do. But it was no more than the dying rattle of Those Who Could Not Do, but needed to Comment on What Those Who Could Do . . .did.

  And if standing the test of time is the marker of an icon's shot at Posterity, well, only last year the superlative writer and editor Al Sarrantonio wrangled into print a big, smart, often experimental, frequently brilliant anthology of original fiction by a stellar lineup of writers, many of whom had appeared in DV or the 1972 sequel, AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS. The book was called REDSHIFT and on the opening page of Al's introduction he graciously wrote this:

  "I set myself a new goal: to put together, at the turn of the millennium . . .a huge original anthology of speculative fiction stories. My initial inspiration was Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, the publication of which in 1967 changed the science fiction field forever. Much of what Ellison codified in that book—the pushing of envelopes, the annihilation of taboos, the use of experimental prose—had been in the air for some time (after all, this was the sixties), but he was the first to nail it between two hardcovers with a force and will that made it irrefutable."

  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

  1967: FOREWORD 1—THE SECOND REVOLUTION

  by Isaac Asimov

  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 magazi
nes 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.