Dangerous Visions Read online

  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.

  It is "steam engine time" for the writers of speculative fiction. The millennium is at hand. We are what's happening.

  And most of those wailing-wall aficionados of fantasy fiction hate it a lot. Because allofasudden even the bus driver and the dental technician and the beach bum and the grocery bag-boy are reading his stories; and what's worse, those johnny-come-latelies may not show the proper deference to the Grand Old Masters of the field, they may not think the Skylark stories are brilliant and mature and compelling; they may not care to be confused by terminology that has been accepted in s-f for thirty years, they may want to understand what's going on; they may not fall in line with the old order. They may prefer Star Trek and Kubrick to Barsoom and Ray Cummings. And thus they are the recipients of the fan-sneer, a curling of the lips that closely resembles the crumbling of an old pulp edition of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

  But even more heinous is the entrance on the scene of writers who won't accept the old ways. The smartass kids who write "all that literary stuff," who take the accepted and hoary ideas of the speculative arena and stand them right on their noses. Them guys are blasphemers. God will send down lightning to strike them in their spleens.

  Yet speculative fiction (notice how I cleverly avoid using the misnomer "science fiction"? getting the message, friends? you've bought one of those s—e f—n anthologies and didn't even know it! well, you've blown your bread, so you might as well hang around and get educated) is the most fertile ground for the growth of a writing talent without boundaries, with horizons that seem never to get any closer. And all them smartass punks keep emerging, driving the old guard out of their jugs with frenzy. And lord! how the mighty have fallen; for most of the "big names" in the field, who dominated the covers and top rates of the magazines for more years than they deserved, can no longer cut it, they no longer produce. Or they have moved on to other fields. Leaving it to the newer, brighter ones, and the ones who were new and bright once, and were passed by because they weren't "big names."

  But despite the new interest in speculative fiction by the mainstream, despite the enlarged and variant styles of the new writers, despite the enormity and expansion of topics open to these writers, despite what is outwardly a booming, healthy market . . .there is a constricting narrowness of mind on the part of many editors in the field. Because many of the editors were once simply fans, and they retain that specialized prejudice for the s-f of their youth. Writer after writer is finding his work precensored even before he writes it, because he knows this editor won't allow discussions of politics in his pages, and that
one shies away from stories exploring sex in the future, and this one down here in the baseboard doesn't pay except in red beans and rice, so why bother burning up all those gray cells on a daring concept when the louse-bug will buy the old madman-in-the-time-machine shtick.

  This is called a taboo. And there isn't an editor in the field who won't swear under threat of the water torture that he hasn't got them, that he even sprays the office with insecticide on the off-chance there's a taboo nesting in the files like a silverfish. They've said it at conventions, they've said it in print, but there are over a dozen writers in this book alone who will, upon slight nudging, relate stories of horror and censorship that include every editor in the field, even the one who lives in the baseboard.

  Oh, there are challenges in the field, and truly controversial, eyeopening pieces get published; but there are so many more that go a- begging.

  And no one has ever told the speculative writer, "Pull out all the stops, no holds barred, get it said!" Until this book came along.

  Don't look now, you're on the firing line in the big revolution.

  In 1961 this editor . . .

  . . .hold it a second. I just thought of something that had better get said. You may have noticed a lack of solemnity and reserve on the part of the editorial I. It stems not so much from youthful exuberance—though there are legions who will swear I've been fourteen years old for the past seventeen—as from a reluctance on the I's part to accept the harsh reality that the I who is all writer has abrogated a wee portion of the auctorial gestalt to become An Editor. It strikes me as odd that of all the wiser heads in the field, all the men who are so much more eminently suited to bring forth a book as important as I like to think this one is, that it fell to me. But then, on reflection, it seems inevitable; not so much from talent as from a sense of urgency and a dogged determination that it should be done. Had I known at the outset that it would take over two years to assemble this book, and the heartache and expense involved—I'd have done it anyhow.

  So in exchange for all the goodies herein, you will have to put up with the intrusion of the editor, who is a writer like all the other writers here, and who is delighted to be able to play God just this once.

  Where was I?

  Ah. In 1961 this editor was engaged in putting together a line of paperbacks for a small house in Evanston, Illinois. Among the projects I wanted to put on the assembly line was a collection of stories of speculative fiction, by top writers, all original, and all highly controversial in nature. I hired a well-known anthologist, who did what many might have called a good job. I didn't happen to think so. The stories seemed to me either silly or pointless or crude or dull. There were some that have since been published elsewhere, even a few "best" stories among them. By Leiber, and Bretnor, and Heinlein, to remember just three. But the book did not excite me the way I felt a collection of this sort should. When I left the firm, another editor tried it with a second anthologist. They got no further. The project died aborning. I have no idea what happened to the stories these anthologists gathered.

  In 1965, I was entertaining author Norman Spinrad in my itty-bitty Los Angeles treehouse, coyly called "Ellison Wonderland," from the book of the same title. We were sitting around talking about this and that, when Norman began bitching about anthologists, for one reason or another that now escapes memory. He said he thought I should implement some of the rabble-rousing ideas I had been spreading about "the new thing" in speculative fiction, with an anthology of same. I hasten to point out my "new thing" is neither Judith Merril's "new thing" nor Michael Moorcock's "new thing." Ask for us by our brand names.

  I smiled inanely. I'd never edited an anthology, what the hell did I know about it? (An attitude many critics of this book may voice when they finish. But onward . . .)

  I had, shortly prior to this, sold Robert Silverberg a short story for a forthcoming anthology he was assembling. I had beefed about some minor matter or other, and received a reply, part of which follows in Silverbob's own inimitable style.

  Oct 2 65. Dear Harlan: You'll be glad to know that in the course of a long and wearying dream last night I watched you win two Hugos at last year's Worldcon. You acted pretty smug about it, too. I'm not sure which categories you led, but one of them was probably Unfounded Bitching. Permit me a brief and fatherly lecture in response to your letter of permission on the anthology (which I'm sure will startle the sweet ladies at Duell, Sloan & Pearce.) . . .

  At which point he launched into a scathing denunciation of my attitudes toward accepting some piddling amount for anthology reprinting of a second-rate story he should have known better than to include to begin with. There then followed several paragraphs of chitchat intended (unsuccessfully, I might add) to mollify me; paragraphs which are hilarious, but which bear little import for here and now, and so you'll have to read them in the Syracuse University archives sometime in the future. But now we come down to the pee and the ess, which read thus and so:

  "Why don't you do an anthology? HARLAN ELLISON PICKS OFF-BEAT CLASSICS OF SF, or something . . . ."

  He signed the letter "Ivar Jorgensen." But that's another story.

  Spinrad nuhdged me. Edit, edit, mein kind. So I got on the phone longdistance (this is one word, I learned it from my Yiddish grandmother, who blanched every time you suggested making one). To Lawrence Ashmead, at Doubleday. He had never spoken to me before. Had he but known what new horrors! new horrors! awaited him because of his common civility, he would have dropped the offensive instrument out the eighth-story window of the Ministry of Truth-style building on Park Avenue where Doubleday keeps its Manhattan offices.

  But he listened. I wove golden magic threads of spidery illusion. A big anthology, all new stories, controversial, too fierce for magazines to buy, top writers, headliners from the mainstream, action, adventure, pathos, a cast of thousands, a parsnip in a pear tree.

  Hooked. On the spot, hooked. The silver-tongued orator had struck again. Oh, was he bagged on the idea. On October 18, I received the following letter:

  Dear Harlan: The consensus of the editors who have looked at your prospectus for DANGEROUS VISIONS is that we need something more definite to go on . . . . Unless you can find out exactly what is available in original stories and can supply me with a fairly definite table of contents, I don't stand a chance of getting approval on this project from our Publishing Committee. Anthologies are a dime a dozen these days and unless they are special, they just don't justify a large advance. In fact, it is my policy to limit anthologies (unless they are "special") to authors who regularly contribute novels to the Doubleday list. So, if you can insure most of the contents of DANGEROUS VISIONS with some definite commitments . . .and I know this is tantamount to the situation of the Butterscotch Man who can't run until he is warm and can't get warm until he runs, but . . .

  Now a piece of historical information. Traditionally, anthologies have been composed of stories already first published in serial, or magazine, form. They can be purchased for hardcover anthologization for a fraction of their original cost. The profit for a writer is made from subsequent sales, paperback reprint, foreign rights, etc. And since he has been paid once for the piece already, it is gravy. Thus, a fifteen-hundred-dollar advance against royalties paid to an anthologist means the editor can cop half the bread for himself and stretch the seven hundred and fifty dollars remaining over eleven or twelve authors, and have a pretty good-sized book. This book, however, was conceived as an all-original collection, which meant the stories would have to be written specifically for the book (or, in rare cases, be those stories already long since written and rejected by all the available markets on grounds of taboo, of one sort or another; these latter possibilities were, obviously, far less appealing, for usually, unless a story is exceeding hot, it can be sold somewhere; if no one had bought them, there was a better chance that they were simply gawdawful, rather than too controversial; I was to find out all too soon that my thinking was correct; stories of a controversial nature a
re often bought by editors not so much because they shock and startle, as because they are by "name authors" who can get away with it; the less well known writers have a much harder time of it; and unless they develop a more prominent name later, and go back to dig these "hot" stories out of their trunk, the stories never get seen).

  But for a writer to do a story for the book, my price on acceptance would have to be competitive with the magazines that would offer him first sale. This meant the standard fifteen-hundred-dollar advance would not be enough. Not if this was to be a big, wide-ranging and representative project.

  The extra three cents a word for magazine publication looms large to the free-lancer making his living strictly from the genre magazines. So I needed at least three thousand dollars, double the advance. Ash-mead, who is not allowed by Nelson Doubleday to dole out more that fifteen hundred dollars, would have to go to his Publishing Committee and he didn't think they would be too keen at this stage of the game. They didn't want to spring for the first fifteen hundred.

  So the cadmium-throated orator once again took to the telephone lines. "Hi, Larry sweetheart pussycat!"

  What emerged finally was the greatest boondoggle since the Teapot Dome scandal. Ashmead was to give me the first fifteen hundred dollars advance, out of which I would only buy, say, thirty thousand words of the proposed sixty thousand. Then I would send the stories in to him and say I needed another fifteen hundred to complete the project, and if things shaped up as well as we anticipated, there would be little difficulty going to the Committee and asking for the balance.