Again, Dangerous Visions Read online

  In case you hadn't noticed, there are ugly and evil things happening all around us, and while I'm not wimp enough to think the answer lies solely with everyone under-30, I believe very firmly that our best hope lies with the young in imagination, and they are the ones for whom and to whom sf speaks most clearly.

  For them, for the new dreamers, this book is sent on its way with enormous amounts of love by the writers, artists, designers, editors and ancillary folk who made it all happen, and with great weariness by its editor,

  HARLAN ELLISON

  Sherman Oaks, California

  6 May 1971

  Once again, the Editor wishes to express his gratitude to, and acknowledge the assistance of, the many writers, editors, agents and aficionados of speculative fiction and Dangerous Visions, whose contributions of time, money, suggestions and empathy, and whose response to the original project (necessitating a companion volume), made this book possible:

  Mr. Lawrence P. Ashmead

  Ms. Judith Glushanok

  Ms. Julia Coopersmith

  Ms. Diane Cleaver

  Mr. Ed Bryant

  Mr. George P. Elliott

  Mr. Ed Emshwiller

  Ms. Louise Farr

  Ms. Janet Freer

  Ms. Virginia Kidd

  Mr. Damon Knight

  Professor Willis E. McNelly

  Mr. Robert P. Mills

  Mr. Ted Chichak

  Mr. Richard Posner

  Mr. Charles Platt

  Mr. Michael Moorcock

  Ms. Barbara Silverberg

  Mr. Robert Silverberg

  Mr. Norman Spinrad

  Mr. James Sutherland

  Ms. Michele Tempesta

  Ms. Helen Wells

  Mr. Ted White

  Ms. Kate Wilhelm

  Dr. Robin Scott Wilson

  As with all projects of this size and scope, stretching over five years, the aid and kindness of many people blurs together at the rushed last moments as one roseate glow of encouragement. Thomas Disch and David Gerrold and Harry Harrison recommended writers; Lester del Rey and Judy-Lynn Benjamin del Rey of Galaxy offered invaluable suggestions and encouragement; only Don Congdon gave me a hard time. If I've overlooked giving any their due, chalk it up to exhaustion and encroaching senility.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  Sherman Oaks, California

  11 November 71

  Introduction to

  THE COUNTERPOINT OF VIEW

  Introducing a "keynote entry" is the sheerest Newcastle-coaling. By its very nature, the piece is intended to set the tone and mood for what is to follow. And yet, symmetry is much to be desired; a certain reliability of order; and why should John Heidenry get jobbed out of a few words of introduction just because he wrote a surreal set-piece that somewhichway cornerstones the intent and attitude of the book? Surely we can't begrudge him such a miniscule pleasure; his due, in fact.

  Heidenry came to me late in the assemblage of this book via Larry Ashmead of Doubleday.

  The chain of goodword put in for Heidenry illustrates the incestuous nature of the New York publishing daisy-chain. Mr. Heidenry was Managing Editor of Herder and Herder in New York, publishers of weighty tomes on theology and philosophy. He writes various stuff on the side. Not the least stuff are three novels he describes as "a lovely dream-flecked pastoral romance, another (for practice) on the black days of fear and trembling, and a third on which I am still receiving mystical revelations." In some arcane manner beyond explication, Mr. Heidenry came to the attention of Miss Elizabeth Bartelme at Doubleday; and though Heidenry had no contract for the books—he says he doesn't want to submit outlines or sample chapters, the fool—Miss Bartelme took an interest in his work and mentioned him to Ashmead. So Ashmead looked at some of it and wrote to me, suggesting Heidenry might be a good bet. So when Mr. Heidenry sent me "The Counterpoint of View" I knew who he was. I was enthused about the piece, and wanted to include it, but the money had run out.

  So I let Larry know the sad state of affairs, and he suggested the cost of buying the story might be equivalent to a good meal bought by him, as my editor, for me, as his author, at one of the posher watering-holes in Manhattan. So he put Heidenry on the expense account as a lunch date with me, and sent me his personal check, and now I've spilled it all and Nelson Doubleday will fire Larry, which serves him right for pushing me on deadlines.

  But that's how Heidenry came to lead off this book.

  "The Counterpoint of View" is his first actual story, though he tells me he has always considered himself a writer, in the manner of Andre Gide who expected others to know from a mere glance at his eyes that he was an artist. (He is allegedly working on a second short story, however, working-titled "Yaw, Dizzy," which, to use a sort of metaphor, is about "the time Arthur Rimbaud used to play right field for the old St. Louis Browns.")

  Though I have not pressed Heidenry on this last—discretion being next to cleanliness, which as we all know lives next door to godliness, thereby depreciating the land values in the neighborhood—I feel it incumbent on me to urge all readers who enjoy what follows to petition Doubleday to give him a contract or two, and some cash, without his having to submit some sample sides of beef.

  Speaking of beef, here are John Heidenry's particulars: born in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 15, 1939; mediocre education; started reading books in nineteenth year; decided to study theology, and majored in same at St. Louis University; swears he never intended to be a priest (man who'd screw around with God like that can't be believed nohow); completed studies but declined degree; mediocre education; 1960–61, super-simultaneous editor of Social Justice Review, Catholic Women's Journal and The Call to Catholic Youth, three monthlies with a combined circulation of 3000; 1961, a charming change-of-pace, a breakdown and some time spent in New Orleans (having spent some time in New Orleans myself, on tour with Three Dog Night, I can assure you it is a fine and juicy town in which to recover from a breakdown while acquiring an altogether different and more debilitating breakdown); 1962–63, super-writer for St. Louis Review; wrote practically everything but the editorials (Heidenry assures me it is a generally good paper . . .except for the editorial page); 1971, finished a novel titled Dearly Beloved, became unemployed, and began accepting alms; married and father of three children, thereby helping to insure not only his status as a solid Catholic, but an expansion of the circulation of The Call to Catholic Youth.

  The final entry necessary here to flesh out Heidenry for you is an excerpt from a marvelous Nabokovian analysis he wrote for The Commonweal in May of 1969. Titled "Vladimir in Dreamland," section one reads as follows:

  Vla-di-mir: the tip of the tongue taking a trip down the palate to stop, at three, on the teeth: Vla. De. Mirror. You can always count on a Nabonut for a fancy prose style.

  And quite apart from the utter fecundity of the keynote item you are about to read, so you shouldn't think this editor is merely trying to maintain the nepotism of the New York editorial ingroup, the editors of The Commonweal—light-years above and beyond the reach of corruption, as we all know—identified John in a one-line précis, as follows: "John Heidenry is at work on a famous novel."

  More distinguished a keynote speaker we could not have found had we engaged the Pope himself.

  KEYNOTE ENTRY

  THE COUNTERPOINT OF VIEW

  John Heidenry

  Enacraos, one of the scholars of Tlön, the most heretical—and wisest—hermeneutist of his time, discovered, perhaps accidentally, during his research into obscure Massoretic palimpsests relating to the qabbalah and its apocrypha, that William Shakespeare was indeed among the company of translators assigned by James I of England in the early 1600's to work out a new version of the Scriptures, so that "it may speake like it selfe." He enlisted as one of his five proofs the translation of Psalm 46, where undeniably Shakespeare had signatured his composition with the forty-sixth words counting from both beginning and end. (A sixth proof has since been offered by an anonymous Tlönian compute
r: that the chance of those two words, shake and spear, falling into their respective positions by haphazard versification was 4,600,000,000 to 1. That larger number, the computer reasoned, did not even exist in Shakespeare's day.)

  At the same time that Shakespeare was introducing1 cryptography into English letters (having earlier practiced with fictional fiction in The Comedy of Errors and other plays), in Spain, land of dark and dangerous experiments, Miguel Saavedra de Cervantes had already begun to allude to characters who had read the actual book of which they were a part, and knew its author. This involution into artifice reached its culmination in recent years with Pierre Menard's heroic attempt—without reading into the life of Cervantes or the history of Spanish culture—to recreate the poetical experience of Cervantes himself: to produce a few pages of manuscript which would coincide, word for word and line for line, with the Quixote. Menard's superior text was the first example of art successfully imitating, and finally transcending, mere art.

  During its complex and imperspicuous development into genre there were times (as Enacraos has shown) when fantastic writing was the idiosyncrasy of philosophy, and lost to art: most ingeniously in the lucid speculations of the neo-Platonic divine, George Berkeley, who attained such mastery that of his subtleties Hume could say, "they admit of no answer and produce no conviction."2 Intermittently too there were hiatus and regression: the ornate skill cheapened into gaudy technique, the clear optic exchanged for (as in Lewis Carroll) the looking glass and jabberwocky. Yet in the brave and finally pitiful person of Edgar Allan Poe—in his essay on cipher writing and in his grotesque, enigmatical tales—the true awful possibilities of illusory truth were, if scantly established, asserted nonetheless for evermore. Poe, at last no longer able to persevere in his investigations, turned finally to the saner unrealities of laudanum and alcohol;—dying, at five o'clock in the morning of October 7, 1849, with the cry, "God help my poor soul!"

  Other practitioners of this subterfuge or art are, of course, Shams Joist, the newclear punman, who split the syllable of reality; Vladimir Nabokov, assembler of Zembla and dissembler of deceit; and Jorge Luis Borges himself.

  Enacraos, in an appendix to his edition of The Targum of Onkelos and Its Massoretic Revision, both anticipated and defined the direction of literary art in his enumeration of the one hundred and three primary types of ambiguity, and in his formulation of the "trifold principle of moving viewpoint," the first and last parts of which read, "Everything that is what it seems is what it seems it is not that is not." By not punctuating his dictum, Enacraos was able to give it both many truths and many lies. Jorge Luis Borges, reflecting on the feat of Menard, saw a further logical insinuation of fantastic writing. Menard's achievement, he has suggested, prompts us to read, for instance, the Odyssey as though it were posterior to the Aeneid; the Imitatio Christi as though it were the work of Louis Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce. Yet a more frightening possibility—revealed now to the world for the first time, plagiarized from secret Tlönian analysis which even that land's most liberal censors would not allow to be published—is that the reader of language becomes its writer, and the writer the reader.

  Let us take as our example the nearest piece of writing at hand—this fiction. Supposedly, in the ordinary space-time continuum, I am its writer and you the reader. But in the Enacraotic scheme of things, things are not only what they scheme to be, but are, or can be (among other things), precisely the opposite. Anagrammatic resolution of the opening paragraph shows thus that in the first and third sentences I have given evidence that it is not myself alone who is at work composing these words. A textual refraction of paragraph 2 clearly raises the likelihood of the reader's identity coinciding with my own; and (inexorably) the deciphered transcription of paragraphs 3, 4, 5, and 7, and the title of this tale, irrefutably verifies the premonition that I am not, in fact, its author, and that you, the reader, probably are. (I say probably because certain details of the solution point also to a contradictory and utterly fantastic alternative. I have come to my conclusion, however, proceeding upon the basis of Sherlock Holmes's observation that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.)

  Thus now that I have finished "writing"—inflected, punctuated, parenthesized to the counterpoint of having neither identity nor purpose nor even knowledge—I propose to sit back and read this story at my ease and learn just what it is that you (its true and onlie author) wish to have me know.

  NOTES

  1 Chaucer's sage puzzles and palindromes are, of course, though pleasing, innocently contrived.

  2 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section XII, Part I, note. William Butler Yeats had very nearly the same insight, writing of his kinsman, "Though he [Berkeley] could not describe mystery—his age had no fitting language—his suave glittering sentences suggest it. We feel perhaps for the first time that eternity is always at our heels or hidden from our eyes by the thickness of a door." Introduction to J. M. Hone and M. M. Rossi, Bishop Berkeley. His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (London, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1931), pp. xxi–xxii.

  Afterword

  I have lost track of this story, but think I wrote it in 1612. There was a third footnote, excised in deference to some ambiguous rules of style, or stylish rules of ambiguity, which inquired into Ben Jonson's perhaps patriotic, but certainly treacherous reasons for denigrating Shakespeare's immense knowledge of Latin and Greek—or of any language for that matter.

  Alternate titles for this little tale are The Counterview of Counterpoint and The Viewpoint of View. These at any rate are the only ones that I have been told about.

  Further information on this story, or on Joseph Conrad, or preferably on the lost land of Raintree County, may be gotten by writing to my father in care of the Imperial Bar, 10th and Pine Streets, St. Louis, Missouri; or by visiting him personally on Wednesday mornings from ten o'clock till noon.

  Introduction to

  CHING WITCH!

  In the ghastly, seemingly endless and (quite obviously to me) artificial brouhaha about "old wave science fiction" vs. "new wave speculative fiction," the majority of those putting in their unnecessary comments have overlooked one salient and saddening fact. By creating a paper tiger and fleshing it with reams of copy so it seemed a threat, many older, long-established writers have taken unto themselves feelings of inadequacy. On half a dozen occasions during the preparations for DV and A,DV when I approached men and women who had been my personal favorites when I was doing the reading necessary to catch up with the field since 1926, I was confronted with a shamefaced (again the word pops up), saddening response that "I can't write that new stuff."

  Three of the most potent, formative talents in our genre in the Forties, refused even to attempt a story for these volumes, having convinced themselves that they were fit only to write what they'd been writing for years; that no one wanted to see them experiment; that if they tried some experimental writing, they'd fail miserably. No amount of cajoling or reassurance could sway them from that sad state of mind.

  I conceive of it as the greatest single evil of the "new/old wave" nonsense. And I suggest to those writers that they consider now Ross Rocklynne.

  Ross Rocklynne is fifty-seven years old. He was born during the First Balkan War in which Montenegro, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia fought Turkey. He was born in the year President Francisco Madero of Mexico was murdered by Huerta and civil war broke out between Huerta's and Carranza's forces, resulting in Pancho Villa's taking over as a dictator in the north. Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States when Ross was born, the year King George of Greece was assassinated. That was 1913, just one year before Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated at Sarajevo. Ross contends he was conceived at the same time as Tarzan, sometime in 1912. Fifty-seven years old, friends and self-deprecating writers.

  The first Rocklynne story to appear in print was "Man of Iron," a short piece in Astounding Stories fo
r August of 1935. He was twenty-two at the time. I encountered Rocklynne's work late in the game, 1951, when I read with considerable awe, "Revolt of the Devil Star" in the now-defunct Imagination: Stories of SF & Fantasy, a story about sentient stars. It was well beyond the terms and intents of what was being written in the field. It was—Ross will excuse the phrase, I hope—very avant-garde. It was also exquisitely written. I rummaged through used magazine shops in Cleveland to find other Rocklynne stories and read with delight "Jackdaw," "Collision Course," "The Bottled Men," "Exile to Centauri," "Time Wants a Skeleton" and later, others in magazines whose names are merely memories to the young writers of today: Planet Stories, Future Science Fiction, Startling Stories; Archduke Ferdinand, Woodrow Wilson, Francisco Madero.

  The latest story by Rocklynne to appear in print is the one that follows. "Ching Witch!" is as fresh and original and now as anything turned out by the young turks I tout so heavily in these pages.