Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers in 1844. Popular demand compelled him to write two sequels, Vingt Ans Après in 1845 and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne in 1848. Arthur Conan Doyle grew tired of Sherlock Holmes and ended his career as a criminologist (as well as that of Professor Moriarty as a master criminal) with a tumble over the Reichenbach Falls in "The Final Problem." The public would have none of it. Doyle, pressed to the wall, revived his immortal sleuth three years later with "The Adventure of the Empty House." In 1959 Evan S. Connell, Jr. wrote Mrs. Bridge and it became an instant classic of contemporary fiction. No sequel was possible, but the name became a literary catchphrase, and in 1969 Mr. Connell wrote Mr. Bridge. The creators of Captain America killed off that star-spangled warrior for Democracy and the American Way near the end of World War II. In the early Sixties the Sub-Mariner, Prince Namor of Atlantis, found Cap floating around perfectly preserved in a block of ice, and revived him. Isaac Asimov has had to suffer sequelization many times. No one will let him stop telling stories of Dr. Susan Calvin and her U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc.; stories of the Foundation; stories of Lije Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw. Ike is resigned. They have lives of their own.
I did not want to edit another Dangerous Visions.
A man may enter the Valley of the Shadow once because he has a taste for danger or because he simply doesn't recognize the terrain. But once having gone and come back, only a fool returns. In November of 1965 I began work on what I thought would be an interesting little project, the creation of an anthology of new stories, in a new mode, for the field of speculative fiction. Four and a half years later, fifty thousand hardcovers and God only knows how many paperbacks later, Dangerous Visions has become a landmark (for once my ego-dreams came true) and somehow, magically, as though it had a life of its own, Dangerous Visions has forced the creation of a companion volume, bigger than the original, and I sit here in lonely desperation, trying to beat a publication deadline, writing another Introduction. We both arrive at the same conclusion: I am a monumental fool.
Let me tell you how it happened.
No, wait a minute. Let me first tell you what Dangerous Visions did, apart from selling more copies of an sf anthology than any other in recent memory.
First, the awards.
Fritz Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones" and Chip Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah . . ." won the 1967 Nebula Awards of the Science Fiction Writers of America in the categories of best novelette and best short story, respectively—incidentally beating out nominees by this editor in both categories. (Seldom has a man so willingly aided his executioners.)
At the 26th World SF Convention in Oakland, in 1968, Philip José Farmer tied for the Hugo Award in the Best Novella category with "Riders of the Purple Wage" from Dangerous Visions (for purists, he tied with Anne McCaffrey's "Weyr Search"); and Fritz took a Hugo with "Gonna Roll the Bones" for Best Novelette. (I got two Hugos that year, so I didn't feel the need to bitch or begrudge.)
And the Oakland convention gave me a plaque for editing "the most significant and controversial sf book published in 1967."
Dangerous Visions appeared on BOOK WORLD'S list of the best paperbacks of 1969. It was reprinted by the Science Fiction Book Club and sold over 45,000 copies. The Literary Guild offered it as a bonus selection. It has had—or will shortly have—translations or editions in Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Spain, Italy and France. It almost single-handedly helped bring into being a counter-revolutionary movement in the genre called "The Second Foundation," dedicated to eradicating all that Dangerous Visions stood for. Whatever that is.
I personally received over two thousand letters from readers of the book ranging from a telegram from an influential New York editor who said Congratulations on publication day of the most important sf book of the decade to a Mrs. S. Blittmon of Philadelphia who wrote, in part: "When I picked up your book 'Dangerous Visions' at the library & read the 2 introductions I thought it was going to be great. I cannot tell you how sick I feel after reading [and she named two stories, one my own]. You say you had a Jewish grandmother (so did I) but I think not; she must have been Viet Cong, otherwise how could you think of such atrocities. Shame, shame on you! Science fiction should be beautiful. With your mind (?) you should be cleaning latrines & that's too nice. Sincerely . . ."
Go please the world.
Mostly, everyone was dazzled and delighted. The men and women who contributed the thirty-three original stories for Dangerous Visions went where no one had gone before and came back whispering of new tomorrows, many of them in ways the field of speculative fiction had never thought possible. Many people said my intention of publishing stories that were unpublishable in the commercial magazine markets because of taboos and editorial restrictions was only partially achieved. Others said only seventy per cent of the stories were top-grade. Others said sixty-two per cent, and one fan magazine found only twelve per cent of merit. Somehow, for all the pissing and moaning, the book managed to sell like ice cubes in Rio, managed to stand the field on its ear and alter its direction, managed to puff the prides of the writers who appeared therein, and became, as I say, a landmark. Ask anyone.
But when the dust settled, I was about eighteen hundred dollars out of pocket.
Through no frugality on the part of Doubleday, our publisher, I assure you. Strictly due to my own grandiose belief that the book was never big enough, never startling enough, never innovative enough. So I spent and spent. And as I said, when the dust cleared, I was in the hole. To date, I haven't yet hit the black on Dangerous Visions and I'm still repaying author Larry Niven for the loan he gave the book to purchase the last few stories. It doesn't matter. It was a prideful thing to assemble that book.
Only one author has vocally confessed to being upset with his participation in the project. I learned of that discontent only recently, and at risk of annoying the author and his agent, I really must relay the anecdote.
J.G. Ballard—easily one of the most innovative and serious contributors to the genre of speculative fiction—mentioned in an interview that he considered Dangerous Visions a hypocritical volume because I had asked writers to submit stories they felt could not be published in the traditional markets due to controversial content or approach, but when presented with it I had rejected "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race."
The interview, in a magazine called Cypher, quoted Jim Ballard as saying I had rejected the story—ostensibly written specially for Dangerous Visions—on the grounds it would offend too many American readers.
When I read that item, I was horrified and stricken with a sinking-gut feeling . . .for I'd never seen the story. Though Ballard had, indeed, written it for the book, his agent in New York, instead of sending it on to me here in Los Angeles, had made a prejudgment that the story was offensive, and drawered it till they could return it to Ballard. Whether or not they contrived to advise Ballard I'd bounced it, I do not know, to this day. Subsequently, Michael Moorcock published the story in New Worlds in England, and it instantly drew the praise it deserved.
As one of the most exciting and controversial stories written in the field in recent memory, it would have been perfect for Dangerous Visions, and when I learned that I'd missed buying the piece because of a wholly unjustified clerical judgment, I ground my teeth in frustration. But to be accused of hypocrisy on top of the loss, was more than I could bear. Jim Ballard's story "The Recognition" in Dangerous Visions was a good story, a laudable piece of fantasy, but it simply wasn't in the same time-zone with "Downhill Motor Race," one of the germinal stories of the past decade.
When I met Jim Ballard—in Rio de Janeiro in March of 1969—we rehashed what had happened, and I thought we'd gotten the matter discussed, with mutual commiseration. Then came that Cypher quote. And though I've written him reminding him of the circumstances surrounding the "submission" of the story, there's been no reply. So if any of you out there run into J.G. Ballard, would you kinda sorta tell him what happened? I'd hate for him, or any of you, to grow much older thinking I was stupid enough to reject a story that clearly brilliant and noteworthy.
I've been known to be stupid, but I refuse to cop to a charge of brain damage.
And while we're on the subject of my stupidity, I have to own up to stupidity in having arbitrarily denied a space in Dangerous Visions to Thomas Disch, whose work these past four years has elevated him to the top level of sf writers. Because of personal blindness, I rejected a Disch story that should have been in the book and, when later I got to know Tom better, regretted my prejudice bitterly.
Fortunately, Disch is a better man than your now-humble editor, and he has written for this volume an even better story. We'll get to that in due time, but the mention of that omission on my part brings us to the next phase of this introduction:
Why another Dangerous Visions collection?
Well, Disch is one reason. Piers Anthony is another. And the forty other writers herein nail it down finally.
Even so, even though there were handfuls of authors who never made it into Dangerous Visions, I was quite literally dragged, kicking and screaming, to Again, Dangerous Visions. I'll tell you about it.
After DV came out (you'll excuse me if I resort to initialese; the book is long enough as it stands, over 250,000 words, without having to write out Dangerous Visions every time), in 1967, and the memory of what aggravation it had been to get the damned thing together had faded from Doubleday editor Larry Ashmead's mind, he considered the sales figures, added them to the amount of prestige the book had brought to the otherwise foundering Doubleday empire, and he decided there should be a companion volume.
I am too much the gentleman to comment on the history of congenital insanity in the Ashmead ancestry, save to report Larry is inordinately proud of a spinster Ashmead aunt who was said to have had repeated carnal knowledge of a catamaran, and a paternal great-grandfather who introduced the peanut-butter-and-tuna-fish ice cream sundae in the Hebrides.
For my part, I was still recuperating from DV, both physically and financially. The high praise and bitter denunciations of the book were totaling at that time, and I was sitting back, breathing deeply, and thinking how good it was that the entire DV affair was ended. That was early in June of 1968.
The phone rang.
It was Ashmead.
"Hi, Harlan!" He always opens his conversations that way with me. As though he's really genuinely pleased to be talking to me. Sneaky sonofabitch.
"Hi, Larry," I responded, "what's happening? How's the latest Allen Drury disaster doing?"
"Making a fortune," he said.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, actually taking money for dreck like that. Why don't you get into a decent line of work, like racehorse doping or pre-pubescent white slavery?"
"We also publish Irving Stone, Leon Uris and Taylor Caldwell. Any one of whom makes more than you make in a year, in any five minute period."
"I only wish on you plagues of mice, locusts, salamanders, Irving Wallace, Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins. Also you should never be able to get a good point on your pencils." I'd have wished Erich Segal on him, but who knew about that horror in 1968? We Jews have a fine mind for curses.
"Just called to tell you we're putting DV out of print."
"Terrific," I said. "It's the hottest selling anthology in sf history, nothing but rave reviews, colleges are starting to use it as a text and you put it out of print. What corporate genius came up with that one?"
"It's Doubleday policy."
"That's what Adolf Eichmann said. Do you broast chickens on the side?"
"How'd you like to do another Dangerous Visions?"
I hung up on him.
He called me back. "We were cut off."
"We weren't cut off. I hung up on you."
"Oh. What I said was: 'How'd you like to do another Dangerous Visions?' "
I hung up on him again.
So he called me back again and before I could say anything he screamed very shrilly, "DON'T HANG UP ON ME!"
"Okay," I said, "I won't hang up on you, but don't you use filthy language to me over the phone. I'm of a delicate nature."
"But why not? I think it would be a marvelous idea."
"I'll hang up on you again."
"Think of all the writers who've been influenced by the book. Writers who need that kind of showcase, writers who need a break, writers who want to spread their wings, writers who . . ."
"Ashmead, knock it off. I used that hype on you when I was trying to sell you Dangerous Visions in '65."
"I know. I was using the memo you sent me. You misspelled fledgling."
"Go away, I'm retired from the editing business."
But he persisted. Lawrence Ashmead is a very persistent man. Anyone who publishes Asimov has learned to be persistent. Also comatose.
So I decided the surest, quickest way to scare him off was to demand three times as much money as Doubleday had ever offered for a science fiction book. So I demanded it. (No, I'm not going to tell you how much that was, so stop bugging me.)
"It's a deal!" Larry chirruped. When he has swallowed a canary he always chirrups.
I sank instantly and completely out of sight in a funk of watertight absoluteness.
"You has done me, Ashmead," I muttered, chewing my armpit. I felt like a satyr condemned to a hell of sex-crazed nymphomaniacs, each with her own special spirochete or Oriental fungus.
"Just remember how happy you were when DV won all those awards," he said. "Don't you remember how happy you were?" My mind's camera quickly flashed the memory behind my eyes. I remembered those Nebula citations Larry and I had picked up for the award-winning Leiber and Delany stories. I saw again my expression. It didn't look happy to me. It looked like a man who has just eaten a ripe persimmon. It looked like this:
Photo by Jay Kay Klein
I shrugged away the ghastly after-image of myself (in corrupted missionary tuxedo shirt and ludicrous facial stricture), of Ashmead (dapper, smug, already plotting my future horror) and said, "Okay, I'll do another volume of the damned thing, but I'll do it at my own pace. You have got to promise on the lives of your cats that you won't noodge me about deadlines. I can take ten years if I want to."
"Sure, Harlan," he said. The voice of the asp.
On June 28th, 1968 the contracts were signed and I began soliciting manuscripts for the book you now hold in your hands. Or propped against your belly. Or whatever.
(As an aside, I also made sure no book club or paperback editions of Again, Dangerous Visions could be sold without my agreement, thereby assuring that the writers who contributed to this volume would have a good long trade edition run for their royalties before those deadbeats among you who wait for cheaper editions could obtain marked-down incarnations. The point of this aside is to assure those of you reading this book over the shoulders of your friends, that you won't be obtaining a cheapo version for some time, so you'd better rush out right now and buy this edition at full-price. Or rip it off from the bookstore. Either way it counts for full royalties.)
As I got into the editing of this book, I found my greatest joy was in seeing stories by new writers who were just starting to flex their literary muscles. An only slightly less joyful joy was in seeing older writers, who'd established reputations for doing one certain kind of story, trying something new.
The word had gotten around because of DV that asking for really far-reaching innovative fiction was not mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And (despite what happened with Ballard) the writers responded.
As a consequence, I find this second book in the DV trilogy much more daring and, well, "dangerous" than the first. Lupoff and Anthony and Nelson and Vonnegut and O'Donnell and Bernott and Parra and Tiptree get it on in ways I don't think would have been possible before the advent of Dangerous Visions.
Now I realize that smacks of hoopla, and I've been pilloried repeatedly in the fan press for steadfastly and endlessly committing the crime. Understanding in front that this explanation contains not one scintilla of defense, let me advise all who will review or comment on this DV that I will do it again—the hyper-ventilating hurrah—because whatever uglies are laid at my door, it gets the word out for the rest of the men and women in this book. You see, in a very real sense, I am the custodian of this wonderland. It is my responsibility to see that every writer in this book gets the widest possible exposure for his or her work. It is a trust which I assume with considerable gratitude, and with a naked intent to smash down doors and bang on drums and buttonhole critics and beat on the ears of potential readers till they scream all right, all right, already, I'll read it . . .and then first-story writers in this book like Evelyn Lief and Ken McCullough and Jim Hemesath will have their chance, as well as established names like Ursula Le Guin and Ben Bova and Tom Sherred.
It's not the gentlemanly way to do it, I suppose, but in a world where Evelyn Lief and Al Parra have to compete with Jacqueline Susann and Erich Segal, having the services of a flack commando can be a necessary evil.
How it pains my mother to hear me called evil.
The introduction to Dangerous Visions talked about that book (hopefully) being the opening shot of a revolution in the literary genre of speculative fiction. From that simple phrase came endless reams of criticism and artificial controversy. The phrase gave birth to another phrase: The New Wave.
A few words should be expended here on the subject.
We are a small but closely-tied community, we readers and writers of sf. We fight and love and honor and hate one another the way any small family does, and whenever one of us has the audacity to suggest that things here in the household might be run a little differently, ah, then we have recrimination, vitriol, backbiting, remorse. Danger threatens. Ta-rahhh! The lancers lurch to the rescue. The dragoons deploy. The hussars hurtle forward. To protect the reputations of Arthur C. Clarke and Hal Clement and Robert Heinlein. Oh, come on! Is someone putting us on? Does Norman Spinrad really threaten Isaac Asimov? Can John Jeremy Pierce truly believe that? No one in his right mind ever said "the new wave," whatever the hell that might be, was going to drive Murray Leinster or Poul Anderson or Frank Herbert off the printed page. In fact, Frank will have a story in The Last Dangerous Visions. (More about that later. Let's stick to the subject.) Poul was in the original DV. It's all bullshit. (Oops. There go a hundred library sales of this book. Ah well.)
The New Wave is as much myth as The Old Wave, unless we choose to postulate The Old Wave as forming back around the time of Aristophanes and cresting out with, say, Randall Garrett.
It's all bullshit, kiddies, and let's hear no more about it.
DV and A,DV are composed of almost a hundred New Waves, each one just a single writer in depth, and each one going its own way, against the tides. Take it or leave it, we are a family of mavericks and toads and pteranodons, and I cannot see anyone driving Bob Heinlein anywhere he doesn't want to go.
Does it parse? Hopefully.
Onward.
Even casual observers of the DV series will see that no one who appeared in DV appears in this book. Nor will any of those found in DV of A,DV be found in the final book of the trilogy, The Last Dangerous Visions. When I took on the job of editing this second book, and said there would be no repeats, I was advised I'd lost my mind, there weren't—simply weren't—enough other good writers to fill out a second book. Bullshit again, my children. Not only were there enough to fill this book with more writers than we saw in DV, but the overflow had to be put into a third volume. And we still haven't used up the riches.
When DV was published, I thought I'd gathered in all the important writers. But since then Piers Anthony and Gregory Benford and Richard Lupoff and Gene Wolfe and Thomas Disch and the amazing James Tiptree, Jr. have burst on us, and there are more where they came from. Ours is a field of constant growth, of fresh thoughts and new dreams. Were I to edit a DV every month for the next ten years I wouldn't be able to keep up with the influx of writers.
So why, the question will be asked, are certain writers conspicuous by their absence? Why no Bester, why no de Camp, why no Heinlein, why no George P. Elliott or Wilson Tucker or Alexei Panshin? Because I've asked each of these writers at least once, and most many times, to contribute to the books, but things just didn't work out. Bob Heinlein is into new novels and he hasn't been well. Alfred Bester is editing Holiday. George Elliott was offered a better showcase and more money by Esquire and he quite rightly took the deal. Alex Panshin tried to please me with a story but I didn't like it, probably because I had to read it in a restaurant in the company of twenty shrieking sf writers and their ladies (as well as some shrieking sf writers who were, themselves, ladies) and I was half coherent from an oncoming flu bout . . .but then again, maybe it just wasn't a very good story. In any case, he didn't try me again, for which I'm sorry. Alex is a fine writer.
As for Wilson Tucker, well, that's another story:
I don't know whether you've ever heard of Richard Geis, but in the event you aren't that much into sf, he is a very talented writer who also edited a magazine called Science Fiction Review for many years. It was a gathering-place and watering-hole for fans and professionals, where opinion and information was offered in between the name-calling. Well, in issue #32 of SFR, in August of 1969, Piers Anthony got into a hassle with Wilson (Bob) Tucker, and the following extract from an Anthony letter appeared:
"In reply to my urging that he publish a good new sf story in Again, Dangerous Visions (so as not to let the volume go entirely to pot by being filled with the crud of neo writers like me), Bob Tucker says he would not have a fair chance with Harlan Ellison . . .Since it is important to me that Tucker be in that volume, I am forced to rear back on my hind limbs and tackle the bull by the balls:
"Harlan Ellison—are you there? I challenge you, by the authority vested in me as one of the youngest and turkiest of the young turks, to publish the excellent sf story Bob Tucker offers you for Again, Dangerous Visions, to pay him at least 3¢ per word against hard and paper royalties, and not to tamper with one single word in it. (You may say what you please in your introduction, however.) Kindly signify your abject acceptance of these rigorous terms by so stating publicly in this fanzine.
"OK, Bob, you're on your own now. Submit your story. (I always like to give the tired old timers a helping hand in coping with today's more demanding market.)"
Well, Piers did it again.
Foot in mouth, he did a no-no.
Understand, I have nothing but respect for most of what Piers has written these last five years, but if he thinks that kind of challenge really incites either Tucker or me, he's wrong. I'd been in contact with Tucker long before Piers set his teeth on edge. In fact, Bob had submitted an excellent short novel for my consideration. After reading and enjoying it, however, I reluctantly came to the conclusion it was not right for this book.
Again understand, it was a good book. It just wasn't offbeat enough for this particular madhouse. It could have been published by any mainstream publisher (unlike Piers's story or Lupoff's or Nelson's or Vonnegut's) and so I very reluctantly returned it to Tucker. Since then, Bob has written and seen published to wide acclaim, The Year of the Quiet Sun, a novel that should have satisfied Piers as to Tucker's continued strength as a writer.
But you see, that's an example of the kind of challenge the DV books have come to represent, and it explains with one instance why some writers are not present here.
Randy Garrett isn't here because, though he called one frantic November night and tried to hype me into sending him an advance against a story he would write, he never submitted a manuscript.
Barry Weissman isn't here because his submission, a short story about a snot vampire was too vomitous even for me! You want to know what taboo turns me right around: snot vampires. Now pillory the editor for a closed mind.
Alfred Bester isn't here because he hasn't been writing fiction, and Arthur C. Clarke isn't here because he made this movie with Kubrick and he's just now getting back into fiction, and Algis Budrys isn't here because . . .well, that's another story. But forty-two marvelous writers are here, and maybe another fifty will appear in The Last Dangerous Visions and perhaps even a few of the men and women I've mentioned here will pull free and submit something before TLDV closes.
But one shot is all anyone gets. The DV writers aren't represented a second time here in A,DV because they had their chance, and most of them took it. With all the gunslinging newcomers coming at us, we have very little time to wait for others to get a second-wind. And besides, some of those stories they've written for the DV books can win awards when they show up in Orbit or Quark or New Worlds or Infinity or the other all-original anthologies that have proliferated since publishers saw how well DV did. (At this point we pause to let the generosity of my nature saturate the air. No, thank you, a shpritz of Glade will not be necessary.)
It occurs to me at this point in the general introduction that a word or three might be proffered about my introductions. Opinion is split. Critics who review the book, and fans who read it, seem divided neatly into two camps: those who dote on the introductions and feel they offer amusing and insightful asides on the writers and their work; and those who flat-out despise the supplementary material that surrounds the fiction. The former view is typified by readers like Sherry Colston of Hannibal, Ohio who wrote, "I relished the candid verbosity in your Dangerous Visions prefaces. If you can't do anything else, you can communicate." The latter position is defined by comments like those of Mr. Edmund Cooper, a writer of considerable talent himself, who said (in the London Sunday Times of 2 May 71, reviewing the English edition of DV, containing the first half of the American edition, the second part to come later in the year): "Dangerous Visions does not seem to contain any dangerous visions. It does contain one foreword, two introductions, and sixteen stories, each with an introduction and afterword." Mr. Cooper didn't think much of the book, but in as brief a review as he gave it, to dote on the supplementary material strikes me as putting him in the latter group of introduction-assayers.
As a well-known chowderhead has said, let me make one thing perfectly clear. People who don't care for the introductions should skip over them. It's that simple, really. They come free. There are over a quarter of a million words of fiction in this book, each word paid for and consequently reflected in the price you pay for the total volume. The introductory stuff is written by me, and I write it free of charge. I sit here for endless days and hammer out lead-ins to the stories that include as complete biographical and bibliographical information as the writers have provided me, and I spice it up with personal reminiscence and observations about the authors. Putting aside the purely factual information, there's maybe another forty thousand words of absolutely free wordage, provided for your possible amusement and edification. If introductions—and notably my introductions—bug you . . .turn to the stories. I don't like Bonanza much, but unlike the people who drove The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour off the air because it tinkered with their ideas of what other folks should view, I simply twiddle the dial and get another program.
Because of the mixed reactions to the introductions, I had serious thoughts about simply presenting the stories without any attendant gimcrackery. But it occurred to me that that was censoring the pleasures of one group to satisfy the prejudices of another, and frankly, that idea stinks on ice. So in advance, to those fan critics and newspaperfolk who'll be getting this book for review (and most of you get the entire tome for free, so who the hell gave you the right to bitch?) may I suggest you worry about evaluating the fiction and leave the curlicues and gingerbread to those who care about such things? I mayn't? Well . . .
And for those of you who are curious as to why I spend all this time doing the introductions, when I only get banged on the head for my trouble, understand this: I enjoy writing about my friends, about the writers of sf, about the real and very fallible human beings behind those flawless fictions. And as long as I'm going in debt, spending years cobbling up this monster, I'm damned well going to enjoy myself while I'm about it.
There is much to be said for making oneself as happy as possible. Even if it means making Edmund Cooper miserable.
Let's see, what else is there to talk about? I guess I should do some lofty number about how sf has come of age and how Kurt Vonnegut is on the cover of Saturday Review and how some of us are even asked to lecture at institutions of higher education, and all the textbooks now featuring sf stories along with Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, and all that jive, but frankly it's a drag; this is a book of good stories (I think), and you were all called here this evening to enjoy them. So I'll skip all the proofs that speculative fiction is hotter than sliced bread, and make just a few comments about TLDV, and we can all pass on through to the KEYNOTE ENTRY by Mr. Heidenry and the stories that follow him.
The Last Dangerous Visions will be published, God willing, approximately six months after this book. It was never really intended as a third volume. What happened was that when A,DV hit half a million words and seemed not to be within containment, Ashmead and I decided rather than making A,DV a boxed set of two books that would cost a small fortune, we'd split the already-purchased wordage down the middle and bring out a final volume six months after this one.
In that book will be such authors as Clifford Simak, Wyman Guin, Doris Pitkin Buck, Graham Hall, Chan Davis, Mack Reynolds, Avram Davidson, Ron Goulart, Fred Saberhagen, Charles Platt, Anne McCaffrey, John Jakes, Michael Moorcock, Howard Fast, James Gunn, Frank Herbert, Thomas Scortia, Robert Sheckley, Gordon Dickson and a gaggle of others. I'm waiting on stories from Daniel Keyes and a new kid named James Sutherland and Laurence Yep and a few more, but this is only a partial taste. There will be novels by Richard Wilson and John Christopher (yeah, that's right, full novels) and short stories by Bertram Chandler and Franklin Fisher, and really fine work by newcomers like Vonda McIntyre and Octavia Estelle Butler and George Alec Effinger and Steve Herbst and Russell Bates and . . .
I grow excited. Let me compose myself.
The four and more years since DV hit have been electric ones for our little field of literary endeavor. Previously, anthologies tended to contain almost exclusively the work of "recognized names" in the genre. Damon Knight's Orbit series and Chip Delany's Quark series and the others, and DV, made it obvious that names are no longer the important commodity we have to sell. The newer writers, the ones who grew up on sf since the Forties, these are the ones who are taking our carefully-nurtured ideas and turning them inside out to show us visions of tomorrows we never dreamed ourselves.
We're constantly being assaulted by these new dreamers, and if nothing else is accomplished by the DV books, it will be satisfying to me merely to know that by the time all three volumes are racked on your shelf—pushing off everything else there with size if not quality—we'll have given half a hundred young turks their turn.
Hopefully, somewhere in this book there are more Hugo and Nebula winners, but that isn't the important dream. The important one is that herein contained are names you may never have heard before, of men and women who will dazzle and delight you, not merely for the time it takes to read this book (or as Liberty magazine would have put it in 1937: reading time, 2 years—6 months—2 weeks—11 days—19 hours—45 minutes—13 seconds) but for all the years to come in which speculative fiction will figure more and more prominently as a fiction for our times.
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