Dangerous Visions Read Free Page B

fiction.
    Truly, I am ashamed, embarrassed and guilt-ridden, for no matter where I go and what I do, I shall always consider myself as a science fiction writer first . Yet if the New York Times asks me to colonize the Moon and if Harper's asks me to explore the edge of the Universe, how can I possibly refuse? These topics are the essence of my life-work.
    And in my own defense, let me say that I have not entirely abandoned science fiction in its strictest sense either. The March 1967 issue of Worlds of If (on the stands as I write) contains a novelette of mine entitled "Billiard Ball."
    But never mind me, back to science fiction itself . . . .
    What was science fiction's response to this double doom? Clearly the field had to adjust, and it did. Straight Campbellesque material could still be written, but it could no longer form the backbone of the field. Reality encroached too closely upon it.
    Again there was a science-fictional revolution in the early Sixties, marked most clearly perhaps in the magazine Galaxy under the guidance of its editor, Frederik Pohl. Science receded and modern fictional technique came to the fore.
    The accent moved very heavily toward style. When Campbell started his revolution, the new writers who came into the field carried with them the aura of the university, of science and engineering, of slide rule and test tube. Now the new authors who enter the field bear the mark of the poet and the artist, and somehow carry with them the aura of Greenwich Village and the Left Bank.
    Naturally, no evolutionary cataclysm can be carried through without some pretty widespread extinctions. The upheaval that ended the Cretaceous Era wiped out the dinosaurs, and the changeover from silent movies to talkies eliminated a horde of posturing mountebanks.
    So it was with science fiction revolutions.
    Read through the list of authors in any science fiction magazine of the early Thirties, then read through the list in a science fiction magazine of the early Forties. There is an almost complete changeover, for a vast extinction had taken place and few could make the transition. (Among the few who could were Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson.)
    Between the Forties and the Fifties there was little change. The Campbellesque period was still running its course and this shows that the mere lapse of ten years is not in itself necessarily crucial.
    But now compare the authors of a magazine in the early Fifties with a magazine today. There has been another changeover. Again some have survived, but a whole flood of bright young authors of the new school has entered.
    This Second Revolution is not as clean-cut and obvious as the First Revolution had been. One thing present now that was not present then is the science fiction anthology, and the presence of the anthology blurs the transition.
    Each year sees a considerable number of anthologies published, and always they draw their stories from the past. In the anthologies of the Sixties there is always a heavy representation of the stories of the Forties and Fifties, so that in these anthologies the Second Revolution has not yet taken place.
    That is the reason for the anthology you now hold in your hands. It is not made up of stories of the past. It consists of stories written now , under the influence of the Second Revolution. It was precisely Harlan Ellison's intention to make this anthology represent the field as it now is, rather than as it then was.
    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