Dangerous Visions Read Online Free PDF

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