Dangerous Visions

by Harlan Ellison

INTRODUCTION by Adam Roberts Dangerous Visions. The question is: dangerous to whom?

Wait, who?

That rabid fan is now out-of-date.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.

Rabid...fans...

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.

Steam-engine time.

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.

Every battle new is old again.

But with one exception this book was never closed to a writer owing to editorial prejudice.

Who? Any idea, @garykwolfe?