More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Dangerous Visions was a neon, five-mile-high middle finger aimed at the forces of repression . . . a three-stage rocket fired squarely up the asses of the censors, the banners, and the burners.
And it may be just as needed now, at this moment, which has seen the return of a new generation of censors, banners, and burners. Because the war for free expression is never truly won, only postponed until those on the other side of the barricades can try again through different organizations, under different names, but always with the same tactics: fear and fire.
Yet all Golden Ages carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and after it is over you can look back and unerringly locate those seeds. (Lovely, lovely hindsight! How sweet it is to prophesy what has already happened. You’re never wrong!)
Writing for the trunk is masturbation,
And the evening and the morning were the eighth day.
Here is Cassiday: nailed to his cross.
“Oh, hell, Ernest,” said Mr. Mandala, “you call him sir. Everybody knows that one.” He yawned and stretched and said reflectively, “You’d think there’d be some new jokes. All I heard was the old ones, only instead of picking on the Jews and the Catholics and—and everybody, they were telling them about the Martians.”
“Hate to disagree with you, Mr. Mandala,” said Ernest mildly, “but I don’t think so. Going to make a difference to some people. Going to make a damn big difference to me.”
He speaks, thinks, lives in the present tensely.
“So now you see, my son. My clapper swings limberly in the bell of my sex. Ding, dong, ding, dong. A lot of dong but not much ding.”
Uncle Sam is like a diplodocus kicked in the ass. It takes twenty-five years for the message to reach its brain.”
Chib grins through his tears and says, “They taught me at school that puns are cheap and vulgar.” “What’s good enough for Homer, Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Shakespeare is good enough for me. By the way, speaking of cheap and vulgar, I met your mother in the hall last night, before the poker party started.
“Mr. and Mrs. Everyman sit on their asses all day, drink, eat, and watch fido, and their brains run to mud and their bodies to sludge. Caesar would have had no trouble surrounding himself with fat friends these days. You ate, too, Brutus?”
“The Internal Revenue Bureau! I thought it’d been disbanded! Who the hell has an income big enough to report on any more?
Grandpa braces himself as if on a rolling deck, the blue-black veins on his legs thick as strangling vines on an ancient oak. “Brief departure from the role of Herr Doktor Sternscheissdreckschnuppe, the great astronomer, to that of der Unterseeboot Kapitan von Schooten die Fischen in der Barrel. Ach! I zee yet das tramp Schteamer, Deine Mama, yawing, pitching, rolling in the seas of alcohol. Compass lost; rhumb dumb. Three sheets to the wind. Paddlewheels spinning in the air. The black gang sweating their balls off, stoking the furnaces of frustration. Propellers tangled in the nets of
...more
“Oh, God, the goatish energy of youth, the unpredictable shift of spectrum from black sorrow to bright orange joy! Dance, Chib, dance your crazy head off! Be happy, if only for a moment! You’re young yet, you’ve got the bubbling of unconquerable hope deep in your springs! Dance, Chib, dance!”
As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.
