Damon Knight: Orbit 21

But it isn’t luck. Any half-decent editor has his senses fine-tuned all the time in the hope of detecting a good new writer on the way up. If you show any sign at all that you know what you’re doing, an editor will write you letters, encourage you, and maybe buy a story that is just barely good enough because he has a hunch the next one will be better.

Sometimes there wasn’t a next one, and that was disappointing. But I kept trying, I asked myself what would have happened in 1939 if John Campbell had bought all his stories from Arthur J. Burks, Eando Binder, John Russell Fearn, and Nat Schachner, the big names then, instead of from the unknown Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert A. Heinlein.

Mea culpa: Every editor bounces stories that later win awards, and I found out I was no exception. I rejected, among others, “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones,” by Samuel R. Delany, “Eurema’s Dam,” by R. A. Lafferty, “When It Happened,” by Joanna Russ, “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” by Harlan Ellison, and “The Death of Doctor Island,” by Gene Wolfe, for reasons that seemed good at the time. About some of these I later thought I had been wrong.

Would I have bought stories I thought were bad if I had known they were going to win awards? I hope not. Would those stories have won the awards if I had published them? I don’t even know that. Well, then, should I have bought stories I didn’t like because I thought they were going to win awards? No again, because I would have had to buy ten bad stories to get one winner, and because everything an editor buys is a signal to writers that that’s what he wants. Then he gets more of the same, and has to buy it, because that’s all he gets, and he’s in a positive-feedback cycle. This happens to nearly every magazine, and there’s no way to break out of it except by heroic measures or by changing editors.

One thing I remember with pleasure is an exchange at a convention: Somebody asked me, “What do you really want for Orbit?” I answered, “I’m trying to keep you confused about that,” and he said, “You’re succeeding.”

When George Ernsberger took over as editor-in-chief at Berkley in 1973, he reviewed the royalty statements and found out something that nobody else had noticed, that sales had been falling off gently ever since Orbit 6 . We discussed this a little; his impulse was to blame the contents, and mine to blame the package. Finally he said that he wanted to hold off on a new contract until new sales figures came in. I refused, and left Berkley/Putnam. It was a gamble that paid off: Victoria Schochet, then the science fiction editor at Harper & Row, bought the series. Meanwhile Orbit 13 appeared, the last from Putnam: it was a grab-bag of everything that was left in inventory.

Even though I had landed on my feet at Harper, a much better house than Putnam, I was alarmed enough to make some changes in Orbit . I began trying to cut back on marginal items and fantasy; I invented some departments; I tried to find stories that both the conventional reader and I could enjoy.

I was going to say earlier that Orbit had published very few stories about spaceships and alien planets, but when I counted those in the first twenty volumes, there were forty-seven. Four of them are by Gene Wolfe—his first story, “Trip, Trap,” “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” “Alien Stones,” and “Many Mansions,” In “Cerberus” he used a colonial planet as a given of the story, and the spaceships were just assumed as part of the background, but in “Alien Stones” he remade the spaceship story as thoroughly as Heinlein did in “Universe.”

My acceptance is that when any category of science fiction writing has become dull and repetitive, there is always a brilliant story waiting to be written by giving up the assumptions that made the story easy to write. This is what Heinlein did in “Universe”: he said, What if energy considerations make the convenient, quick interstellar flights of pulp s.f. impossible—what then?

The interstellar exploration story is waiting to be rediscovered in the same way. Suppose we assume that pulp s.f.’s quick and easy adaptation of human beings to alien worlds is impossible— what then? Solve the problems of economic return, allergic reaction, systemic poisoning, irradiation, etc., instead of sweeping them under the rug “for the sake of the story.” Then we’ll have a new wave of interstellar stories which will be exciting once more because they will be honest and therefore believable.

My relationship with the editors at Harper & Row’s trade department was harmonious; we never had a single quarrel. After Harper took over, however, there was no paperback edition of Orbit , and the series could not make a profit on hardcover sales alone. Harper bravely held out for six years, hoping for better times, but the end had to come, and Orbit 21 is the last.

The aim of this series has always been to demonstrate that science fiction is a flourishing branch of literature, not a bastard subliterary twig (a view which I have maintained since 1952), and that, as I wrote in In Search of Wonder, science fiction is a field of literature worth taking seriously, and that ordinary critical standards can be meaningfully applied lo it: e.g., originality, sincerity, style, construction, logic, coherence, sanity, garden-variety grammar.

It is true, of course, that subliterary s.f. far outweighs the other kind—the twig, in my image, is larger than the branch—but this is true also of every other form of literature, including the “mainstream” novel—take a look at the paperback best-sellers in your local supermarket—and it is merely a restatement of Sturgeon’s Rule: “Nine tenths of everything is crud.” (When has so much wisdom been condensed into six words?)

Coming to the end of this road is a lonesome thing in a way, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that the idea of Orbit is alive in other anthology series, in the hands of other editors. What is especially satisfying to me, and quite marvelous, is the emergence year after year of strong new writers, in the Clarion Workshop and elsewhere. As long as science fiction can attract and nurture so much talent, we haven’t got much to worry about.

D. K.

I saw Death walking, moving toward the rainbow spires and softly-painted eaves of Elsinore.

I knew he’d come for Katie.

This really burned me up—he was trying to welch on an old friendship. We’d fought in a couple of campaigns together, one against fire demons who’d been harassing the theocrats in Rutland back around the turn of the century, the other against a contingent of lizard men that had tried to stage a takeover in Rumeria. That was even further back. We were good soldiers, Death and I. And good friends.

Damn.

The fink knew I’d be on duty. I grabbed my cloak and started down the stairs.

The gods had been fickle for as long as I’d known them. Arrogant, too. Those were the main reasons divinity had been banned in Elsinore—Death wasn’t any exception.

I was one of the reasons the ban worked.

I emerged in the Watchtower gardens, and paused for a moment to fiddle with the small gold clasp on my cloak that had somehow managed to get caught in my beard. Then I headed north, running through the parks that paralleled the entrance avenue, careful to blend my form with the ashen and sunlit greens that flickered in the breeze. I didn’t want Death to spot me until I was ready for him.