Damon Knight - Orbit 19

Gene Wolfe(“Many Mansions” and “To the Dark Tower Came”) wrote on Boxing Day, 1975, “When I was a very little boy, at the beginning of the dark ages, I used to memorize all the rules and regulations in the stories that were read to me. I knew with a divine perfection of knowledge that if I were given a mysterious box and told not to open it I should not open it; I knew that whenever I discovered a corpse in a private library I ought on no account to get my fingerprints on the gun; I knew that the foreman of any ranch owned by a pretty girl (that was what we called them then—the charming creatures are extinct now) was a man to be wary of. . . .

“The realities are something else again. The realities are two hundred and ninety-three sheets of paper lying beside my typewriter, the aggregation making up perhaps one third of a novel in which it is possible next to no one will be interested. People (so I imagine) are already beginning to ask one another, ‘What is Wolfe doing? Has he dropped out?’ ‘Writes mostly for New York , I think.’ ‘Not him, the other one.’ ‘Oh, him . He died back in the thirties.’ “

We wrote to a writer we esteem, “You have two terrible habits which you should discontinue instantly, even if it takes self-flagellation or aversion therapy. One is using an apostrophe for a French accent (an accent leans left or right; an apostrophe is neither one nor the other, & just gets in the way when the copyeditor has to correct it); the other is using an X to delete letters. No copyeditor is going to believe that a printer is bright enough not to set that X; so he’s got to cross out your mark and add the correct one, making a real mess in the process. No marks at all would be better than wrongo marks.”

FelixC. Gotschalk (“The Veil Over the River”) told us recently, “I’m about half through a Southern gothic, and the story is told by the hero, who is 100 years old. The tennis bug has hooked me, I’ve been playing daily, and have a 137 mph service, and an 8% first-serve accuracy. The coach has been discouraging my cannon-ball service, but I think he is just jealous. I have lost interest in cars, but big money would revive that.”

We wrote to Brian Aldiss in September, “Thank you for your letter after [James Blish’s] death. I’ve only been to two funerals in my life; after the second I was so outraged that I wrote an essay suggesting an alternate procedure. . . . The bastards had made the corpse up like a Byzantine whore, and the preacher alluded to Jesus in favorable terms but had nothing to say about the deceased. My idea in brief was that the remains ought to be cremated without ceremony, & then the guy’s friends ought to get together of an evening, drink wine and eat bread & cheese, and remember what a good old boy he was.”

R.A. Lafferty (“Fall of Pebble-Stones”), one of our favorite authors, first appeared in Orbit in 1967, and since then has contributed sixteen more stories. We meet him only at science fiction conventions, where he smiles inscrutably.

To a promising young writer we said in October, “This has its poetic moments, but there is a misty & vague feeling about it throughout and particularly in the opening, and I think that’s a mistake. Stories using mythical material should be as hard-edged & specific as possible, to keep the whole thing from turning into Jell-O.”

Stephen Robinett(“Tomus”) told us recently, “I spent time bumming around Europe, time in the army, time collecting a couple of academic degrees (neither of them, fortunately, having anything to do with writing) and getting a license to practice law, which currently hangs unused on my wall, though it represents reasonably good job training in case writing for a living—the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do—proves a financial mistake.”

Michael W. McClintock (“Under Jupiter”) teaches English at the University of Montana. He is thirty-four, married; three cats, no children. Except for a story which appeared five or six years ago in the Carleton Miscellany , this is his first published fiction. Recently we wrote to Mr. McClintock, “Thirty years ago the dominant s.f. writers were engineers or scientists, & the problem was to get them to write literate prose; now they are English teachers and the problem is to get them to keep their science straight, but there are a few people like you who can do both, & I think there is hope for us yet.”

Dave Skal, a frequent contributor, wrote in December, “It is a little known fact that the distinguished English illustrator John Tenniel visited the United States in the late 1800’s and while touring the West filled several notebooks with sketches of the fast-dwindling buffalo herds. The drawings were eventually collected in a volume entitled The First American Bison Tenniel “

Michael Conner(“Vamp”) spent some time in a garment factory, being cursed at in six languages. After that he paid a visit to his alma mater, San Francisco State, where he was surprised to find the students neatly dressed and well-groomed. “When I went there, the situation was something like the oily residue of the sixties left in the bottom of a giant Mr. Coffee filter. Hayakawa was still around, and the old guard SDS, dressed in rumpled field gear, still were passing out mimeo’d communiques. (Though, in truth, Jews for Jesus were a more potent political force on campus.)”

Phillip Teich(“Beings of Game P-U”) is a marketing manager who lives in California; this is his first story. He would like it to be known that although he is a member of MENSA, he is not now and has never been a Scientologist.

In March we wrote to Charles and Dena Brown, editors of the science fiction newsletter Locus, “Orbit requirements are the same as before, any length to 30,000—no space opera, no conventional fantasy (i.e. no werewolves, shuggoths, kobolds, etc.).” We have been saying the same thing for ten years, but it has yet to do any good.

Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. (“Night Shift”), not to be confused with K. M. O’Donnell, who is a pseudonym of Barry Malzberg’s, got a degree in Chinese Studies from Yale, then spent two years teaching English in Hong Kong and Taiwan. His first story appeared in the October 1973 issue of Analog.

Eleanor Arnason(“Going Down”) wrote us a long time ago:“I now live by Lake Calhoun—a pretty busy place, today. I took a walk around it after breakfast. Besides the usual swimmers, joggers, bicyclists, and sunbathers, I discovered a civic fish fry, a gymnastics display, and milk carton boat races. I never realized you could make boats out of milk cartons—big boats, I mean, twenty feet long and more.”

Eugene, Oregon, where we have been living since January 1976, turns out to be a hotbed of science fiction. Besides ourselves, five s.f. writers live in Eugene—Paul Novitski, Duane Ackerson, Glenn Chang, Tony Sarowitz, and John Varley. We see more people here in a week than we did in six months in Florida. So much for the idea that Oregon is a remote backwater.

The drift of s.f. writers and editors westward in the last decade is one of those lemminglike phenomena for which science has no explanation. Three of the four surviving s.f. anthology series are now edited on the west coast— Orbit, New Dimensions, and Universe. California has more SFWA members than any other state, and New York, once populous, is now a desert. If we were inclined to give in to our latent Lamarckism we would say that Americans have a genetic urge to move west. Luckily there is nothing to this, or the continent would tilt.

Kim Stanley Robinson (“The Disguise”) is teaching a freshman writing course and working on a study of the novels of Philip K. Dick. This is his fourth published story; the first two appeared in Orbit 18, and the third in Clarion.