Damon Knight: Orbit 18

This was a contribution to a round-robin letter circulated among a few Orbit writers: Mr. Lafferty later withdrew from it, alleging unparliamentary remarks and stuffiness, but at least we got this piece of free verse out of him.

In February we wrote to a young writer, “After reading the sex scene, I venture the guess that you have never been kneed in the stones.”

George R. R. Martin (“Meathouse Man”) writes science fiction on weekends and makes his living by managing chess tournaments, an occupation now in decline “in the wake of the Bobby Boom.” “Actually, what you probably should run in Arcs & Secants is a want ad for me. With the chess business dying on the vine, I’m currently sending out resumes all over the place, hoping to find a position teaching sf and/or creative writing at the college level.... If any of your readers are college presidents, they should flip through the book and read “Meathouse Man” and hire me. . . .”

Michael Helsem of Dallas sent us a short story written by a Burroughs 5700 computer. “This example originated in a 20/80 mix of punctuation and words expanded about fifteen times for a total of 1,500 units. The input can be literally anything, from a carefully selected vocabulary to pages out of a book. For instance War and Peace can be condensed to a few paragraphs for quick scanning; or ‘The Game of Rat and Dragon’ can be turned into a full-length novel.”

Gary Cohn (“Rules of Moopsball”) is a motorcycle freak and a maker of scene phone calls. (“I know you’re watching me through the window. . . . You want to see me naked,” etc.) Cohn sometimes pretends not to be serious about Moopsball, but he really is, and we think he is just crazy enough to be right.

In “The Memory Machine” in Orbit 17 we quoted two sentences from an article by Frederik Pohl in Galaxy, November 1974: “There’s a handsome mountain called Avala near Belgrade; people go there on one-day excursions. ... It also has a small plague to the memory of Soviet Marshal Zhokov, who died there a few years ago when his plane crashed into the mountain.” Somewhere between the cup and the lip, “plague” got changed back to “plaque.” If you were confused, now you know why.

A trend we deplore is the substitution of lay for lie as an intransitive verb, now well on the way to becoming standard. Lay, being defective, produces monstrosities like had lay (as in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren). The past tense of may (might) is now known to few, and is probably beyond rescue. English has been shedding its inflections for centuries, and no doubt could get along without any. In that event we would have to retranslate the Twenty-third Psalm for modern readers: “The Lord be my shepherd; I not want. He make me lay down in green pasture,” etc.

Another problem with English is that it has no neuter singular noun for human beings (except person, as in chairperson, washerperson, etc.). To remedy this, we propose to substitute Sap (from Homo sapiens) for the collective noun Man in all its uses— Sapkind, Stone Age Sap, etc. This word now has an unfortunate connotation, but that will wear off with use, and even if a trace of it should remain, it will be no more than we deserve.

In response to our request for biographical information, Craig Strete (“Who Was the First Oscar to Win a Negro?”) wrote as follows: “Nosluke showt. No’vak nussmam shinlusk. Hawotoi shispi chowt. Zuma nah’soc nah tia. Haliwa gloosklap 1954,” and so on for quite a while, ending, “Orbit niga kaw sit Kaw Oscar scu-la. Jope-le-wa. Bak-kar kantie-no-nah oddin Kigir aroflimah Kigi. Wichi wah-nunc. I would also like to add, that in my opinion, Custer got off much too lightly.”

A correspondent asked us, “Why don’t you right more of your own stories?” We do, but they keep turning turtle again.

Kim Stanley Robinson, who prefers to be called Stan, is a graduate student in English. “In Pierson’s Orchestra” was his submission story for the Clarion Workshop in 1974. He did not attend that year, because his acceptance letter arrived too late, but we saw the manuscript there and bought it. (He did make the Workshop in 1975.) “In Pierson’s Orchestra” and “Coming Back to Dixieland” are his first two published stories.

In June William F. Orr (“Euclid Alone,” Orbit 17) wrote on the back of an envelope addressed to us:

If all people of the world learned

ESPERANTO

They could communicate with Harry Harrison.

Howard Waldrop (“Mary Margaret Road-Grader”) was born in Houston, Mississippi, now lives in Texas. Since 1970, his stories have appeared in Galaxy, Analog, Vertex, etc., and in many hardcover anthologies. His novel The Texas-Israeli War, 1999, written in collaboration with Jake Saunders, was published by Ballantine in 1974.

We told all we know about Felix C. Gotschalk (“The Family Winter of 1986”) at the time of his last appearance here, except that he is one of the most interesting and fastest-rising of the new science fiction writers, and that his spelling is untrustworthy.

Kathleen M. Sidney (“The Teacher”) writes movingly about the teaching profession, of which she is a member, but she is not herself a dedicated teacher: she is a frustrated film director. This is her second story for Orbit.

Raylyn Moore (“A Modular Story”) lives in “an elderly white frame cottage attached to a garden full of roses (which for some inexplicable reason seem to bloom all year) and nasturtiums, almost within throwing distance of the Pacific Grove [California] beach.”

John Varley (“The M&M, Seen As a Low-Yield Thermonuclear Device”) is a young writer who lives in Eugene, Oregon, the very place where we intend to settle when we leave Florida. We have not yet had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Varley, but by the time you read these lines we may have done so: both the I Ching and the Tarot say we will sell our house and move to Oregon in December or January. (Stop Press: They were right.)

Gene Wolfe, a frequent contributor, reports that at a session of the Windy City Writers’ Conference early in 1975, he was severely criticized for having introduced into a far-future story a family coat of arms including a spaceship volant. "Now as you may have noticed earlier, Damon, I am a villager. I live in the Village of Barrington [Illinois]; and Barrington may be small, but it’s classy—it even has a coat of arms, and it makes me go down to the village hall every year and shell out ten dollars for the privilege of putting its tax stamp on each car. So there, waiting for me on my own windshield, was the quartered escutcheon of Barrington: dexter chief point, a sheaf of grain; sinister chief point, an open book; sinister base point, a tree in leaf; and dexter base point, a test tube and retort.”

The day after we got this letter, we read a newspaper article about a firm that will design a coat of arms and put on it any damn thing you want—if you’re a hog merchant, for instance, a hog. Hurrah for the spaceship volant!

Carter Scholz (“The Eve of the Last Apollo”) dropped out of school in 1974 because it was taking too much of his time. He has worked as an illustrator, graphic designer, composer, radio announcer, etc. At present he is living with the talented printmaker Lisa Houck in Providence, Rhode Island. This is his first published story.

Faithful readers will recall that in Orbit 16 we invited them to submit temporally scrambled words to be added to the “Little Lexicon for Time-travelers” in that volume. We offered a small prize for the five most outrageous entries, thinking that, if lucky, we might get that many. To our surprise, twenty-nine readers responded with a total of six hundred ninety-six words and phrases. Luckily, the operative word in our offer was “outrageous,” not “ingenious” or “difficult”; even so, we found it impossible to reduce the list of prize winners to five. Accordingly, the following are being sent $5 for each word, and a copy each of Orbit 18: