Damon Knight - Orbit 17

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS

New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London

Copyright © 1975 by Damon Knight. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

FIRST EDITION

isbn: 0-06-012434-2

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 75-6371

Designed by C. Linda Dingier

Illustrations by Diehard Withelm

When do I work? Optimally, at night—starting at midnight, and continuing until I have done my quota for that day, whereafter I read a little, eat something, listen to a little music and go to sleep, generally about sunrise. (My old friend, Cyril Korn-bluth, used to say, “If God had meant man to be awake by day He wouldn’t have given us the electric light.”) This makes problems when I interface with the real world. Publishers and university people in particular have a foul habit of trying to telephone me in the morning, when I am generally asleep. But I won’t change; from midnight to six there are no phone calls, the household is asleep, no one comes to the door and that is how I like it. I am all too easily distracted. Years ago I used to try to get my family to tell callers I was out in the morning. Now they just say I am asleep.

Being a writer is difficult; you not only need the talent and technique to write, you also need the discipline to make yourself do it, and the critical judgment to know when you are done. If you are a bricklayer, say, people tell you what to do—“twelve courses of glazed yellow, ten yards long, staggered and faced with stone at the gate—” and when the wall is up you are through. If you are a writer you have to set yourself a task, make yourself do it, and evaluate the result when you are done, with little or no real help from anyone. To be sure people will try to tell you what you should do, and give you all the criticism you want, maybe more than you want, once it is irretrievably in print; but the only opinion that really matters is your own.

—Frederik Pohl, in Hell's Cartographers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975)

Fairy tales are more concerned with situation than with character. They are the space fiction of the past.

—Iona and Peter Opie,

The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford University Press, 1974)

... But no amount of expert advice or money can make up for lack of imagination, as Harlan Ellison discovered when he tried to midwife a series called The Starlost, inspired by Heinlein’s “Universe” and various imitations thereof.

Ellison is usually the mortal enemy of “hard” science fiction, but he had enough integrity to want to do The Starlost justice. Nobody else did, however.

He had carefully worked up an outline based on the series heroes trying to locate the lost controls of the runaway starship they were on—and not finding them until the last episode.

But before he knew it, the producers destroyed the integrity of the series by having the controls discovered in the second or third episode. Don’t worry, they told Ellison—they could keep up suspense with a search for the backup controls. On questioning them, he learned they thought backup controls were what would make the starship back up!

—-John J. Pierce, in Reason, January 1975

Mr. Fiedler: Well, let me tell you an experience which I lived through. Not this time at the National Book Awards but the time before I was one of the fiction judges. There was a book I very much wanted the fiction judges to consider for the prize—

Mr. Buckley: Are you at liberty to say which?

Mr. Fiedler: Yes, it was a book by a young science fiction writer called Norman Spinrad. It’s called The Iron Dream. And the rest of my committee simply said, “That’s science fiction. It doesn’t enter into consideration as a novel. Someday we’ll have a prize for science fiction.” This is a kind of ghettoization of literature which is built into libraries even, right, public libraries. Children’s department, adult department. Real books, detective stories, westerns, science fiction, girls’ romances, whatever the distinctions are. And that also doesn’t make much sense to me anymore.

—Interview with Leslie Fiedler on Firing Line, December 1, 1974

The vast mass of humanity is, alas, attracted by nonsense. To point out that it is nonsense is merely to reassure people. They will roll in the dung heap all the more merrily for knowing that it is the real thing. The Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Man is a reasoning animal.” What evidence he had for that assertion no one knows; certainly none has surfaced in the 19 centuries since his time.

To be sure, a few individual human beings are reasoning animals. You can tell who they are by the fact that they are denounced by everyone else every time they open their mouths.

—Isaac Asimov, in a letter to Time, January 20, 1975

Home for Robert was a place he had never seen—did it exist at all?

“Where are you going?” his sister asked.

“Home.”

He awoke, huddled among blue-grey bodies. For warmth? On a planet where no one was ever cold?

He woke up with a question. If nothing else, he was an anthropologist.

If nothing else.

“Why are we huddled here?” he asked them aloud. No one so much as opened an eye. They were used to him. They had always been used to him. From the first day he had stepped into their circle, one E-year ago, not one of them had shown the slightest spark of curiosity concerning him. Or anything else. Was nothing new to them? And nothing old? Half his time was up, and he knew no more about them now than when he began.

Gradually they woke up, stretching, an almost human gesture. And Robert spoke to them aloud, as a man lost in the wilderness for a year might speak to the trees. Pointless questions, to fill in the terrible quiet.

“Where are you going?” his sister asked.

“Out to play.”

“They laughed at you.”

“Mommy said that’s only because I’m so different. They’ll get used to me.”

And they laughed at him. He was too young to know that it was fear. If he was ridiculed, then he was ridiculous. And gradually they did grow used to him. He had learned the secret of success. He became their pet, a puppy dog who could talk and do tricks for them. If there is one thing stronger than the need for self-respect, it is loneliness. But he was spared one agony: he made a poor scapegoat. They could not easily project their fears about their own human weaknesses onto a beast with three heads and nine legs.

“Mommy, where did I come from?”

His mother was a biologist, a scientist, impatient with lies.

“Remember how I told you about the planets and the suns?” “Yes.”

“Well, you came from another planet, called Epsilon Geminorum V. It’s far away from here. Across the stars.”

Robert pictured the stars, and the darkness between them.

“Your parents gave you to Earth. Along with two others. I think so that we could raise you as our own children and come to understand them better through you.”