Damon Knight: Orbit 16

A puzzled reader asked in March, “Do you actually want amateur writers to submit manuscripts to you?” We said yes. Orbit gets most of its material from previously unknown writers, and pays 3-5 ¢ a word, as an advance against a share of royalties.

R. A. Lafferty (“The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street”) wrote to his agent in April, “Hey, Mildred Virginia, about allegory, symbolism, metaphysical stuff, multiple depths, transcendental aspects, of course they are always present in everything. If we are the six or seven or eight dimensional persons that we are supposed to be, then everything we do is done in several worlds at the same time and has a complex of meanings. But I never liked to isolate minor aspects and pull them out by the bloody roots to analyze them. It’s a little as though one should say of a picture ‘Is the perspective right in that? Is it supposed to have depth? Let’s see if it has,’ and then drive a surveyor’s stake through the middle of the picture to take bearings. Or say of a living arm ‘Well, it’s all right on the surface, but what is the hidden substance? What is the interior content of it?’ and then a bodkin in to its hilt to start a little gusher. ‘Oh, blood is the hidden substance, huh? But blood’s old stuff. It’s been done before.’ Or to wander through a playing orchestra with a piano tuner’s whistle to check on the pitch of everything, but maybe it will miss some of the harmonics anyhow. Integrated depth is what a thing is supposed to have (hey, that’s a pretentious phrase, isn’t it?) and if it’s done right it won’t let itself be pulled apart.”

Doris Piserchia (“A Brilliant Curiosity”) is bemused by everything about the writing and publishing world, but is hooked and can’t stop.

Jesse Miller (“Phoenix House”) drove a cab in New York after he got out of the air force, and loved it, but had to quit because of eye trouble. This story was written in a va hospital; it is his first, although others were sold and published earlier. “I am black, I am twenty-nine, and I have a good sweet woman, whose name is Jean, and I am slowly going blind. That just about puts me where I am this morning.”

Joe Haldeman (“Counterpoint,” Orbit 11) sent us a picture postcard of a Spanish cathedral with the note, “This would really be a great hotel, but they keep ringing those damned bells.”

Robert Thurston (“Jack and Betty*’) is living with his wife and small son in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan (“quiet, with trees lining the streets”). In a way, this story is a companion piece to Thurston’s “Stop Me Before I Tell More” (Orbit 9).

Technological regress dept.: On a recent visit to Louisville, Kentucky, we saw a supermarket advertisement for “Imitation Salad Dressing.”

Henry-Luc Planchat (“Prison of Clay, Prison of Steel”) is a young French writer and editor. This is the first story of his that has been translated into English.

Lloyd Biggle, Jr., wrote in June: “Dean [McLaughlin] called me the other day. ‘I’ve just invented a new antigravity device. It’s called a ladder.’ I said, ‘Great idea—if you can keep the moving parts to a minimum.’ ”

Gustav Hasford (“Heartland”) is a young Southern writer who is working and starving on the West Coast. Pray for him.

Readers are invited to submit temporally scrambled words to be added to the “Little Lexicon for Time-Travelers” which appears on page 173. To be accepted, words must be ingenious, unexpected and pronounceable. The best entries will be published in Orbit 18, and the contributors of the five most outrageous words will receive copies of that volume in its hardcover edition. (To the writer of the most piteous letter expressing bewilderment about the whole thing we will send a copy of Lin Carter’s Black Legions of Callisto.) Entries must be received not later than August 15, 1975. They should be addressed to: Damon Knight, Editor, Box 8216, Madeira Beach, Florida 33738.

Moshe Feder (“Sandial”) spent his childhood in a yeshiva and then went to Queens College of the City University of New York, from which he graduated, a year late, in 1974. Since 1972 he has been a part-time, unpaid assistant editor of Amazing and Fantastic. Th is is his first published story.

C. L. Grant (“In Donovan’s Time”) is a former Army MP who was once assigned to write up the awards for bravery won by other MPS stationed in Quinhon, Vietnam. (“Most of them were a pack of purple-prose lies, the worst being an attempt by a career major to get himself a Purple Heart for catching his finger in the door of his trailer during an enemy rocket attack. He never got it, but the colonel who fell off an armored personnel carrier and skinned his elbow (he was drunk at the time) did. Thus did I practice science fiction while in the army.”)

Dave Seal (“Ambience”) reports that the Rocky Mountain Casket Company of Whitefish, Montana, markets a $180 coffin which converts into a wine closet.

Richard Bireley (“Binary Justice”) is an electrical engineer, a former professional magician (“The Great Bikini”) and disk jockey.

Eleanor Arnason (“The House by the Sea”) makes great Christmas tree ornaments out of wrapping paper and eggshells, and is the only person she knows who has written an epic poem.

William F. Orr (“Euclid Alone”) says he has been writing a lot, but not fiction: “Two mathematical articles, one NSF proposal, one popular science article in Esperanto for an amateur astronomy magazine published by an observatory in Yugoslavia, a short article for a Polish Esperanto magazine suggesting that Lem be translated into Esperanto . . . and some translations from Arnaut Daniel’s Provençal poetry.”