Damon Knight: Orbit 14

Gary K. Wolf (“The Bridge Builder”) is now product promotion manager for the ad agency for which he was formerly a senior copywriter. His wife, Bonnie, is an airline stewardess and he flies her everywhere. He writes, “I’ve taken up Transcendental Meditation with the result that my short stories have become far more incisive and easier to write (the same is true for the novel I’m at work on now, a book which has all the potential sweep and grandeur of that little known classic by Anon., ‘Ratman Meets the Walking Weenies’).”

We heard from Olive Hupp Maynard in Muncie, Ind., who stated that she has been in constant communication with the World Beyond since 1929. “If my cassette recordings of Glossolalia can be interpreted, they may reveal something of importance.”

To a young writer in Oakland we wrote: “I used to have a rubber stamp for telling correspondents what you were tempted to tell me; only used it once, and then not seriously, though.”

Gene Wolfe (“Forlesen”) was for sixteen years a project engineer in the employ of Procter & Gamble, an experience which is reflected in this story. Late in 1972, after he had left P&G to join the staff of Plant Engineering, he wrote: “I had a call from a writer today & suddenly realized that I am an editor. Weird—like waking up and finding that you are a woman: you are still in the familiar arrangement, but on the wrong side.”

Professor of geography and director of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado.

Professor of zoology and curator of mollusks in the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan.

Director of the Natural Resources Research Division of UNESCO in Paris.

The Aswan High Dam has seventeen times the volume of the Cheops Pyramid.

Research professor of zoology at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Professor of soil science at the University of Reading, England.

Mohammad Abdul Fattah Kassas, professor of applied botany at the University of Cairo.

Mary A. Farvar, an anthropologist at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.

Gunnar Karl Myrdal, professor of international economics at the University of Stockholm.

Kenneth E. Boulding, professor of economics at the University of Colorado.

“Si’s no good,” they bellow till we’re deaf.

“But this looks good.”.—“Well then, it’s not sf.”

E.g., “The greatest of these books would be the greatest of science fiction books if they were science fiction; but they are not, and it is only the growth of the genre since, stimulated by their vigorous example, which makes them seem to resemble it as much as they do.”