Дэймон Найт: Orbit 12

Ursula K. Le Guin (“Direction of the Road”) writes about herself: “I grew up in a city and a family both of which might be characterized by saying that they combined a great deal of freedom with a great deal of order. Both provided plenty of intellectual stimulation, without social overhomogeneity or emotional aridity. Berkeley was very beautiful then, and was (and is) full of both strange and interesting people. Summers we went to the Napa Valley, where an intensive and individualistic kind of agriculture (vineyards) coexists with real wilderness and solitude. I had three older brothers, and mostly ran around after them. My father was a scientist, in the most humane of the fields where the scientific method really functions, anthropology; we absorbed his attitudes, and perhaps some of his joie de vivre; and the idea of science as antagonistic to esthetic, social, and spiritual concerns therefore seems merely a misunderstanding to me. As a child I wanted to be a poet and biologist. In college (where again my experience was of self-imposed discipline as a way towards personal and intellectual freedom) I studied French literature because I liked foreign languages, and specialized in the early French and Italian Renaissance, because I liked the 15th century. I had dropped the biology ambition because I could not do math, either through poor teaching or innate stupidity; I have no science now except what is available to the interested layman. I always wrote, and finished a first novel at twenty-one. In graduate school the imperative to write grew stronger, and though I liked research enormously it became all too clear that, for a woman, a Ph.D. in Romance literature was likely to mean at least twenty years of teaching freshman English and not much else, a dreary prospect. A Fulbright grant to France put off the problem for a year, and marriage to another Fulbright student while in Paris changed its terms altogether. It is very difficult for one person to undertake two lifetime jobs and do both well, but two people in partnership can handle three lifetime jobs. My husband is an historian, I am a novelist, and we are both householder/parents. It’s Kropotlan’s principle of Mutual Aid, It works beautifully if you don’t mind working. I kept writing some while the children were litde, but did not get anything published until I was over thirty. It did not worry me desperately because I knew I had a great deal to learn, and a lifetime job is very likely to take a lifetime. My life itself has been bourgeois and uneventful; the events are there, but they’re not the kind you can say much about. I have always written science fiction and fantasy, I suppose because life has always seemed a very strange business to me, and you can communicate that best by using what Darko Suvin calls the devices of ‘estrangement.’”

Sample titles from the contents pages of the first two German editions of Orbit, published in January and February, 1972: “Staras Flonderanen,” by Kate Wilhelm; “Die Lulies sind unter uns,” by Allison Rice; “Kangeruhgericht,” by Virginia Kidd; “Baby, du worst fabelheft,” by Kate Wilhelm,

Michael Bishop (The Windows in Dante’s Hell”) teaches freshman English at Georgia State U. He is twenty-eight. His infant son Jamie, along with Mao Tse-tung and Francisco Franco, is a major character in a long story that will not appear in Orbit.

Leon E. Stover, author of “What We Have Here Is Too Much Communication” ( Orbit 9), wrote a book on American SF for a French editor, who liked it so much that he invited Stover to attend a convention of Americanists in Paris in the spring of 1972. The topic was science fiction. Stover’s editor is a professor at the Sorbonne, where he has taught American popular culture for twenty-five years.

Brian W. Aldiss (“Four Stories”) has become a minor celebrity in England since the publication of his best-selling The Hand-Reared Boy . He recently visited the United States, where he spoke at California State College and then toured Tijuana with Harry Harrison. The four Malaria stories presented here were inspired by 18th-century Venetian etchings and engravings, and their titles are derived from that source, chiefly from Tiepolo. His latest work is a history of science fiction, The Billlon-Year Spree , published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in England and Doubleday in the United States.

Miss S. B. Davis, of Cottesloe, Perth, Western Australia, wrote to inform us that she is “a ‘Special Being’ such as is ‘born only once in a million years’“ and that God has told her he has made her a little bit differently from the rest “God has shown me I am able, with Me as His instrument, to put atmosphere on the Moon so we people of the earth may habitate it and possibly some form of light could be given to the dark side of the Moon.”

Kate Wilhelm (“The Red Canary”) was the winner of the 1968 Nebula Award for best short story—”The Planners,” Orbit 3. Edward Bryant’s “Jody After the War” ( Orbit 10) and Vonda N. McIntyre’s “Spectra” ( Orbit 11) were responses to assignments she gave the authors at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her most recent book is a novel, Margaret and I, published by Little, Brown in 1971.

We heard from Jack M. Dann, author of “Whirl Cage” ( Orbit 10) , that he had just helped Gardner R. Dozois, a frequent contributor, move to Philadelphia. “It was one of our usual odysseys: I had to wire for money—I couldn’t pay the tolls to get back to Binghamton. When I left Gardner he had two dollars cash and was in the process of opening a bank account.”

Mel Gilden (“What’s the Matter with Herbie?”) attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1970 and 1971. His first published story, written there, was “What About Us Grils?” It appeared in the anthology Clarion and has been reprinted elsewhere. Gilden was born in 1947: he spent his formative years watching Captain Video, Flash Gordon and Commander Buzz Corey of the Space Patrol. Until recently he lived with his parents in Los Angeles and wrote in the bathroom (the only place he could type at night without disturbing anybody). “I get funny looks when I tell people where I work, and some of them make crude jokes, but I guess that’s the price an artist has to pay.”

In response to a reader who praised “Heads Africa Tails America” by Josephine Saxton and expressed puzzlement about three other stories in Orbit 9, we wrote: “In Toy Theater’ the narrator says he is going back into his own little box, i.e., that in a way he is a puppet too, like thee & me, or/and if you want to read it that way, there is an anatomical reference to ladies which I will not spell out lest I make you blush. In ‘Marigolds’ the protagonist is running toward a transcendental reality revealed by the rending of the veil of maya. The ending of The Science Fair’ deliberately forecasts another story—you know, like After Worlds Collide, or Flash Gordon on the planet Mongo. Now tell me what the hell ‘Heads Africa Tails America’ is about”

Vonda N. McIntyre (“The Genius Freaks”) got a degree in biology from the U. of Washington “with honors, cum laude, all that stuff,” and went into graduate work in genetics there, but dropped out when she began to notice that none of her experiments worked. Her story “Spectra,” which appeared in Orbit 11, took second prize in the 1970 Clarion competition. Her own Clarion-type workshop at the U. of Washington is now in its third year.

In returning a story submitted by a New Orleans friend, we wrote: “Even the funny stories in Orbit tend to take themselves & the universe more seriously than this. E.g., I got a feeling that if Don shot his pecker off, rubber would fly. In Orbit, it would have to be meat” And we added a footnote: “Ground chuck would be OK.”