Дэймон Найт: Orbit 12

Steve Chapman (“Burger Creature”) is twenty-one. He has had one story published previously, in Analog, and has a children’s picture book coming soon from Follett Two of his plays were produced in the 1971 Edinburgh Drama Festival. He has toured England with a mime troupe, and when last heard from was acting in a musical called “On Account of Sid Shrycock” in Chicago.

From Sonya Dorman, author of “Time Bind” (yet to be published) we heard the following: “I’m apalled at how much editing you had to do, and apologize for the rotten typos; I did proof it myself before sending it out, and don’t understand how I missed so many, as well as absurd mispellings.”

Doris Piserchia (“Half the Kingdom”) was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, and worked as a lifeguard there while she earned a teacher’s degree in phys. ed. She realized that the next logical step was to get a job teaching, so she climbed on a bus to Pittsburgh and joined the Navy. Four years later she married an Army man, got out of the Navy, had “a baby or five,” traveled all over the world, and then settled down in Utah while her husband took a tour in Vietnam. With nothing to do but baby-sit, she worked toward a master’s in ed. psych. Thesis time came, and she realized she was again training to be a teacher. She kicked it all the way and began to write stories. After a few years’ resistance editors began buying them. Her husband, meanwhile, came back from Vietnam with a wrecked heart, “and this spring or early summer [1972] he will undergo high-risk aortic reconstruction, so I can go nowhere for the duration. I live in a madhouse and my nerves are shot. Perhaps this is the reason why I rarely attempt a serious story. Such an attempt would be very easy for me, but I’m afraid to tap the vein right now.”

Gene Wolfe (“Continuing Westward”) writes as follows:

“I am forty.

“I try to look busy a lot.

“I remember sitting in English class listening to Texas City blow up. None of us knew what it was, so after five minutes or so Miss Collins said (effectively) the hell with it, we’re going to go on with class, what did you (boom) boys and girls (booom, booom) think of Silas Marner?

“That’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to put down, right? Actually my character is, to at least an equal degree, being shaped right now by current pressures—by my thoughts, my own thoughts, most of all.

“Wolfe (woolf), Charles, 1791-1823. Irish poet.

“—, Gene Rodman, 1931- . Am. writer.

“—, James, 1727-1759. Brit. gen.

“—, Thomas Clayton, 1900-1938. Am. nov.

“I am very conscious that a great deal of my behavior is genetically determined, yet at the same time conscious of the possession of a soul, a thing independent of heredity or environment. Also that this present is the distant past—that you and I, Damon, if we are recalled at all will eventually be thought of as contemporaries of Xenophon and Mark Twain. That this is a small world at the edge of its galaxy, tumbling through the night, a provincial and rural backwater.”