Orbit 15 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Without getting undressed, Mac slid beneath the blankets on his cot. The gray winter light was failing, and the room was dim. Mac felt warm and comfortable. “Nama, Nama Sebesio,” he murmured, not knowing what the words meant. He was soon asleep.

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  It was the second week in December; the weather was actually fairly mild, bright, clear, temperature in the high fifties. The yard was brown and grassless. Where rain had made mud a few days before, there were hard, dry ridges of a lighter buff color. The high gray walls around the yard were close and cold.

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  Arcs & Secants

  R. A. Lafferty (“Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread”) was born in Neola, Iowa, fifty-eight years ago but has lived most of his life in Oklahoma, with time out for World War II, which he spent in Texas, North Carolina, Florida, California, Australia, New Guinea, Morotai Island (then Dutch East Indies, now part of Indonesia), and the Philippines. “I am forever a Catholic, a bachelor, a political independent, a lone badger (lone wolves are a legend, they are always in groups, but even the bachelor badger digs himself a hole and spends most of his time in it).”

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  Doris Piserchia (“Pale Hands”) rides horses, takes care of a large noisy household, and writes. “I sold two books and ten stories this year [1973] so I guess I can call myself a writer. I’m a little reluctant to, though. Other writers’ comments sound so darned confident, as if they really have it made, and I know damned well I haven’t got anything made, so I wonder. Ginn & Co., Mass., bought one from Fred [Pohl]’s Best SF for 1972; it’s the third time I’ve sold it and each time I get more money. That makes no sense, but then I take all this business too seriously and would be better off if I ignored a lot of it.” “Pale Hands” was written on commission for another editor, who asked Mrs. Piserchia for a story about mass masturbation, then rejected the finished manuscript because it was “just too much of a sex story.”

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  To a new writer who asked if he thought it was all right for him to use the title “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” we wrote: “No problem about the title unless there is a possibility of confusion, and Gibbon’s was in 12 volumes, so don’t worry.”

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  Kate Wilhelm (“Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang”) takes her own warnings seriously—she grows a vegetable garden, bakes bread, brews beer, and makes wine. Her stories are sometimes prophetic, but with such a short lag that by the time they are published, they look as if they had been inspired by last month’s headlines. “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang” is the fourth in a series of connected stories that began with “The Red Canary” (Orbit 12) and continued with “The Scream” (Orbit 13) and “A Brother to Dragons, a Companion of Owls” (Orbit 14).

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  We received a submission from a literary agency in Searcy, Arkansas, which calls itself Infinity Ltd.

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  Gene Wolfe (“Melting”) recently wrote, “I have been considering joining the Procrastinators’ Association, but I keep putting it off.”

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  In October we wrote to the St. Petersburg Times: “The members of the Citizens’ Commission on Education, who profess to believe that children learn their profanity from dictionaries, are leery busnacks (suspicious busybodies), grumpish old busters (sour-faced oldsters), sticky-beaks (inquisitive persons) and noodles (simpletons). Here’s a ripe Richard (raspberry) for them.” The Commission later gave up its attack on the school libraries where it had found copies of Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Language (Librarians 1, Wowsers 0).

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  Michael Bishop (“In the Lilliputian Asylum”) was in college when he first thought of writing a story from the viewpoint of a Lilliputian after Gulliver’s departure. He tried writing it as a novel in 1969 but didn’t like the result and put it aside until 1973, when it began to re-emerge as a series of poems. Ballantine has accepted his first novel: it is called A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire.

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  We heard from W. T. March, Cdr. USN (Ret.), that he has been reading science fiction since 1926 and that “this so-called SF that you and Ellison are anthologizing is enough to make John W. Campbell, Wells, etc., turn over in their graves. There isn’t 99 out of 100 of this Clarion bunch that are fit to empty Isaac Asimov’s chamber pot.”

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  Lowell Kent Smith (“Ernie”) is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Redlands, Redlands, California, where he specializes in biomedical computing and biological modeling; he is a consultant on these subjects and on water pollution. Earlier in his career, as a first lieutenant in the artillery, he taught the employment of nuclear weapons as a member of the teaching staff of the Tactics and Combined Arms Department of the U.S. Army Artillery and Missile School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. This is his first story.

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  Brian W. Aldiss (“Live? Our Computers Will Do That for Us”) was guest of honor at Beneluxcon 1 in Ghent, Belgium, in the spring of 1973. In the summer he and his wife, with another couple, rented a villa at Rovinj, Yugoslavia. Then they came home and he wrote this story, which is one of a projected series about the Zodiacal Planets.

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  To a talented young writer we wrote: “Am probably not qualified to say anything about the topic (because it does not turn me on much) but I could not figure out why if your guy digs corpses he would not wait until the woman was dead. (That’s how I’d do if I was a necrophile.) And my advice to him would be to give up kidnaping anybody & just get a job in a funeral parlor.”

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  Eleanor Arnason (“Ace 167”) lives in Detroit, and likes it because it has no culture and a lot of energy. “The poets here talk about their jobs in factories instead of about literature.” She lives in a hillbilly/black/Slavic neighborhood with a lot of Arabs moving in. “I ate breakfast at the local greasy spoon this morning. The Greeks there were talking about how the bar down the street, that used to have such good hamburgers, had been bought by camel jockeys.”

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  George Alec Effinger (“Biting Down Hard on Truth”), a Clarion alumnus, now lives in New Orleans, where he is working hard to acquire Southern decadence. The first step, he says, is to distinguish between decadence and “mere depravity.”

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  Sonya Dorman (“The Living End,” Orbit 7) wrote a long time ago, “I have a hideous radical suggestion for Orbit, which no doubt you have thought of and discarded. You know, I am your book review fan from way back. . . . What if: for each Orbit, you were to do one in-depth review of a book which interested you? Or two or three shorter reviews? And not necessarily fiction, but perhaps some things reasonably relative to s.f.?” And Wally Macfarlane (“Gardening Notes from All Over,” Orbit 13) also wrote: “Got a suggestion: Orbit theme. With the whole number in small numerals somewhere. Orbit Around Mars, Orbit into Worlds that Never Were, Orbit in the Head, Orbit for Good, Orbit for Bad, Orbit around and about Nekkid Women, How to Robot Orbit, In the Literary Orbit, you know like that.” We followed Ms. Dorman’s suggestion in Orbit 14 and may do it again; and as it happens, the stories in this volume are all about love, “all the different kinds there are or could be.” That was an accident, but we may do it again on purpose with another topic. Your comments are invited. Letters, and manuscripts for publication, should be sent to Damon Knight, Editor, Box 8216, Madeira Beach, FL 33738.

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