Science Fiction Book Club
Interview with Richard Wilhelm
(October 2024)
Richard Wilhelm is the son of Kate Wilhelm and the
stepson of Damon Knight. Richard runs InfinityBox Press, a publishing company
that Kate started with him, his wife, Sue Arbuthnot, and brother, Jonathan
Knight. You can purchase many of Wilhelm’s and Knight’s novels and short
fiction from their websites, infinityboxpress.com and reanimus.com.
As an opening note, Damon was born
on September 19, 1922, in Baker—now Baker City— Oregon. Soon after, the family
moved to Hood River, Oregon. Not at all athletic—although he tried—Damon preferred
to read—and at the ripe age of eleven, found his first science fiction story.
Here's his description:
In the
thirties I became intensely aware of pulp magazines. There were Spicy
Adventure and Spicy Mystery, which I did not dare buy, even in the
dingy little secondhand store at the bottom of a side street in town. There
were air-war magazines, which I did buy. One story concerned a squadron leader
who was having headaches and whose hair was falling out; it turned out that a
German agent had been concealing a capsule of radium under his pillow.
Then I saw
and bought an issue of something called Amazing Stories. It was bigger than
other pulps, about 8-1/2 X 11, and the cover, in sick pastels, showed two
helmeted and white-suited men aiming rifles at a bunch of people. This was the
August-September 1933 issue, and the cover story was "Meteor-Men of
Plaa" by Henry J. Kostkos.
That was the beginning.
Note: When I add direct quotes from
Damon, these are from his 1989 autobiographical sketch from Contemporary
Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 10. For further reading about Damon
Knight, his books, The Futurians and Writing Short Fiction are
recommended. There also many online sources for further understanding his life
and work.
Bill Rogers: Richard, what sort of relationship did
Knight have with the more politically vocal/militant members of the Futurians
like Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, and Donald Wollheim?
Damon was desperate to leave Hood River. He had graduated
high school, moved to Salem, Oregon’s capital, and was enrolled in a WPA art
school, when he sold a story to Donald Wollheim. Here's his note about that:
While I was
in Salem, Don Wollheim's first issue of Stirring Science Stories appeared,
with my story in it. The printers had changed "Brittle People" to
"Little People" in the first sentence, rendering the story
unintelligible, but I was proud of it anyway.
Soon after, he moved to New York. He describes part of
his initiation into the Futurians (These guys were not hard-nosed anything
[except maybe Judy Merril]; they were all in their late teens or early 20s, had
no money, and Kornbluth and Wollheim still lived mostly with their parents,
spending their weekends in whichever apartment the group could collectively
afford):
I adopted
all the Futurians' attitudes. They looked down on fannish activity, and so did
I. They said they were Communists; I said I was a Communist. They expressed
contempt for Campbell and his stable of writers; I lost interest in Astounding
and stopped reading it. They were nearly all native New Yorkers who would have
died rather than get on a sight-seeing bus; I lived in Manhattan for ten years
and never went to the Statue of Liberty, or the Cloisters, or took a boat trip
around the island.
Again, from
Damon:
We were a
gallery of grotesques, but we were all talented to one degree or another, and
we counted on that to save us. We were anything but a close-knit group, and yet
we stood together against the outside world. A Futurian crest, designed by
Kornbluth, had a large flat-headed screw with the legend "Omnes qui
non Futurianes sunt."
(The Latin quote, translated as, "Not all that
wander are lost" being ripped from Tolkein, and with the wry insertion of
"Futurians.")
Damon's relationship with Judith Merril was forged from
steel, with a few cracks. They were both in their mid-twenties, when they met.
She and her husband at that time, were Trotkyists.
In Damon's words:
Judy in a
political argument was a juggernaut. Danny [her husband] was in the navy,
serving aboard a submarine, and Judy struck up a friendship with Johnny Michel.
This displeased Wollheim, and presently Judy came to tell us that Wollheim had
forbidden Johnny to have anything more to do with her (because she was a
Trotskyist) or Jim Blish (because he was thought to be a fascist). Our
indignation was acute, and we sat up half the night composing a document in
which we read Wollheim, Elsie, and Michel out of the Futurian Society. We
mimeographed and mailed this out to a fanzine mailing list. Wollheim then filed
suit for libel in the state supreme court, naming the seven of us who had
signed the document: Judy, Blish, Lowndes, Virginia, Chet, Larry, and me. The
suit was thrown out of court, with costs charged to Wollheim; but it cost us a
hundred dollars apiece in legal fees.
Bill Rogers: Also, what were Knight's politics and what
effect, if any, did they have on his writing?
Damon was apolitical. He rarely
brought up anything that emanated from Washington, D.C., much less his own local
government. Although he experimented with various beliefs as a youth, his
involvement in anything political was transient and faddish. A little later in
life, he would begin to look down his nose at anyone trying to sell him on one
movement or the other. Plus, as a writer, he could fully inhabit any particular
belief he desired, anywhere in the universe.
In Damon's words:
Everything
I saw around me led me to the belief that the world was badly organized:
politics, religion, and education were incomprehensibly absurd, social
relationships only a little less so, and all the young people were under the
thumbs of the old. Even science fiction, to which I had fled as a refuge,
eventually began to seem unbearably conventional. I never became a Marxist or
revolutionary, being too skeptical of dogma of any kind, but in my own fiction,
over and over, I blew the established system apart as thoroughly as I could.
"Not with a Bang," "To Serve Man," Hell's
Pavement, A for Anything, and many others were expressions of this
urge, and I am still at it in the series of near-future novels that begins with
CV.
I don't believe this counts as political as much as bohemian,
but a friend of Kate and Damon stole a street banner, while in Rome, during an
election cycle. It was heavy canvas about 25 feet long, three feet high, with a
blue field and the words in yellow read: VOTA COMUNISTA printed across its
length and large hammer and sickle logos on each end. It was quite something,
and my friends were amazed by it. Appreciative of the gift, Damon climbed a
ladder and nailed the banner to the wall just below the living room ceiling
(our living room in the “Anchorage,” our house in Milford, was about 35 feet
long with an 18-foot-high ceiling). As he was attaching it, he fell about 14
feet to the floor, breaking his wrist. Kate and I were witnesses. (Bonus story:
Damon was working on his Charles Fort book at the time, and he had to build a
rope and pulley system in his office to help him hold his cast-covered arm up
in the air so he could type.)
Dave Hook: I love a lot of his fiction, and I respect his
work in editing. I am not as familiar with his work as a critic. I do wonder
how he felt about those different areas of his career?
Damon's move to New York exciting; a revelatory change
from the depression he’d felt living in the provincial Oregon towns he’d fled.
Kornbluth, Lowndes, Wollheim, Merril (Zissman, at the time) and others each
offered him their numerous contacts in the New York publishing world. He
settled into editing, writing, and criticism as opportunities arose. Although
he worked in several office settings during his time in New York and California,
he preferred the independence of his own space.
In Damon's words:
In the
forties nearly every science-fiction magazine had a book-review department, but
these were mostly of what I later called the shopping-guide type; the reviews
were about an inch long and always ended, "A must for every science
fiction fan." Besides the Worlds Beyond reviews, I had already
written one long critical essay (about the works of A. E. van Vogt), which
Larry Shaw had published in one of his amateur magazines, Destiny's Child.
When Lester [del Rey] started two new magazines, Space Science Fiction and
Science Fiction Adventures, I was able to talk him into letting me do the
book department in one. He paid me, if I remember, fifteen dollars a column.
After a
year or so Lowndes also offered to run any reviews I sent him, no matter what
the length, and to pay his usual rates, i.e., half a cent a word. At various
times I also published reviews in Harlan Ellison's huge sloppy fanzine Dimensions
(where my column was called "Gardyloo," a call formerly used when
throwing the contents of chamber pots out of windows), in Walt Willis's Hyphen,
in Infinity, and finally in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction. When I quit, in a dispute over a review F&SF refused to
print as written, I had been reviewing books for nine years.
Dave Hook: I'd also like to know if he preferred short
fiction or novels, both in terms of writing and reading?
I don't know that Damon had a
preference between writing one or the other. He was a master of short fiction;
they were tight, focused, and sold well to magazines. Plus, he loved adding
little hooks, where he could. "To Serve Man" is a great example. But
he also liked the relative freedom of writing novels with their structure
allowing for more expansive storytelling.
SFBC Member: I speak English as a second language, and I
remember Mr. Knight's stories as amazing. I'd like to know if there are
recompilations of his stories as there are for other writers of his time
(Simak, Zelazny, Sturgeon) I would love to have and reread them.
We recently started a partnership
with Reanimus Press to release ebook editions of Damon's backlist. We don't
have all of them out, yet, but many are now available at reanimus.com.
SFBC Member: How accurate is his take on himself (and
other writers) in this intro to his book?
“Psychologists have found out a little bit about the
personalities of writers. They are individualists, skeptics, taboo-breakers,
mockers, loners; they are undependable, likely to be behind on their rent; they
keep irregular hours and have strange friends. Professional writers, like
criminals, really live outside society: they have no regular jobs, they come
and go as they please, they live by their wits.”
— Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight
Lots of
tongue-in-cheek stuff here, but mostly accurate.
SFBC Member: What did he think of the adaptation of his
short story "To Serve Man" for "The Twilight Zone" series?
We watched the Twilight Zone production as
a family when it first aired. Damon was delighted that Rod Serling had bought the
story and produced the show. But Damon always thought the aliens—the
Kanamit—were much too pretty in the TV version. He had envisioned them this
way:
The Kanamit were short and very hairy -- thick,
bristly brown-gray hair all over their abominably plump bodies. Their noses
were snoutlike and their eyes small, and they had thick hands of three fingers
each. They wore green leather harnesses and green shorts, but I think the
shorts were a concession to our notions of public decency. The garments were
quite modishly cut, with slash pockets and half-belts in the back. The Kanamit
had a sense of humor, anyhow.
Unfortunately, our publishing company,
InfinityBox Press, is unable to honor requests from producers seeking rights to
adapt the story for TV or film. After more than 60 years, CBS still owns the
TV/Film rights to the story and won't consider reverting those back to Damon's
heirs.
Jeff Pfeiffer: What are some of your favorite stories of
his and why?
Sorry, it's difficult to single out
any of his stories as favorites.
Philip Bonner: I would like to know more about the Orbit
anthologies. As someone who is reading through them all at present (I just
finished Orbit 9,) I am curious about Knight’s motivations in editing them.
There
were many factors that led Damon to begin the Orbit series, the most
significant of which was working as an editor and reviewer/critic in New York.
From Damon:
In 1964 I
had the itch to edit something again. I realized that if I could do a series of
original anthologies in hardcover, paperback, and book club, it would certainly
pay its way. I wrote a proposal and sent it to Dardis [Thomas A. Dardis, of
Berkley Books]. I called the series Orbit, expecting some discussion,
but there wasn't any. Orbit 1 appeared in 1966, and twenty others
followed.
In the
beginning I was able to look brilliant because I was buying all the great
stories that other editors were too dumb to buy. Later the supply ran out and
was not renewed, and the series went downhill, the way every series and every
magazine does. The only known solution to this is to replace the editor, and
even that doesn't always work.
I’m constantly flabbergasted by how wildly experimental
and diverse these books are. In a way it is analogous to an American New
Worlds. They go beyond Dangerous Visions. I think of him as a writer who is
from a generation previous to the New Wave, so how did he become a curator for
voices even younger and more adventurous than those surrounding Ellison, Dick,
Delany, etc.?
Damon tapped into a new generation
of writers with some help from his Futurians cohort and by reading many
hundreds of manuscripts as an editor/critic. Initially, Orbit was his
statement that science fiction didn't have to be stale stories with poorly-crafted
writing. The stories didn't even really have to be strictly nuts-and-bolts
science fiction and could venture down new avenues of discovery like
speculative and psychological fiction. He knew that he was helping to drive a
seismic change in science fiction—he would liken it to something just shy of a
K-T extinction event—and did all he could to encourage its success.
Also, are there any interviews with or essays by Knight
where he talks about the Orbit project at length in his own words?
There may be something out there on
tape but I'm not aware of it. He would often write short essays or comments in
the Orbit series books with insights regarding the authors, stories, or
context. Here's the introduction from Orbit 21, his last:
A series of original anthologies, like Fred Pohl's Star Science
Fiction, if it had hardcover, paperback, and book-club editions, could
easily pay its way. I made up a proposal, called it Orbit more or less at
random, and my agent sent it around ...
Thomas A. Dardis, then editor-in-chief of Berkley, bought it, and we
worked out the details. For a while Doubleday was interested in doing a
hardcover edition, but that fell through; then Berkley was acquired by Putnam,
and there was our hardcover edition ...
What I wanted to do in Orbit was to bring about
a revolution in science fiction, like Campbell's in the early forties, Gold's
and Boucher/McComas's in the fifties. My thesis was that there was no inherent
reason why science fiction could not meet ordinary literary standards, but that
the pulp tradition of forty years has encouraged ideas at the expense of
writing skill. It seemed to me that the only way to cure this was to set high
standards at the beginning, even if it meant publishing a lot of fantasy and
marginal material because most hard-core sf could not make the grade. Later,
cocky with success, I followed this trail too far.
SFBC Member/John Grayshaw: His van Vogt quip, "no
giant, a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter" is one
that would make Nabokov blush. Did Knight’s criticisms ever go too far?
Damon was a tough critic. His
voracious reading habit fed his need to question everything and "call it
like it is," when in his official capacity as critic. He believed he could
help move science fiction out of the pulp era and into a more literary one. His
tool was brutal honesty, which was not universally appreciated... but it was
effective, and he realized his dream.
In his own words he describes one
encounter:
I kept
running into incomprehensible responses in other people around me, as when I
criticized the new comic strip Flash Gordon because the natives of Mongo spoke
English, and a friend of mine said, "What else would they talk?"
If he can criticize Flash Gordon, well...
Damon saved nearly everything he had ever written,
including correspondence with authors submitting stories for the Orbit
series. He would often offer a paragraph or two of valuable notes to the
authors whose stories he didn't think were up to snuff. But not always. I don't
remember which Orbit edition it was, but one group of rejection letters Damon
sent to four individual submitters grabbed my attention. They went something
like this:
First
letter: Thanks for submitting your story for inclusion in Orbit. I
didn't feel this story set the right tone for the series. Sorry. Please send
something else.
Second
letter: Thanks for submitting your story. It needs work, and I'd have to
rewrite it from the start. Try again. Good luck.
Third
letter: This story does not rise to the level of something I would ever
publish.
Fourth
letter: Good Christ!
I believe
that, for some people, the harshness of his criticism abruptly halted their
writing ambitions. Who's to say if that was too harsh.
Alan Kovski: What were his favorite SF stories and
authors and why? Given his willingness to be such a demanding critic, I can
imagine his tastes in fiction were subject to quite a bit of judicious
evaluation.
Damon's tastes were ecumenical, to
say the least, and everything was open to evaluation. Walls and towers
of books stood next to his favorite Morris chair: his ever-present, ancient
Webster’s dictionary, fifteen or twenty books of various genres which would
cycle in and out, a bird identification guide, cookbooks, even a Bible. (Damon
was not a religious man but appreciated the Bible as a good anthology).
In his words:
[As a youth] I attacked the Hood River [Oregon] library
in various ways, by authors—all of Dickens, all of Dumas—then by subject—all
the pirate books—and finally at random. One of my pleasant memories is of some
illness when the librarian sent me out a pile of books, all by authors new to
me. I read children's books and fairy tales, but I also read romantic novels
and novels of manners that I only half understood.
Damon's critic hat was always on. He would add margin
comments in many of the things he read. He believed that using a soft lead
pencil—he favored 2Bs—he could ease his guilt marking up a book and that
someone could always erase his notes without leaving indented traces. But, when
"editing" newspapers and magazines, he would use to his ever-present
Papermate Flair black felt tip pen for emphasis.
A direct answer to this question is: He favored Kate
Wilhelm, of course.
Alan Kovski: Damon Knight saw a lot of evolution of SF
and helped bring some of that evolution about. Did his critical judgments
similarly evolve in the 1970s-80s-90s? Late in his career, did he offer
judgments that were different in various ways--wiser, crankier, more
introspective, more knowledgeable? Did he wish SF evolved differently?
Damon's evolution as a critic grew
with experience and age as one might expect, but his goal from the start was to
put science fiction on the literary shelf. He accomplished that, along with
others whom he influenced and was influenced by. He was completely hooked on
science fiction by the early forties and from the beginning, recognized a sameness
in the stories being published. And he set out to change that.
His astute work as an editor,
starting at some of the larger houses in New York, then on his own, gave
credence to his critical analysis of a story. And, though authors didn't
exactly flock to him for critical readings—owing much to his scathing review of
A.E. van Vogt's works and politics—they recognized that if they did have their
work critiqued by Damon, it would likely be the most comprehensive—for better
or worse—they were likely to receive. And that was the case through his career.
The van Vogt critique was published originally in Larry Shaw's Destiny's
Child magazine and later in Damon's book of critical essays, In Search
of Wonder, for which he was presented with the Hugo award.
John Grayshaw: What made Knight write novels? Was he a
storyteller at heart?
Damon started his career writing
short stories. Novels came later, when he noticed some of his contemporaries
were selling their novels for considerably more money and were enjoying all the
accolades that follow. Plus, he had stories to tell that simply didn't fit
within the short story format. Damon was a master short story author, but he
enjoyed the depths he could reach in a longer story. Here's a note about his
first attempt at writing a novel:
I had asked
Ryerson Johnson [creator of Doc Savage] how he could manage to write anything
as long as a novel. Well, he said, you get used to it in stages: first write
some short stories, then two or three novelettes of ten thousand words, then
some longer novelettes and then you're ready for a novel.
I had been
writing longer and longer things, and I thought I was due for a novel, but I
still shrank from the idea of doing all that work from scratch. Instead, I
thought of a sequel to a story of mine called "The Analogues." The
sequel, "Turncoat," was a little over twenty thousand words, and then
I had enough to offer, with an outline of the rest, to [Walter] Fultz [of Lion
Books]. He gave me a contract, and I finished the book as Hells Pavement. The
novel was about the consequences of an invention, and it was more or less
legitimate for it to be broken down into a short section (the original story)
introducing the invention, then a longer one showing its early development, and
a still longer section winding up the plot.
John Grayshaw: You talked about your mom telling all the
kids stories around the fireplace. Did Knight tell stories too?
No one in the family remembers
Damon telling them bedtime-style stories. He was more of an anecdotal
storyteller and deftly crafted these to be short and poignant.
John Grayshaw: You mentioned in the previous interview
that your mom and Knight “tried and failed miserably at collaboration.” Can you
elaborate on this story?
They were so good at collaborating while teaching others that they
tried once or twice to collaborate in writing. But each had a style and working
method that thoroughly frustrated the other. During their early years together,
they played chess, but their equally competitive natures put an end this
activity. Kate won most of the games (chess and checkers) and Damon quit
playing. Kate happily taught the kids to play.
John Grayshaw: You talked about times when you were
growing up that writers were there as dinner guests as well as when your
parents hosted the Milford Writer’s Conference. I wondered if you had more
stories about this?
There were few dull moments around
the table or fireplace when guests were present. Damon had a knack for
limericks and would involve whoever was available in creating new ones. Here's
an example of one he came up with:
There once was a man from Japan
Whose limericks never would
scan
When asked why this was,
He answered, “Because
I always try to cram as many
words into the last line as I can.”
He also collected corny elephant
jokes. An example: “Where do elephants go to get their dental work done?
Tuscaloosa.” You can see where this is going. And there were dozens. Sometimes
he’d break out in some arcane song he had learned somewhere. He was a fan of
rounds and would include up to six or seven voices, each coming in at the right
moment and continuing until things broke down and into chaos. Occasionally, he
would assign bagpipe drone notes to his guests, while he would use his own
voice to add the tune's melody. One of his favorite tongue twisters was
"the leith police dismisseth us." But he had dozens of these, too,
and collected more from anyone who showed up at the house.
Harlan Ellison was a frequent flyer
at the conference and had become good friends with Kate and Damon. He was the
most competitive person I had ever met and, at roughly five-foot-one, acted
like a defensive lineman. One evening, while he and Kate were sitting by the
fireplace in the living room of the Anchorage, our big Victorian house in
Milford, Kate was a bit peeved about something Harlan had been talking about
and decided to distract him and change the subject. The living room was huge
and had a grand staircase in the corner with a large landing halfway up, immediately
above where the two were seated. Kate, at one key moment, pointed up and told
Harlan that she had seen me jump up and grab onto a spindle in the baluster
(about eight feet above the floor) with one hand and hoist myself up to the
landing using only that one hand. She said later that she enjoyed watching
Harlan spend the next hour trying to do the same. At one point, he told her
that he had no idea how I did that and would ask me to show him. He never
asked, and she never told him that she made it all up.
John Grayshaw: What are some of your fondest memories of Knight
and what are some of the funniest memories?
During the hot summer months, Damon
would lead any number of people—kids, friends, other writers, whoever might be
around—in a procession across the highway, down a farm lane, and through the
woods to reach the bank of the Delaware River, where he would be the first in the
water, and he would float in the eddy for long periods of time. I envied his
ability to float, as I was never able to.
Damon also fancied himself as a
cook, alternating days with Kate for dinner prep. Although his culinary
repertoire consisted of around a dozen dishes, he was passionate about his
skills and wielded his cleaver decisively when making one of his favorite meals.
He created his own version of an Asian-influenced chicken and congee dinner.
His chicken chopping rattled the house and its occupants, and the meal would
typically include many tiny bone fragments we would have to be careful not to
swallow. And then there was the congee, which resembled, in both taste and
texture, elementary school paste. His go-to line, while cooking, was, "Out
of my kitchen!"
John Grayshaw: When did you first read Knight’s writing?
I started reading Damon's stories,
when I was about nine or ten. I was not a big science fiction fan as a youth,
but I came back to his work as a twenty-something, when I read all of his
stories I could find on their shelves. I have reread since then.
John Grayshaw: Did Knight have personal favorites of his
own works?
I don't know much about his
favorites except one he mentions here:
In 1963
when I was working on a short novel called "The Other Foot" which is
still my favorite and was having difficulty with it, I turned for relaxation to
another novel which I made up as I went along. I called it The Tree of
Time. It was a wild van Vogtian adventure involving an amnesiac superman
from the future and a search for a monster which turned out to be the hero in
disguise, etc. I enjoyed writing it, especially the sequences that took place
in a zero-G satellite of the future (a nasty little scientist I introduced here
was modeled partly after J.R. Pierce.) All my friends and well-wishers hated
it, but I sold it everywhere—F&SF, Doubleday, book club,
paperback. This made me cynical about the sf novel-writing business.
John Grayshaw: What are some of Knight’s works that you
feel should be better known than they are?
It's difficult to point to specific
works and say, "That one!" as the title that should be better known.
But we're finding there's a resurgence of interest in Damon's work since we
started to rerelease his titles, in partnership with Reanimus Press. Time will
tell.
John Grayshaw: What can you tell me about how Knight
first started the Milford Science Fiction Writer’s Conference.
After marrying and being persuaded to move to Milford,
Pennsylvania by Judy Merril and Jim Blish, Damon and Judy hatched a plan to do
something each of them had dreamed of—put on a writers’ conference.
Here are a few of Damon's notes:
Judy Merril
and I had talked a little about holding a writers' conference in Milford, but
it was the way you talk about building a boat in your basement. Then we went to
the World Science Fiction Convention in Detroit in 1955, and found ourselves
being taken so seriously that we began to think people might actually come to
our party. When we got back to Milford, we called in Jim Blish, formed a
committee, and issued manifestoes.
The convention the following year was held over the Labor
Day weekend in New York. We set our date for the week after that, in hope that
people would spill over from New York to Milford. It worked almost too well—we
got forty people and crammed them into the living room of a summer cottage on
the Delaware. We were too innocent to realize that a "writers'
conference" was usually a bunch of paid lecturers talking to an audience
of paying would-be writers.
In our
second year, 1957, we didn't have the nearby convention to help us, and the
Conference hit its low point. We had six writers, not enough to keep a
conversation going spontaneously, and not enough, I guess, to reserve the
cottage colony we had used before. We held the sessions in Judy's house and
mine (Jim was working in New York and could not come) and it just did not work
out very well. Ed Emshwiller proposed making a film, and we did one called
"The Thing from Back Issues," with a plot borrowed from Heinlein's The Puppet
Masters.
In our
third year, enrollment rose again; Judy found another cottage colony that would
accommodate us, and we settled into the format we used from then on. The
Conference lasted eight days, Saturday through Saturday. Every afternoon except
the first (when people were still checking in) we had a workshop; that is, we
met and discussed each other's manuscripts. Every evening except the last
(because of the going-away party) we discussed a set topic—"Religion and
Science Fiction" maybe, or "Getting Along with Editors." In
between, whenever the Conference was not in formal session, people were
talking. My God, how they talked!
Because of
this incessant rattle of tongues, and the late hours and the general
excitement, Milford was like a week-long party. After a few years of this, we
began to notice that the end of one Milford was attaching itself in our
memories to the beginning of the next; the series formed a nonstop party that
went on for twenty years, or, depending on how you looked at it, for twenty-one
weeks. This was very pleasant in a way, but also a little scary.
John Grayshaw: You said your mom first met Knight at the
Milford conference, did sparks fly between them right away or was it more
gradual?
Damon invited Kate to the Milford
Conference in the late 50s. Their affection for each other was gradual, as each
was married when they met. A year passed before they decided to explore their
relationship. Here's Damon's take on how that evolved:
I also invited a young writer named Kate Wilhelm, from
whom I hadn't bought anything but whose stories had caught my eye.
I had visualized Kate Wilhelm as a middle-aged woman with
iron gray hair and flat heels; instead, she turned out to be young, slender,
and pretty.
Next year at the Conference Katie and I approached each
other hesitantly; neither of us knew quite how to begin, but we finally
managed. We agreed that Katie would get a divorce, bring her two boys to
Milford, and live there for a year; then if all went well, we would be married.
She stayed with Judy for a week or two, then rented a little house on the
Dingmans Road.
When I told
Judy that Kate and I were going to be married, her jaw dropped. I had read
about this in fiction, but it was the first time I had ever seen it.
We asked
Ted Thomas to perform a ceremony which we devised. Ted was a Conference
regular, as were my best man, Avram Davidson, and Kate's matron of honor, Carol
Emshwiller. Richard 'Mac' McKenna gave the bride away. Before the ceremony,
Clayton Rawson did some magic tricks.
John Grayshaw: Who are some of the authors Knight mentored?
It's a long list. As an editor,
critic, author, teacher, lecturer, and through the Milford Conferences and
Clarion Workshops, there are thousands of writers that he had direct or
indirect influence on.
John Grayshaw: Who are some of the science fiction
writers Knight had correspondence/friendships with? Any stories about those
relationships?
From the time he lived in Hood
River, Oregon, in the late 30s, and throughout his life, Damon enjoyed
corresponding with many writers, editors, critics, and fans. The list is very
long, and he was not in continuous correspondence with everyone on the list
below, but these represent some of the more significant penpals. Here's a
sampling (in alphabetical order):
Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, Greg
Bear, Ben Bova, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Brunner, A.J. Budrys, Ed Bryant,
Octavia Butler, John Cambell, Terry Carr, Arthur Clarke, Theodore Cogswell,
Avram Davidson, Ellen Datlow, L. Sprague De Camp, Lester del Rey, Samuel
Delany, Philip Dick, Gordon Dickson, Tom Disch, Gardner Dozois, George Alec
Effinger, Harlan Ellison, Carol Emshwiller, Hugo Gernsbak, David Gerrold, H.L.
Gold, Eileen Gunn, James Gunn, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein,
Frank Herbert, Nina Hoffman, R.A. Lafferty, Keith Laumer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz
Leiber, Doris Lessing, Robert Lowndes, Anne McCaffrey, John D. MacDonald, Vonda
McIntyre, Richard McKenna, Barry Malzberg, George R.R. Martin, Richard
Matheson, Judith Merril, Larry Niven, Andre Norton (Alice Mary Norton), Alexei
Panshin, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, Terry Pratchett, Mack Reynolds, Kim
Stanley Robinson, Joanna Russ, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Robert Sheckley, Lucius
Shepard, John Shirley, Robert Silverberg, Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon,
Theodore Thomas, Mark Tiedemann, A.E. van Vogt, Jack Vance, John Varley, Kurt
Vonnegut, Jack Williamson, Richard Wilson, Leslie Perri, Gene Wolfe, Donald
Wollheim, Roger Zelazny.
I'm sure I've forgotten many
others.
John Grayshaw: Any stories about Knight going to
conventions or corresponding with fans?
I never accompanied Kate and Damon
to conventions, so I don't have personal anecdotes. Although he was a gifted
speaker, Damon was not a big fan of conventions and attended as few as
possible. If he or Kate or both were Guests of Honor, he would relent and
attend.
John Grayshaw: Do you know of any future adaptations of Knight’s
works in TV or movies?
There are no plans, currently.
John Grayshaw: What were some of Knight’s hobbies other
than writing?
Whether it was a hobby or not, Damon
was always drawing and doodling. Otherwise, he read, which was his form of
relaxation.
John Grayshaw: Did Knight have a writing routine he stuck
to?
Damon would work through the day,
and sometimes in the evening, but not on a strict schedule. It really depended
on the project he was working on.
John Grayshaw: What is Knight’s legacy? Why was his work
significant at the time? And why is it still important today?
Damon believed he could help breathe
new life into what he and others considered the stagnation of science fiction.
The pulps were on their way out and something needed to replace them. As editor
and critical reader, Damon saw many excellent stories that were being passed
over by the industry heavies. Eventually, his anthology series, Orbit,
was born, which for 20 years, gave him the free hand to buy and publish
cutting-edge stories by well-known and unknown authors. Although Orbit
finally came to an end, it greatly influenced the direction science fiction
would take.
Through his writing, teaching,
editing, and criticism, along with his work starting the Milford Writers
Conference and Clarion Workshops, he was instrumental in raising the
recognition of science fiction as an accepted, even celebrated literary art
form. Damon considered this to be his greatest professional achievement.
