Interview About Damon Knight

 

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.