Late Friday's "Forgotten" Books: On ORBIT 6 edited by Damon Knight (Putnam, 1970) a discussion on Facebook initiated by Gregory Feeley

Gregory Feeley (link here) August 7

The anthology begins with “The Second Inquisition” by Joanna Russ and ends with “The Asian Shore” by Thomas M. Disch. In between are “Goslin Day” by Avram Davidson, “Entire and Perfect Chrysolite” by R.A. Lafferty, “The End” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Where No Sun Shines” by Gardner R. Dozois, and “Debut” by Carol Emshwiller.

Neither of the two short stories by Gene Wolfe are among his classics (that began with the next volume), and I don’t remember anything about the story by Kate Wilhelm—I will try reading it next week when the present project is finished.

In terms of sheer quality, this may be one of the very best original anthologies ever published, Harlan Ellison’s not excepted.

Anthology Title: Orbit 6 • [Orbit • 6] • anthology by Damon Knight

Contents (view Concise Listing)

• 1 • The Second Inquisition • [Alyx] • novelette by Joanna Russ
• 40 • Remembrance to Come • (1970) • short story by Gene Wolfe
• 55 • How the Whip Came Back • (1970) • short story by Gene Wolfe
• 75 • Goslin Day • (1970) • short story by Avram Davidson
• 83 • Maybe Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, Was a Little Bit Right • (1970) • short story by Robin Scott Wilson [as by Robin S. Scott]
• 92 • The Chosen • (1970) • short story by Kate Wilhelm
• 115 • Entire and Perfect Chrysolite • (1970) • short story by R. A. Lafferty
• 131 • Sunburst • (1970) • short story by Roderick Thorp
• 142 • The Creation of Bennie Good • short story by James Sallis
• 146 • The End • (1970) • short story by Ursula K. Le Guin (variant of Things)
• 158 • A Cold Dark Night with Snow • (1970) • short story by Kate Wilhelm
• 171 • Fame • (1970) • short story by Arthur Jean Cox [as by Jean Cox]
• 184 • Debut • (1970) • short story by Carol Emshwiller
• 191 • Where No Sun Shines • (1970) • short story by Gardner Dozois
• 203 • The Asian Shore • (1970) • novelette by Thomas M. Disch

Rich Horton

"The Creation of Bennie Good" isn't my favorite early Sallis story, when he was at his weirdest, but I think it's at least intriguing. And of the two Wolfe stories, I think "How the Whip Came Back" is pretty good -- for me it's the earliest of his stories to really make an impression (though I do like "Trip Trap".)

Definitely a remarkable original anthology. The next issue is pretty strong too, with two of Lafferty's best stories, one of Wolfe's very best and another good one, one of the best early Sallis stories, a strong Wilhelm novella, very good stories from Disch, Emshwiller, and Dozois, and probably the only Laumer story that stands out in my memory.

Knight really knew what he was doing. And so of course the old farts in SF got really ticked off at him, and pulled stunts liking voting for No Award in the Nebulas to keep Gene Wolfe from winning.

[in response to a Brett Cox conjecture on the No Award "winner" in a Hugo ballot at the height of New Wave/Old Guard hostility in SF; at the 1971 SFWA Nebula Awards ceremony, MC Isaac Asimov, reading from the list of various nominees and winners, assumed that "No Award" getting the most votes in the short fiction category must be a transcription error, and read off Gene Wolfe, whose story "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" received the second-highest number of votes, as the winner:]

Rich Horton:

Brett Cox For Jo Walton's "Revisiting the Hugos" project, I made a comment about that particular controversy repeating the "confusing ballot instructions" explanation, and Gardner Dozois, who was there, responded as follows:

'There’s no “supposedly” about it, Rich. I was there, sitting at Gene Wolfe’s table, in fact. He’d actually stood up, and was starting to walk toward the podium, when Isaac was told about his mistake. Gene shrugged and sat down quietly, like the gentleman he is, while Isaac stammered an explanation of what had happened. It was the one time I ever saw Isaac totally flustered, and, in fact, he felt guilty about the incident to the end of his days.

'It’s bullshit that this was the result of confusing ballot instructions. This was the height of the War of the New Wave, and passions between the New Wave camp and the conservative Old Guard camp were running high. (The same year, Michael Moorcock said in a review that the only way SFWA could have found a worse thing than RINGWORLD to give the Nebula to was to give it to a comic book). The fact that the short story ballot was almost completely made up of stuff from ORBIT had outraged the Old Guard, particularly James Sallis’s surreal “The Creation of Benny Hill”, and they block-voted for No Award as a protest against “non-functional word patterns” making the ballot. Judy-Lynn del Rey told me as much immediately after the banquet, when she was exuberantly gloating about how they’d “put ORBIT in its place” with the voting results, and actually said “We won!”

'All this passion and choler seems far away now, as if we were arguing over which end of the egg to break.' 

 Michael A. Armstrong

Damon’s story selection model made him open to getting great stories from not just established writers but new voices. He took unsolicited submissions (I have the rejection slips!), but I’m guessing he also invited Milford [Writer's Workshop] and other writers to submit.

If he stumbled upon a good story he also grabbed it, as when he bought Kim Stanley Robinson’s Clarion [Writer's Workshop] application story. I think it was Damon who suggested Stan use his full name so as to not be confused with Spider Robinson.

Buggerly Otherly

(aka Michael Moorcock, among other tasks editor of New Worlds magazine in the latter '60s/early '70s)

ORBIT & NEW WORLDS were publishing similar authors sometimes almost simultaneously -- Sallis and Wolfe for instance -- and occasionally even taking stories which for some reason were not quite suitable for our respective markets. I think ORBIT was, indeed, the best original anthology series. 

Steve Rhodes

Orbit 6 & 13 others in the series can be checked out at Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/orbit60000damo

Ian McDowell notes that the Roderick Thorp listed on the cover is the same Thorp who might be best-remembered for such novels as THE DETECTIVE (adapted to a Frank Sinatra film) and NOTHING LASTS FOREVER (the novel source for the film DIE HARD).

FFB: WORLDS TO COME edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row 1967); FOURTEEN FOR NOW edited by John Simon (Harper & Row 1969)

 Dutch Uncles: Two Anthologies for Younger Readers:

Worlds to Come edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row, LCC# AC 67-10130, 1967, $4.95, xii +337pp, hc)
• ix · Introduction · Damon Knight · in
• 1 · The Sentinel · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Ten Story Fantasy Spr 1951, as “Sentinel of Eternity”
• 17 · Moonwalk · H. B. Fyfe · nv Space Science Fiction Nov 1952
• 81 · Mars Is Heaven! · Ray Bradbury · ss Planet Stories Fll 1948
• 109 · The Edge of the Sea · Algis Budrys · ss Venture Mar 1958
• 141 · The Martian Way · Isaac Asimov · na Galaxy Nov 1952
• 213 · The Big Contest · John D. MacDonald · ss Worlds Beyond Dec 1950
• 227 · Ordeal in Space · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Town & Country May 1948
• 253 · That Share of Glory · C. M. Kornbluth · nv Astounding Jan 1952
• 303 · Sunken Universe [Lavon] · James Blish · nv Super Science Stories May 1942, as by Arthur Merlyn, see also “Surface Tension”
• 337 · More Good Reading in Science Fiction · Damon Knight · bi

Fourteen for Now: a collection of contemporary stories edited by John Simon (Harper & Row, OCLC #54245, 1969, $4.95, xvi + 316pp, hc)
ix · Introduction for the Young Reader: Books in an Age of Television / by John Simon  

1 · When the Priest is Not at Home / by B. Traven (ss) The Night Visitor and Other Stories, Hill and Wang 1966

19 · A Good Man is Hard to Find / by Flannery O'Connor (nv) The Avon Book of Modern Writing, ed. William Phillips & Philip Rahv, Avon 1953

44 · Into the Green Night / by Irvin Faust (ss) Roar, Lion, Roar, Random House 1961

60 · The Stone Boy / by Gina Berriault (ss) Mademoiselle Jun 1957

79 · The Games of Night / by Stig Dagerman (translation by Naomi Walford) (ss) Nattens lekar ("Night Games") Norstedts förlag 1947; The Games of  Night, Bodley Head 1959

93 · Nazis / by Ferenc Sánta (translation by John Simon)(ss) Kortárs ("Contemporary"), May 1960; translation in New Hungarian Review

103 · Among the Dangs / by George P. Elliott (nv) Esquire Jun 1958

119 · The Death of Me / by Bernard Malamud (nv) World Review April 1951

151 · Murke's Collected Silences / by Heinrich Böll (translation by Leila Vennewitz) (ss) Esquire Nov 1959

182 · The Hero / by Bruce Jay Friedman (ss) Cavalier 1966

196 · Ceremonies / by Joyce Carol Oates (nv) By the North Gate, Vanguard 1963

227 · As I Was Going Up the Stair / by Alfred Chester (nv) The Sewanee Review 1957

262 · A Stick of Green Candy / by Jane Bowles (ss) Vogue 15 February 1957 

277 · The Day Beaumont Became Acquainted with His Pain / by J.M.G. LeClézio (translation by Daphne Woodward) (nv) Mercure de France 1964; Fever, Hamish Hamilton 1966

313 · Biographical notes / by John Simon

Two anthologies aimed at a teen readership by two famously prickly critics, and writers otherwise (not that Harper & Row, their mutual first publisher, nor certainly the paperback packagers, would mind if adults were willing to partake--one notes the degree to which adult-targeted anthologies could easily feature the same sets of stories). Notable in part for the eclecticism of the choices, in the case of the Knight even to the the degree that all the stories are drawn from different magazines in the sf field (including Worlds Beyond which Knight edited), and that famous speculative fiction title Town and Country (devoted, of course, to fantasies and achieved realities of expensive living). 

Also notable to the degree which the Simon anthology doesn't eschew the fantastic, from the rather thoroughly science-fictional "Among the Dangs" to the various more blatantly metaphorical explorations as the Böll, and those that can be read as certainly akin to the fantastic (or at least as a borderline horror) as the O'Connor; certainly, very few of Simon's writers haven't at least delved notably into the fantastic, even as few of Knight's haven't made at least some notable or interesting contribution to the contemporary/mimetic or other non-fantasticated genres, including Heinlein and Asimov and definitely including Budrys, Kornbluth, Blish, Bradbury and, most obviously, John D. MacDonald, most of whose career was set in other contexts than fantastic fiction. Also, as is common in anthologies aimed at young readers, no fear of gathering chestnuts, mixed in both cases with rather obscure stories...and at the remove of half a century, some once ineluctable stories are now only infrequently seen, if at all...such as "The Stone Boy" or "The Edge of the Sea". 

Knight offers quick headnotes and a brief bibliography of recommended additional reading, Simon musing endnotes to each story, and both manage to provide introductions that are interesting mixes of useful observation and hobbyhorse-riding on their parts...Knight lays out rather well why science fiction is not so much a predictive artform as a speculative one, which can at times predict and at times nudge readers, scientists or technologists or those who are likely to work in those fields eventually, toward development (and notes that Jules Verne enjoyed playing around with exotic but already achieved advances and discoveries, while imbuing them with Gosh-Wow as if they were still basically out of reach)...while providing in his anthology a number of stories with no relation to the stated thesis, as one might take it, of the anthology...since "Mars is Heaven!" and at least a few of the others are more borderline horror and/or of other ambitions altogether (as Algis Budrys noted, in his own hobbyhorse-riding review, one of only two the book received in the sf media, apparently--typically, Budrys does not miss a chance to dismiss his own work as less than fully-realized, while also justly taking on the unearned reputation of Arthur C. Clarke as primarily a hard-science extrapolator so much as frequent mystic). While Simon makes useful argument for what makes good narrative art vs. less good, while mostly pretending that what made so much television drama in the 1960s and previously (he doesn't admit that there are any exceptions) so bland and unenlightening doesn't apply to such arts more dear to his heart as film, stage drama and literature (and where he does admit the latter, it is almost grudgingly and fleetingly).

Good anthologies, some interesting arguments and insights from the editor/annotators, and some work no longer as over-familiar as it once was, and some which never had the chance to become over-familiar...and there are worse fates than reading the Oates or the Kornbluth again. Knight had already published a few younger-skewing anthologies at time of publication, and would publish a few more, though he would produce vastly more aimed at adult audiences; I believe this is Simon's only anthology of fiction, for any audience. And it should be noted that the Blish story in the Knight volume is the predecessor to Blish's most famous single short story, "Surface Tension" (as "Common Time" is becoming more obscure)..."Sunken Universe" was combined with the later story to fashion the novella form of "Surface Tension"...

Fourteen for Now can be read here.

Worlds to Come can be read here.

Algis Budrys reviews the Knight in Galaxy, October 1967 issue. (P. Schuyler Miller reviewed it for Analog, as well.)
John Leonard reviews the Simon in The New York Times in the 1 March 1970 issue (rather late)(and the scanning in of the article was particularly inept, putting paragraphs out of place; you'll have some puzzle assembly to do while reading Leonard's review of the Simon and The Loners, edited by L. M. Schulman, and George A. Woods's review of a how-to-cartoon book for young readers, admixed.)(Woods mentions in passing how he meant to be reading instead TR and Will by William Manners...one of Manners's popular-history successes after his work as founding editor of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, whom I was asking after just yesterday and the day before.)

For more of today's books (in 2019), please see Patti Abbott's blog.

US first edition:

UK paperback:

a redux post with some slight edits and added links.

SSW: "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff; "Mary" (and "The Country of the Kind") by Damon Knight

 "The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1956, edited by "Anthony Boucher" (William White); can be read here.

"Mary" by Damon Knight, Galaxy Magazine, June 1964, edited by Frederik Pohl (who for the magazine's purposes retitled the story "An Ancient Madness"); can be read here.

"Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff, The New Yorker, 25 September 1995, edited by Tina Brown; can be read here or here.

A few days ago, participants on the Rara-Avis hardboiled and noir crime fiction discussion list mentioned how much they enjoyed Wolff's rather short story, which moved me to (finally) read it; a day later, on the FictionMags discussion list, heavily but not exclusively devoted to fantastic fiction (among other sorts as published in, oddly enough, fiction magazines), mention was made of a Damon Knight story, "Mary" of which I had no memory (sadly, this is becoming increasingly common an occurrence as I enter my dotage); a devoted fan of Knight's work (and one who has read most but not all of that work), I refreshed the memory. And in doing so, I was reminded of Knight's brilliant story, "The Country of the Kind", which I have mentioned on the blog before, as one that was hugely influential on me upon reading it first as a child. It's a better story than the not-bad but somewhat more slight later Knight novelette, and in some ways prefigures the Wolff. You could spend worse afternoons than reading all three. You definitely might want to do so before reading the commentary below.

Somewhat perversely, this 1976 selection of his own work includes "Mary" but excludes "The Country of the Kind". His 1991 entry in the Author's Choice Monthly series, God's Nose, again choosing from his own work, actually averages a bit better, though is too slim a collection. Even though it slights his later work and some excellent novellas (and several good novels--finally--at the end of his career), this omnibus of his first four short-fiction collections (Far Out, In Deep, Off Center and Turning On) is the best one-volume introduction...though copies of the God's Nose volume and the Best of would be, even together, more portable!

Includes "Bullet in the Brain", first collected in Wolff's 1996 volume The Night in Question.

"The Country of the Kind" (the title as well as, to a lesser degree, core concept a riff on H. G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind", a challenge to the adage about the One-Eyed Man being King there) involves an essentially utopian society, in which a sociopath who has artistic impulses of a sort has been not so much imprisoned but allowed to wander freely in society, only with universal proviso that he not be interacted with (since he is prone almost exclusively to sadistic violence in his interactions), altered in a manner that will cause him to black out before he can actually physically hurt anyone, and given a permanent distinctive unpleasant scent (which he can't detect) which will tip off the more or less normal people to his presence (presumably almost no one in this society has lost their olfactory sense). By story's end, Knight has made the case that artists can tend to be disturbers of the peace, at very least, without actually advocating that sociopathy be condoned (too many have done so in the years before and since this story's publication, particularly if the behavior was from some sort of artistic genius), and suggests the protagonist's isolation is a cruelty that parallels any he attempts. The first-appearance headnote by Anthony Boucher, describing Knight's inspiration in writing the story, is useful reading (I first read the story in Robert Silverberg's SFWA anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, V. 1, without any sort of introduction), and the story deftly makes every point Knight seeks to tick off.

Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain" in its even shorter focus deals instead with a literary critic, facing life with a critic's intellectual toolkit employed too much to his own detriment, which in a very unfortunate encounter with some bank robbers while making his irritated way through a tiresome day, can't stop mocking the lack of imagination or artistry of mundane reality and the bad behavior around him. As he is shot, even his last conscious thought is a memory of a fellow child on a baseball team with him, using improper grammar in a naturally colloquial way. That this man has allowed carping to shape his entire life, and to hasten his death, seems a bit facile but still makes for a compelling story not too much longer than a vignette. Both the Knight and Wolff stories limn a certain (necessary?) estrangement of the artist and (cousin) critic from the rhythms of what might be considered a regular life, for good and ill. 

Meanwhile, "Mary" is a lesser Knight story in large part because its critique is not delivered with as much brio, even as it's carefully constructed to make its point. Mary's society is post-disaster, not quite apocalypse, and to prevent genetic drift, everyone human is cloned rather carefully rather than allowed conventional breeding, and the society is likewise highly regulated, as people live communally in what amounts to barracks devoted to their jobs; Mary is one of a number of spinners, who manipulate a kind of gelatinous plastic into various sorts and shades of fabric and other similar material. The sexual relations of the various citizens are uncharged, and tend to be free-floating and temporary...Mary, however, is an atavistic creature, as it turns out, known as an oddball from the start for her moodiness (she was allowed to grow from a less than "perfect" ovum, you see) and eventually for her falling for a slightly less disaffected but similar oddball male, and wanting to have an ongoing monogamous relation on their own...they are allowed to do so, much to the dismay of Mary's sorority sisters, though it's unclear how well they might do in the slowly healing post-nuclear/similar-disaster world. In many ways a parody of those who have difficulty tolerating any "variant" lifestyle, the story relatively cleverly builds up its regimented and communal society, dominated by Elders and largely self-enforced, by its "proper" citizens, limitations, but unlike the casual, even bland well-adjustment of the utopian community's middle-class suburban cheer in "Country" or the inanity of much of what the hapless critic faces in "Bullet", the metaphor doesn't quite meet all the requirements for the critique in "Mary"; it has excellent details and even seems heartfelt, in a double-bottomed way, but feels like a more lifeless argument. Frederik Pohl, as Galaxy editor, certainly appreciated its virtues...the Knight story was cited first among the stories on the cover of the issue, and it led off the next best-of volume, The Ninth Galaxy Reader, for Doubleday in 1966.

Today's (or yesterday's!) more prompt entries for Short Story considerations actually posted on Wednesday in the author's timezone, can be found at Patti Abbott's blog here.

FFB: WORLDS TO COME edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row 1967); FOURTEEN FOR NOW edited by John Simon (Harper & Row 1969)

Dutch Uncles: Two Anthologies for Younger Readers:

Worlds to Come edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row, LCC# AC 67-10130, 1967, $4.95, xii +337pp, hc)
• ix · Introduction · Damon Knight · in
• 1 · The Sentinel · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Ten Story Fantasy Spr 1951, as “Sentinel of Eternity”
• 17 · Moonwalk · H. B. Fyfe · nv Space Science Fiction Nov 1952
• 81 · Mars Is Heaven! · Ray Bradbury · ss Planet Stories Fll 1948
• 109 · The Edge of the Sea · Algis Budrys · ss Venture Mar 1958
• 141 · The Martian Way · Isaac Asimov · na Galaxy Nov 1952
• 213 · The Big Contest · John D. MacDonald · ss Worlds Beyond Dec 1950
• 227 · Ordeal in Space · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Town & Country May 1948
• 253 · That Share of Glory · C. M. Kornbluth · nv Astounding Jan 1952
• 303 · Sunken Universe [Lavon] · James Blish · nv Super Science Stories May 1942, as by Arthur Merlyn, see also “Surface Tension”
• 337 · More Good Reading in Science Fiction · Damon Knight · bi

Fourteen for Now: a collection of contemporary stories edited by John Simon (Harper & Row, OCLC #54245, 1969, $4.79, xvi + 316pp, hc)
ix · Introduction for the Young Reader: Books in an Age of Television / by John Simon  

1 · When the Priest is Not at Home / by B. Traven (ss) The Night Visitor and Other Stories, Hill and Wang 1966

19 · A Good Man is Hard to Find / by Flannery O'Connor (nv) The Avon Book of Modern Writing, ed. William Phillips & Philip Rahv, Avon 1953

44 · Into the Green Night / by Irvin Faust (ss) Roar, Lion, Roar, Random House 1961

60 · The Stone Boy / by Gina Berriault (ss) Mademoiselle Jun 1957

79 · The Games of Night / by Stig Dagerman (translation by Naomi Walford) (ss) Nattens lekar ("Night Games") Norstedts förlag 1947; The Games of  Night, Bodley Head 1959

93 · Nazis / by Ferenc Sánta (translation by John Simon)(ss) Kortárs ("Contemporary"), May 1960; translation in New Hungarian Review

103 · Among the Dangs / by George P. Elliott (nv) Esquire Jun 1958

119 · The Death of  Me / by Bernard Malamud (nv) World Review April 1951

151 · Murke's Collected Silences / by Heinrich Böll (translation by Leila Vennewitz) (ss) Esquire Nov 1959

182 · The Hero / by Bruce Jay Friedman (ss) Cavalier 1966

196 · Ceremonies / by Joyce Carol Oates (nv) At the North Gate, Vanguard 1963

227 · As I Was Going Up the Stair / by Alfred Chester (nv) The Sewanee Review 1957

262 · A Stick of Green Candy / by Jane Bowles (ss) Vogue 15 February 1957 

277 · The Day Beaumont Became Acquainted with His Pain / by J.M.G. LeClézio (translation by Daphne Woodward) (nv) Mercure de France 1964; Fever, Hamish Hamilton 1966

313 · Biographical notes / by John Simon

Two anthologies aimed at a teen readership by two famously prickly critics, and writers otherwise (not that Harper & Row, their mutual first publisher, nor certainly the paperback packagers, would mind if adults were willing to partake--one notes the degree to which adult-targeted anthologies could easily feature the same sets of stories). Notable in part for the eclecticism of the choices, in the case of the Knight even to the the degree that all the stories are drawn from different magazines in the sf field (including Worlds Beyond which Knight edited), and that famous speculative fiction title Town and Country (devoted, of course, to fantasies and achieved realities of expensive living). 

Also notable to the degree which the Simon anthology doesn't eschew the fantastic, from the rather thoroughly science-fictional "Among the Dangs" to the various more blatantly metaphorical explorations as the Böll, and those that can be read as certainly akin to the fantastic (or at least as a borderline horror) as the O'Connor; certainly, very few of Simon's writers haven't at least delved notably into the fantastic, even as few of Knight's haven't made at least some notable or interesting contribution to the contemporary/mimetic or other non-fantasticated genres, including Heinlein and Asimov and definitely including Budrys, Kornbluth, Blish, Bradbury and, most obviously, John D. MacDonald, most of whose career was set in other contexts than fantastic fiction. Also, as is common in anthologies aimed at young readers, no fear of gathering chestnuts, mixed in both cases with rather obscure stories...and at the remove of half a century, some once ineluctable stories are now only infrequently seen, if at all...such as "The Stone Boy" or "The Edge of the Sea". 

Knight offers quick headnotes and a brief bibliography of recommended additional reading, Simon musing endnotes to each story, and both manage to provide introductions that are interesting mixes of useful observation and hobbyhorse-riding on their parts...Knight lays out rather well why science fiction is not so much a predictive artform as a speculative one, which can at times predict and at times nudge readers, scientists or technologists or those who are likely to work in those fields eventually, toward development (and notes that Jules Verne enjoyed playing around with exotic but already achieved advances and discoveries, while imbuing them with Gosh-Wow as if they were still basically out of reach)...while providing in his anthology a number of stories with no relation to the stated thesis, as one might take it, of the anthology...since "Mars is Heaven!" and at least a few of the others are more borderline horror and/or of other ambitions altogether (as Algis Budrys noted, in his own hobbyhorse-riding review, one of only two the book received in the sf media, apparently--typically, Budrys does not miss a chance to dismiss his own work as less than fully-realized, while also justly taking on the unearned reputation of Arthur C. Clarke as primarily a hard-science extrapolator so much as frequent mystic). While Simon makes useful argument for what makes good narrative art vs. less good, while mostly pretending that what made so much television drama in the 1960s and previously (he doesn't admit that there are any exceptions) so bland and unenlightening doesn't apply to arts more dear to his heart as film, stage drama and literature (where he does admit the latter, it is almost grudgingly and fleetingly).

Good anthologies, some interesting arguments and insights from the editor/annotators, and some work no longer as over-familiar as it once was, and some which never had the chance to become over-familiar...and there are worse fates than reading the Oates or the Kornbluth again. Knight had already published a few younger-skewing anthologies at time of publication, and would publish a few more, though he would produce vastly more aimed at adult audiences; I believe this is Simon's only anthology of fiction, for any audience. And it should be noted that the Blish story in the Knight volume is the predecessor to Blish's most famous single short story, "Surface Tension" (as "Common Time" is becoming more obscure)..."Sunken Universe" was combined with the later story to fashion the novella form of "Surface Tension"...

Algis Budrys reviews the Knight in Galaxy, October 1967 issue. (P. Schuyler Miller reviewed it for Analog, as well.)
John Leonard reviews the Simon in The New York Times in the 1 March 1970 issue (rather late)(and the scanning in of the article was particularly inept, putting paragraphs out of place; you'll have some puzzle assembly to do while reading Leonard's review of the Simon and The Loners, edited by L. M. Schulman, and George A. Woods's review of a how-to-cartoon book for young readers, admixed.)(Woods mentions in passing how he meant to be reading instead TR and Will by William Manners...one of Manners's popular-history successes after his work as founding editor of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, whom I was asking after just yesterday and the day before.)

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

US first edition

UK paperback