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).

two "proposed" anthologies: WE ARE IN THE VASTNESS and WE ARE VASTER THAN WE MIGHT WISH, ed. by TM: Short Story Wednesday

I'm in a Facebook group hosted by D. F. Lewis, called Hyper-Imaginative Literature, where Des is seeking at getting at the kind of fiction (as I understand him to mean) that tends to shake up perceptions, at least to some extent...the other week, members had been offering potential 12-entry anthologies of some of the relevant fiction...I was sleepy but not successfully winding into sleep, so I decided to play along, but hadn't noted fully the dozens rule, and Des wondered if I would pare my 18-entry item down (it echoed the Robert Arthur-edited Alfred Hitchcock Presents: volumes even down to including a novel, in that first batch only Kate Wilhelm's Death Qualified, which is my favorite of her most qualifying novels, though most of hers would qualify). So, I did two dozens, instead, with a Calvino novel-of-sorts in multiple Tarot-driven vignettes among the added, instead. (Since I was sleepy still, I was lazy enough to add my two better relevant very short stories, or at least the choice of one of the two.)

I gave the two "volumes" titles, as well. I shall gather links to the stories and books that are online, in the next little while (now provided).

We Are in the Vastness

A. A. Attanasio: "Sherlock Holmes and Basho" (first in Beastmarks, Zeising 1985) (not online)

Jorge Luis Borges: "The Other Death" (preferably the translation by Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, if available)

Joseph Payne Brennan: "Levitation"

Grania Davis: "David's Friend, the Hole"

Ellen Gilchrist: "The Green Tent"

Damon Knight: "You're Another"

Fritz Leiber: "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee"

David Redd: "Morning" (not the story, but a page offering his collected stories volume)

Kit Reed: "Winter"

Joanna Russ: "My Boat"

Margaret St. Clair: "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" (originally published as by "Idris Seabright")

Kate Wilhelm: DEATH QUALIFIED

As the subtitle suggests (and it's notably been dropped from the two US paperback reprints' covers I've seen so far, the first's cover below), this is not simply a lawyer-procedural novel, but digs a bit more into further realms than that...the subsequent, also good or better, Holloway novels stuck to more specifically legal-procedural concerns.

We Are Vaster Than We Might Wish

Alfred Bester: "5,271,009"

Robert Bloch: "The Final Performance"

Italo Calvino: THE CASTLE OF CROSSED DESTINIES (translation by William White) preview only

Avram Davidson: "The Lord of Central Park"

Edward D. Hoch: "The Oblong Room"

Joe Gores: "The Second Coming"

Barry N. Malzberg: "Prowl"

Todd Mason: "Bedtime" (alternately, "Bonobos") [at the initial hour of TOC composition, I was nodding more than Homer--these would be rather unlucky 13th entries!] (?amusingly, neither is online, as far as I can see, at the moment.)

Rachel Pollack: "Burning Sky"

"Saki": "The Reticence of Lady Anne"

Lisa Tuttle: "Sangre"

Evelyn Waugh: "The Man Who Liked Dickens" (similarly, Joan Aiken: "Marmalade Wine") [there's at least one other Very Similar story of similar vintage at the edge of memory]

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

FFB Redux: LIVING IN FEAR: A HISTORY OF HORROR IN THE MASS MEDIA by Les Daniels (Scribner's, 1975); some notable horror fiction that can be read online; S-F: THE YEAR'S GREATEST SCIENCE-FICTION AND FANTASY (First Annual) edited by Judith Merril (Dell; Gnome Press 1956); THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES AND NOVELS: Ninth Series edited by T. E. Dikty and Earl Kemp (Advent: Publishers/Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club 1958)

from a 1995 interview with Daniels for Tabula Rasa:

Kyla Ward for TR: Just touching on the other non-fiction book, Fear--

Les Daniels: AKA Living in Fear--

TR: "A History of Horror in the Mass Media."

LD: This followed the first book on comics [Comix, 1971], and once again was based on the fact this was something I was interested in. In a way it's dated and superceded now, there were fairly few books even on horror films back then; but what makes it more unique now is that in addition to discussing most of the significant English-language horror films made up till that time, it also tried to deal with the literature, going back to the Gothic novel and so on. I tried to cover so much ground that there's usually only a couple of sentences about anything that I mentioned, and so much written since that in a way it's superficial.

TR: And it also includes certain stories --

LD: It's partially an anthology.

TR: -- you printed Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder." Thank you.

LD: Well, it's important to me. At that period, I think the concept of the tradition and what had gone before was almost the basis of horror and was of interest to horror writers and people who made horror films; there has been a tremendous leap, it was almost as though I wrote that book at the appropriate time, because since then there has been a big jump in horror in terms of its wide promulgation and acceptance, and at the same time there has been a tremendous difference in the content.

Living in Fear was the first book about (as well as in small part collecting) horror that I encountered, and as a survey it was an excellent indicator that there was a wide world of material awaiting me of which I had only picked up on a small segment so far...albeit with the anthologies and comics I was reading and the Thriller television series playing in repeats locally in Connecticut (even as repeats of the first The Outer Limits series had brightened noirishly my Saturday afternoons in the Boston suburbs a few years before), and the infrequent good films I could see in theaters (tv averaged better, even with all the damned commercials and the cuts in some of the films, at least as often for more commercials...the rare horror film on the PBS stations were a particular treat), I was already aware of quite a range of work.

Daniels, an independent scholar with a continuing love for horror (and a novelist, beginning in the next decade), didn't produce an impeccably researched book, and even I as a ten year old could spot an error or two (he referred to Gene Roddenberry's nonexistent work on The Outer Limits, for example), but the stories recounted and described (of the development of horror as a field of literature and in related media) and the actual fiction collected in the coffee-table book were often excellent, as well as excellent nudges. As an anthology, others were more important to me, but as a key to the highway...

Richard Bleiler holding his anthology.

Certainly Stephen King's Danse Macabre and others which followed Living in Fear never would have such an impact for me, even when written by such well-informed and reflective artists as Ramsey Campbell...even now, very few have attempted to match the scope of this one. (Though, for example, E. F. Bleiler's works, among them the first edition of Supernatural Fiction Writers, are always worth the look...even if a look in son Richard Bleiler's 2002 second edition of that compendium, also a Scribner's book coincidentally, would provide one with, among better and worse contributions, an example of my own bit of survey, on Joyce Carol Oates and, in passing, Kate Wilhelm.)

One can read Living in Fear at the internet Archive here.

Some important horror fiction you can read online, at least at this time:

A few examples of the better horror fiction you can currently read online (no promises that any given item will still be posted tomorrow, but I'm avoiding the more obviously criminal sites on the web, or anything that demands that you download):


Fritz Leiber:
Conjure Wfie (original magazine publication)
"Smoke Ghost"
You're All Alone (original magazine edit)

Theodore Sturgeon:
"It"
"Shottle Bop"
"The Professor's Teddy Bear"

Damon Knight: 
"Special Delivery"

Robert Bloch:
"The Weird Tailor"
"The Man Who Collected Poe"
"Enoch"

Ray Bradbury:
"The October Game"

H. Russell Wakefield:
"Ghost Hunt" (if you were wondering about ancestors of The Blair Witch Project)

Saki:
Beasts and Super-Beasts (for a sample, try "Laura," the second story)

The last and the first.

This initial volume of Merri's annual can be read at Archive.org here (where it's been helpfully mislabeled, at time of link placement, as volume 5).

In 1956, Judith Merril was already a veteran anthologist in the fantastic-fiction arena, her first effort thus a 1950 assembly of sf, fantasy and horror from Bantam entitled Shot in the Dark in part because that's how the publishers looked at the project; you don't see stories by Jack London, Merril's old Futurian Society friend John Michel and Marjorie Allingham in immediate succession in too many books then, or now.  She was given, by Dell, the opportunity to edit the second US-based Best of the Year series to focus on short sf and fantasy, stressing the former...she could live with that...S-F in her early volumes officially stood for "science-fantasy" in the broadest sense (later, it abbreviated her revival of Robert Heinlein's suggestion of "speculative fiction"--covering all the fantastic, as Merril used it). Since 1949, there had already been a primarily science fictional BOTY, from the minor but professional hardcover house Frederick Fell, edited by Everett F. Bleiler and Ted Dikty (and George Kelley has been reviewing each in turn); Bleiler tapped out with the 1954 volumes, The Best Science Fiction of the Year and Year's Best Science Fiction Novels (devoted to novelets and novellas), perhaps in part because Fell didn't want to go forward with the longer-story annual, and the remaining volumes combined the shorter and longer stories. Dikty came to depend more and more on unofficial co-editor Earl Kemp, who was also part of the group of s-f/fanzine/convention fans who in 1955 came together to form Advent: Publishers, mostly with the intent of collecting Damon Knight's critical essays and reviews in book form, and In Search of Wonder saw its first edition that year. Advent decided to continue in that mode (publishing books about sf  and related matter by James Blish, Robert Bloch and others), and apparently Fell, which began publishing operations in 1949 with, among other books, an artistically wildly uneven and not terribly commercial set of sf releases, and whose sf program shrank almost immediately to their two annuals, decided after the 1956 volume that they didn't want to publish The Best Science Fiction of the Year either, and so there was no 1957 volume...but there was a 1958 volume, published via a partnership between Advent and Doubleday's Science Fiction Book Club: Doubleday printed the copies, including the perhaps thousand or so Advent received for sale to the general and library trade, while the SFBC edition, identical except for the lack of price on the jacket and "Book Club Edition" in its usual place on the front flap, was made available to the membership.  The fan-initiated Gnome Press, one of the most prosperous (but apparently not the most ethically-run) of the small houses publishing a lot of sf and fantasy magazine reprint material the larger houses weren't picking up too readily in the early and mid 1950s, got the rights to publish the hardcover editions for the first several volumes from Dell, till Gnome began to completely collapse and Merril and Dell struck up a deal with Simon & Schuster for the hardcover editions with the fourth volume. Meanwhile, the Richard Powers cover for the Dell paperback and the Edward Emshwiller design for the Gnome hardcover jacket were both typically impressive...one wonders who misspelled Avram Davidson's name below, however--and left off Shirley Jackson's name altogether!






























SF: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. Judith Merril (Gnome, 1956, $3.50, 352pp, hc)

• Introduction · Orson Welles · in
• Preface · Judith Merril · pr
• The Stutterer · R. R. Merliss · nv Astounding Apr 1955
• The Golem · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Mar 1955
• Junior · Robert Abernathy · ss Galaxy Jan 1956
• The Cave of Night · James E. Gunn · ss Galaxy Feb 1955
• The Hoofer · Walter M. Miller, Jr. · ss Fantastic Universe Sep 1955
• Bulkhead · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Galaxy Mar 1955, as “Who?”
• Sense from Thought Divide [Ralph Kennedy] · Mark Clifton · nv Astounding Mar 1955
• Pottage [People] · Zenna Henderson · nv F&SF Sep 1955
• Nobody Bothers Gus · Algis Budrys · ss Astounding Nov 1955, as by Paul Janvier
• The Last Day of Summer · E. C. Tubb · ss Science-Fantasy #12 1955
• One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts · Shirley Jackson · ss F&SF Jan 1955
• The Ethicators · Willard Marsh · ss If Aug 1955
• Birds Can’t Count · Mildred Clingerman · ss F&SF Feb 1955
• Of Missing Persons · Jack Finney · ss Good Housekeeping Mar 1955
• Dreaming Is a Private Thing · Isaac Asimov · ss F&SF Dec 1955
• The Country of the Kind · Damon Knight · ss F&SF Feb 1956
• The Public Hating · Steve Allen · ss Bluebook Jan 1955
• Home There’s No Returning · Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore · nv No Boundaries, Ballantine 1955
• The Year’s S-F, Summation and Honorable Mentions · Judith Merril · ms

While writer Julian May (Dikty)'s clip art-style and basic typography cover for the Advent/SFBC final volume was certainly functional (she was far better known for her story "Dune Roller"--which she also illustrated for its magazine appearance--and would return to writing sf after a long hiatus with a series of novels, and also short movie novelizations as by "Ian Thorne", in the early 1980s).

The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 9th Series ed. T. E. Dikty and Earl Kemp (Advent:Publishers; Doubleday SFBC, 1958, hc; 258 + vi pp)

• 1 · The Science-Fiction Year · T. E. Dikty · ar
• 14 · 2066: Election Day · Michael Shaara · ss Astounding Dec 1956
• 28 · The Mile-Long Spaceship · Kate Wilhelm · ss Astounding Apr 1957
• 37 · The Last Victory · Tom Godwin · ss If Aug 1957
• 53 · Call Me Joe · Poul Anderson · nv Astounding Apr 1957
• 85 · Didn’t He Ramble · Chad Oliver · ss F&SF Apr 1957
• 97 · The Queen’s Messenger · John J. McGuire · nv Astounding May 1957
• 119 · The Other People · Leigh Brackett · nv Venture Mar 1957, as “The Queer Ones”
• 155 · Into Your Tent I’ll Creep · Eric Frank Russell · ss Astounding Sep 1957
• 164 · Nor Dust Corrupt · James V. McConnell · ss If Feb 1957
• 178 · Nightsound · Algis Budrys · ss Satellite Science Fiction Feb 1957, as “The Attic Voice”
• 189 · The Tunesmith · Lloyd Biggle, Jr. · nv If Aug 1957
• 226 · Hunting Machine · Carol Emshwiller · ss Science Fiction Stories May 1957
• 233 · The Science-Fiction Book Index · Earl Kemp · ix

One notes both anthologies hew pretty closely to the sf and fantasy magazines for their selections, with the Merril showing a slightly greater eclecticism in sources, if not to nearly the same degree she would later, with stories from a paperback collection and Bluebook and Good Housekeeping, the latter by fantastic specialist Jack Finney. Both mix new and veteran writers, and both limit the contributions by women writers to three each...if rather stellar trios: Shirley Jackson, Mildred Clingerman and Zenna Henderson in the Merril, Leigh Brackett, Kate Wilhelm and Carol Emshwiller in the Dikty/Kemp. Only Jackson and Brackett could be considered true veterans at time of inclusion, though Clingerman, Henderson and Emshwiller were a few years into their careers. 

The Merril book begins with Orson Welles's account of his wife Paola Mori and a publisher friend going and buying the actor/director a gift of a shelf-full of sf and similar novels, and how little he enjoyed most of them...in the course of making a pitch for the short fiction in the field, which was less likely to be written by an opportunistic veteran or tyro writer, either sort frequently not up to speed with the best of sf, as the novels often were in 1955. Not that there was any lack of hackwork in the magazines, particularly the lesser ones, which were undergoing the first thinning out, after a boom in the early 1950s in the wake of the insurgent successes of the new Galaxy and the improved, more mature Startling Stories, and the continuing good profitability of Astounding SF, as the American News Company, the distributor which handled perhaps half  or more of the magazine traffic in the States, was beginning to lose some of its major clients before the company was sold off piecemeal in 1957 for its real estate and other assets, more valuable by some distance in total than its stock price had been. The glut of magazines had made it possible for a half-competent writer to place any given half-competent story Somewhere in the field, but this also didn't do any favors for the magazines as a whole, since it meant casual or first-time sf/fantasy magazine readers often were as likely to find a mediocre experience at best in their purchase as a good or better one. But, nonetheless, the magazines did tend to have editors more knowledgeable about sf, fantasy and horror than the paperback or hardcover book houses did, with some few exceptions...and even the lower-budgeted magazines often featured work less spavined than too many of the novels, whether new books or primitive or otherwise unworthy reprints. It might also be noted that Dell was fond of getting some sort of Name associated with their magazines and paperback anthologies in those years, not infrequently a Hollywood celebrity such as Welles or Alfred Hitchcock. 

Merril's first-volume preface is brief, and agrees with Welles's notion that sf and fantasy are the Fables of Today in 1956. And then leads off the fiction in her first volume with a relatively clumsy "first story", R. R. Merliss's "The Stutterer", which would turn out to be its young medical-doctor/writer's only story (at very least under his own name) in the sf/fantasy media; he would write two novels with medical themes, one an historical novel set during the Black Plague years, and the other a contemporary novel about life as a med student and intern, published in the 1960s, as by Reuben Merliss. The story, given it was published in Astounding, is remarkably clumsy not only in its literary qualities (often overlooked in that magazine) but also in some of its technological aspects, as it posits android soldiers built from an alloy so hard that an atomic blast at ground zero will do no more to it than crystallize a thin outer layer of it, without bothering to explain how such a material might be shaped or otherwise worked with in manufacture. Merliss also frequently jumps from

one character to another in terms of point of view in a scene to no good purpose, and explains every action of his characters at times in such a way that should've been pruned, but this was the beginning of the Tin Age at John Campbell's Astounding, where his attention was beginning to be concentrated in fringe "science" and the political content of his editorials, and such miserable writers as E. B. Cole and the blandest sort of yard-goods writing by those who could do better, such as the young Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett, began to be staples of the magazine. Not a terrible story, but probably the worst in the book, and a very poor choice to start with. 

The next, much better story is also about an android, one of Avram Davidson's most famous, if a bit heavy on the fan service and easy schtick, "The Golem"...an elderly couple, the Gumbeiners, are visited one afternoon by a lumbering, gray-complected fellow who invites himself up onto their front porch, and begins to lecture them about how there is clearly an innate emnity between humanity and androids such as itself. The Gumbeiners are unimpressed. 

Humor, a bit more labored, continues with Robert Abernathy's "Junior", involving sentient polypoid sea creatures including an innovative young male who manages to upset tradition. A lot of fan service in this one, though with a cute notion to end with. 

James Gunn's "The Cave of Night" is, like the Davidson, his earliest widely-cited story, an account of the first human astronaut, launched in military secrecy and on a budget mission...and apparently through misadventure stranded in his disabled space capsule in Earth orbit, making broadcasts to the Earth below over shortwave as he awaits probably unlikely rescue or for his oxygen to run out in about a month's time. The pompous tone which runs through the piece is not completely excused by it being told by an old newspaper-reporter friend of the broadcasting astronaut. Nicely encapsulates the notion of three-stage rocketry for Earth-based space exploration, and deftly describes the impressive vistas from an orbiting craft, though.