Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  I can and always will credit Damon for that literary gift. I never would have attempted the story without his goading. And so far as I can tell, the whole challenge thing was done off the cuff, winging it as he went, all because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Finally, though, the thing about Damon’s life and personality that I’ll carry with me in memory so long as I live is something that has a little to do with Peter Pan and a lot to do with keeping in twisted touch with the inner child. I think it made some observers a little nervous when Damon Knight, one of the major intellects of the field, offered clear indications that—at least at times—he was a big kid at heart.

  Remember Tom Hanks in the movie Big? About the child who, through a type of magic, wishes he were all grown up and finds himself with his boy’s mentality inhabiting Tom Hanks’s adult body?

  At the various workshops where he taught—especially at Clarion—Damon suggested it was merely therapeutic when he hauled out mass quantities of squirt guns and Superballs and paper airplanes and Silly String and triggered long episodes of hysterical playtime among adult participants so boisterous, they suggested herds of kindergartners off their meds.

  I can recall a Clarion decompression episode where something like two dozen people crowded into Damon and Kate’s small faculty apartment. Everyone but Kate was screaming like a mad creature. Damon grinned like a lunatic as he hurled missile after paper missile. Kate, of course, sat perfectly still with a Mona Lisa smile, an island of patient calm amid the surrounding melee. Naturally not a single paper aircraft struck her; it was as though they veered aside as they approached her event horizon.

  But Damon appeared to be having the time of his life as he ensured that we all were having ours. For that as well as all his formal literary gifts, I’ll always thank him. It’s the way I want to remember one of science fiction’s greatest senior statesmen.

  CURIOUS DAMON KNIGHT

  Eileen Gunn

  Eileen Gunn is the editor and publisher of the online science fiction magazine The Infinite Matrix and is at work on a biography of Avram Davidson. She is currently chair of the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for the Hugo Award. Eileen’s Web site is http://www.sff.net/people/gunn/. The Infinite Matrix can be found at http://www.infinitematrix.net/.

  Damon Knight was a curious fellow, in the several senses of the word: he exhibited curiosity, and he was himself a fascinating and atypical example of his species.

  Damon expended, in a deceptively casual fashion, a great deal of energy toward discovering what was curious in the world around him. Much of the world around him was words. He would leap upon a word or a concept, interrogate it, and try to find what, if anything, it had to recommend itself to him. Any chat with Damon at home usually involved a number of incursions into a dictionary or encyclopedia. He kept a trove of them in which to pursue etymologies and ideas, and he delighted in searching just a bit past the point at which most people would stop, looking for odd meanings, earliest uses, beginnings, dead ends, uniquenesses.

  He interrogated people the same way, probing them for meaning, and when he found it he gave a gleeful laugh that was somewhere between an extended chuckle and a hoot. On first observing this, I thought he was laughing in scorn, and that the person thus examined was found wanting, but eventually it dawned on me that this was a laugh of delight. It was a finder’s laugh, the laugh of Damon discovering something unique: an unusual point of view, an unanticipated idiocy, a surprising association.

  I knew Damon first as a writer of clever short stories: “The Handler,” “Rule Golden,” “The Country of the Kind,” and, of course, “To Serve Man.” When I was a teenager, Damon Knight’s early stories defined the genre for me. This was what a science fiction story was meant to be: witty, clean, slightly cruel, with a twist at the end that subverted what had gone before. This is not how I think of Damon’s later stories, which seem more meditative, more about the immediacy of experience and the uniqueness of the individual. They are still witty, still clean, but, rather than cruel, they seem transparent, objective. It may be the same attribute, worn smooth by forty years of writing.

  As an adult, I knew Damon as a teacher and a friend. I attended Clarion, and for a couple of years I lived in Eugene and attended the monthly workshops and other gatherings there at Kate and Damon’s home. Damon was a painstaking, informative, and hilarious copy editor, and I learned a lot, very quickly, from the way he marked up stories—my own and those of others. Hmmm. Right. Won’t do that again. Damon was also an artist, and he had a tendency to illustrate, in the margin, unfortunate turns of phrase. “Her eyes fell to the floor” was a favorite.

  I have heard Damon called a cruel critic, but I never saw that. He was an honest critic, and said what he thought. If he wasn’t interested in a story, he didn’t try to be. He gave, as far as I could see, the same attention to everyone. In his critiques, he usually gave me the impression that there was really nothing worth reading in what I had written. Occasionally—months, sometimes years, after the critique—I’d get a note suggesting he hadn’t meant to be harsh. (“There must have been something there that I liked, as I set this aside. I have no recollection now what it was.”)

  In the early 1990s, Damon discovered the Internet. He was entering his seventies, and his hearing was starting to give him trouble. The Science Fiction Roundtable on Genie presented a throng of old friends and antagonists, Clarion grads, and newcomers of every stripe. Damon quickly became a presence there—funny, in-your-face, knowledgeable, nitpicking, snarky, and intolerant of carelessness and ignorance. He enforced a standard of proper discourse by means of his witty, relentless ridicule of careless spelling and inept punctuation. He wasn’t the only intelligent, precise, literate human being on Genie, not by far, but his insistence that everyone rise to his standards, watch their spelling, and learn how to use apostrophes contributed a lot toward making the SFRT seem an enclave of articulate discussion.

  Being on Genie with Damon was a lot like visiting him at home. He asked curious questions and never explained why. Sometimes they seemed to be research of a sort: “What’s the difference between a fatal and nonfatal bullet wound in the brain?” “Isn’t there a rhyme that begins, ‘Ringel, ringel, rosen’? If so, does anybody know the rest?” He offered spelling corrections: “That’s ‘bandied about,’ unless you were throwing chickens back and forth.” He presented odd facts, and told jokes and parables. Sometimes it was hard to tell a joke from a parable: Young bride from the Middle West is having tea with wives of her husband’s friends in New York. “And where do you come from?” one of them asks. “Iowa,” says the trembling bride. The other woman leans closer. “Dear,” she says, “out here we pronounce that ‘Ohio.’ ” It had been a dozen years or so since I’d sat on the claw-footed chairs in Kate and Damon’s living rooom, but Genie brought it all back. If there’s an archive somewhere—and there probably is—it’s a national treasure, for Damon’s posts alone.

  The earliest photos I’ve seen of Damon, fannish snapshots from the Forties, show a gangly and serious young man, more Abraham Lincoln than Damon Knight. Bookjackets from the Sixties show a clean-shaven, slightly grim-looking guy, possibly a jazz musician or an abstract painter. When I first met Damon, in 1976, he was a bit younger than I am now, but his Shavian beard gave the impression that he was as old as Methuselah. The inner Damon, the “young punk” of Genie, the “annoying kid brother” of Leslie What’s essay, was never so old, and I’ve never seen a photograph that depicts that fellow. If you’ve got one, get in touch. I’m sure it’s a curiosity.

  SENSEI WONDER

  Leslie What

  Leslie What has won a Nebula Award for short story and a bookstore award for sitting while tap dancing. Her novel Olympic Games will be out in May 2004. Leslie’s Web site can be found at http://www.sff.net/people/leslie.what/.

  Damon Knight was a kid brother–silly curmudgeon when I met him at the Clario
n Writers Workshop in 1976. I thought he was a good teacher and a mean guy. After Clarion I moved to Oregon, wrote, worked in hospice care, moved away, married, bore children, and created art. I returned to Oregon in 1985, and Damon and his wife Kate Wilhelm invited me back to the monthly workshop they held at their house. My two reproductive outbursts had transformed me from a confident outgoing woman into an uncertain, anorexic mom who had managed to write only one short story in five years. Believing that my story offered proof of exceptional talent, I presented it for critique, expecting praise.

  That didn’t happen.

  The critique went around the circle. Condemnation poured like salt over my bleeding manuscript. One woman stopped knitting and pointed a silver needle toward my face, emphasizing her sharp critique. Damon added cantankerous remarks I can’t quite recall, something like, “There are more layers in a baloney and cheese sandwich,” only with panache. As was the protocol of the workshop, I listened and said nothing. I gave up writing to focus on art, work, and homemaking.

  A few years later, while shopping for a toilet plunger at the Freddie’s department store, I met Damon in the checkout line. He wore corduroy pants, a red flannel shirt, and wool motoring cap. With his long hair, Birkenstock sandals over bare feet, and poorly behaved beard, he looked like an Oregon-hippie lawn gnome.

  “You know,” he said, “we haven’t seen you at workshop for a while. Did something happen?”

  “Don’t you remember?” I said. “You trashed my story—the first thing I had written in years! I never wanted to write again!”

  His words seemed carefully chosen. “I don’t remember the story,” Damon said, “but you’re welcome to come back.” He apologized for having hurt my feelings and offered to reread the story and see if his opinion had changed. He waited for my answer, oblivious to his role in one of the most devastating events in my life.

  I was bewildered. How could he not remember?

  I experienced what philosopher Emil Fackenheim calls a shocking moment of recognition, discovering something so true, it forced me to reevaluate everything I thought I knew. Damon had not meant for his cutting remarks to be taken personally. He had critiqued a story, not me; he was unaware of the power he wielded, or how students craved his approval. Damon wasn’t a mean man so much as he wasn’t a sensitive one. I later told Kate that Damon wasn’t sexist like so many men of his generation, not because he proved that by publishing a number of women authors when he edited the Orbit series, but because he treated every sloppy writer with equal contempt.

  I rejoined the workshop and for the next several years turned in a story nearly every month. Damon was a less patient critic than Kate, who excelled at figuring out what the writer meant to do with the story. Damon limited his responses to the words as written. He acted genuinely puzzled when students got things wrong, as if we had messed up on purpose. People reacted to his brusque remarks in different ways. He once told Martha Bayless that “The universe would have been a better place had this story never been written,” and told another workshop participant that her story made him want to vomit. The woman whose story made Damon want to puke left rather bruised, but to this day, Martha is proud to have written a story that threatened the stability of the universe.

  “How much are you paying me to read this?” he wrote on one of my manuscripts. On another, he crossed out page after page of text, leaving about 100 out of 6000 words untouched. When I complained about him castrating my story, he laughed. Damon had a better belly laugh than Santa Claus.

  Damon marked every typo, unneeded word, and questionable usage in his careful line-by-line edits. His writing was precise and clear; he demanded no less from his students. He compared stories to fruit and told us when we had picked them a little too green. He drew comical pictures on the back pages, especially when the story bored him. If he liked something, he drew a smiley face beside the line. After workshop, students compared how many smiley faces we had earned. Ray Vukcevich usually won.

  Social courtesies weren’t his thing. Maybe he was too busy reading important books, writing, or contemplating the big stuff to care how others perceived him. Though he argued relentlessly with fans and colleagues, he was more interested in finding truth than winning arguments. When he was wrong, he readily admitted it.

  His critiques weren’t helpful to every writer, but Damon became my mentor. I possessed creativity and talent without discipline. Damon’s willingness to read and comment on my work over a sustained period of time allowed me to acquire the skills and work ethic needed to become a professional writer. He was my esteemed sensei, who taught me to pay attention to every word. Nothing got by him. I could tell when he had checked out a library book before I got to it by his corrections to the text.

  When my first story was published in 1992, I gave Damon and Kate a copy of the magazine. Damon offered congratulations before sitting with his pen to mark up the text. His corrections were small—word choices, cuts that would have improved comic timing. He was genuinely proud, but let me know, sensei-style, that I could do better.

  Damon expected his students to go beyond achieving simple competence as writers. I workshopped a story that later sold to a theme anthology. Damon said, “If this is for that anthology, then you’ll probably sell it, for while I think you’ve written a dreadful story, the others are bound to be worse.”

  I finally wrote something Damon admired, and his praise filled me with pride because I knew that he wouldn’t compliment me just to be nice. In fact, he detested the next story I turned in. “Leslie,” he said, sounding weary, “reading is a voluntary act. You can’t force me to read this, and I didn’t.” He smiled and added, “Other than that, I liked it.”

  That statement taught me the most important thing I have ever learned about writing.

  Reading is a voluntary act.

  If a story is so unpleasant, boring, or unrewarding that a workshop leader doesn’t choose to read it, how can a writer persuade strangers to pay attention?

  Damon was also more fun than Pop Rocks. Workshop member Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I came up with the idea of photographing people on a bearskin rug at conventions. Damon was the first one to pose, which he did while smoking a cigar. He was famous for his stealth squirt gun fights, and he also played a mean game of croquet. Eileen Gunn reminded me of the time I brought a book called “57 Sneaky Feats” to the workshop. One stunt told How to Pick Up a Person Using Only Your Teeth. The trick involved convincing someone to lie faceup while the performer lifted him off the ground by grasping his leather belt in her teeth. Damon thought the whole thing preposterously funny until I seemingly defied physics and common sense by lifting him several inches off the ground.

  In 2000, Damon’s health began to fail, and late in the year he fell, breaking his coccyx. The pain made him crankier than usual. After I visited one day, he worried that he had acted rudely and e-mailed to apologize. I quickly let him know that I hadn’t noticed.

  But there were typos in his e-mail. Damon never made spelling mistakes, even in e-mail—a worrying signal. Despite physical limitations, his critical facilities were sharp as ever, his last writings brilliant. Although in pain, he continued to colead the workshop until a few months before his death. Teaching students to care about the art of writing was a commitment that Damon Knight took seriously.

  At one of the last workshops, he and I both presented offbeat stories for critique. His was wonderful, but confusing in places. He praised my work and told me to cut out my favorite scene. After the critique, Damon took my hand. He warned me that my story might be too odd to sell. I told him the same about his. We made a deal: I would send my story to an editor who disliked my work, if he would send his story to an editor he doubted would buy it. Neither story sold its first time out.

  I am profoundly grateful that Damon Knight accepted me as his pupil, and heartened that he knew how much his students cherished and respected him. I would learn that he respected us as well. When Damon’s story was published, it was
slightly different than the workshop version. Our mentor had taught us well and used our critiques to better his writing.

  NEIL GAIMAN SAYS . . .

  American Gods is a big, sprawling, slightly peculiar novel about America and about a man called Shadow who finds himself working for an elderly Odin in the run-up to a war between the old, forgotten gods, and the newer, more transient, more technological gods. It’s a fantasy novel, and it contains several short stories as part of its substance, in which people come to America. This is the story of the first people coming to America, about 16,000 years ago.

  I’m English. I write comics sometimes, and prose, and, occasionally, films and radio plays. I write books for children and books for adults, and, from time to time, short stories. Also I keep a Weblog and too many cats. I’m living in the midwest currently and can no longer remember why. . . .

  His Web site (and Weblog) can be found at http://www.neilgaiman.com/.

  FROM AMERICAN GODS

  NEIL GAIMAN

  Coming to America

  14,000 B.C.

  Cold it was, and dark, when the vision came to her, for in the far north daylight was a grey dim time in the middle of the day that came, and went, and came again: an interlude between darknesses.

  They were not a large tribe as these things were counted then: nomads of the Northern Plains. They had a god, who was the skull of a mammoth, and the hide of a mammoth fashioned into a rough cloak. Nunyunnini, they called him. When they were not travelling, he rested on a wooden frame, at man height.