Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 10:04:43 -0500
Subject: Re: (urth) A Sad Loss
From: Adam Stephanides 

on 4/15/02 11:58 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes at ddanehy@siebel.com wrote:

> The dedication to THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS reads:
> 
> To Damon Knight, who
> one well-remembered
> June evening in 1966 grew me from a bean.
> 
> I have no idea what that means,

In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series vol. 9, Wolfe writes:

"I sent him [Knight] a rather experimental story in which a series of
reports by an astronaut and a series of letters from a knight on the
medieval planet he was exploring ran in parallel columns--the left column
being science fiction, the right fantasy.  Knight liked the story but not
its double-column format, and asked me to break it up into conventional
skips from astronaut to alien and back to astronaut.

   "I retitled it 'Trip Trap,' idiotically retyped it with the astronaut's
reports, complete, follwed by the alien's letters, and returned it to
Knight....

   "Knight returned 'Trip Trap' marked to show the points at which he felt
the switches from one letter to the other should be made.  I spent a couple
of hours trying to improve on them and found I could not....  I'm still
questioned occasionally about that dedication; this is the event to which it
refers."

Wolfe goes on to say that Knight "was the first--for a long time the
only--editor who communicated with me.  We are both difficult personalities,
perhaps, and we have drifted far apart since _Orbit_ went under; but I will
always be grateful to Knight for what he taught me, and still more for
teaching me when no other editor thought it worthwhile."

--Adam



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