{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3152", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 3152, "subject": "A Sad Loss", "messages": 5, "voices": 5, "first": "2002-04-15T16:58:26+00:00", "last": "2002-04-19T16:05:53+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com" }, "date": "2002-04-15T16:58:26+00:00", "subject": "(urth) A Sad Loss", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "The dedication to THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS reads:\n\n To Damon Knight, who\n one well-remembered\n June evening in 1966 grew me from a bean.\n\nI have no idea what that means, but I know that if it\nwere not for Knight's ORBIT series or original anthologies, \nwe might not have Gene Wolfe - we might not, that is, have \nthe Gene Wolfe we know & love; I am sure that his talent\nwould have blossomed somewhere, but it might not have been\nin the genre of SF/F. And, of course, \n\nLet us then observe a moment of silence and, for those of\nus who do such things, prayer. \n\nDamon Knight is dead.\n\n--A Very Depressed Blattid" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Tony Ellis", "address": "littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk" }, "date": "2002-04-18T10:16:51+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) A Sad Loss", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:\nThe dedication to THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS reads:\n\nTo Damon Knight, who\none well-remembered\nJune evening in 1966 grew me from a bean.\n\nI have no idea what that means, but." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Hmm. There used to be some sort of in-joke in SF publishing circles that\npublishers (or editors?) didn't discover their writers, but grew them from\nmagic beans. Please don't ask me where I got this from, because I've been\nracking my brains trying to remember ever since I saw your post. It feels\nlike I read it in an essay or a foreword somewhere, and I can conjure up\nalmost the exact sentence, but not the source.\n\nOn another level, if you're right about Number Five's family name being more\nthan just a pun, then it's hard not to also see this dedication as a joking\ncomparison of the Knight-Wolfe relationship to that of father and son in\n5HC. After all, Maitre grows little Gene Wolfes from seed too." } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "James Jordan", "address": "jbjordan4 at cox.net" }, "date": "2002-04-18T13:43:05+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) A Sad Loss", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 05:16 AM 4/18/2002, you wrote:\nDan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "The dedication to THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS reads:\n\nTo Damon Knight, who\none well-remembered\nJune evening in 1966 grew me from a bean.\n\nI have no idea what that means, but." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Hmm. There used to be some sort of in-joke in SF publishing circles that\npublishers (or editors?) didn't discover their writers, but grew them from\nmagic beans. Please don't ask me where I got this from, because I've been\nracking my brains trying to remember ever since I saw your post. It feels\nlike I read it in an essay or a foreword somewhere, and I can conjure up\nalmost the exact sentence, but not the source.\n\nOn another level, if you're right about Number Five's family name being more\nthan just a pun, then it's hard not to also see this dedication as a joking\ncomparison of the Knight-Wolfe relationship to that of father and son in\n5HC. After all, Maitre grows little Gene Wolfes from seed too." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I believe the root meaning is that early on Wolfe attended one or more of \nKnight's SF Writers Workshops.\n\nNutria" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Adam Stephanides", "address": "adamsteph at earthlink.net" }, "date": "2002-04-19T15:04:43+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) A Sad Loss", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "on 4/15/02 11:58 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes at ddanehy at siebel.com wrote:\nThe dedication to THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS reads:\n\nTo Damon Knight, who\none well-remembered\nJune evening in 1966 grew me from a bean.\n\nI have no idea what that means," }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series vol. 9, Wolfe writes:\n\n\"I sent him [Knight] a rather experimental story in which a series of\nreports by an astronaut and a series of letters from a knight on the\nmedieval planet he was exploring ran in parallel columns--the left column\nbeing science fiction, the right fantasy. Knight liked the story but not\nits double-column format, and asked me to break it up into conventional\nskips from astronaut to alien and back to astronaut.\n\n \"I retitled it 'Trip Trap,' idiotically retyped it with the astronaut's\nreports, complete, follwed by the alien's letters, and returned it to\nKnight....\n\n \"Knight returned 'Trip Trap' marked to show the points at which he felt\nthe switches from one letter to the other should be made. I spent a couple\nof hours trying to improve on them and found I could not.... I'm still\nquestioned occasionally about that dedication; this is the event to which it\nrefers.\"\n\nWolfe goes on to say that Knight \"was the first--for a long time the\nonly--editor who communicated with me. We are both difficult personalities,\nperhaps, and we have drifted far apart since _Orbit_ went under; but I will\nalways be grateful to Knight for what he taught me, and still more for\nteaching me when no other editor thought it worthwhile.\"\n\n--Adam" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "William Ansley", "address": "wansley at warwick.net" }, "date": "2002-04-19T16:05:53+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) A Sad Loss", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Adam,\n\nThank you very much for solving the magic bean mystery. You have the thanks\nof a grateful discussion group.\n\nAs far as Wolfe having read Baum's Oz books as well as Ruth Plumley Thompson's,\nI am certain that he did. Quite a while ago, I posted a very long and roughly\nwritten series of messages analyzing Wolfe's novella \"The Eyeflash Miracles\"\nand I was able to find some pretty specific references to Baum's Oz books. Of\ncourse, I suppose this isn't definitive: Thompson and the other subsequent Oz\nauthors reused charaters and settings from Baum as well as inventing their own.\nI only re-read Baum's original 14 Oz books during my \"Eyeflash\" analysis. Now\nthat I know he preferred the Thompson books, I'll have to try to find time to\nre-read those, as well." }, { "kind": "sig", "depth": 0, "text": "William Ansley\n\n-- " } ] } ] }