Subject: (urth) A Sad Loss

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 16:58:26 +0000

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, but I know that if it
were not for Knight's ORBIT series or original anthologies, 
we might not have Gene Wolfe - we might not, that is, have 
the Gene Wolfe we know & love; I am sure that his talent
would have blossomed somewhere, but it might not have been
in the genre of SF/F. And, of course, 

Let us then observe a moment of silence and, for those of
us who do such things, prayer. 

Damon Knight is dead.

--A Very Depressed Blattid

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From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 10:16:51 +0000

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>I have no idea what that means, but.

Hmm. There used to be some sort of in-joke in SF publishing circles that
publishers (or editors?) didn't discover their writers, but grew them from
magic beans. Please don't ask me where I got this from, because I've been
racking my brains trying to remember ever since I saw your post. It feels
like I read it in an essay or a foreword somewhere, and I can conjure up
almost the exact sentence, but not the source.

On another level, if you're right about Number Five's family name being more
than just a pun, then it's hard not to also see this dedication as a joking
comparison of the Knight-Wolfe relationship to that of father and son in
5HC.  After all, Maitre grows little Gene Wolfes from seed too.

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From: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 13:43:05 +0000

>5HC.  After all, Maitre grows little Gene Wolfes from seed too.

I believe the root meaning is that early on Wolfe attended one or more of 
Knight's SF Writers Workshops.

Nutria

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 15:04:43 +0000

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

> 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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From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 16:05:53 +0000

Adam,

Thank you very much for solving the magic bean mystery. You have the thanks
of a grateful discussion group.

As far as Wolfe having read Baum's Oz books as well as Ruth Plumley Thompson's,
I am certain that he did. Quite a while ago, I posted a very long and roughly
written series of messages analyzing Wolfe's novella "The Eyeflash Miracles"
and I was able to find some pretty specific references to Baum's Oz books. Of
course, I suppose this isn't definitive: Thompson and the other subsequent Oz
authors reused charaters and settings from Baum as well as inventing their own.
I only re-read Baum's original 14 Oz books during my "Eyeflash" analysis. Now
that I know he preferred the Thompson books, I'll have to try to find time to
re-read those, as well.

--
William Ansley

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