Looks like this is the year for ancient photos of me I didn’t even remember having been taken turning up.

First, Sam Maronie surprised me with a 1974 photo of me threatening the world’s greatest comic book inker Joe Sinnott with a broadsword (plus two other pics). Now David Lubkin coughs up a 1979 photo of me and Damon Knight at Noreascon Two, the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention.

Damon was one of the six instructors during my six weeks at the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 1979, the others being Robin Scott Wilson, Algis Budrys, Carol Emshwiller, Tom Disch, and (of course) Kate Wilhelm.

I have no memory of this moment. Lubkin had captioned the photo, “Damon Knight admiring Stacy Mandell’s puppetcraft while Scott Edelman shows off his coiffure. Noreascon Two, at which Damon and wife Kate Wilhelm were Guests of Honor.”

When I asked him about the pic, which he’d shared on Facebook, he wrote, “I was sharing the dealer’s table with Stacy and organizing a Clarion reunion party, for which Damon & Kate volunteered their GoH suite and kicked in $150. I’m not sure if you were with Damon or were independently checking in with me.”

I’m not sure either. And if any of you out there think I remember after all these years whether I was trailing Damon or checking in about a party, you have a higher opinion of my memory than is deserved!

A few weeks back, I ran across a piece of my writing from a few decades ago that was so horrendous I felt I dared not share it with you. And when I told you that, I asked that you remember what Ezra Pound had said.

Found a poem I wrote 20+ years ago about Clarion. Man, was I pretentious! I _won't_ be sharing it with you. Remember what Ezra Pound said.

— Scott Edelman (@scottedelman) June 7, 2013

I figured I should share the exact quote—but when I went looking, I couldn’t find it. And neither could my friends who know more about Pound than I ever will. Which meant the only way to track down the quote was to dig out my diaries and find the page on which I had copied it over in my own hand from a book I’d found while visiting a friend in Eugene, Oregon. (I was staying with him because we’d attended Clarion together and I was going to head over to Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm’s house in the same city to take part in one of their famous workshops.)

Anyway, I’ve now finally found the time to locate the right diary—I’ve been keeping up with it since 1978 and so had a LOT of volumes to go through—and learned exactly why none of us could find that Pound quote, even with all the power of the Internet at our disposal.

(more…)

As soon as it was announced yesterday that Connie Willis had been named the next SFWA Grand Master, the Internet exploded with a wide range of chatter, ranging from “It’s about time!” to “Wow, I suddenly feel very old” to “Already?”

That was to be expected. Science fiction fandom doesn’t speak in one voice on anything.

But what I didn’t expect was to find some science fiction fans who had no idea who she was.

Here’s just one example, from Reddit:

Wow… Never heard of her, but she’s never written a series; it’s all short stories and individual novels, by the look of her wikipage.

How very unusual… And unmarketable, which is presumably why I’ve never heard of her.

Will look her stuff up, though.

How interesting to think that to some readers, if you’re writing short stories, or if your novels are not part of a series, you’re invisible—even if you’ve won seven Nebula Awards and eleven Hugo Awards.

I’m not judging the commenter, I’m just … surprised.

Damon Knight used to say that science fiction was the thing we pointed at when we said “science fiction,” but these days, science fiction is so fragmented that Damon would throw his back out trying to point in a thousand directions simultaneously.

And I keep forgetting that.

I’ve just been quoted extensively in an article by Carol Pinchefsky that went live today over at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. Carol interviewed me at last year’s World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs for a piece which would eventually be titled “Is There Nepotism in Science Fiction?” Go read it, and not just because you know me. Because that, after all, might be considered nepotism.

Interesting quotes there from David Hartwell, Stanley Schmidt, Susan Allison, Jay Lake, and others. And me. But more important than anything I might have to say on the matter is what Damon Knight once said:

I was a little shocked once, in the early fifties, when Tony Boucher mentioned casually that in a recent issue of F&SF, there was only one story that he had bought solely because of the author’s name. I thought that was one too many. Famous names may help sell a magazine; they don’t always, but if they do, it’s because those writers have written good stories in the past. Every time you publish a poor story by a famous writer, you diminish the value of that name and defeat your purpose.

I’m not sure when Knight said that, but it certainly still remains true today.