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A Tribute toJudith Merril This piece was read at the tribute to Judith Merril, sponsored by the Harbourfront Festival of Authors, held at the premiere Dance Theater at 8:00 p.m., on Thursday, October 15, 1992, in Toronto. Other speakers that night in Merril's honor were John Robert Columbo, Katherine MacLean, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Frederik Pohl, Pierre Berton, Spider Robinson, and Michael Moorcock. The Tribute was hosted by Greg Gatenby. It concluded with an interview of Merril by Susan Crean.Judith Merril died in September 1997. Traditionally, "tribute" iswhat we pay to those who have conquered. And in the case of art, such conquest ispresumed a happy thing. The first works byJudy I read—and they whollyconquered me—were Gunner Cade (1952) and Outpost Mars (1952), whichJudy wrote in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth under their collaborative pseudonym, Cyril Judd. Brutal and authority-fixated Cade's transformation, as he learns compassion, to understand human rights and a higher sense of ethics, was as powerful to me as a thirteen-year-old reader as anything I'd read. Then an adolescent friend, more aware of the workings of the science fiction world than I, explained to me that Cyril Judd was, indeed, a shared pen name. Immediately I hunted up stories byboth writers. I found them. And I didn't like them—what thirteen-year-old reader would? For both writers, on their own,were working in the front rank of the genre, producing the most mature and measured work—and in Kornbluth's case, the most mordantly satirical work as well—of the day. I was, after all, only thirteen. When I came back to Merril's stories, however, as a reader on the slightly saner side of twenty-one, I began to see how extraordinary these stories were and how much—especially Merril's,for all their imaginative material—they clung to the nuance and articulation of the real and recognizable world. 19 374 Shorter Views For Merril's science fiction purposely eschewed the luxuriant exotica promising the adolescent mind the longed-for, and often needed, escape for which science fiction is so notorious. Rather, here wasa progression of sentences as clean and as balanced as sentences could be in the English of that decade, totally dedicated to the precise evocation of their object. And they were welded together into deeply wise stories, like "Peeping Tom" (1954), and into wonderfully moving ones, like "Dead Center" (1954). JamesJames Morrison Morrison Weathcrbee George Dupree Took great care of his mother, though he wasonly three. My own mother had read me that A.A. Milne poem many, many times; perhaps there was no way I could fail to identify, then, with six-year-old Toby, the bright, articulate child who views the desperate action around his father, the stranded astronaut Jock Kruger, and his mother, the engineer , Ruth. But I point out that when itwasfirstpublished, "Dead Center" was chosen for the prestigious Martha Foley Best Short Stories of 1954 anthology —the only story from the science fiction community to be so honored . I reread the tale last night. Its accuracy and its orchestration sounded out as truly and as tragically as they did in the year of its writing. Some time later, Merril would begin a glitteringlyincisive essayon the SF writer Theodore Sturgeon, with the ringing constadve: "The man has style. ..." But one need only read a page of that same essay, or, indeed, practically any of her other works to realize (as an English friend of mine put it when, to his delight, I first passed him the piece): "Sohas the lady. ..." For Merril was reconquering me—like a general who, having swept the land in one direction, sweeps back, securing this or that stronghold on the way,reinforcing this or that border. Many people have written about science fiction. But few have written about it as continuously and as intelligently as Merril. Because we are writers, our major life experiences are often caught between the covers of a book. It was my first visit to the Milford Science Fiction Conference (which Merril helped found, with writers Damon Knight and James Blish). Gracious and generous Kate Wilhelm had let me sleep in one of the empty rooms occupied during the school year by one of her adolescent sons, on the top floor of the cavernous Anchorage where the conferences then met. Myfirstafternoon I had walked into the workshop and found myself confronted by more of my fellow SF practitioners than I...

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