Moderated by the one of the most highly awarded novelists and short story writers in the genre, Michael Swanwick (pictured at right) this panel also includes Gardner Dozois (author and editor of both the influential magazine Asimov’s Science Fiction and the long-running Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series), celebrated novelist, poet and critic Thomas M. Disch, and distinguished British novelist and short story writer D. G. Compton. (Carol Emshwiller, a SF icon whose current work is winning a new readership, was scheduled to attend but had to cancel due to fragile health.) All the panelists have ties to Milford.

The late Judith Merril, an author and anthologist still remembered by a few older Milford residents, moved here in the wake of similar moves by author/critic Damon Knight, author/critic James Blish, and Blish’s wife (Judy’s former roommate), Virginia (nee Kidd). Judy once wrote:

• I was at the Milford Science Fiction Conference, an annual event that I co-founded and used to attend every year. A young writer named Thomas Disch [pictured at right] came to the conference for the first time. When we met, he said ...."I wanted you to know, Judy, that, when I was thirteen years old, I picked up an anthology of yours in a little town in North Dakota where I was living, and for the first time, I knew that things could be different."
  -Reprinted by permission of the Judith Merril Literary Estate, Emily Pohl-Weary (executrix), and their literary agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
  

Looked at with a knowing eye, this passage says a lot about science fiction/SF, its influence and its relation to Milford.

Judith Merril (pictured at left), Damon Knight, James Blish and Virginia Kidd Emden were originally science fiction aficionados belonging to The Futurians, a New York fan club that believed in the future, science, technology - and science fiction. As their success grew, Knight, Blish, and Blish’s wife Virginia (nee Kidd), moved to Milford, Pennsylvania. Virginia Kidd’s former roommate, Judith Merril, found her way here as well.

In Milford, Knight (pictured at right), Blish and Merril established the Milford Conferences, yearly one-week writers’ workshops formally instituted in 1956. The group bent its early efforts toward promoting such mainstream literary values as characterization and thematic complexity. The community they fostered supported the development of, to name a few, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, Alfred Bester, R. A. Lafferty, Jack Vance, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Golding. It was the critical force in introducing "women’s material" to science fiction, creating the climate for the work of, among others, Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K. Le Guin, both of whom became clients of Virginia’s (pictured at left), who had started a literary agency. The Milford spirit was behind the founding, under Knight’s initial presidency, of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SWFA. Further, the Milford Conferences’ methodology was the model for the Clarion Workshops, an SF writers’ bootcamp central to the development of any number of current SF writers, including some on the panel.

Science fiction itself, of course, was born either at that famous party in the city of Geneva, the one where Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein – or maybe it was in the village of Bath, where she wrote it. But is Milford the birthplace of Modern Speculative Fiction?

You bet. In the 1960's, it was Judy Merril of the "Milford Mafia" who declared science fiction dead and speculative fiction (SF) raised from its ashes.

"Image, Flesh & Voice", a 1969 documentary by famous science fiction illustrator Ed Emshwiller [pictured at right], featuring many of the Milford Mafia was shown at 10.15pm Saturday night in the Film Salon. All of the panelists, along with friends, were in attendance to see this long-lost gem.

Sponsored by The Pike County Historical Society, The Virginia Kidd Agency, and The Black Bear Film Festival

The Foundation Room
The Columns
Pike County Historical Society