Damon Knight (1922–2002)

You can’t judge a book by it’s cover, I know, but it sure is hard to ignore that testicular head.

If you get passed it, though, you are in for a treat.

A genre story has an effect in mind, always. It is aimed at something. In a horror story, it is fear. In a cowboy story, it is a sense of adventure.

A science fiction story from the fifties wants your chin on the floor and Damon knight knew how to get it there.

His are stories of the kind published in Galaxy and Astounding, polished and show more structured. A lot of them are told like a joke, with the obligatory punchline. “Not with a bang”, is one. “To Serve Man.” Others go a lot deeper and use the outlandish to embody an emotional truth: “The Enemy”, “The Handler”.

Science fiction, by now, has become what it always proclaimed to be: a combination of scientific speculation, combined with domestic realism.

To me, that is a loss.

Because stories from the 50s are crazy, unpredictable, bizarre. You never now what you are getting into and it never takes too long.

Clearly, this is where Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) did his shopping. show less

Damon Knight is the most vivid contemporary critic of Golden Age science fiction. He was a pal who crashed on the couches of some of the writers that an organization he founded would later celebrate as Grandmasters. He knew precisely the nature of their talent, but from his1945 devastating takedown of A.E. van Vogt to his qualified appreciations of Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Clarke, he was quite willing to tell his friends when they tripped over their shoelaces.

Here are some show more highlights.

As a young man in 1945, he was undaunted by the reputation of A. E. van Vogt. He finds egregious errors in his science. He finds the plot of The World of Null-A full of “contradictions, misleading clues and irrelevant action.” Its characters do not act consistently with the qualities they are supposed to have. Knight says van Vogt’s sentence and diction are “fumbling and insensitive.” Nor can he build a scene or create a believable character.

He notes that a year after becoming a best seller, L. Ron Hubbard vanished “trailing a cloud of lawsuits.” His scamming and role-playing led him to waste his talent.

At times, Knight slips in the knife with faint praise: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend “is full of good ideas, every other one of which is immediately dropped and kicked out of sight.” In Double Star, Knight says Heinlein “demonstrates again that the boobs cannot put so many greasy fingerprints on an idea that a good writer cannot lift it out shining and new.”

Asimov said his Galactic empire was “simply the Roman … Empire written large.” Knight calls that phrase “an absolutely devastating criticism of any science fiction story.”

Knight agrees with those purists who say that Bradbury does not write science fiction and that his technology is a joke. He writes, Knight says, about a remembered Midwestern childhood “seen through the wrong end of a rose-colored glass.”

Finally, Knight would not be the last to note that Arthur C. Clarke writes fiction in which gadgets are more important than people.

He makes a good case for two writers, Theodore Sturgeon and Jack Williamson, whose reputations have unjustly slipped. But he certainly overpraises Curme Gray, the author of only one novel of any note.

Most of these essays were originally published in small circulation pulps, and we are lucky to have them rescued from oblivion in this book. show less

2.5/5

While better than the other Knight that I've read (Hell's Pavement), A For Anything still leaves a lot to be desired and leaves me feeling like I can safely pass up anything else written by Knight in the future, especially since most consider this his best work.

The narrative is far more coherently drawn than Hell's Pavement, though we still have a dystopia that was nucleated by a singular macguffin technology. In A For Anything the macguffin is a simple matter duplicator called a show more "Gismo" that gets spread to the public, prompting widespread societal upheaval. The story takes place some generations after this event, when the control of this device has been taken over by an aristocratic class who rule over a much large slave caste, much of whom have been 'duped' by the device itself, clones that get replaced as they age out of their function. The central character, Dick Jones, is the juvenile heir apparent to a feudal lord who rules over a portion of land near Pittsburgh. Much like the aristocratic class in Vance's The Last Castle, Dick and his family are mostly wrapped up in political intrigue games, focused on concepts like honor and tradition as their every whim is serviced by the slaves that serve as the backbone of society. Dick is sent off to Eagles, the capital city located near Denver, to earn his stripes in society, make connections with other nobles, and become worthy of inheriting his fathers estate. During this time at Eagles, Dick is involved in political subterfuge that eventually gets overshadowed by a widespread slave revolt.

The central thematic idea is that, once material goods becomes unlimited in quantity, the dominant commodity will become labor itself, and wealth will subsequently be measured by how much labor you command. Hence, a slavery caste system. Knight certainly has a pessimistic view. Where others might see a utopia, he sees reason to believe that without the struggle to survive we would find ourselves reverting to some of our most sinful tendencies as a species. I find it hard to agree with him in many ways.

The characters, the setting, the prose, and everything else outside of the central idea and narrative are boilerplate at best. Nothing memorable or exciting that would set it apart from the million other dullard dystopian novels of the time period. The Last Castle is its superior in most every way, so it's hard to get excited about the limited strengths that I found here. It's also rife with a lot of the more regrettable gender and racial stereotypes that were common at the time.

Interesting to a point, but ultimately not super noteworthy in any particular way. show less

A classic science fiction tale and a warning about 'Greeks bearing gifts' from Damon Knight that stands up seventy years on. To say more would ruin the tale because it is really one of those 'punch line' tales that dominated short form sci fi in the 1950s and 1960s.

Many science fiction tales in that era shared the pattern of horror, fantasy and mystery stories in being structured like extended 'jokes' with an exposition that would lead to a 'twist' that caused a shiver in the reader rather show more than a laugh.

This was the tradition of Hitchcockian television whose British equivalent was Roald Dahl's sinister 'Tales of the Unexpected'. It raises interesting questions about the link between laughter and fear, between the punch line and the 'twist' as a shared form of tale-telling.

Either way, the 'twist' was the gateway into an insight into the human condition much as the punch line satirised that condition. It seems to have diminished in importance in the last half century - perhaps we are no longer so easily surprised unless it is more obviously a joke.

But perhaps Knight's tale is a sort of joke of the type we call gallows humour ... show less