The Best of Damon Knight

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 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 show more 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

A collection of short stories first published between 1949 and 1973. One of the earliest of of these is "To Serve Man," which was adapted into the classic Twilight Zone episode of the same name and features what is probably the most well-known punchline in the history of science fiction. For those familiar with that particular tale, in either form, it probably gives you a decent sense of what the collection as a whole is like. Some of these stories are silly, some serious, some in a weird gray area in-between, but they almost all have a sort of clever wryness that holds up quite well, even when the stories, at this late date, feel stylistically or culturally old-fashioned. Which some of them do and some of them don't. And the last show more piece, "Down There," is a trip to read in 2025, let me tell you. Its opening pages are one of the most bizarrely prescient things I've ever read, as they basically describe a guy writing a story using ChatGPT and stopping occasionally to google stuff. show less