In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction

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 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 show more 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