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Dark of the Knight
An Introduction And Epilogue
(Damon Knight)

Damon Knight grew up in Hood River, Oregon, made himself first known in the science-fiction field via a classic demolition in a fan magazine (despite the fact that the magazine had a circulation of no more than two hundred, the review had significant consequences upon two careers), and, like most bright people of his generation, fled to Manhattan. He worked briefly in a literary agency (the same one I worked in almost twenty years later), collaborated with James Blish on "Tiger Ride" for Astounding—this was his first major sale—wrote a few pulp stories under various pseudonyms, became a freelance illustrator and editor, and began to publish s-f widely. His "Not with a Bang," which leads off this collection, created some talk in the fall of 1949; by the mid-1950s he had established himself at the top of his field by steadily putting out sardonic and elegantly crafted pieces for the magazines. He wrote a few novels, too, one of which—A for Anything—is probably a masterpiece.

In the mid-fifties Knight's career as a creative writer began to slow up; he became a reviewer, then a critic, and wrote for a number of publications the first body of literate criticism in the history of science fiction. (His criticism was later collected in an important book, In Search of Wonder.) Around 1960 he got tired of criticism and turned to editing the Orbit series while he got back to fiction on a modest scale. "Down There," the last story in this volume and Knight's most recent, strikes me as being the best he's written, so one can hardly say that Knight has deteriorated in his middle age; in fact, he's a better writer than ever. He lives placidly and happily now with his wife, the distinguished writer Kate Wilhelm, in a big house in Florida, and he talks of never coming to New York again.

This is a bare enough outline of a working life, yet in the interstices you can see suggestions of the dimensions of the accomplishment. I submit that a good case could be made for Damon Knight's being the most important literary figure to come out of science fiction to date. He has, in the first place, excelled in everything he's done—editing, criticism, novels, short stories, and some extraordinary dirty limericks, too. In the second place, his reputation as critic and editor has obscured to younger writers and readers the fact that the body of fiction he produced in the 1950s was superb. Of all the writers H. L. Gold developed for Galaxy, Knight was probably the most characteristic and often the best at social satire and criticism. That he was not merely a satirist but a writer of great passion and stylistic range can be seen in stories like "The Handler" and "Masks," which are included here.

Always underrated (even by himself) as a novelist, he has produced several ignored works of quality—of which the aforementioned A for Anything, temporarily and unfortunately out of print, stands to last as long as any novel of its decade. (It was published in the late fifties.) A stunning portrait of a feudal society built upon the deliberate repression of abundance, A for Anything has the veracity of a political handbook and the conciseness and inevitability of a good scatological joke. It also has a conclusion that strikes me as being the single most depressing in science-fiction novels. I recommend it to you highly, and I also think you ought to take a look at Mind Switch (1964), an extension of his novella "The Visitor in the Zoo"; it strikes me as being the only novel in the manner of Garnett's Lady into Fox that has anything new to say.

And of course I recommend In Search of Wonder. Knight's original modest proposal was simply that science fiction is a branch of literature to which one can—and has to—apply the same critical standards one would apply to any other branch of literature. Out of reasonable scholarship, a good command of the history of the modern novel, and a shattering wit, Knight produced a critical work that stands by itself and is essentially responsible for any informed criticism of science fiction coming out today.

In short, Knight is a man of stature and quality, a writer of importance, and a writer whose works will be a new and perhaps jarring experience for many people who were not around when this oeuvre was being built block by block.

At some basic level I owe almost all the critical apparatus with which I now deal with science fiction to Damon Knight, and I owe practically to him alone my first astonished realization in the early fifties that, by God, science fiction not only was a lot of fun . . . it could be written by its best practitioners so as to correspond to (though never duplicate) the best of work done anywhere.

 

Teaneck, N.J.

September, 1975

 

Epilogue: After 27 Years

Pocket Books brought out eight of these science fiction "Best" collections in 1976. Adele Leone Hull (later Adele Leone the agent; she died a few years ago) commissioned me to write all of the Introductions and that to The Best of Damon Knight was the last to appear within that short compass. Oh, how your Damon and mine must have shuddered, reading this. The small illiteracies ("career as a creative writer began to slow up"), the tortured phraseology ("critical apparatus with which I now deal with science fiction"), tortured relationship with grammar ("the same one I worked in almost twenty years later") bring me to quivering and shamed alertness now. If they do this to me, what would they have done to the fearsome apostrophe detective, the merciless hunter and trapper of false tropes?

But Damon was in fact nice about it all. In a letter of response to the essay which had been sent in manuscript, his only objection was to the first sentence with its evocation of a "classic demolition." Damon wanted to let it go; all of that had happened a long time ago. I pointed out that his "critical demolition" in the mid-forties had been of pivotal importance to the history of science fiction: it was, perhaps, the first rigorous criticism any science fiction writer had received on the proper terms. Rigorous because it took the premise of the work as honorable and examined the degree to which the premise had been betrayed. That was quite a distance from Asimov's portrait of the pre-atomic bomb literary critics "Who thought that science fiction was just a bunch of crazy stories for kids."

Science fiction was anything but such by 1945, of course . . . but it took Damon and James Blish as the first serious critics with primary background in the field, to prove that this was so and that our potential was limitless. That criticism moved in a swift arc over a decade and a half and was collected by Advent in 1964 as In Search of Wonder. Damon by that time had moved on to the Orbit series and an editorial career which to some degree eclipsed the critical writings.

Also somewhat shrouded was the fiction, as the Introduction noted. The fiction is beyond remarkable. My considered judgment—long after his hot 1950s and more than a quarter of a century after the paperback collection which at 100,000 words was a microcosm—is that Knight produced the finest body of short fiction to emerge from the confines of the genre. There was competition from his contemporaries and predecessors—Kuttner/Moore, Pohl, Sturgeon of course, Phil Klass—and there was competition from those who came after: Silverberg, Tiptree, Avram Davidson . . . but the quality of Knight's work at the top is astonishing and almost all of the stories are at that top. It is impossible to locate a single "best" story or even ten best. There are at least forty at the highest level and through the whole body of work there are no weak stories. (Well, maybe "A Likely Story," a kind of jumped-up fan fiction which ran in Swank Magazine in 1956. To prove that Homer nodded.) "Anachron," "Country of the Kind," "What Rough Beast," "Ask Me Anything," "Ticket to Anywhere," "Four-In-One," "Man in the Jar," and on and on . . . there are maybe four or five stories in the entire run of the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories anthologies from the 1950s and 1960s which are at this level of craft. Damon was a better short story writer through the range of his work than Bernard Malamud or J.D. Salinger. I have done the research. I can defend this.

The novels are, as they say, uneven but A for Anything (also published as The People Maker) is, as I noted 27 years ago, remarkably accomplished. Unlike almost anyone, Damon's novelistic skills improved as he aged: Why Do Birds and Humpty-Dumpty: An Oval represent a new level of accomplishment. That latter novel, in fact, is comparable to the Ninth Symphony in E Minor of Ralph Vaughan-Williams which was written when the composer was 85; it is a visionary work coming from and pointing toward the undiscovered countries. No way of knowing what the Tenth Symphony or Damon Knight's next novel might have been but the clues are fascinating. These men, never old, soldiered on and on through the far lands.

Remarkable too that the short stories (of which no improvement could have been asked) held to their stunning level throughout Damon's entire working life. "Fortyday," published in Asimov's in 1994 (it appears in Nebula Awards 30 to mark Damon's Grand Master year and is the best story in that very good anthology) is flabbergasting. It appeared 45 years after "Not With a Bang," more than four decades after "The Analogues" and "Four-In-One." This is as pure an accomplishment, as miraculous a commission as Jack Williamson's Nebula and Hugo for a novella written in his 90s.

The editor of Orbit gave me much unhappiness and no encouragement; I am not the only writer to have felt that whip. But the colleague who I asked for favors in 1987 and 2000 came through at once with far more than I had asked. (I wrote Damon in 1987 that science fiction, thanks to him, had proven yet again to be the secular replacement of a Yiddishekeit in which I no longer believed.) The tumult and the shouting die, the Captain and the King departs but in recessional the exacting and irreplaceable contribution are ours.

He might even have been my friend. Enigmatic guy, Damon. I'll never know for sure. Hope so.

But friends and confessors: what a career! What a legacy! Libere me. Libere us all.

 

Teaneck, New Jersey
June, 2002

 

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