Damon Knight's contributions to the field of science fiction as author, editor, critic, illustrator, and translator represent several decades of commitment to making sense of the literature while defending its existence as a serious enterprise. Born in...

IT SEEMS astonishing that Damon Knight was an old man when he died. For more than half a century, he had served as an intellectual gadfly and iconoclast for the science-fiction field in America; it was a young man's role, and, for decades after...

EUGENE, Ore. - Damon Knight, a prolific science fiction writer and editor who helped transform pulp science fiction into a respectable genre, died Monday. He was 79. "He was immensely respected," said Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor of Mr. Knight's final novel, "Humpty Dumpty:...