Damon (Francis) Knight | Biography

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 Baker, Oregon, Damon Francis Knight discovered science fiction in 1932 in the magazine Amazing Stories. During the summer of 1940 Knight began his correspondence with various members of a group calling themselves the New York Futurians, including such luminaries as Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, and Isaac Asimov. Knight's first story, "Resilience," was published in Wollheim's Stirring Science Stories in February 1941 while he was attending art school in Salem, Oregon. As a science-fiction author, Knight had an inauspicious debut, for a typographical error apparently made the story incomprehensible. Nevertheless, his own fanzine Snide so impressed the Futurians that they encouraged him to come to New York in 1941. Knight has chronicled the activities of these New York writers and editors, as well as his own rise from fan to science-fiction editor, in The Futurians (1977), a valuable account of the frenetic think tank that nurtured the seminal writers of science fiction in America. It was in this environment that Knight learned some of the important lessons that he communicates so often in his criticism: that science fiction must be taken seriously as literature, that science fiction is about people, and that the "story should be more important than the idea."

After holding a variety of jobs, Knight began his editing career by assisting Ejler Jakobsson at Super Science Stories (second series). He left in 1950 to become the editor of Worlds Beyond , which, though well received, was canceled by the publisher after three issues. In the 1950s Knight's book reviews appeared in several science-fiction magazines such as Infinity Science Fiction, Original SF Stories, and Future SF, and in 1956 he received a Hugo Award for his criticism. Many of these reviews were collected in In Search of Wonder (1956). In 1958 Knight returned to editing and worked for five months on J. L. Quinn's If, continuing his reviews and editing the magazine in an attempt to increase its circulation; however, the magazine was soon suspended. Although since 1959 Knight has reviewed few books, an excellent sample of his recent reviews appears in Orbit 14 (1974).

Knight is acclaimed most frequently by science-fiction critics as a short-story writer. His skill was recognized with the publication of the story "Not with a Bang" (1950; collected in Far Out, 1961), an amusing yet macabre extrapolation of T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" that tells the tale of the last man and woman on earth--a recurrent theme in Knight's work. During the same year he published another fine story, "To Serve Man" (1950; collected in Far Out), which was later dramatized by Rod Serling as the eighty-seventh episode of the "Twilight Zone" television series.

Knight has written more than seventy stories which have appeared in numerous science-fiction magazines since the early 1940s. Recently he has translated several French stories by such writers as C. Henneberg, Claude Veillot, and J. H. Rosny, aine; a number of these translations have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in his anthology Thirteen French Science Fiction Stories (1965). Knight is also a notable anthologist--perhaps the most significant of his compilations is the Orbit series (1966-1978), one of the earliest and the most influential of the original anthology series which began appearing in the mid-1960s. In 1963 Knight was married to fellow science-fiction writer Kate Wilhelm, whose fine stories have appeared consistently in the Orbit series.

The problem for any critic of Knight's work arises in a discussion of his novels because his strength, a prose style full of "so many ideas," as one critic put it, is also his weakness. Many critics have skirted the issue by emphasizing the provocative--while granting the chaotic--qualities of his narrative; others concentrate on his excellence as an anthologist or short-story writer; indeed, most of his novels are expansions of shorter works. In the decade between 1955 and 1965 Knight produced seven novels, four of which are especially important: Hell's Pavement (1955), a tale of an oppressed, mind-controlled society in the twenty-first century (derived from his stories "The Analogues," 1952, and "Turncoat," 1953); The People Maker (1959), which is an extended example of his gadget story, featuring a matter duplicator called the gizmo (the novel is an expansion of "A for Anything," 1957--the book, however, suffered several unauthorized cuts, and its 1961 republication as A for Anything is the more reliable edition); The Sun Saboteurs (1961), a story of humans trying to live on a very un-Earth-like world (expanded from "The Earth Quarter," 1955); and Mind Switch (1965), which depicts a man's mental transfer to an alien body (expanded from "The Visitor at the Zoo," 1963).

A common theme in these novels is the situation of man trying to improve himself, and instead, falling pitifully further behind in his own development. A for Anything is a poignant example of this theme. The story of the undistinguished yet pugnacious Dick Jones, who is catapulted into hero status in the heyday of the gizmo, has been called "a peculiar story of lust and decadence." In addition to the strange turns of plot, there is the ambivalence of Knight's language, which parallels the ups and downs of the characters, providing an uneven reading experience. Yet perhaps Knight's fascination with language proves, ultimately, to be a weakness in his fiction. Often he appears to be hypnotized by the power of his own metaphors; they are extended beautifully and do perform the function that he has described as essential to science fiction: "to lift us out of the here-and-now and show us marvels." The stunningly apocalyptic description of the falling tower in A for Anything is such a marvel, but it seems to lead a life of its own, ignoring the mundane plot. It should be emphasized, however, that such passages are not failures, but they do detract somewhat from the overall unity of the novel.

No discussion of Knight's work would be complete without mentioning his criticism. Possibly the most sentimental, yet among the wisest of science-fiction critics, Knight is the most persistent advocate of the literature. Knight has always promoted the respectability of science fiction, but his love of the genre is tempered with a demanding sense of literacy. As Anthony Boucher observed, Knight is capable of both the "hatchet job" and the "love letter." In 1952 Knight espoused the view that science fiction and literature are not mutually exclusive terms--a view that he has defended persistently and convincingly since that time. As Boucher wrote in his introduction to In Search of Wonder, "He is able, as is almost no other professional writer of fiction, to stand apart from his completed work and look at it objectively." Whether the reader experiences Knight's critical persona implicitly, as in the "They Say" and "Memory Machine" (features of the Orbit series in which Knight collects and arranges without comment quotations from various critics and writers), or explicitly, as in the fine critical premises evident in his anthology selections or in his bristling at abuses of language in a "Chuckleheads" essay, he will find Knight to be a perceptive reader who enjoys "the act of thinking" and is willing to risk telling the truth. In an essay on "Half-Bad Writers," Knight makes a comment that may well summarize his goals as a writer, editor, and critic of science fiction. In describing an otherwise poor novel that suddenly comes to life, he exclaims: "Now by God, this is science fiction. It performs s.f.'s specific function, to lift us out of the here-and-now and show us marvels. No matter how badly it's written, if a story does that it is s.f. A story that fails to do that, no matter how well written, isn't."