Late Knight Edition

LATE KNIGHT EDITION

by

DAMON KNIGHT

Produced by ReAnimus Press

Other books by Damon Knight:

Creating Short Fiction

The Futurians

The Best of Damon Knight

CV

The Observers

A Reasonable World

In Search of Wonder

The World and Thorinn

Hell's Pavement

Beyond the Barrier

Masters of Evolution

A for Anything

The Sun Saboteurs

The Rithian Terror

Mind Switch

The Man in the Tree

Why Do Birds

Humpty Dumpty: An Oval

Far Out

In Deep

Off Center

Turning On

Three Novels

World Without Children and The Earth Quarter

Rule Golden and Other Stories

Better Than One

God's Nose

One Side Laughing: Stories Unlike Other Stories

Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction

1939 Yearbook of Science, Weird and Fantasy Fiction

Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained

Clarion Writers' Handbook

Faking the Reader Out

© 2021, 1985 by Damon Knight. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS SCIENCE FICTION?

THE THIRD LITTLE GREEN MAN

WHO IS DAMON KNIGHT?

DEFINITION

I SEE YOU

TARCAN OF THE HOBOES

LA RONDE

THE CAGE

GOOD-BYE, HENRY J. KOSTKOS, GOOD-BYE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

Going through a collection like this is time travel in many ways. What we ask in time travel stories usually is what will it be like, or what was it like. If you browse in an old family album and identify yourself through many ages, you will always find the same you in different flesh, heavier, lighter, maybe in funny clothes, taller, but always you, and this, too, is time travel of a sort. What was it like then? What were you like then? The evidence of the photographs is undeniable, documenting the growth and development of a person, but says nothing of what the interior development was like. Stories that span nearly forty years reveal a different process: the development of a literary artist, and this too is undeniable. Here it is in print speaking out from the past.

The sampling here is small, too small to be definitive, but even so, we can trace the same voice from the beginning throughout to the latest work. It is a voice finding its range, finding its power, always becoming clearer and truer.

The oldest story here is The Third Little Green Man, and this is an impossible story. An impossible galactic empire, impossible space ship and crew, an impossible mission, an impossible planet and inhabitants, even an impossible barroom brawl lifted bodily from mining movies of the thirties. And yet. It’s the and yet that is important here. Everyone was doing this sort of story, and many still are, alas, but everyone went to the parade, too, and only one voice piped up about the emperor’s interesting condition.

The deftness that has come to characterize all of Damon’s work is already apparent in this early story, as well as the exact observation and precision of language in which to describe it. Damon has perfected this very strong triad over the years and everything he writes is supported by it.

Five years later, in 1953, Definition was published. At that time hardly anyone was bothering about the use of the word Man to mean all of us. This story hangs on that misuse of language. It’s a bit contrived and conventional in the use of science fiction concepts, but it really isn’t about aliens, after all.

These two stories are early Knight. There are threads that run through them all—aliens, interstellar travel, the ingenuity of the human race. Damon began out in space and now has come home to Earth, bringing the aliens here, to be sure. There is a thread of religious questioning in both, not dominating the stories, but there. And there is always the question, who are we? What makes us tick? Holding the magnifying glass on aliens is one way of investigating the question. But sometimes the glass turns into a mirror and the aliens we find are ourselves.

We jump forward to the early seventies for I See You. The craft that was already good has become true artistry, the details so carefully chosen and lovingly worded are exactly right. The result is a hauntingly beautiful story that is like looking through a mirror to see yourself looking through a mirror, on and on. Later you might say, no, the world couldn’t become like that, but you believe while you read, and you wish, you wish.

There may be people reading this who have never read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan and I would love to know how they react to Tarcan of the Hoboes. Damon complains that he gets letters now and then asking why he wrote something or other. If one of those letters was about this story, I can answer: Because it was such fun. It must have been fun to write; it certainly is fun to read, and in its own insane way it even works as a story. I wish I had thought of it.

I was aware that the Victorian life I was attempting to recreate within these walls was not the reality. That life is recreated; one fine stroke after another brings it to life, and when that life is contrasted to contemporary life, it is a dash of shocking cold water. In La Ronde you will go around and around searching for reality. And your hand will close on air. It is all real; none of it is real, and the two statements mean the same thing. You are sent back to yourself to examine what you mean by reality.

Damon often advises students to look at the inversion of any commonly held belief for story ideas. One such belief is that many a man has been saved by the love of a good woman. The word saved is the one inverted in the story The Cage. I watched Damon research this story. He haunted the post office until I was afraid we might have a visit by an inspector ourselves. He corresponded with people who have worked for the post office. All the details are right. But it isn’t the exactitude of the worked-out plot or the details that linger in my mind. It is the final image and it is unforgettable. Damon chooses quite an objective viewpoint in his fiction most of the time. He does not tell you what to feel, how to regard his characters; you seldom are allowed in their heads, and when you are, it is to see their thought processes, not to feel their emotions. When an intellectual experience suddenly flips and becomes an emotional one, it has great power, you are caught off guard and defenseless. This is not the sort of thing one can teach another to do; all one can do is to point to it when it happens and say, here’s an example of that. The Cage is an example of that.

These are the stories. The essays will tell you Damon’s thoughts much better that I can. This, I repeat, is time travel of a sort, from the beginning when Damon first found his voice and yodeled down the mountains, brash perhaps, but joyous too, until the most recent, very mature offerings. The voice is getting better all the time.

Kate Wilhelm

WHAT IS SCIENCE FICTION?

Once at a Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference I said a colleague’s punctuation was wrong; he replied that he didn’t agree with me. I failed to ask him why he thought punctuation was a matter of opinion, but I brooded over this later, and finally realized that he was talking about what the rules of punctuation ought to be, while I was talking about what they are. One is arguable, the other not.

In a similar way, science fiction writers and critics have been trying without success for forty years to define science fiction, because each of them has been talking about his own idea of what the field ought to be, never about what it is. Intent on distinguishing the true sf from the false, they invariably find that most of it is false; thus Heinlein casts out space opera, Bailey scientific romance, Asimov social satire, de Camp divides fiction into imaginative stories (including science fiction) and realistic stories; Heinlein insists that sf is a branch, and the most important branch, of realistic fiction.

Here are some other attempts:

Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode.—Brian W. Aldiss. (This admits The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, but excludes Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity.)

The more powers above the ordinary that the protagonist enjoys, the closer the fiction will approach to hard-core science fiction. Conversely, the more ordinary and fallible the protagonist, the further from hard-core.—Aldiss. (This admits Dracula as hard-core science fiction, but excludes Night by John W. Campbell.)

A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the scientific method. To make this definition cover all science fiction (instead of ‘almost all’) it is necessary only to strike out the word ‘future.’—Robert A. Heinlein. (This admits Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis, but excludes the collected works of Robert Sheckley.)

There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make pragmatic sense: ‘Science Fiction is anything published as science fiction.’—Norman Spinrad. (This admits Spinrad’s The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, but excludes the book version of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.)

Taken together (if anyone were idiot enough to try), these definitions would narrow the field of science fiction almost to invisibility. Yet nearly every critic claims an intuitive knowledge of what sf is, and I claim it myself. We do know the difference between stories that are perceived as science fiction and those that are not; the question is, how do we know?

In an attempt to find out, I wrote a list of promising definitions and checked them against works published as science fiction to see how well they matched. This is the list:

1. Science. (Gernsback.)

2. Technology and invention. (Heinlein, Miller.)

3. The future and the remote past, including all time travel stories. (Bailey.)

4. Extrapolation. (Davenport.)

5. Scientific method. (Bretnor.)

6. Other places—planets, dimensions, etc., including visitors from the above. (Bailey.)

7. Catastrophes, natural or manmade. (Bailey.)

I discarded other definitions, for instance Campbell’s dictum that sf is predictive, which I thought were impossible to evaluate. (To find out how many sf stories contain accurate predictions I would have to wait until the results are all in, i.e., to the end of the universe.) I also discarded all negative definitions, e.g., that any story that contains fantasy elements is not sf (because that excludes Heinlein’s Waldo), or that any story that is literature is not sf (because that excludes Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness).

For source material I used Nebula Award Stories Eight, The Hugo Winners, Volume Two, and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, in the belief that any defect in the hypothesis would show up here first. I added recent issues of the three leading sf magazines, and recent volumes of three hardcover series, plus a one-shot anthology, Spinrad’s The New Tomorrows, which I chose because it is devoted to New Wave sf¹.

On the basis of the results (see tables), I conclude that a story containing three or more of the elements listed above is usually perceived as science fiction; with two, it is perceived as borderline; with one or none, it is non-science fiction.

I had better emphasize that these scores say nothing about the quality of the stories, or about the quality of the science, the extrapolation, etc. If an element was present in a story, no matter how perfunctory or feeble, I scored it.

I also ran some test cases. The system held up well for these, with the single exception of Gulliver’s Travels, which scored a 4, although it is not usually perceived as sf. To cure this, I would have to add the negative definition that nothing published before 1860 is science fiction, a perception due partly to tradition and, I think, partly to the desire to get rid of all the Lucians and Cyranos who have been dragged in by overanxious scholars.

In the course of this study my own perceptions were altered. At the end of it I found that I agreed with C. S. Lewis when he said that not all romances laid in the future are science fiction. I lost some (not all) of my dedication to a very broad definition of sf, one which would include any work of fiction informed by a scientific attitude toward nature and man. I became more aware of the sleights practiced by commercial sf writers to ensure that their work will be perceived as science fiction, and to get work published which could as well have been written as mundane adventure fiction. I also became more aware of the number of non-sf stories regularly published in nearly all the magazines and hardcover series, including my own.

I offer this study as an extended definition of what science fiction is. Like other people, I have an opinion about what it should be. I would like to see less dependence on conventional stage furniture and more on honestly worked out extrapolations. I am inclined to agree with Alexei and Cory Panshin when they say that sf and fantasy as we know them are two filled-in areas in a broad, largely empty field. I believe more strongly than