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Largely lost to modern science fiction fans, Damon Knight was influential in sci-fi from the 1950s-1970s, not so much as a writer but as one of the early critics advocating that science fiction be taken as a literary art form and held to the same standards as “straight” literature. The introduction to The Best of Damon Knight claims that Knight first became known in science fiction circles after “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)”. I have no idea who he reviewed in that take-down, but I would sure love to read it! We’ll get to some more autobiographical details through the lens of our three stories. First up could be none other than – To Serve Man Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1950 (click to read the issue on the Internet Archive) Read in The Best of Damon Knight If Damon Knight is known by name to any science fiction fans of my generation it would undoubtedly be for his short story To Serve Man which was the basis for the classic Twilight Zone episode of the same name. This is such a classic episode that even those that haven’t seen it will know the ending (“It’s a cookbook!”), perhaps from the excellent Simpsons parody. As such, I have no reservations about spoiling the story’s twist ending. Knight’s story starts quite brilliantly, with the Kanamit portrayed visually differently than in the Twilight Zone episode. I absolutely love the opening paragraph. The Kanamit were not very pretty, it’s true. They looked something like pigs and something like people, and that is not an attractive combination. Seeing them for the first time shocked you; that was their handicap. When a thing with the countenance of a fiend comes from the stars and offers a gift, you are disinclined to accept. As opening paragraphs go this is basically perfect. In four sentences we know that the story is about an alien race called the Kanamit, that they are vaguely humanoid and repulsive in appearance, and that they want to give humanity some form of gift. Not to mention the brilliance of making the alien race that wants to eat people look like pigs. Outstanding! Unfortunately, the story declines in quality after that. Everything holds together well enough, but the story is written as a very short stream of consciousness, with the entire thing racing by at breakneck pace. As a result, the ending falls pretty flat because of its abrupt reveal and muted emotions. I’m sorry to say that I think the plot was better executed in the Twilight Zone. Perhaps we should forgive Knight, because The Best of Damon Knight comes with brief story introductions by the author, and this one reads, in its entirety, ‘To Serve Man’ was written in 1950, when I was living in Greenwich Village and my unhappy first marriage was breaking up. I wrote it in one afternoon, while my wife was out with another man. Yikes. An Eye for a What? Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1957 (click to read the issue on the Internet Archive) Read in The World That Couldn’t Be (a collection of novellas that first appeared in Galaxy) One of Knight’s contributions to literary criticism was to popularize the excellent term “idiot plot,” defined as a plot which only functions because everybody in the story is an idiot. A prominent example of this is Back to the Future II, in which Doc recklessly uses self-evidently dangerous time travel to help his friend stop his unborn child from making a bad decision. (Could Doc not just have told Marty to do a better job raising his kid?) Mentioning the idiot plot is appropriate here because this story has a one hundred percent idiot plot. The novella revolves around a vaguely defined group of humans aboard a space station orbiting an alien world which they hope to rape for all its natural resources. Native to this world is a species of intelligent gelatinous balls, one of which lives on the space station as a sort of exchange, the goal of which is to get the gelatinous elders to agree to massive strip-mining or their planet. While at a state dinner, the normally polite resident ball attacks the commander’s wife, who, being a woman, is in hysterics for the rest of the story. The alien society says that the humans must punish their resident alien for his transgression, and if the humans don’t do it, then the alien society will attack all of the humans presently on the planet. So the humans must punish the alien, not knowing why he did what he did or even what a suitable punishment is. This is where the idiot plot comes in, since brief and unbelievable excuses are made as to why they can’t just ask what the hell is going on. Instead, the story degenerates into a quest to torture this alien, not knowing what methods will even work. Oh, but the first idea they have amounts to water boarding! The story gets increasingly dumb from there, and not in a fun way. In the end, the entire thing basically amounts to a fat joke directed at the commander’s wife, which along with “automatic whistles” at a few passing women on page one, really sets a tone for this story that can fuck right off. Overall this one is disjointed, confusing, objectionable, and just plain bad. Masks Originally published in Playboy, July 1968 Read in The Best of Damon Knight In the introduction to this story in The Best of Damon Knight, the author mentions that he discovered that there were many new areas of science that were not being written about in science fiction, one of them being the (then new) field of prosthesis development. Masks was Knight’s attempt to write a story on the subject, one which he notes in the introduction feels “jagged and lumpy” to him, which is interesting because I find it to be the best written of the three. (An Eye for a What? in particular suffers from some abrupt and confusing scene changes.) This story has what I can now assume to be Knight’s characteristic minimal world building and setup, but the basic idea is an inspection of a ridiculously expensive government program to outfit a single wounded soldier with multiple prosthesis. (Think Johnny Got His Gun level of bodily injury.) In the end, the story takes the stance that someone with a prosthesis is automatically less than a man, which is undoubtedly offensive to anyone with a prosthesis. I will defend Knight a bit here in that he was holding up the lens of science fiction to this new technology of mechanical replacements for human limbs and organs in order to challenge the obvious belief that repairing a damaged body is always good. The story does raise a valid question about how much medical treatment a wounded soldier deserves, and at some point are you doing more harm than good? The story doesn’t really deliver on all its promise, but I do hand it to Knight for trying to poke a new branch of science and engineering with the sci-fi stick. In the end it’s not hard to see why Knight has fallen to the wayside. Some of science fiction’s pioneers are forgotten for no good reason (my best example being Clifford Simak), but others didn’t so much disappear as they were surpassed by better writers that followed. For what it’s worth, it seems that Knight’s written criticisms had a strong positive impact on science fiction as a legitimate literary enterprise, and for that we can only thank him. I have to say that I found the mechanics of his writing to be inferior to almost everything published these days in Analog, Asimov’s, or Fantasy and Science Fiction, so the genre has clearly come a long way. In my ever growing collection of vintage science fiction books I hold a high regard for anthologies. Ever since I was a kid, short stories have been my preferred sci-fi format. Anthologies are a great way to read a wide selection of authors and find favorites you never knew about. As such, my library boasts a respectable (and ever growing) collection of anthologies from the 1950s to today. Many of them are filled with repeat authors that I’ve never read before. So it occurred to me, why not pick one of these authors and – almost at random – pick a trifecta of stories from different anthologies to get a pseudo-random sampling of the author’s work? Then I thought, why not blog all of these trifectas? Then I thought, what life choices have brought me to such a weird decision? Then I got to reading. First up on the list of authors-I’ve-never-read-before: James Tiptree, Jr. Our first story comes from Harlan Ellison’s venerable original sci-fi anthology, Again, Dangerous Visions volume 2. Tiptree ends the anthology, which means that this story was the last published in this iconic anthology series (though there are claims that the final volume is on the way). Ellison felt that the last story in an anthology had to be the best, and positively glows when writing about the story he nabbed from Tiptree. I had been reading Tiptree for some time. He’s a fairly recent addition to the corps of sf writers, and he hadn’t had all that much published – not even a novel as of this writing – but what I’d seen had impressed me considerably, and so I wrote asking for a submission. Ellison’s fantastic chauvinism is rendered even more ridiculous because James Tiptree, Jr. was a woman. Of course, it wasn’t known at the time, and wouldn’t be known until 1977, which really makes me wonder what Ellison thought when he found out. Alice Bradley Sheldon published under the name, and male moniker, of James Tiptree, Jr. from 1967 until her death in 1987. From 1974 to 1977 she also published under the name Raccoona Sheldon, but even in anthologies today she is still listed at “James Tiptree, Jr.”, there’s just too much history I guess. I’m not going to explain probable reasons why she wrote science fiction under the moniker of a man, or passed herself off as a man in all contracts and correspondence. I think there’s enough explanation in Ellison’s introduction that I’ve quoted above. Though how Ellison continues can only be considered comical today. All of this ferocity of flack is offered not merely because I am so high on his story, but… because, ironically, James Tiptree refuses to provide any personal data on himself. Now, on to the stories. The Milk of Paradise Originally published in Again, Dangerous Visions volume 2 Read in same It’s easy to tell why Harlan Ellison liked this story so much. Having received a solicitation to write a story for Ellison, Tiptree wrote what I can only describe as a knockoff Ellison story. The story follows a human spaceship-hand that was apparently raised by an unknown race of incredibly beautiful aliens that make humans look like C.H.U.D.s. He is confident that these aliens all died out from some pathogen that was inadvertently brought to their world by his human rescuers, but is tricked by a trader into going back to the world of Paradise, where the aliens lived. The story starts with the protagonist having sex with a random human woman and vomiting because he finds her human body so hideous, and that was my introduction to Tiptree. This is a weird one, and I think Ellison fans will like it. I have to take Ellison in small doses, and I like my science fiction prose a bit less enigmatic, so this one was not for me. The Man Who Walked Home Originally published in Amazing Science Fiction, May 1972 Read in The 1973 Annual World’s Best SF I picked this one because after reading the title I had to know what it was about. This tale was super clever, and has to be one of the best and most original time travel stories ever told. Written in the omniscient, with a hint of A Canticle for Leibowitz , it begins with an apocalypse at a particle accelerator and follows the slow rebuilding of society at the devastated site. On the same day every year a man appears for a split second accompanied by a thunderclap, and local superstitions, myths, cults, and scientific curiosity surround his appearance. I don’t want to give too much away as its a fun trip, but this was a much more straight story than my first introduction, and turned me on to Tiptree’s creativity. Houston, Houston, Do You Read? Originally published in Aurora: Beyond Equality (a feminist anthology published in 1976) Read in The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF This one was proceeded in Annual World’s Best SF with a disclaimer that it wasn’t for prudes, and it definitely has a lot of eyebrow raising bits. This novella length story starts on a spaceship with our narrator, a “beta” male astronaut often felt emasculated by his two alpha male colleagues, on a spaceship full of female astronauts. You are given the impression that the men are surprised to find themselves on a ship of women, and as the story develops our narrator is convinced that he’s been drugged. Tiptree uses a clever device here where the drug induces a near stream-of-consciousness which allows the story to be told in shifting time frame. The narrative is linear, sprinkled with moments of clarity that brings the narrator to the “present.” It’s remarkably well executed and the transitions are not jarring or confusing in any way, giving us a really nice mystery to unravel. I really enjoyed this one, and it has a great punch for a climax. This one will stay with me a long time, and I highly recommend it for a commentary on gender equality that is as relevant now as it was in 1977 – maybe more so. All in all, Tiptree came across in these three stories as one hell of a writer with an amazing creative mind. Her ability to write an Ellison story to sell to Ellison is impressive in its own right, but the fact that it landed so perfectly with him just adds to the comedy of the effort. I’ll definitely seek out more of her stories. As a parting note, depending on which version you believe, Tiptree either murdered her husband then killed herself, or she and her husband had a suicide pact that she enacted. She openly struggled with suicidal thoughts for years, and it is evident that she finally lost the battle. |
AuthorDr. Andrew Porwitzky is a scientist and freelance writer living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, scientific articles, and essays. Categories
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