{"id":6297,"date":"2018-03-22T10:30:04","date_gmt":"2018-03-22T17:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=6297"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:43:46","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:43:46","slug":"damon-knight-in-search-of-wonder-3-e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2018\/03\/22\/damon-knight-in-search-of-wonder-3-e\/","title":{"rendered":"Damon Knight, IN SEARCH OF WONDER 3\/e"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Damon Knight was perhaps the earliest knowledgeable critic of science fiction. He was a science fiction author himself, beginning in 1948, and is most famous for a couple early short stories, “Not with a Bang” (1950) and “To Serve Man” (1950), the latter made famous by its adaptation into a Twilight Zone<\/i> episode. (Notable later stories included “Four in One” (1953), “The Country of the Kind” (1956), “Stranger Station” (1956), “Masks” (1968), and my favorite, “I See You” (1976).) He wrote novels too, though none quite as notable as his short fiction. Knight’s greatest impact on the science fiction field, aside from his critical work, was as an anthologist; he edited the earliest series of original anthologies, ORBIT, 21 volumes from 1966 to 1980, and produced several volumes of classic SF and fantasy stories, compiled at sfadb.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Knight made his critical reputation in 1945 with an essay that assaulted the works of A.E. van Vogt, author of popular novels SLAN and THE WORLD OF NULL-A, by pointing out that they were badly written and incoherent, as he explained at length.<\/p>\n

(We met van Vogt in the critical anthology OF WORLDS BEYOND, summarized here<\/a>, where he described his kitchen-sink method of writing.)<\/p>\n

Knight went on to establish, in 1952, a \u201ccredo\u201d for his work, of which the third point is the most essential, quoted here in full rather than paraphrased:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. That \u2018science fiction\u2019 is a misnomer, but we might as well learn to live with it;<\/li>\n
  2. That a publisher\u2019s jacket blurb, and a review, are two different things;<\/li>\n
  3. \u201cThat science fiction is a field of literature worth taking seriously, and that ordinary critical standards can be meaningfully applied to it: e.g., originality, sincerity, style, construction, logic, coherence, sanity, garden-variety grammar.\u201d<\/li>\n
  4. That a bad book hurts SF more than 10 bad notices.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This third point was controversial, because it declared that Knight was not writing magazine reviews like those common at the time, in which the reviewers generally liked pretty much everything. Knight was stating he had no problem calling out bad work. He wrote critical essays for various publications, throughout the 1950s and ’60s, and these essays formed the first edition of this book, with later editions adding some later items.<\/p>\n

    It wasn\u2019t until I reread the book just now that I appreciated why that third point was so controversial, and why the magazine reviews of the time were so mild. It was this: there simply weren\u2019t very many SF books published in those days. (Recall the counts presented by Anthony Boucher in Bretnor\u2019s MODERN SF, discussed here<\/a>; 20 or 30 books a year, total!) And because there weren\u2019t very many, it would have been ill-mannered to criticize any of them, like criticizing a member of one\u2019s own family, especially since there was no shortage of outside critics dismissing science fiction as sub-literary. Indeed, Knight immediately in this essay presents an example, a 1953 essay in Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em> by none other than Arthur Koestler, called \u201cThe Boredom of Fantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n

    The majority of IN SEARCH OF WONDER\u2019s 33 chapters consists of essays about particular books, demonstrating Knight\u2019s impatience for bad writing and bad science, and also revealing why he admires, to one degree or another, the work of many authors\u2014especially Heinlein, Sturgeon, Kornbluth, to some extent Asimov, Clarke, Blish, Pratt. His essay on van Vogt is included, as is one on Ray Bradbury, titled \u201cWhen I Was in Kneepants,\u201d whose thesis is that Bradbury doesn\u2019t write SF at all, how his \u2018imagination\u2019 consists merely of borrowed backgrounds, how his one subject is childhood.<\/p>\n

    There are also occasional essays on other topics:<\/p>\n