Posted on April 18th, 2002 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Writers, Science Fiction.
And then, two days ago, even worse news.
Damon Knight, 1922 - 2002
Arguably the most important figure in modern science fiction, with an unmatched breadth of accomplishments: he made crucial contributions to the field as a writer, editor, critic, organizer, historian, and educator.
As a writer, he's best known for short stories, especially "The Country of the Kind," "Stranger Station," "Masks," "Not with a Bang," and "I See You." He is most famous outside the field for having written the short story "To Serve Man," which became probably the most famous Twilight Zone episode.
He had always been a good but sporadic writer, but late in in his life he made a sudden leap as a novelist; the last two he wrote are the most ambitious and best of his life, deeply strange and creepy.
As an editor, he founded Orbit, an original anthology series (21 volumes) that revolutionized American science fiction in the late sixties, central to the American half of science fiction's new wave. The stories were literary, often experimental, and entirely eschewed space travel and other traditional elements of science fiction, because Knight thought they were played out and belonged to another era. It was in Orbit that Knight discovered and developed Gene Wolfe, who published most of his early stories there.
He was the first serious critic of science fiction; his columns, reprinted in the book IN SEARCH OF WONDER, were both insightfully appreciative and instructively nasty, and remain excellent reading today, whether or not one is familiar with the stories he's writing about.
He founded the Science Fiction Writers of America, and he co-founded the Milford Conference, which was the first regular workshop for professional science fiction writers.
He wrote the book The Futurians, a well-researched and anecdotally wonderful history of a group of 1940s fans that ended up having wide professional influence on the field (they included Frederik Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth, James Blish, Judith Merril, Virginia Kidd, Donald Wollheim, Knight, and Isaac Asimov).
He co-founded Clarion, the first and by far most successful science fiction workshop for unpublished writers, which has had a profound effect on American science fiction of the last thirty years; among its graduates are Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, George RR Martin, Vonda McIntyre, George Alec Effinger, Martha Soukup, and dozens of other writers I forget right now.
He took easily to the internet, and was a major figure on the science fiction round table on GEnie, which was the central online hangout of science fiction. He was acerbic, goofy, and kind. I literally can't think of a death among the major figures of the field that would upset me more. It's been a bad few weeks.
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