Turning On

Just finished reading Turning On, a collection of 50s and 60s SF short stories by Damon Knight. What the title has to do with the stories, I have no idea. There's no unifying theme, and the stories themselves are somewhat erratic in quality. It seemed the shorter ones, the ones I started reading first, were average. No truly remarkable characters, ideas, or hooks. But the longer ones definitely read better, and I'm pleased I stuck with it and waded through all thirteen short stories.

Some of the tales in this collection are dated, but to me that's not necessarily a bad thing. It conjures a simpler, gentler time, where green nasties from space lurked behind every bale of hay in America's heartland. Where both men and women smoked and tossed back expensive eighty-five cent drinks. I envision the Ralph Kramden-like characters interacting with bird men from Antares. But there're others that are set hundreds and even millions of years in the future. These are the better stories. The last man on earth, completely insane, taunts the last male canine, who's species have developed intelligence. A political officer from a society four hundred years hence is forced to travel back to our time and realizes the history he worships has been thoroughly whitewashed - and faces a moral dilemma of whether to do something about it or not.

I really enjoyed and seriously recommend three of Knight's stories. "Backward, O Time," is a clever summary of a man's life - except the man lives during the Big Crunch, opposite of the Big Bang, when the universe is in a contraction phase. As a result, he lives life backwards. "Man In A Jar" features a cretinous thug forcing an alien native to make diamonds for him using some special inherited skills. There's fancy gadgets, and an ever fancier comeuppance. And towards the end is the zany (at least for Damon) little piece "A Likely Story" about a convention of SF writers who encounter a demented fan who can manipulate the laws of physics. Knight's fellow writers are only thinly disguised (I guessed the identities of Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and John C. Campbell). I chuckled through it, but maybe you need a little bit of nerdiness in you.

Knight, who died just a few years ago, was a later contemporary of the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein), published scores of short stories and over twenty novels beginning in the Golden Age. He had even more reknown as a critic of SF and was married to fellow writer Kate Wilhelm. My connection to him is geographic: for decades he lived in Milford, Pennsylvania, a half-hour's drive from my parents' house. Throughout the years he'd host numerous SF seminars in his home, attracting many of the most prominent writers of the day. I have yet to locate it (hoping there's some sort of public memorial) and visit it as a kind of pilgrimmage. There is an excellent used book store in Milford, which I hit whenever I'm down that way; I should mention Knight to the proprietor next time I'm there.