In Search of Wonder
Essays on Modern Science Fiction
by Damon Knight
  

Advent: Chicago  (via NESFA Press)
first edition: 1956
second edition: 1967
third edition, enlarged and extended: 1996

402 pages

In Search of Wonder is the foundational work of science fiction criticism, as Sam Moskowitz's The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom is the foundational history of its organized readership. Like Moskowitz's book, much of Knight's was written in the early 1950s when science fiction in magazines was proliferating at the newsstands, and beginning to burst into the paperback and even the hardcover book market. Partly because of these growing pains, SF quality was all over the lot.

Meanwhile the field's history and critique were fugitive and in-group rarities, appreciated and encouraged only by science fiction's still-tiny organized fandom. In those days you could hold in your two hands all the books ever written about science fiction, and probably juggle them too.

Most of Knight's material appeared as articles or columns, first collected as a book in 1956. The third edition is substantially longer than previous editions.

This book is not a history, more a delightful grab-bag of Damon Knight's critical writing, with some chapters which are memoir, or how-to-write, or definitional overview. The memoir sections seem to me more enjoyable than Knight's autobiographical The Futurians. As a particular treat for writers, there is a technically annotated version of a short story by Knight himself. And for a definition, or definitions, of science fiction, of this field so brash but elusive-to-definers: Knight has tried longer and with better success than almost anyone.
  

Just about since I first read it as a teenager, I've felt that Frederik Pohl's novella "The Midas Plague", in Galaxy for April 1954 and collected in The Case Against Tomorrow, is an overrated story. Knight shows what's wrong with it, illustrating some larger tendencies or risks in the author, the magazine, and the field:

"The Midas Plague" is a distressing example of the kind of story that became identified with Galaxy during the 50s; the inside-out future society, played poker-faced for snickers, in which the author, whenever he comes across an inconvenient fact or consequence, slaps a coat of paint over it and goes right ahead.

In this case, the thinking behind the story goes something like this: Expanding technology means overproduction. The solution to this is compulsory overconsumption, with ration points. Therefore the rich are poor, and the poor are rich.

This is good for one laugh, or possibly two, but there is something gaggingly irrational after a while in the spectacle of Pohl's hero choking down more food than he can eat. ...

This is something new in idiot plots — it's second-order idiot plotting, in which not merely the principals, but everybody in the whole society has to be a grade-A idiot, or the story couldn't happen. Admittedly, this attitude toward amusing but intrinsically wobbly ideas gets a lot of stories written that otherwise would be discarded: but it also populates the future exclusively with lackwits.
  

Knight revels in comparing and contrasting, both within and without science fiction and fantasy. His analysis often makes essential qualities jump into clarity, as though with a few quick turns of a focusing wheel. A lovely example:

The Coming of Conan, by Robert E. Howard, is of interest to Howard enthusiasts, who will treasure it no matter what anyone says, and to students who may find it, as I do, an intriguing companion piece to L. Sprague de Camp's The Tritonian Ring. Howard's tales lack the de Camp verisimilitude — Howard never tried, or never tried intelligently, to give his preposterous saga the ring of truth — but they have something that de Camp's stories lack: a vividness, a color, a dream-dust sparkle, even when they're most insulting to the rational mind. Howard had the maniac's advantage of believing whatever he wrote; de Camp is too wise to believe wholeheartedly in anything.
  

The pointedly accurate dissection of The World of Null-A in "Cosmic Jerrybuilder: A. E. van Vogt" is expanded from Knight's classic fanzine essay, published shortly after van Vogt's impressive novel's serialization in Astounding in 1945. Reading this chapter in the first edition of In Search of Wonder was a baptism of fiery darts for my teenage critical faculties.

The chapter "One Sane Man: Robert A. Heinlein" is particularly fine and insightful, as are various discussions of James Blish's works. Early looks at Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke are perceptive as well as appreciative. Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and the husband-and-wife team of Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore are included — but all, inevitably, with fewer pages than I'd like. A lot of middling and minor writers and works are analyzed; some of the best and perhaps most useful insights are into lesser or problematic works of major writers.

On non-fiction, there is a review of The Immortal Storm by Sam Moskowitz; and a chapter on "The Excluded Data: Charles Fort" heralds Knight's book-length biography-analysis, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained.
  

Given the grab-bag format, what are the weaknesses of the criticism of In Search of Wonder?

I think Damon Knight's view of John W. Campbell as editor of Astounding Science Fiction is much too shallow, as are the mentions of Edward E. Smith — Knight's once-modern outlook is dating itself with these. Campbell's absolutely critical importance to the development of science fiction, while never lost, as more years pass is being rather grudgingly re-acknowledged. And despite changing fashions, Doc Smith's Lensmen continue to cast an illumination that has been spurned, but not dimmed.

Of several excellent authors: James H. Schmitz is mentioned only once, albeit quite positively. Both Murray Leinster and Fritz Leiber are mentioned multiple times, but discussed too little. On the other hand, from assorted writers too many truly worthless stories are covered, which scarcely deserve mention as horrible examples. But the substantial virtues of the book vastly outweigh its weaknesses: a characteristic sadly not shared by too many of its targets.

Some concluding words of warning and praise: In Search of Wonder is full of plot spoilers. It's meant for aficionados who already are fairly well read in the science-fiction field and curious about its structure and history, rather than for those who mainly are looking for good stories to read and bad stories to avoid. That said, it is a critical landmark, informative, and fun to read. If you have a deep interest in science fiction's means and ends, how and why it works its wonders or fails to do so, Damon Knight's set of analyses is the place to start.

© 2007 Robert Wilfred Franson

  
If my [youthful] experience was typical, and I think it was, people turn to science fiction for a blend of two feelings — fantasy, the roller-coaster shock of fantasy — and reality, the instinctive feel of reality — the feeling that this might be true. ...

[Robert A.] Heinlein's identification with his viewpoint character [in Starship Troopers] is so absolute, and his attention to detail so careful, that he shows you one picture, with everything fitting together, and you have to believe it, at least for a moment, just as you have to believe a photograph.

With Heinlein, unique among present-day science fiction writers, you feel that what he writes about might very easily be possible, simply because the man knows so much and writes so carefully. But please notice that you can have this feeling about something that actually is completely impossible. ...

I've quoted ... examples to try to show that the quality I'm talking about can be present in fiction all the way from realism to the purest fantasy. The best stories in Unknown had it, because those writers were able to convince you that the horrors they wrote about could be real, that they weren't just conventional sprites and goblins. ... You can't do it by taking your subject lightly, by kidding it, by being cute, by writing just for kicks or for money. You can't do it if you start out by assuming that what you're writing about is not to be taken seriously. ...

I want to call your attention to Heinlein's declaration, in the Advent: Publishers book, The Science Fiction Novel, that s-f is a branch of realistic fiction. It would be nice if we could try harder to earn that label.

Damon Knight
"Good Science Fiction — Where Is It?"
Guest of Honor Speech,
17th World Science Fiction Convention
Detroit, 6 September 1959

New Frontiers #3, August 1960