Damon Knight (1922–2002) was an influential US science fiction writer and critic, highly regarded for editing the edgy original anthology series Orbit and for his (sometimes overshadowed) fiction, for which he won the Hugo Award. He started early, founding his own fanzine, entitled Snide, when he was only eleven. Knight could also be said to have helped create, along with his second wife (the acclaimed writer Kate Wilhelm), the modern structure and apparatus of the US science fiction community.
In addition to being a member of the famous Futurians science fiction group, Knight founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and cofounded three influential organizations: the National Fantasy Fan Federation, the Milford Writer’s Workshop, and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. As creative writing teachers, Knight and Wilhelm helped shape several generations of primarily US and UK speculative fiction writers by teaching at both Milford and Clarion; they also helped run Sycamore Hill, a kind of Clarion for intermediate and advanced writers. The SFWA officers and past presidents named Knight its thirteenth grand master in 1994. After Knight’s death in 2002, the award became the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2003.
Ray Bradbury bought Knight’s first short story, “The Itching Hour” (Futuria Fantasia, 1940), but Knight would soon also be active as an editor and reviewer. As a critic, he (in)famously wrote in 1945 that A. E. van Vogt “is not a giant as often maintained. He’s only a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter”—a hyperbolic statement that has not been proven true. Knight is more rightly known for the term idiot plot, a story that only functions because almost everyone in it acts stupidly. The term may have been invented by James Blish, a fellow Futurian, but Knight’s frequent use of it in his reviews made its use common.
Knight’s Orbit series (1966–80) ran contiguous with New Worlds during the New Wave boom and then outlived New Worlds, providing an American refuge for edgy, risk-taking speculative fiction. In addition to being an influence on the editors of this volume, Orbit was the only home for early chapters from Stepan Chapman’s Philip K. Dick Award–winning novel The Troika (stand-alone segments reprinted herein) and a host of other interesting writers. Knight edited several wonderful reprint anthologies, including A Century of Science Fiction and A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels. Knight was also an active translator and champion of French fiction, including that of the notorious Boris Vian.
In terms of his fiction, Knight’s most famous story is the jokey “To Serve Man” (1950). It won a fifty-year Retro Hugo in 2001 and was made into a Twilight Zone episode, but it is not his best work and has not aged well. Readers should instead seek out his strange, sometimes Nabokovian novels and stories like the first-contact story reprinted here, the novelette “Stranger Station.” First published in 1956 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “Stranger Station” showcases Knight at the height of his powers, able to convey both intensity and nuance in a truly unique context. As the title suggests, this is a truly strange story, and a superior example of exploring the complexities of alien contact through fiction.