I’m revisiting this little-known novel, which I read as a kid. I didn’t remember much detail, only a few of the odder incidents in the story, and its creepy atmosphere. Damon Knight first made a reputation as an acerbic critic, and was extremely critical of A. E. van Vogt’s work. So it’s ironic that this novel struck me as distinctly “van Vogtian”. It certainly has that author’s tendency to jerk you from one plot development to another, and to constantly shift its frame of reference. There’s also a bit of a Philip K. Dick feel to it. The story starts with a protagonist with memory loss, a dubious identity, enigmatic events, murder, aliens masquerading as humans, and soon drifts into time-travel, wandering about an empty space ship after the human race is extinct, and even has the main character fall through the earth like a yo-yo. The stuff is just piled on. And yet, it’s readable.
In fact, it was just this kind of stuff, with no literary pretensions, that made reading SF such a pleasure. The ideas just tumbled out, willy-nilly. They were fun to think about. There was a playfulness, an irreverence, and an “outsider” feeling that you sensed in the writers that can’t be found in today’s SF. Damon Knight was one of those writers you pictured meeting in a seedy bar at one in the morning, nursing a glass of Jim Beam. Nothing like the tediously respectable types who dominate the field today. (Come to think of it, I once met van Vogt — in a seedy bar at one in the morning, and we talked for hours)
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