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Author: John Kessel

A World Built on Atrocity: Damon Knight’s “Down There”

A World Built on Atrocity: Damon Knight’s “Down There”

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New Dimensions III, edited by Robert Silverberg
(Signet/New American Library, February 1974). Cover by Charles Moll

One of the writers who strongly influenced me when I was learning to write fiction was Damon Knight.

Although he founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, co-founded the Milford Writers’ Workshop, made the Clarion Writers’ Workshop the force that it is in the development of speculative fiction, edited the influential anthology series Orbit, and wrote one of the first significant critical works on science fiction, In Search of Wonder, his fiction is little remembered today.

Knight was a brilliant writer of short stories. He also wrote some damn good novels; his last one Humpty Dumpty, An Oval, published in 1996, is sui generis. But I want to talk about one of his most obscure stories, “Down There,” which appeared originally in the anthology New Dimensions 3 in 1973. It’s also available in The Best of Damon Knight.

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As Subversively Funny and Modern as Anything Ever Written: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville

As Subversively Funny and Modern as Anything Ever Written: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville

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The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Dover Thrift Editions,
November 2017). Cover: New Orleans Map, Currier and Ives, 1885

Last night I finished re-reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. I had not read it in many years — I first read it in the mid-1970s in a graduate seminar on Hawthorne and Melville taught by the wonderful Professor Elizabeth Schultz at the University of Kansas.

It’s perhaps my favorite Melville book, and a significant influence on my writing; my first solo novel Good News From Outer Space was an attempt to cross the figure of the multiply-disguised Confidence Man from Melville’s book with the shape-changing aliens of classic science fiction.

It all takes place in a single day — April Fool’s Day — on a steamboat that leaves St. Louis for points south, carrying a carnival of American character types, among them a confidence man who assumes eight different disguises as he interacts with, and bilks, various passengers during the the course of the day. It’s been described as a series of sketches or conversations. But that description does not do justice to the ways in which this book deconstructs America — and friendship and society and capitalism and progress and nature and religion and language itself — pretty much anything that any of us put faith in.

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