Rule Golden

The socially sensitive writers of our time seem to me to have assembled under the banner of science fiction, where they send forth message, after message warning us of our folly and of the Furies we seem about to awake. One of the most devastating devices for showing these follies to us in science-fantasy form is to import a being from another, far-distant civilization, a being that has powers of one sort or another to make us see what horrible fools—what criminal fools— we are. In “Rule Golden,” Damon Knight—one of the most perceptive and astringent of science fiction’s writers and critics—takes the deceptively simple device of inverting the Golden Rule in the hand of an “alien” with strange powers, and putting it to work. Mr. Knight carries out his fable with relentless logic until you fairly squirm with reflected anguish. Believe me, it’s good for you!

This is one unswerving fact about Damon Knight: as a moralist as well as a writer, he is unbendingly honest, relentlessly logical. For this reason he is, and probably always will be, a poor man. Knight was born in Oregon in 1922, and as a young man spent a few unremunerative years as a commercial artist. He then shifted to pulp editing, and then, in his words, “was chained to an oar in a reading-fee literary agency.” He finally began writing full time in 1950. In 1956 Damon received a “Hugo” (science fiction’s imitation of the movie “Oscar”) as the best s-f critic of the year. He has written over sixty stories and two novels, and has fathered three children, all with the same wife.