Customer Reviews

The Star Beast and Other Stories

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Enjoy this book. Even after all this time, each story is thought provoking and entertaining--even topical. I had a good time reading this, and know that I'll return now and then for a good chuckle.

By the 1940s, the cynical, fatalistic style of literature we now call "noir" was well-established in the crime/mystery genre, but was still a a rarity in science fiction. These six early stories by famed science fiction author-critic-editor Damon Knight are an exception-- his characters may battle their fate, but can never overcome it.

Knight's characters are a varied lot: a criminal seeking to pull off the greatest heist in the solar system; a missionary trying to bring God to the inhabitants of an alien world; a time traveller from the far future trying to save the future earth; the crew of a space ship trying to solve a murder on board the ship. What ties them all together is the ultimate futility of their efforts, no matter how ingenious or well-intentioned. In fact, all of the stories in this anthology can be summed up with a quote from one of them: "When every action led to disaster, those who did nothing were damned equally with those who acted."

The longest story in this collection, "The Earth Quarter" (1955), turns all of science fiction's Golden Age optimism on its head. Humanity achieves interstellar travel only to discover that we are the only violent, aggressive species in the galaxy; humans become interplanetary pariahs, crowded into ghettos on other planets so that we will not infect other species with our violence.

This is not a long anthology-- five short stories (one of them very short) and one novelette-- but the quality of the writing is very high and the anthology is well-formatted for the Kindle, with no typos, good navigation and bibliographic information about the date and place of original publication of each of the stories.