2015 read #68: The Sun Saboteurs by Damon Knight.

The Sun Saboteurs by Damon Knight
101 pages
Published 1961
Read December 4
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Here we are in December, and I haven't even read seventy books yet. By this date last year, I'd read 115 books; by this time in 2013, I was working on my 148th. After this September, when I'd finally managed to read a respectable twelve titles in the space of a month, I'd dared to hope that I could consume a hundred books by the end of the year, but alas -- September was an anomaly, and my attention span remains as tenuous and unreliable as it has been throughout this year.

Well, time to artificially pad out my numbers while I still can!

The Sun Saboteurs is half of an old Ace Double, which I had bought early this summer to get my hands on G. McDonald Wallis' The Light of Lilith. At that point I had yet to read Wallis' Legend of Lost Earth, and harbored some groundless notion that she might be some forgotten and unfairly overlooked past master of sci-fi. Reading Legend dispelled that idea quickly enough, but by that point this volume was already in my hands. The Light of Lilith has a totally sweet pulp cover, though, so it wasn't entirely a waste.

I've encountered Damon Knight's short fiction in a handful of retrospective anthologies, including "The Country of the Kind" (reviewed here) and "I See You" (reviewed here), which gave me a general impression of him as a Silver Age author, big into ideas and allegories, thought-provoking but unlikely to ever number among my favorites. The Sun Saboteurs seems to conform to this predicted pattern, attempting to wrestle with concepts of human nature and the violence seemingly implicit within it, touching on aging and mortality and written with a galaxy-wide streak of nihilism. The framework of the story was interesting, with the human survivors of a global collapse either eking out peasant livelihoods on a decrepit Earth or musing upon the slow extinction of humanity from ghettos on a hundred alien planets. Perhaps what this novel needed was some space to breathe; the tight-packed pace and get-the-job-done prose of the Ace Double era (if I may make so sweeping an assertion after reading a mere three samples of the product) resists the cultivation of anything like character or nuance. I could imagine a larger, more indulgent, more psychologically and emotionally adept novel making much better use of these materials to tell a much more affecting and provocative tale, in the right hands. As it is, Saboteurs was a hundred-page slip of a book that I sped through in one evening, and it read like one.