چهار در یک

by Damon Knight, مهرداد تویسرکانی (Translator)

As Frederik Pohl noted in an essay decades after this story was published, much of GALAXY’s contents contained stories which were not really about their nominal subject. As editor of GALAXY magazine, Horace Gold’s editorial interest was always tilted toward satire and social commentary, which in the main interested him far more than technological extrapolation. These interests put his magazine at the outset in a different place than John W. Campbell’s at least ostensibly rigorous ASTOUNDING. In regard to the commentary, Pohl wrote, "There were only a few places in the 1950’s in which the real condition of the Republic could be examined. One of them was the science fiction magazines," and GALAXY was the most oriented in that direction. FOUR IN ONE (February 1953) reads as if it were a study of alien menace and its interface with the human organism as Knight’s shipwrecked colonists, seeking physical preservation, amalgamate with an alien being which can absorb their brains intact and respond to signals. It is an horrific speculation and Knight works it through with a fair amount of rigor. Damon Knight was an established contributor when this novelette was published, and Robert Silverberg’s long introductory essay accompanying the work testifies to its influence upon him and his great admiration.

Genres: Science Fiction

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Damon Francis Knight was an American science fiction author, editor, and critic.
Knight's first professional sale was a cartoon drawing to a science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. His first story, "Resilience", was published in 1941. He is best known as the author of "To Serve Man", which was adapted for The Twilight Zone. He was a recipient of the Hugo Award, founder of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), cofounder of the National Fantasy Fan Federation, cofounder of the Milford Writer's Workshop, and cofounder of the Clarion Writers Workshop. Knight lived in Eugene, Oregon, with his wife Kate Wilhelm.

Reviews

[Hollis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this little adventure thriller, shot through with reasoning and critical thinking. It's particularly brutal on military groupthink and bureaucracy. The woman is both sex object and under-realized heroine, but that's a reflection of the time in which it was written. Doesn't bother me much. I love this little group's predicament, the different ways they dealt with it, even up to the ending.

[The Professor · Rating 3 out of 5]

“We are the future”. The first in Robert Silverberg’s “Science Fiction 101” short story anthology, Damon Knight’s 1953 short-ish tale delivers a good shudder to those of us who recoil at tales of lucid alien body horror and then some food for thought. A planetary survey team of four head out to explore a new planet, trip, land in some leaves and wake up fully conscious of their bodies having been absorbed into some God-awful monsterish gestalt.

Knight describes the absorbing alien as “a shabby blanket of leaves and dirt”, “a long, narrow strip of mottled green and brown”, “a humped green-brown body” and this post-Star Trek reader was quickly put in mind of the Horta. Personally I would have started screaming the place down if any of my many planetary explorations ended in such a fashion but Knight throws us a rather amusing curveball. The brain stems now forced to work together to move and eat are all warring factions, a sort of four person mirror of society – prissy bureaucrat, elder statesman, a scientist who plays it jarringly cool and frightened girl (try swapping “country” for “creature” in the line “our efforts to move in opposite directions must be pulling this creature apart”). As the four start to realise they can grow limbs – pointedly arms – and eventually the ability to eject “poisonous” personalities the tale, without ever going into lecture mode, edges towards metaphor. In the end Knight lands the plane with some images that wouldn’t be out of place in Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” – vis a vis malformed humanoids who have risen above the fray and now represent the future – although the survey team in this 1953 story are rigorously kitted out head to toe in PPE unlike any of the red shirts Ridley likes to feature in his 21st century films. The finale is idealistic but Knight is on the side of the angels even if he does seem to advocate bashing competing brain stems with boulders and forcible ejecting those with inconvenient views.

Silverberg – of whose own work I need to explore – provides an essay at the end of each of these anthologised stories and for “Four Into One” gives us a) a very sharp observation about the loyalty-obsessed character being named McCarty ("All of this will be reported. All of it.") in a story published in 1953, the year of the McCarthy communist witch hunts and b) a really great structural analysis of the story. “It works very well” he concludes and I’m include to agree. This is a textbook demonstration of craft with some shudders and wider things on its (gestalt) mind. “Good Lord. . . . That does rather put another face on it, doesn’t it?”

[Dave Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great comment on society at the time thinly disguised as a body horror story.

The author manages to attack both the McCarthy Red scare and the Soviet system itself while mentioning neither.

The protagonists are good people in a bad situation and are a bit slow to realize the potential and threat of the being that has absorbed them. The antagonists are thuggish and are quick to use the situation to create danger to the protagonists for not being "loyal" to the state.

All in all a good time capsule read, a bit of the "damsel in distress" that liked to pop up in the 50's, and still pops up occasionally today though in the end, it's the female protagonist who actually saves the day..

[Brian R. Mcdonald]

This short story, published in Galaxy Magazine in 1953 and as a self-contained ebook in 2011, describes go as being played on a 30x30 board; then it compares a space war between two expanding empires, both armed with so many weaponized robot satellites that they no longer engage in active combat, to a three dimensional game of Go, one in which each side colonizes countless planets in patterns to protect its own territory and trade routes and interdict those of the other.

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A human struggles to cope with his modified body.

Another body shock story from the pen of Damon Knight.