Beyond the Barrier

by Damon Knight

Sci-fi novel of a physics professor grappling to resolve a problem from 10,000 years in the future, triggering a series of violent events.

Serialized originally in 3 parts: Dec. 1963, Jan. 1964, April 1964 editions of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Pulp

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

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

[SciFiOne · Rating 4 out of 5]

1987 grade B+
2023 grade B+

"He sat down and watched the great sheet of wrinkled cloud drift slowly ..."

"What is a zug?" Professor Naismith does not remember the first 30 odd years of his life, only the last few. That all starts to change near the beginning when an odd student asks him "What is a zug?" after his university lecture. The story gets wilder after that, and it takes him the whole book to find the answer. In most of the story, he is reacting to other people pushing him, which gets annoying (I did skip over small bits). But the world building is fantastic, and the prose, which included the first quote, is fast reading. The content is a bit nasty in places, and I did guess a few small things ahead of time, but not enough to spoil an interesting story.

Recommended, I think.

[Glen · Rating 2 out of 5]

A professor is teaching a bunch of classes about temporal energy, when a young lady asks "What is a Zug?" Then it all gets very confusing.

I didn't get it.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Damon Knight's 1953 novel entitled "The Rithian Terror," the author presented his readers with a vaguely octopuslike menace, the titular Rithian; a spy with the ability to hide itself inside the body of any Earthling. But this was not the last time that the Oregon-born writer would give us a tale featuring a hideous, nonhumanoid alien hiding in plain sight! More than a decade later, Knight, in his novel "Beyond the Barrier," presented his audience with an alien who was not only as difficult to find as the Rithian, but infinitely harder to kill. Sadly, the 1964 book was also infinitely harder for the reader to wrap his/her mind around, as compared to the 1953 effort. But more on that in a moment.

"Beyond the Barrier" was actually an expansion of Knight's novelette "The Tree of Time," which had appeared in the December '63 and January '64 issues of the 40-cent, digest-sized "Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction"...both issues, incidentally, featuring cover artwork for Knight's tale. In 1964, the story was expanded to novel form in a Doubleday hardcover and retitled "Beyond the Barrier," with cover artwork by Tom Chibbaro; it would receive another hardcover edition from the British publisher Gollancz that same year. In 1965, the book would be given the paperback treatment by the American firm Macfadden, with a cover by the great Richard Powers; a 50-cent affair that I was happy to find at the (now sadly defunct) NYC bookstore Singularity. The book has seen around a half dozen more iterations in the last 50 years, so laying your hands on a copy should not prove too difficult to accomplish...if, that is, you still wish to do so after reading this review.

Okay, now for the part that I’ve been dreading...giving you some idea of what Knight's book is about. And that might just prove more easily said than done, as I'm not really sure that I completely understood the darn thing myself. But I'll do my best. "Beyond the Barrier" starts off in the futuristic year of, uh, 1980, when we meet a 35-year-old physics professor, Dr. Gordon Naismith, who is teaching a class on "quasi-matter" and temporal energy, in an L.A. university, when we first encounter him. Naismith is an amnesiac, who can remember nothing of his past up until the time of crash-landing in an Air Force jet four years earlier. Thus, with his first 31 years a complete blank, Naismith is strangely startled when one of his students, Lall, whom he takes for a young Indian woman, asks him in class, "Professor, what is a Zug?" The baffling question is the seeming commencement of a series of highly unusual and increasingly nerve-racking events in the befuddled professor's life. He is framed for the murders of his housekeeper and the campus bursar. A man named Churan, who he has never met, sends him a futuristic mechanical device that he cannot even open, and then Churan makes out an official complaint that Naismith had tried to kill him. The poor professor sees a vision of a reptilian monster in his bedroom, with some kind of weapon gizmo floating in midair. He dreams repeatedly of a beautiful city of the far future. His psychiatrist is beaten to death, with the incriminating signs once again pointing toward Naismith.

Eventually, the pieces in this bravura opening section begin to come together, and Naismith, on the run from the law, learns that Lall and Churan are actually aliens from the far future. Once their makeup is removed, they are revealed to be green-skinned, toadlike beings from 82 Eridani, and we learn that Lall's real name is Miko, and Churan's, Gunda. The two aliens tell Naismith that he is in actuality a Shefthi; one of a warrior caste from the distant future who had been/will be specifically created to fight the hideous, mutated "ortholidans" known as the Zugs. With nowhere left on Earth to run, Naismith agrees to accompany the couple in their "shadow-egg" time device. It seems that the Earth civilization known as the Lenlu Din, in the far distant future, has erected a "time barrier" to prevent the Zugs from coming forward, but somehow, impossibly, one has managed to do so anyway. And now, Naismith is needed to do what he was designed for...namely, kill the Zug, a winged, scaly, fast-moving creature that also has the ability of creating bewildering illusions. Surely no simple task, especially for a mixed-up academic who can't even begin to figure out who he really is, or what is what....

Well, as you might have inferred, when it comes to this particular Damon Knight book, there's both good news and bad news. Let's take the good news first, shall we? First, "Beyond the Barrier" does boast a thoroughly intriguing opening section, as matters grow increasingly strange for Naismith and he wonders what can possibly be going on. At least three more well-done sequences follow. In the first, those toadlike alien beings bring our hopelessly confused hero to a wrecked spaceship on the Earth's surface in the 111th century for their own mysterious purposes. While there, Naismith spends weeks exploring the interstellar liner, and learns why Earth is a barren wasteland at that time. In the next remarkable segment, Naismith, even farther up the time line, grips a machine that sends him plummeting through the Earth, through the core (!), and up to the other side! He fetches up not in what would be China, as might be expected, but elsewhere, improbably calculating just when he might reemerge while he plummets: "Call the radius of the Earth four thousand miles--about twenty million feet, for convenience. Gravity at the surface of the Earth, thirty-two feet per second per second. The square root of twenty million over thirty-two would be two hundred and fifty times the square root of ten...times pi...about twenty-five hundred seconds. Call it forty-two minutes...." Got all that? And in the next mind-boggling segment, which transpires in the floating bubble city of the Lenlu Din, with its truly bizarre and decadent populace, Naismith goes up against the Zug, in a surprisingly short but exciting battle. That floating city, I might add, filled with various robots, outre costumes and psychedelic backdrops, is a great work of the imagination, to be sure. Kudos also to Mr. Knight for all the technological wonders on display in his book. Thus, that time travel device, the wristband "directors" that help propel the Lenlu Din in their gravityless environment, the "mind helmets" that can read another person's thoughts fully, the "total-access clothing" that some of the city's women wear (basically, curved metallic plaques on the body that can wink in and out of existence!), an unending assortment of robots, and, of course, that time barrier itself. And the book is wonderfully readable, as would be expected of the author who was also the co-founder of the Milford Writer's Workshop. The fact that my favorite word in the English language, "chthonic," appears (in the bizarre juxtaposition of words "chthonic ourobouros") is another item to this novel's credit. Anyway, that's the good news.

As for the bad, I regret to add that although "Beyond the Barrier" sports any number of colorful, imaginative and exciting sequences, all those pieces just didn't add up for this reader. The book ultimately feels like a jigsaw puzzle that is missing more than a few pieces. Or perhaps Knight, rather than giving us not enough information, has given us too much? It's hard to tell. Is the plot here half baked, or does the reader need to get fully baked (if you get my drift) before making any sense of it? If this novel is the expanded version of "The Tree of Time," I wonder what that earlier story must be like to decipher! Here, the reader is not given nearly enough background information on that time barrier, the future Earth, and especially the Zugs. As to those latter, Knight fails to tell us their history, how they came to be on Earth, or precisely what that word "ortholidan" means. His descriptions of the creatures are nebulous at best: winged, scaly, up to 30 feet long, man-eating, and eager to lay their eggs in a human host. The dreams that Naismith suffers are inadequately explained; the "Entertainer" Dar-Yani, who figures largely in them, is never even mentioned again. Also never explained: the paintings that had been mysteriously torn from their frames in that wrecked space liner. Gunda and Miko disappear from the book at its 2/3 point, never to be mentioned again. And as regards those two, the reader is left with the nagging question of whether or not they in fact knew Naismith's full background; one must read between the lines, I suppose, to divine the answer to that one. The book also introduces several of those temporal paradoxes that, as I have mentioned elsewhere, often give me a near migraine as I endeavor to suss them out, and the ones brought up here are no exception.

And yet, despite all these issues, as I made my way through Knight's book, I kept expecting the author to make everything clear, and to resolve all my many questions. When only 10 pages in the book remained, I was still hoping that the author would miraculously bring his work in for a nice three-point landing; that he would tie things up with a neat bow. Sadly, quite the opposite lay in store. On the front cover of my Macfadden edition there is a blurb from the "Edmonton Journal" that reads, in part, "The final twist is well hidden and adds spice to the conclusion." A fair enough statement, but unfortunately, that twist also serves to upend everything that we had believed before, rendering much of the book even more confusing that it had been up until then! I am trying to be coy here, so as not to spoil any surprises for the prospective reader, but have to add that this twist raises more conundrums than it serves to clarify. It was, for me, a most disappointing conclusion. Again, by the final page, the whole story line ultimately comes off as being insufficiently developed. This is a book with lots of good ideas and set pieces, but they just don’t cohere seamlessly. And the more one thinks about Knight's plot here, the more frustrating it becomes. Trying to figure out Gunda and Miko's actual motivations was giving me a throbbing head last night, and that comes way before the final upending twist. (I do believe I've actually riddled that part out...at least, to my satisfaction.) Unlike "The Rithian Terror," which was a breeze to follow and was ultimately a modestly satisfying affair, "Beyond the Barrier" must be deemed something of a failure. I am giving it a generous 3 stars for its pacing, color, and imaginative and atmospheric sequences, but do feel that this renowned author has let his readers down here. I guess all his books can't be winners, right? If only I had a "shadow-egg" time device so I could go back to 1964 and ask Damon Knight some questions. Or better yet, use a mind helmet on him....

(By the way, this review originally appeared on the FanLit website at https://fantasyliterature.com/ ... a most ideal destination for all fans of Damon Knight....)

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"Damon Knight’s dismal Beyond the Barrier (1964) is all plot, lacks even the most cursory world development, makes no attempt to construct a “character”, and contains one of the single most ludicrous scenes I’ve encountered. Knight is considered somewhat of a “master” of sci-fi but his [...]"

[Seymour · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't epic or mind blowing but it was everything I needed it to be a for a short, engrossing holiday read and a gentle massage for the imagination: an interesting plot that unfolded with enough mystery and pace to stay engaging, a bit of science and speculation, a nice twist, a dash of metaphysics, alien scenery and strange machinery ... nice!

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have the hardback of this, published in 1964. Pretty good. Dated, of course

[Patrick Scheele · Rating 1 out of 5]

I despise the "humans suck!" subgenre of SF. Can you imagine a distant future where the technology has advanced way beyond what we know now (including interstellar travel and time travel), but everybody is basically an idiot and childish to boot? Of course you can't because such a future doesn't make sense. Yet here it is, as described by Damon Knight.

Also, this is one of those books where you can sense in advance that the writer hasn't created enough interest in the story yet, so as he nears the end he's going to have to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Which means a twist ending. And of course the bigger the twist, the better the story, right? So, the writer pulls the biggest twist you can think of within the context of the (disjointed) world he has built and expects us all to sit there with shocked pikachu faces or something, but it was easy to see it coming. And not that interesting. And anti-human. Meh.

[Debby Kean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as I remembered.

[Lauren Stoolfire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was just missing something with this one.

[Mike Franklin · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published in 1964, Beyond the Barrier, does feel a little dated now but still makes for an interesting read. In the last years of the twentieth century (should have gone for twenty first century but hey ho!) an amnesic physics professor finds a series of inexplicable events channelling him towards surrendering to the will of a couple of strange characters from the future.

This is a short book of around 150 pages which, though pretty typical in the sixties, would probably be marketed as a novella today and, as always, I find myself less drawn into such a book; there’s too much that gets glossed over that an author today would expand with far greater detail giving, for me at least, a much more satisfying and immersive experience. It is also a time-travel book, a subject that seems to have been more popular back then. I suspect the modern sceptical reader is far more likely to dismiss time travel as fantasy now rather than science fiction and I must admit I tend towards that feeling. Knight does address some simple paradox elements but shies away from any really significant ones which was probably wise. In fact although time travel is central to the whole plot of the book it actually spends very little time examining it beyond what is absolutely necessary to the plot.

The writing is fluid but we really only get to know the main character, there simply aren’t enough pages to give any depth on any others, and my biggest complaint is that throughout the book that character pretty much only ever reacts to events and almost never drives them himself and when he does I simply found his actions so out of his character that I struggled to accept them.

I do seem to struggle to get my head into the right frame of mind to read these older books despite them being the sort of books I was brought up on and loved to death at the time (I was born in 1957). So I always feel a little harsh marking them down now but I can only play it as I feel it and overall this wasn’t one of my best recent reads.

[Hilary G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember this book fondly because it was the first ever science fiction novel that I read and it piqued my interest enough that I read hundreds more over the next decades. I must have read this one in about 1964. It won't have had the cover shown here, because I used to get all my books from the library and most of them were Gollancz SF, hardbacks with bright yellow covers. I probably read most of the ones in my small local library. It isn't one of the recognised SF greats, but it made a huge impression on me because I had never read anything like it before. All these years later, I can still remember the question "What is a Zug?" And I can remember the answer. These days I can't remember books I read only a few months ago, so this is a compliment to Damon Knight. I have never read the book since, perhaps I should, but I like to remember it the way I remember it - as a door into other worlds, a beacon lighting the way as I embarked on a journey of discovery into imagination, space and time.

[Joe Santoro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this one... Prof. Gordon Naismith is multi-teaching his physics class when someone asks him what a Zug is. This leads him to remember he is really from the distant future, and two rival groups are trying to convince him to help him get rid of the other. While the near future (1980), is not very exciting, the only sign of 'future tech' is the ability to have a teach be in multiple classrooms at once, and still retain the memories of each, that, and video phones (of course). I'd think that would trigger lots of other stuff, but since it wasn't important to the story (the book shifted to future locales less than 1/2 way though).

The time travel bits were almost a joke, but they works for the story, and there was a really cool scene with the main character driving through the Earth and out the other side that was really well done.

I'm on a good streak for endings, as this one was once again a good, interesting twist that left me satisfied. Definitely recommended.

[Alan Marchant · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is a Zug?

This was my coming-of-age novel, my first slick and jacketed selection from the adult SciFi shelf of the Carnegie Public Library. It opened my eyes to how exciting adult fiction could be. Within the year I had read everything else on that shelf. I remember thinking that it was a bit sexualized for a pre-teen, but what the hey.

I doubt that I would find Damon Knight's book such a great read today. But there's no denying that it was imaginative SciFi. Beyond the Barrier extends the exploration of cloning vs identity that was begun by Van Vogt in The World of Null-A. Clever inventions include electrochromic clothes and the first implanted alien.

[Tracy Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this at used library book sale in my youth, circa 1975. I’ve held onto it ever since for sentimental reasons. I recently came across it again when re-shelving my books after Hurricane Irma prep. After decades I still remembered the basic premise of the story but decided to read it again. I had the feeling of reading a brand new book from an adult perspective while having flashbacks of the boy I was reading it in his room.

[Nurture Waratah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was such a light and easy read that I almost did not read it. However, I found myself being pulled into the story despite myself and I am glad that I was. This book turned out to be better than it appears at first, and I find the concluding concept quite intriguing. This is worth reading if you are a science fiction fan, but others probably wouldn't enjoy it.

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a copious amount of sci-fi, yet still found this story to be innovative. I both appreciated its pulpiness and wished for more character development. I harkened often to Heinlein in the content, but also noticed subsequent topics from other authors. Enjoyable.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Based on the story entitled "Tree of Time" which originally appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, I recall nothing of this novel.

[Pierre · Rating 2 out of 5]

Voorbij de barriere

[Neil Davies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant, from another of those authors who I've known about for years but only just got around to reading. Will definitely be reading more.

[Del · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Loved it!

[Matt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some great moments that were unfortunately scattered amongst a dull grind. Maybe it's a consequence of being pieced together from three shorts, but the pace is so fast that I rarely became immersed.