A for Angsty Adolescent Assholes

A for Anything
by Damon Knight
p. 1961

A lot of fifties and sixties science fiction often revolved around ‘what if’ questions and Damon Knight’s A for Anything poses the question: what if you had a machine that produced duplicates of any physical object—even people? It’s a question that sets up Knight’s world and a whole slew of philosophical questions; the only drawback is that Knight does not really answer any of them.

I suppose there is a thin line between writing a book that compels the reader to examine these philosophies and one that just posits the questions without ever intending to answer them, so as to let the reader do all the work. You could argue that Knight’s intention was the former, or perhaps he got lazy and it’s the latter. I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end.

A for Anything’s first 3 chapters (comprised of 33 pages) hint at a very different type of novel, one that details the immediate aftermath of such an invention—referred to only as a ‘gismo’—falling into the average person’s hands. In chapter one, some random guy gets the first gismo in the mail anonymously. In chapter two, we learn everyone is talking about them and wants one but no one knows where they came from and chapter three hints at a changed world as the darker nature of man’s insatiable materialism takes hold.

Then you get to chapter four and everything is different. We have jumped in time to the ‘present’ world of the story being told. My book says it’s the year 2049; Wikipedia says 2149. I really hope that my book had a typo and it actually is supposed to be 2149 because less than a century seems way too short for life to have changed so dramatically, especially since characters refer to pre-gismo times as ‘ancient’ several times, and tell stories of their ancestors as if they were speaking about knights of the round table.

Thanks to the advent of the gismo, the world has evolved (or devolved, depending on if you view this world as a Utopia or Dystopia) into a society divided by powerful clans, dependent on slave labor, provided by ‘duped’ humans. It’s not quite clear which humans are being duped; I suppose we can assume that everyone who isn’t related to someone who has a gismo is a slave. In any case, slaves outnumber the ruling families fifty to one but inconceivably, revolt has never been an issue before.

Our ‘hero’ is the sixteen-year-old privileged heir to his clan, Dick Jones, and his name is... stunningly appropriate. I kept waiting for the part where Dick grows up, learns to control his anger, gets a few lessons in impulse control and possibly, gradually, learns the error of treating humans (even duped ones) like slaves and joins them in overturning society... but that doesn’t happen. Dick remains, well... a dick.

A for Anything caught me off guard with its stylistic choices. With such a powerful ‘what if’ guiding the story, a world of the future so changed from our own, and a host of philosophical and ethical questions raised about the issues of of slavery, one would assume this book would include a lot of talking but instead we are treated to a surprising amount of action. Dick’s tale starts with a lethal duel with his cousin and he continues to feud with people he meets at ‘Eagles,’ the militaristic base he is sent to for his secondary schooling. The ending seems kind of tacked on, as Dick somehow becomes involved with an uprising completely unrelated to the slaves, which is quickly squashed when the actual slave revolt sneaks in first and ruins everyone else’s plans. Dick, despite being exposed to plenty of ethical debates, never chooses a side on anything (apart from his own, of course), and yet his actions and opinions seem to be highly regarded. Weird.

I can’t say I disliked A for Anything. I felt more engaged in the action than in other old sci-fi novels I’ve delved into. It is a bit of a departure from what I’ve been reading lately—namely post-apocalyptic fiction that deal with the everyman. Knight’s story takes place in an established world, long after the so-called ‘apocalyptic’ event, and is not necessarily suggesting that the world is all that bad. I’ve spent a long time since I put the book down wondering if Knight was suggesting the world was a Utopia.

I guess I just expected more from the story than I got. The most interesting characters are quickly discarded, often unceremoniously, and their motivations are never clear. Furthermore, with all the debates on morality and Dick’s impulsiveness and anger—not to mention the novel’s traditional set up as a coming of age story—I really expected Dick to be the first to learn the error of his society’s ways and rise up with the slaves but the slave leader of the revolt is portrayed as being a bit villainous. Yet, I still sided with the slaves, because I was more invested in their fate than Dick’s teenage angst. In spite of the promise of its premise, A for Anything is a story about growing older, but not necessarily about growing up.