Talk:Damon Knight

Merge suggestion

The reason I separated the bibliography was that at John W. Campbell, Jr., where I also created a biblio of first editions, a comment on GA review was that the biblio was too detailed for the article. I don't mind whether it's in the main article or separated, but I think it should be consistent, and I'd be a little concerned that someone would argue for separating it again. The GA comment is here, and the biblio of Campbell as a separate article is here. Mike Christie (talk) 01:32, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

I am removing the merge tag as there has been no other comment. Mike Christie (talk) 20:36, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Beyond the Barrier

[Low spoiler content, i'd say.]

Only his bibliog has an entry for

Beyond the Barrier, Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1964; hardcover

and there are only 3 copies within inter-library-loan range for me. I'm not prepared to make the case for upgrading mention of the book into the accompanying article. It does have some distinctions, tho. The PoV-setting character is a physics prof (in 1980, 16 years into Knight's future). Curiously provoked by the context-less question "Professor, what is a zug?" (which stuck in at least my mind far longer than the author and title), he has recourse to the university library's computer-based, uh, 'pedia. (Sorry: ARPANET may have existed when he wrote, but public demo was 4 years off. And 1-person-portable wireless meant a push-to-talk walkie-talkie and per-user FCC licenses.) For plot simplicity, Zug (disambiguation) goes unmentioned, and the only article is within the domain of Swiss geography: there's no mutated orthilodont article (but he doesn't yet know those future-biology terms, either).
It's not hard science fiction by any means (characters are being sent back to 20th century from the far future, and for reasons that rest on the "barrier" of the title, a phenomenon that is a classic exercise of SF literary fiat), but the behavior of the gratuitous goofball matter-interpenetrating vehicle was subjected to apparently rigorous real-universe analysis: harmonic motion driven by the radically non-uniform G-field (non-simple harmonic motion!), with Coriolis effect and orbital motion factored in.
If i had to guess, i'd say it's a longshot for an article, tho a paragraph may not be out of the question. But i don't have to guess; i'm quite happy to rely on many eyeballs over my guesses.
--Jerzy•t 07:31, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: withdrawn by nominator, closed by BlueMoonset (talk) 04:00, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Article was turned into a redirect, leaving nothing for DYK to work with; withdrawn by nominator.

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

• ... that Damon Knight invented a language for his story "Babel II", where the protagonist accidentally triggers a second Tower of Babel event? Source: page 104 of the original story and the entry in Conley and Cain
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Brennley Brown

Created by Maury Markowitz (talk). Self-nominated at 00:32, 7 March 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Babel II (short story); consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

• Maury Markowitz:
  • general: article is new enough and long enough.
  • policy: article is neutral. everything is sourced except for the plot summary, which does not require citations as per mos:plotsource. earwig shows nothing of concern.
  • qpq: not yet provided.
  • hook:
    • i don't have access to the conley and cain source, but the story itself describes a simple substitution cipher, which i wouldn't call an invented language. (the story "partially describes" the language when the protagonist lists which letters he had worked out.) if, for example, i decided to substitute all my a's with e's and vice versa, i don't think i cen cleim to ba writing in e diffarant lenguega. i think it is also a bit unusual to state that knight invented the language. although he may have been the first to use that specific substitution cipher, i believe the general concept has existed for thousands of years.
    • i think adding "event" to the end of the hook, to conform with the description in the plot summary, would prevent the hook from suggesting that another tower of babel was built in the story. i wouldn't consider this modification necessary though; it's just a suggestion.
  • points outside of the dyk criteria:
    • do reliable sources state that the traveller was from a different dimension? this did not seem clear to me from the story.
    • the plot summary is worded to suggest that after the protagonist realizes that this is a repeat of the tower of babel event, he heads first to mexico to meet up with the traveller. however, the story has the protagonist head first to greenwich village. was this part of the story deliberately skipped? if so, i think the phrase "his next stop is in Mexico" could be reworded, for example, by replacing it with "the traveller would be heading to Mexico", to accurately reflect the story without needing to go into details regarding the trip to greenwich village.
    • i don't think the protagonist caught the traveller "entering another building". the traveller exited the world the same way he entered: via the protagonist's drawing table.

awaiting qpq. issue with hook. dying (talk) 16:52, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

• Maury Markowitz, it's been two weeks since this was noted as awaiting QPQ. Given that a week is how long you have to supply one after it's been noted as missing, this could technically close at any time. Please supply your QPQ right away. Thank you. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:38, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

• @BlueMoonset: Sorry guys, I'm not getting any in-wiki notifications - I got an email for your ping BM, but not the one from dying. C'est la vie. QPQ: Brennley Brown. Dying, added "event", works for me. As to the "invent", I'm not sure what to say - this is what they called it. I understand what you're saying, but it's about V in the end. Having been to this rodeo many times, would you pass the hook if it said "used a substitution cypher" and had no c&c ref? Maury Markowitz (talk) 19:13, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
  • Maury Markowitz, no worries about not getting my ping; it seems like some pings never reach me as well.
    i understand that "the threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth", but i don't believe verifiability necessitates inclusion, and personally, i have refrained from including verifiable statements when i believe that they are not true. the "used a substitution cypher" proposal seems agreeable, though i am worried if it is in danger of violating c6 of the supplementary guidelines, which requires the hook to "involve the real world in some way". technically, the hook satisfies that guideline, so i would approve the hook, but since i haven't been to as many rodeos as you have, i'd also flag it so that a more experienced promoter can review it to make sure that it is okay.
    similarly, if you mention the cipher in the plot summary, i'd be fine with the article not strictly adhering to rule 3b (which requires the hook to be cited) due to the exception afforded by d2 (presumably based on mos:plotsource), but i'd still recommend that you at least add appropriate citations to the parts of the summary relevant to the hook, as recently, people have been more strict on wt:dyk about citations being at the end of the relevant sentences in the article.
    more pressing, though, is the fact that the article has been unilaterally converted into a redirect. i don't have access to the offline sources, so had assumed that, with your experience, you would know if the short story passes gng. should the conversion be reverted? dying (talk) 18:39, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

@Dying: Oh, isn't that nice? Delete someone's work without following any established guidelines like PROD or AfD. I wasn't aware this had even happened. I thought maybe this was just another missing ping, but nope, the editor in question didn't bother to inform anyone, they just went ahead and deleted it. I give up. Nom withdrawn. Maury Markowitz (talk) 23:55, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Maury Markowitz, i am sorry to hear that. if it helps, i enjoyed reading the story, so am glad that you had created the article. by the way, this discussion [perm] might offer some insight regarding current practices at npp.

withdrawn by nominator. dying (talk) 17:41, 28 March 2023 (UTC)