ONE SIDE LAUGHING

Seventeen variations, 1965-86, from respected editor-writer- critic Knight (most recently the CV trilogy), each a delightful fusion of craft and ideas. Knight covers familiar territory with style and wit: time travel, religion, peculiar alien invaders, a Tarzan pastiche, crime, a viewer that scans all places and times, a breathtaking circular fantasy. And in the two longer pieces he illuminates darker human impulses: an intelligent alien kept as a specimen in a zoo exchanges minds with a human observer; and a researcher learns that, in order to occupy a paradise planet, the human colonists ruthlessly exterminated its intelligent alien inhabitants. Knight's novels, paradoxically, have an irritatingly juvenile feel, with disappointingly vacuous contents; whereas his stories are almost always charming, vivid, subtle and—as, emphatically, here—a pleasure to read.