Time for a true confession: I’ve not read Damon Knight’s “The Visitor at the Zoo” from the April ’63 issue of Galaxy. However, both the cover and interior illustrations, by Edmund “EMSH” Emshwiller, are intriguing, and beautifully representative of his presentation of action combined with detail, let alone his sense of originality.
A closer look. The violet and green work well. EMSH’s logo is in the electrical-circuit-like-schematic-as-well-art along the upper left of the painting.
Normally, I’d provide you with an interior edited from my own (Epson V600 Photo) scan of the magazine. However, my own copy is so very tightly bound that placing and flattening the interior – to eliminate image distortion – would irreparably damage the magazine. No, go, that just will not do. So, I resorted to downloading the magazine from the Luminist Archive, and editing the somewhat-lower-resolution (less than 400 dpi) after converting the PDF to a JPG, which results in a conversion to 300 dpi. At this size, not much of a difference in resolution. (Alas, aaaargh, gadzooks, the Internet Archive remains “down” as of the creation of this post, on October 17, 2024. Thankfully the Luminist Archive, which seems to share many / most / almost all? (many more?) of the digitized science fiction and fantasy pulps at the Internet Archive, remains unaffected.)
Oh yeah, back to the story. As for the tale itself, oddly, given Damon Knight’s prominence (though what he did to A.E. van Vogt’s reputation was appalling; of course literary skill is entirely unrelated to character), it was only published in an Italian edition of Galaxy – and two likewise Italian Galaxy-related-story collections – in the 1960s. References about the tale seem very really, really few. As in, only one. Here it is: Rod Howell reviewed this issue of Galaxy in 2019, and herein gives his opinion.
