Norman L. Knight

Norman L. Knight (1895-1972) was an American science fiction writer and, for most of his career, a government chemist -- he worked for the Department of Agriculture as a pesticide chemist until his retirement in 1963. He wrote only a handful of stories, beginning with the 1937 Astounding serial "Frontier of the Unknown," but is remembered for a single novel: A Torrent of Faces (1967), written with James Blish. Expanding on ideas from Knight's earlier fiction about an amphibious offshoot of humanity, the novel imagines an ambiguously utopian, vastly overpopulated future Earth of a trillion people confronting an approaching asteroid, blending hard-SF speculation with a critique of unchecked population growth.