(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: dark flutter)
Kornbluth background, non-spoiler
JM:
Good evening, everyone. We are Chrononauts, the science fiction literature history podcast, and we're talking about Galaxy Science Fiction magazine today. If you would like to listen to our intro about the magazines, Nate explained it very well, and we had a little discussion about all that and what the history of this magazine was. And now we're going to talk about a story that I'm quite familiar with. This is a story called "The Marching Morons" that was published in April 1951. So this is a story that I've read several times already, and I'm already quite familiar with the writer, Cyril Kornbluth. And so I guess we'll just start by talking a little bit about him.
Cyril Kornbluth was born in New York in January 1923 of a Polish-Jewish family. And he lived a short life that was fairly productive. He was a member of the Futurians in his teens, served in the Second World War, and was married to Mary Byers, from whence the "M" in his pen name supposedly came, since he always envisioned they would collaborate on something. But it seems like they never actually did. Cyril was, in fact, a big fan of collaborations. And most of his work was with Frederik Pohl, including many posthumous collaborations, but he also worked with people like Robert A. W. Lowndes and especially Judith Merril. His wife outlived him by 50 years, dying in 2007.
Cyril pretty much got his start writing in 1939 at age 16. And during the early '40s, he wrote lots of stuff under various pseudonyms for different magazines, published by fellow Futurians and otherwise, like Stirring Science Stories, Astonishing Stories, and Cosmic Stories. And I believe all his short fiction can be found in the collection "His Share of Glory", which is a huge tome that spans his short but prolific writing career.
So early on, the pseudonyms defined what kind of story to expect and what kind of style would be delivered. The Cecil Corwin stories were silly and humorous. The Kenneth Falconer stories tended toward occult horror. S. D. Gottesman was another one that he used pretty often. And to me, his stories are characterized by some clever wit, surprising depth, and occasional sensitivity, really biting and sometimes vicious satire and bitter irony, and a tendency to perhaps show off the minutiae of his erudition. And he was described as acerbic by Pohl and seems that he could even be a bit pugnacious. I even came across an anecdote years ago where he supposedly punched Forrest J Ackerman in the stomach once at a convention.
Cyril reminds me a lot of precocious young people that I can think of, perhaps overcompensating for his sharp intellect and less than stellar physique. He was described by both Pohl and Merril as being small and pudgy, basically, with excessive bravado and some belligerence. And to give you a further idea of what kind of kid this guy was, according to his widow, Mary, Cyril graduated high school very early at age 13 and was admitted to City College of New York on a scholarship a year later. And he was then subsequently thrown out of school for organizing a student strike. Along with Pohl, Kornbluth is mentioned and discussed by Judith Merril in her memoirs, in Damon Knight's book "The Futurians", and in Isaac Asimov's memoirs. But as far as I know, there's no complete and full biography of this man's very short life.
So, in general, he seems to have been a man of eccentricity and strange habits. I don't know if this is really true, but apparently Kornbluth decided to educate himself as, I guess, a late teen or early twenty-something by reading an encyclopedia from beginning to end. And that's where he picked up a lot of, "esoteric knowledge". And I think it was Pohl who joked that you could tell where he was in his reading because the stuff would show up according to alphabetical order by subject.
But like some of our other writers this block, C. M. Kornbluth was one of those who could work in multiple genres, whereas it's sad that he died so young, arguably at the height of his powers, and we'll never really know what was to come. So, Kornbluth was a decorated infantryman during World War II, receiving the Bronze Star for fighting in the so-called Battle of the Bulge. Kornbluth was vehemently anti-fascist and absolutely convinced of the rightness of the cause of the Allies during World War II and would tolerate no nuance or doubt on this particular subject, according to Judith Merril.
I do think this is clear reading some of his stories, but also, unfortunately, because I can say this because I've read a lot of the short stories, as well as the book "The Space Merchants", which we'll talk about in a minute, I do think there's a little bit of anti-Asian racial sentiment sometimes, also possibly influenced by his war experience, although unlike next week's author, R. A. Lafferty, it looks like Kornbluth served only in the European theater. So, it's an interesting contrast to Lafferty in actually several ways.
After the war, he got into the University of Chicago under the G.I. Bill and studied journalism, working at Trans-Radio Press. And story writing did slow down for a bit, but really picked up again with decided verve and skill come the late 1940s. This time, everything was published under the C. M. Kornbluth name, and now he was writing stuff for Astounding, Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and various annuals and anthologies edited by Frederik Pohl. And some of his stories, like the ones we're covering now, were controversial, and not everyone really was able to swallow his perceived bitterness.
Kornbluth did try his hand at solo novel-length work in the early 1950s, some outside of the genre. He didn't meet with a lot of success until he joined forces with Frederik Pohl. And their most famous collaboration is the only other work, besides lots of the short stories published in "His Share of Glory", ultimately. It was a work called "The Space Merchants" in 1953, where their talents really combined in the ideal way, with the two of them producing a really cutting and funny satire of the advertising industry, basically in a world where advertising has completely taken over everything, and basically the ad agencies conglomerate run how everything works. So this is a story about espionage and, indeed, trips to Venus that aren't all they're cut out to be.
Nate:
Yeah, the collaboration thing, I think, is just a really interesting phenomenon in general. I recently picked up a copy of "Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth", and Pohl writes the intro decades after Kornbluth passed, and basically says that collaborative works really weren't a thing until science fiction came along. And even then, it really wasn't a thing until like the '40s or the '50s. And while we covered "Unveiling a Parallel" on the podcast a while back, which was one of the few examples of a collaborative effort from before that time, like I really can't think of any non-genre fiction from, I don't know, before the '40s or '50s that was a collaborative work, or at least explicitly billed that way.
It's not that like Dickens was collaborating with Thackeray or something like that on a novel?
JM:
Yeah, certainly not in the same way.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It wasn't uncommon for both writers to be credited on some of these things as well, or maybe they would operate under a joint pseudonym or something like that, because they actually didn't really even care that nobody recognized their name.
Yeah, it does seem like in cases where it happened before, things were a little different. Like, I mean, after reading the Jack London book earlier, I was reading about how he apparently bought story ideas from, was it Sinclair Lewis or something like that? The guy shot ideas at him, and London was just like, here, I'll give you a couple of bucks for them or whatever. But that's not really a true collaboration. And certainly only one author's name was credited on the byline. So yeah, it's interesting.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the only examples I can think of before it are really something like collaborations between playwrights from the Renaissance era, where it was like, that was before we had the real concept of authorship. And I think when you get the rise of authorship, you don't really see collaborations. It's usually just an individual creating a work of literature, a work of art.
Nate:
Yeah, but I mean, it's just interesting kind of how it takes off in the '40s and '50s. And while we covered a couple of C. L. Moore stories, we haven't done any of her stories with Henry Kuttner, though she did have some. And even to the modern day, I mean, "The Expanse" series of novels was quite popular, and it spawned a very good TV show. And those are collaborative novels. So I mean, it's still a thing that's very much being done to the present day.
Yeah, it's just kind of an interesting phenomenon.
JM:
Yeah, and it continues in the science fiction field to this day with a recent award winner, "This Is How You Lose the Time War", being a collaborative work.
This is how I want to conduct this, because this is a story that you really can't just talk about as a whole. You have to kind of stop as you go, because every couple of paragraphs there's something that makes you go, wait a minute.
Well, "The Space Merchants", though, we're talking about, and that was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1952 as "Gravy Planet" and got a book publication the following year, probably thanks to Pohl's connections. And their collaborations, of which there were a good five or six, all appeared initially in Galaxy Science Fiction. And besides "The Space Merchants", they were released by Pohl in the 1980s in book form. Much of Kornbluth's biography has, in fact, been provided by Pohl himself. And he says that he needed Kornbluth and other collaborators early on because he just didn't have what it took to construct longer coherent story narratives. And he thought Kornbluth was his best collaborator on these.
And he did get some of his solo novels—that is, Kornbluth's—published in the '50s in magazines, even having "Not This August", a book about a communist invasion of the United States, published in the somewhat prestigious Canadian magazine Maclean's. Cyril Kornbluth suffered from essential hypertension through much of his adult life. And he was due to meet with the publishers of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction on March 21st, 1958, to discuss a possible position as editor. After running late due to shoveling snow from his driveway, he ran to the train station, where he suffered a fatal heart attack on the platform and, yeah, didn't make it. He was only 34 years old, and that's just brutal.
I mean, yeah, I don't know. According to a few things, he didn't really live the healthiest lifestyle, and you know, I guess that's the hypertension and everything like that. It's sad because yeah, you can really see, especially later on, he's doing some really cool things. He's a unique voice in the genre, and if you really want to read into his stuff, that collection "His Share of Glory" is just like—I mean, it's so big you probably wouldn't want to read all the stories too quickly, but it's just a real accumulation of everything he did from 1939 to 1958, bar the longer works, and you can really see how he develops. The stories are not in chronological order. They're kind of all over the place, but I kind of think that that's a cool approach in a way rather than doing it chronologically. I don't really know what the people who compiled it had in mind, but Pohl wrote a really nice intro to the piece talking about his colleague and friend.
But this little story now, I don't know how many times I've read this story now. I've read this story a number of times since the early 2000s, and I've always been really fascinated by it. It's a nasty story. It's just ugly in every way, but it's also pretty funny, and it's just something that I've heard a lot of conflicting opinions about. And I think, again, I don't really want to get into it too much until we actually start summarizing the story, because there's no real way to sugarcoat anything or to go around it. We just have to tackle it head on. But I guess we'll get into the summary a little earlier than usual. But just as a general thing, how do you guys take to this nasty little joke?
Nate:
Yeah, I think it was interesting. I think a lot of people come into this in the modern era. I'd seen the film "Idiocracy" quite a fair number of times, and I had heard that this was basically an uncredited influence, and I'm not sure.
JM:
Yeah, I really think it must be. Even some of the jokes are the same.
Nate:
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of parallels for sure. It's possible Mike Judge came up with the idea in parallel. It's possible this was a subconscious inspiration, or it's just possible he got direct inspiration from it. But yeah, there's definitely some major, major parallels here. And some of the criticisms of "Idiocracy", I've heard, is that it subtly promotes eugenics.
JM:
Right, and that's also a criticism of this story.
Nate:
Right, this makes it so much more explicit, though. It spells it out a lot more, and it's just, generally speaking, a lot more mean-spirited. I mean, in "Idiocracy", Joe is an average Joe, and he's actually like a pretty nice, decent guy, whereas that is absolutely not the case about our Barlow main character here.
JM:
Yeah, so I think a potential shortcoming of this story is not necessarily that, because I think it's clear—it's pretty clear to me, especially this only really came to me after reading Merril's memoir, because I had never really thought about this before—but yeah, Kornbluth was a Jewish man who fought in the Second World War, and he's definitely not in favor of this kind of thing. Like, he's not, absolutely not. But one thing that I want to get into a little more: this story feels very prescient in a number of ways, and I don't just mean the obvious ways where we feel like our media is getting dumber, right? I mean, that could be a thing, but also in other ways. And this predates a really, really famous work in the United States that arguably influenced a lot of the oligarchs that we know today as running American capitalist society and stuff like that, that kind of rose to prominence, especially in the late 1950s and after. But we'll get to that, because this didn't really occur to me before now. Even though I've read this story a number of times, this didn't really occur to me until getting ready to do this podcast.
Why don't we just bring it up now? Who's read "Atlas Shrugged"?
JM:
Not me.
Gretchen:
I am familiar with it, and I know of a lot of the criticisms toward it, but I've never read it myself.
JM:
Right, yeah. I wanted to bring up Ayn Rand earlier, because I think that there's a really, really obvious parallel here to her most famous work, and that came out much later. And I'm not going to get into specifics now, but this is kind of an aha moment for me, because I feel like—and I kind of hate being that guy, and this is part of the dangerous thinking that this story gets into. And again, when I do the summary, I want it to be an extremely interactive one where we just talk about this stuff. But this story actually made me kind of think: ah, well, here's Kornbluth basically describing the "Atlas Shrugged" situation seven years earlier and with a lot more morality than Ayn Rand ever had. And yeah, that might seem weird given how nasty this story is, but we'll get into it.
And there's a very specific thing that made me go, ah, well, that's really interesting, because it's kind of like when I read "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco, and I was like, yeah, this book, basically in two pages, goes through the entirety of conspiracy fiction and conspiracy-thriller fiction. He covers all that in just a really short time. And meanwhile, you get "Atlas Shrugged", which is trying to argue this polemic for like 1,100, literally 1,100 pages. It's unbearable.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the 80-page speech that happens like in the middle of the book, where it's just a monologue for that long, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I've heard it's a very tedious read and yeah, tone-deaf and also mean-spirited.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
I don't know why it's still held in good regard by some people in certain corners of the internet, but I guess those are the corners of the internet that....
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah.
Okay. I would like to say that this is going to be one of the several authors, or a couple of the authors, that we'll be talking about where my first exposure to them was their TV work. And really the only exposure was their TV work, because I had actually watched the Night Gallery episode "The Little Black Bag", which, before going into the story, it's set in the same world as this story. And I originally had thought that "The Little Black Bag" came after this.
JM:
Oh yeah.
Gretchen:
But it's actually before it. So it was kind of interesting going into the story, having seen that. I was going to try to read the story before this recording. I didn't get a chance to. JM, I know that you have seen the Night Gallery episode as well.
Yeah, I did. It's really interesting the way these parallels go, because, I don't know, Kornbluth just seems to have these things that he goes into. So this is actually the sequel of sorts to "The Little Black Bag", right? Yeah.
Gretchen:
This is like the peek into the world where the little black bag of the title of the other story comes from.
JM:
Right. So this is technically—I mean, I don't know, Pohl calls it a sequel, but I'd just say it's a parallel, because, you know, I mean, there aren't all the same characters. You can read one completely without knowledge of the other. It's not like that. But essentially, "The Little Black Bag" has a very, you know, more noir situation where you have some instruments that fall through time into the past, and they're medical instruments from the future, right? And they come around time, and it does seem like at the beginning of this story—I didn't really get into this scene too much—but there's a guy visiting the character who starts the story, who's supposedly a doctor, and he's obviously a pretty thick-headed individual, and you're kind of like, that doesn't seem like a doctor, right?
And yeah, the idea of "The Little Black Bag" is that anybody can use these instruments from the future because they're made to be as simple and user-friendly as possible, so that you don't need to have any kind of expertise to do the thing. And so this guy who is a doctor, but he's all completely messed up and alcoholic and he can't practice anymore, is now in possession of this bag of instruments, and he can do all this stuff. And there's kind of a noirish plot around it. It takes place during the present time, not during the future. But yeah, that was on Night Gallery, and it's been dramatized a couple of other times too, I think. And that story was actually from Astounding. So this one was Galaxy, but you kind of presume that probably readers of one might very well have been readers of the other magazine as well, even if they didn't necessarily—I don't know, it does seem like Galaxy Science Fiction and Astounding Science Fiction have very different ideological standpoints due to their editorship and everything like that.
Yeah, I don't know. This is kind of learning about Kornbluth a little more and putting into practice kind of what I kind of realized. Yeah, he's coming at this from a different angle. One of the things I was going to say was the shortcoming of this story maybe isn't so much that people could interpret it as a pro-eugenicс story. And I don't necessarily think it's a shortcoming, but he does seem to be like just firing at all targets. Like, he doesn't seem to be necessarily trying to say that some character in this story is better than some other character. He's like literally just shooting at everybody. And it's just a very angry-seeming thing, right? I guess it does kind of support some ideas about what his personality might have been like, although it doesn't seem like he was always like that. And some of his stories definitely don't read like that. But it does seem like there's a lot of this sardonic quality to what he's doing.
And if you try to read too much, I mean, it is a satire. It is cutting. But he's not necessarily gunning for any particular solution. He's kind of, I don't know. I guess you could say that's immature in a way, because people will say, well, it's one thing to point out how shitty the world is, but if you don't have a solution and you don't have a way to make it better, what good is your criticism? And that's something that I've heard people say before. And I don't know. I think I enjoy this story, though, because of how provocative it is and how he doesn't care. He's just going to fire at will. And if you get caught in the crossfire, that's just too bad. And I don't know. I kind of appreciate that. I wouldn't want every story to be like this, but I get it. It does feel like a story written by a guy in his 20s who's really pissed off at everything. But it's also very well done and very clever and funny.
(music: moronic marching)
spoiler summary and discussion
JM:
All right, let's get right into it then, because we've got a lot of talking to do as we go. We're in the year 7-B-936, and Efim Hawkins—it sounds more like a biblical name.
Nate:
It's used more in Russian.
JM:
So he's an all-around man, and he's the perfect definition of, I guess, Robert Heinlein's Renaissance man. He's an engineer in several different fields, an expert in psychology, air traffic control, tool design, and architecture. Yeah, we need people like that, right?
“Specialization is for insects,” as Robert A. Heinlein has said. The problem is, for people like Efim, there’s just so much to do. In his free time, he makes cool stuff with clay in his potter’s shop, which is what he’s doing when the story starts—or rather, selling some of his wares. And he’s one of the smart ones. But a lot of people have basically turned into chuckleheads. Sometime in the future, there seems to have been some kind of apocalyptic or semi-apocalyptic event, maybe nuclear; I don’t know. It’s not really gone into. And the United States is not quite what it used to be, although things are pretty similar in some ways. So the only way to really convey what it’s like is just to read the story.
It’s funny, but it’s reminding me a lot of “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, only a lot more humorous and, I guess, cynical. So sometimes the secretaries and seemingly underling people are the smart ones. And the ones that have the public faces are the, "normal people". They don’t know much, and they speak with a lot of ignorance. And it’s funny dialogue, where they’re obviously speaking like rubes. The rockets and transportation make a lot of noise and trail a lot of fire, and they look like flying barracudas, but they don’t go very fast. Because if they did, everybody would just kill each other. And there are still a lot of accidents anyway. And the people are addicted to stuff like “Whambozambo Comix” and bad movies where everyone’s horrible to their parents. And they keep making babies anyway.
So yeah, there are only a few smart people in the United States, and they do several jobs at once. And the opening, "moron" is a doctor. And that’s the real reference to “The Little Black Bag” there, I guess. And the secretary talks to Efim, and he’s talking about a radiation program or something like that, which sounds like one of the many different things that the elite want to try against the population and the so-called Topic Number One. So Hawkins is looking for stuff to use for his pottery, and Efim hits upon something. He’s hoping it’s a cemetery where he could get lots of decayed oxides, but no, it’s something with an inscription on it. And it looks like a specimen from some biological lab from the University of Chicago. And he’s got a pick, and it’s on this hummocky thing, and he swipes it with the pick, and he’s basically uncovering the container of Honest John Barlow, a real estate dealer from the 1980s who got accidentally put into suspended animation one day when he was at the dentist. They used this experimental anesthetic drug, and some freak electrical charge from his drill pumped current through the patient, and boom, he was down for the count, and medical science just could not find a way to revive him.
So they put him in a case in a museum, and all this process is described on the plaque which adorns his casket. There were a bunch of pranks at the University, so they put his casket in a vault in 2003, and that’s how he got buried. And now Mr. Hawkins has unearthed him. The process that put Barlow into suspended animation has become understood, and all they need to do is squirt some saline to revive him into the spinal column. And there’s no more call for real estate agents, and I guess Hawkins isn’t an expert in history, so he doesn’t know what one is. But with nothing but a pick, a hypo, and a bit of salt from the kitchen supply, he’s able to get Honest John Barlow up and running again. And the first thing John Barlow does is threaten to sue as he realizes he’s butt naked, his fingernails are gone, and so is his hair.
Yeah, reminds me of that “Star Trek” episode where they had people from the 20th century revived in the 23rd, and then the Romulans showed up, and everything like that. And then the whole thing is these three people trying to come to grips with things. But that’s not nearly as mean as this.
He wants to see his lawyer right away, but at least shows some concern for his wife, especially when Hawkins hands him the explanatory plaque from his casket. Surprisingly, he doesn’t immediately dismiss it all as some joke.
Interestingly, despite the year being 7-B-936, and there being no TARDIS telepathic circuits around, the English language seems to have been left basically intact. So Efim and John have no trouble understanding each other, although Hawkins seems a little unclear on certain terms. And also, the elite do speak in some kind of interesting clipped shorthand lingo with words that almost feel like Germanic compounds or something like that, or not quite Newspeak in Orwell’s book. Like, yeah, I don’t know, it’s interesting, but we only see a little bit of that.
But Hawkins is unaccountably angry and sensitive about the idea of children. And he doesn’t seem all that keen on dealing with John Barlow. Barlow is pretty impressed by the sight of the “rocket” thundering by overhead. In short order, he’s starting to see the positive possibilities of his situation. He was never much for reading, but he remembers some movie, presumably, where somebody ended up in the future. Maybe he could make some money out of this. And he has visions of getting a ghostwriter and making best-selling books. But Hawkins tells him people don’t read much nowadays, so there aren’t any best-sellers. And people in 7-B-936 are not modest, apparently, and Hawkins throws him some clothes and money. Barlow is surprised it’s dollars. And I guess he’s seen enough 1970s sci-fi movies to think it might be credits or something like that. Yeah, remember this is from 1951, but of course, in 1988, the dollar is 22 cents. What the hell?
Anyway, the U.S. still has a President and Congress, but Barlow isn’t going to see them. They, after all, are among the morons. And the psychist, Tinny-Peete, arrives, and Hawkins is relieved to be rid of Barlow. Tinny-Peete is going to take care of you and show you how he can make lots of money. And it’s clear that the men from Central want to see if Barlow can somehow help them with the Problem.
And the personal cars are really nice-looking to Barlow. They’re all roomy and curvy and big and full of plush cushions. And it’s satisfyingly loud, and the exhaust trail is huge and sparkly. And it can do 250 according to the speedometer. And the radio is a small personal helmet full of buttons, which Barlow happily puts on. And the local entertainment is kind of dumb. There’s an awful quiz show, and the phrase “Would you buy that for a quarter?” seems heavily in popular idiom. And the humor is just really lame. The news broadcasts are similarly stultified. And the vocabulary in general discourse just seems really basic and stunted. But it’s funny because sometimes it really does sound like some political discourse, especially, is kind of on this level. They’re talking about fisheries or something or other. And this guy’s like, “Hull-Mendoza don’t know what he’s talking about. He should drop dead.”
There are animated roadside ads, of course, all in simple language and with pictures of mostly nude women and what would appeal to men too. Really, it’s the car that makes Barlow finally bolt and run. He realizes he’s not going nearly as fast as he assumed he was, and neither are any of the others. And the roaring noise and rushing of air is artificial. And at a red light, he throws open the door and runs off. And it’s a weird Chicago Barlow finds himself in. He fantasizes about the secret police state and Big Brother and all that: that he’ll be caught for trying to tell the slaves about freedom and stuff. And it’s really funny because the story feels like a subversion of what was still pretty normal sf tropes in the early 50s. It’s just a couple of years after Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” but also people reading this would have been familiar with the pulp magazines and would think of Buck Rogers, right? Buck Rogers is a guy from the early 20th century who’s shot forward into the future and has to save the future time by being a great American hero, right? That seems like the normal expectation. People love that stuff. People kind of still love that stuff. I mean, look at “Stargate,” for example, right? It’s a different planet, but it’s kind of a similar kind of thing.
Even crossing the street is hard work. The cars are slow, but nobody seems to care about any of the signals. And a lot of stuff is the same, but it’s just different enough to be totally disconcerting and disorienting. And this is where Barlow decides to take in the movies, and it’s a triple bill: “Babies Are Terrible,” “Don’t Have Children,” and “The Canali Kid.”
Nate:
Those are all great titles.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. I would see those movies. I mean, “Babies Are Terrible”.
Nate:
Definitely sounds like Something Weird would pull out of the obscurity dump, and yeah.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. Some movies are 3D and accompanied by scents, and “The Canali Kid” seems to be a space opera, but the other two are anti-baby-making propaganda, which nobody seems to pay any attention to. And the trailers are totally overwhelming—loud noise and smells—and they drive him out, and I know how he feels.
So when he’s looking at the races in the papers, yeah, he’s seeing that the horses have no class, and everything is just slow and makes no sense. And Tinny-Peete shows up again and sits beside him, and Barlow makes the logical assumption that Tinny-Peete and the others live in luxury on the backs and sweat of the enslaved lower classes. And here we learn the apparent truth, that it’s the reverse. The millions, the billions in masses live off the backs of the aristocratic elite. And what a picture this is.
So how did it all happen? Well, here we get to the uncomfortable aspect of the story. Earlier, Hawkins seemed to blame Barlow for not having children. And he and Tinny-Peete have already figured Barlow for an educated man of his time with, I guess, good genes or something. Yet it’s the fault of Barlow and people like him that things are as they are. And the Problem is such a looming threat. And that’s why people like Tinny-Peete will probably die before their time of exhaustion and overwork. They have to keep society running, and there are so few of them.
So Tinny-Peete takes Barlow to see this person, and he’s really unhappy about all this, and angry at Barlow for not having kids. And how could a society have tolerated economic conditions that penalized the intelligent from having children? And well, I mean, from a 21st-century perspective, this is very awkward indeed. I mean, I don’t know. The thing is, I can’t come down on Cyril too hard for this because I don’t think he’s endorsing this at all. The fact that probably a lot of his readers then, but also now, probably thought that he was endorsing this is interesting in and of itself. But again, I can’t really blame them either because he just seems to be firing it off at everybody. He’s not like, “Oh, the morons should revolt,” and he’s not really making any kind of definitive statement about how the world can be improved. He’s just pissed off and shooting at everybody, right?
So now we can just say, well, I mean, life is hard, man. Life is hard, especially if you have a lot of skills and you need to put them to use. And this was written in the 50s, and there’s not really a lot of mention of this in the story, but it does kind of come up. Right now, we live in a time where if you’re, I don’t know, like a couple, for example, and you have children, for most people, both people in that couple probably have to work. And the idea of having, I mean, putting aside overpopulation and stuff like that, the idea of having four, five, six, seven, eight children is just not the same as it was. I mean, like, you know, you get generations like my mother’s generation, which was around when this story was written. Being Catholic and everything, they didn’t practice birth control. And yeah, families with eight kids were very common. My mother has eight siblings, or she did have eight siblings. And that’s just crazy when you think about it now. And how do families manage that, right? And here’s this self-righteous guy from the future being like, how could you make this happen?
So it gets worse, though. He blasts the modern age and reveals the truth about the rockets and cars: they’re fakes, and the cars actually can only reach a top speed of 100 kilometers per hour. And the cities are, quote, “ridiculous, expensive, and unsanitary.” The people should be spread out over the countryside. And the, "migrant workers, slum dwellers, and tenant farmers" were, meanwhile, mass-producing and breeding like vermin, overwhelming the educated minority. And this started back in Barlow’s time or before. And the average IQ is now 45. Meanwhile, there’s a, "closed corporation of genetically selected individuals" who run everything, all doing four or five important jobs at a time.
And so, interestingly, getting back to “Atlas Shrugged,” this story predates that by about six years. And this unbearable 1,100-page tome essentially describes something that is just about to come up in this story. So Barlow asks, well, why didn’t you just let them all go to hell in their own way? And apparently they did try this. They went to hole up at the North Pole or something for three months and wait for everything to collapse. And it didn’t work because nobody noticed. And I’m not sure, well, what they were expecting, but of course in three weeks, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are basically running rampant over everything. And the minor functionaries who were running everything called the experiment a failure and came back.
This is really interesting because in “Atlas Shrugged,” the plot of that book is essentially that the intellectual elite, who are all like arch-capitalist kind of types but also have a lot of skills, and somebody like the architect from her other book, “The Fountainhead,” for example, just the best at their job that could possibly be, they all decide to hole up in Galt’s Gulch, which is this valley somewhere that’s completely protected from everything. And they have all this technology and all this stuff at their disposal. And they can just wait out the world collapse, and everything will fall apart because they won’t be around to run things, and then they’ll just be able to come back and pick up the scraps.
Ayn Rand tackled this in 1957, and it seems like at least Kornbluth had a little bit of forethought to see what the consequences of this might really be like. Whereas the way she puts it, she demonstrates that it’s basically their "God-given right" to do this, and that, yeah, they would be absolutely in the right. And she has all her John Galt people basically swear an oath against altruism and stuff like that. It’s like, yeah, and it’s just really interesting to me because the ah-ha moment I mentioned earlier is basically saying, well, look, see, I mean, this is exactly what happens when a science fiction writer who makes it his point to think about this kind of stuff in the future and what it might be like actually addressed this in a very short story and brought up all this stuff. And it’s a nasty little story where there’s no right; everything is wrong. And yet his characters here are more moral than Ayn Rand’s characters in “Atlas Shrugged” because at least they’re like, well, I mean, things really suck. We better come back. Things are out of control. We can’t just leave them to their own devices. But also they realize if everybody kills themselves, there’s going to be like 500 million rotting corpses, and it’s going to be horrible, and there’s no way we’re going to be able to deal with it, right? And I mean, both of these are post-atomic stories. So, I mean, surely this is something that Ayn Rand must have thought of as well, but she just chose not to address it.
And it’s just really interesting because, yeah, again, it’s an example of—we can look at so-called literary writers. I don’t know, maybe it’s a stretch to call Ayn Rand that, but I mean, she’s not a genre writer, right? And we can look at that and say, well, they bring interesting things to the science fiction field because they’re coming at this from outside. Like somebody like, I don’t know, maybe a better example would be Anthony Burgess or something like that. Or Margaret Atwood, I guess. Or to say, well, they’re not really known as science fiction writers, but they contributed to the genre in really important ways. E. M. Forster, you know, that’s in “The Machine Stops.” But it can also kind of go the other way, where you’re looking at the science fiction books that some of these people wrote, and you’re like, but they didn’t address anything. They don’t really seem to; they seem more interested in a polemic than actually thinking about the topic that they’re writing about, you know? Or maybe they’re just not used to science fiction, so they think that the ideas they have have never been discussed before, but that’s not true.
But it’s just really interesting to me that he kind of—at first, I was actually thinking, oh, maybe “Atlas Shrugged” came first. So I had to look it up because I couldn’t remember, right? And I was like, oh no, this is way after; it’s 1957, right? So as far as I know, this is not something that the Futurians or Kornbluth specifically commented on. I know John W. Campbell kind of did appreciate her, but—and I don’t know this for sure—but it seems like she and maybe Robert A. Heinlein were on the same wavelength, at least some of the time. But I don’t know. I don’t know for sure.
But Barlow is already thinking on his feet. So he’s thinking, what about mass sterilizations? And there are too many operations, and it would all be too slow. But I did mention the radiation stuff earlier. So it does seem like this is something they were thinking about in an even worse way. Barlow mentions the, “marching Chinese” paradox, which is something formulated in the 1920s by Robert Ripley of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” and since thoroughly debunked. But the anti-baby propaganda doesn’t work, and the big brains can’t think of any way that propaganda can inhibit a biological drive—reproduction.
But Barlow knows. He’s already starting to mock the technocrats. And now, Honest John Barlow is in fact not a very nice man. And he appeared to have lived off real estate scams and such. He’s the kind of guy who would try to sell you magnificent oceanfront property in Nebraska or something like that. And he describes how he sold 10,000 acres of barren Siberian tundra to innocent and uninformed buyers through a dummy firm. They thought they were getting improved building lots. So the man to deal with Poprob is to figure out what way to con the morons. And they won’t fact-check or do anything of the sort. So it appears the psychist and his friends have indeed found their man because something has been, "bred" out of the technocrats too. I don’t know what it is. Is it ruthlessness? Cunning? Self-interest? I’m not really sure. What do you guys think?
Gretchen:
It does seem like they still have a bit more morality than the example of “Atlas Shrugged” and here Barlow.
JM:
Yeah, because he comes from that bad 20th century. He probably liked Eichmann and stuff, even though.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, if he’s working in real estate, he seems to have some sort of experience with advertising and stuff. He probably is in Ayn Rand’s sort of wheelhouse here.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, and it’s a very specific experience, which is mentioned and is very, very, very on the nose, which, again, if you’re just having this gut reaction to this and being repulsed by it, I mean, I totally understand. But again, he’s so on the nose with it that after a couple of readings, it’s pretty certain to me that he’s just, yeah, like, he’s not coming from that place. Again, it’s kind of this—remember when we were talking about fandom and A. E. van Vogt, and there was a whole “fans are slans” kind of thing? And the whole idea is that the people who like this, the people who think about this stuff, the people who are both science fiction fans and perhaps got into being—or toward working in science fields and technical fields and computer fields and all that—are maybe somehow just a little bit better than everybody else.
But they’re also persecuted. They’re also persecuted by the majority who thinks they’re not normal and are somehow dangerous. Right. And it just seems like something you see a lot. And I think it’s survived pretty well into the modern era. Although it’s perhaps very tempting, especially when you’re young and really getting excited by this stuff, it is probably kind of a dangerous, dangerous way to keep thinking, right, too much. And I kind of wonder if there is a bit of commentary on that, too, in this, because yeah, I mean, the technocrats all seem to be—again, I thought of Heinlein. I don’t know how much Kornbluth knew about him. Heinlein was just entering his novel-writing phase at this time. He’d been writing for the magazines pretty much as long as Kornbluth had. So I guess they were basically contemporaries. Of course, Heinlein lived a lot longer. And his whole idea about specialization being for insects and stuff like that. And if you’re a real man, you know how to do, like, twelve really important things. And if you can’t cut it, well, too bad for you, basically. Sometimes that’s the impression. And it comes and goes; you know, you read different things from somebody like that over the years. They may not always be saying the same thing, but it’s sometimes an impression you get. And it does leave you feeling a bit in the dust when you’re not capable of doing all these things, and you’re like, well, I only have one job to do, and I’m not that great at it. You know?
Again, it’s perhaps slightly wish fulfillment, right? Because it’s like, this is the way it should be, right? Not necessarily the way it is. But I think Kornbluth’s own feelings on this are pretty complex. He did write an essay later on in the 50s called “The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism.” And he’s basically pointing out the shortcomings of the genre in this area, and specifically the genre that he’s writing in. So I think he’s kind of aware of sort of the pitfalls that can overcome a person when they start to think they’re an outsider and a particularly clever outsider at that.
But yeah, so the brains are not able to come up with these sorts of ideas on their own. And they need a huckster from the past to come and save them. But John Barlow is going to demand a high price. Satisfaction sure as hell is not enough for him. And Barlow is pretty obsessed with money, of course. It’s not something the elite really seem to care about all that much, and they offer him all that he wants. But he wants prestige, power, publicity, parks and portraits and statues. And it’s funny, because when he mentions power, they look at him funny and they go, what do you mean? Do you want a nuclear pile or a hydroelectric station? No, no, he wants a world dictatorship. And the hawk-faced man they’ve been talking to is willing to go along with anything. And there will be an emergency act of Congress. And again, not much about the rest of the world here at all, although it does come in at the end. But it’s all pretty much the USA. We’re used to seeing that. We talked about that in the last episode.
But the plan: Barlow wants to turn the morons into lemmings, of course. And the hawk-faced man says, you’re in, and introduces himself, finally, as Ryan-Ngana. And it’s the usual hyphenated, compound, multi-ethnic-sounding name of this era. What’s more, Mr. Barlow is racist on top of everything else and says that, well, he doesn’t want to hurt Ryan-Ngana’s feelings; there must be someone whiter he could work with. And he even starts to use the classic “some of my best friends are” argument, literally. They part on it, and Ryan-Ngana goes to run the San Francisco subway for a while. And Tinny-Peete sends Barlow off in a helicopter to the polar base. The elite are already figuring ways to trick Barlow, including post-hypnotic suggestion. And they don’t want him leaving the polar base, of course.
Meanwhile, Barlow starts concocting his plans and thinks of all the specialists he’ll need in advertising and communications. And he wonders if the people of this time know anything about hypnotism. He spares a thought for his long-deceased wife as he thinks this is the best and most outrageously great deal he’s ever made. I don’t know, I know this is on the nose too, and I almost hate to bring this up, but I couldn’t help but think of Donald Trump’s classic ghostwritten book, “The Art of the Deal,” when I read this. But he says he has no conscience and no qualms about what he’s about to do. Anyone not smart enough to protect themselves doesn’t deserve anything. And he won’t budge on the world-dictatorship thing. And while there are some objections, he just says, it’s my way or there’s no deal.
So the plan starts, and we get some views of various citizens and TV programs, and the trips to Venus are what is being offered. Nice sunny destination for everyone. And on all the TV programs and everything, stuff about going to Venus and how awesome it is starts slipping in. And we get the perspective of one woman who is particularly puzzled by the whole thing. She’s convinced that it’s impossible to get to Venus and all that, but the evidence around her starts to add up and keeps pooh-poohing her convictions. So she goes to see the family Freud, and I feel like this was something I’ve seen in other stories. I feel like Robert Sheckley had something like this in one of his short stories, and the Freud was a robot or something like that. Maybe it was Philip K. Dick, actually. And there’s a whole funny thing when there’s a ritual and she has to say, “Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses.” And right away, without being prompted, the Freud suggests a vacation on Venus. And eventually she cures herself and decides it’s time to go to Venus for a nice vacation.
And all her friends are doing the same thing, and it’s the Evening Star Travel and Real Estate Corporation, a new thing. The spaceship looks like all the stuff you see on TV, but it’s more comfortable inside. Ryan-Ngana is the flight captain. The ports will be closed because of the meteorite season, and outside, when they land, it’s a tropical island. Very nice. It’s a beautiful, dreamy ten days in paradise. Why wouldn’t anybody want to live there?
So Senator Hull-Mendoza of California is just the man to bring to the legislature this prime idea of colonization, and some grand speechifying is made. The idea is to go city by city in the U.S. and offer everyone prime Venusian land, free and clear, with free transport too. And they’ll evacuate and then demolish the cities for scrap metal and other stuff to prepare the next mission. And it’s just, yes, it is a giveaway. It is the most glorious giveaway in the history of mankind. “Mr. President and gentlemen, there is no time to waste—Venus must be American!”
Los Angeles is the first victim, and a team of staff is assembled to concoct postcards and letters home. And yep, you got that right. Barlow is specifically thinking of Hitler and his Final Solution, how he solved his particular problem. And it’s very, very specifically referring to how families of prisoners incinerated in the death camps would continue to receive happy letters. And Los Angeles goes off without a hitch. The president of Mexico has been hypnotically alarmed, and soon they follow suit, and the whole world joins in too. So it’s global after all. And it’s almost too bad this is all a horrible scam. And we then get some samples of fake letters and stuff. It’s really cute and horrible.
And on Venus, there are blanket trees and ham bushes and soap roots. First it is the families who go, but soon the loners go too, since they are conditioned to a great mass of population and cannot bear the isolation. So away they go on the cheap rockets.
Hull-Mendoza is now officially the president of the United States, but it is an almost empty country. Soon he goes off too, helped along by a little hypnotism. The government gets the nicest spaceship, but it goes to the same place as everybody else, presumably blowing up outside the atmosphere somewhere. And Black-Kupperman, the chief hypnotist, commits suicide because he cannot live with his conscience.
Meanwhile, Honest John Barlow, World Dictator, is upset about something that has come across his desk called Poprobterm, which he has no idea about. His statistician, Rogge-Smith, offers to show him all about it, congratulating him all the way on a job well done. Thank God he knew all about that Hitler stuff. It just would not have occurred to any of them. They go into a big machine shop, and Rogge-Smith pushes a button, and a big panel opens in the roof. And yeah, there is a little spaceship with the door open, and all Barlow's boys are there waiting to help him along. Into the little ship he goes, and it blasts off immediately. There is no comfort at all in this little ship, and acceleration breaks Barlow almost immediately.
And the story ends with this: “Lying twisted and broken under the acceleration, Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner however many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily. The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.” And that is it.
Nate:
Definitely a pretty grim ending there.
JM:
Yeah, pretty grim ending to a really horrible little story that is also really fascinating and fun to read, and that brings up a lot of questions. I do not think this story has lost any of its potential for stirring up trouble, and that is its kind of power, in a way. I do think it is funny how it ends on this note that is almost like, I do not know, the typical pulp ending. It feels like something out of “The Shadow” or something like that. It is like, “We want you all to remember that crime does not pay. The Shadow knows.” But at the same time, this is a real subversion of that kind of hero trope, right? You expect that he has come to save them all and everything will be great after, right? Because there are so many stories that are kind of like that. And this is kind of what Norman Spinrad was satirizing in “The Iron Dream,” which is how he saw science fiction.
And I do not know, I was even reading Adam Roberts’s “The History of Science Fiction,” book that we have in our reference library there. He talks about this story, and he does not mention Kornbluth’s origins. So I do not know if he was just unaware of it. It definitely helped me because, yeah, even though Kornbluth mentions Hitler, and that is pretty on the nose, it now seems more on the nose to me than ever, right? He is obviously coming at this from a—well, his own perspective was definitely more leftist, more anti-capitalist. He is not an Ayn Rand type at all. That is not to say that the story might not have its problems, and yeah, it does kind of feel like the work of somebody who is just, I do not know, really, really angry at everyone. And you could say that that does not benefit people. And I would kind of say, yeah, maybe not. But at the same time, maybe we need that. Maybe we need those kinds of angry stories.
And, you know, you have to think again too when the story is written. It is the beginning of the 1950s, which, rightly or wrongly—and I think it is obviously more nuanced than this, like the Victorian era in England, for example—we now often think of the 1950s as a very complacent kind of time period. We think of McCarthyism, and we think of anti-intellectualism and stuff like that, especially encouraged by the fact that the United States government was trying to round up a lot of people and accuse them of being communists and stuff like that, sometimes without much rhyme or reason. This came early in the decade. Obviously, only the readers of Galaxy magazine were really listening. But at the same time, yeah, I think it is good. It is pointed. I admire just how it does not hold back, and it is really mean-spirited. It does not make any bones about that whatsoever.
Nate:
Yeah, I think Galaxy was deliberately trying to cultivate that, maybe not necessarily the mean-spirited element, but that subversion of just wrapping up everything neatly at the end, where the hero and the good guy always win. I mean, we see that in “Contagion.” Also, I mentioned earlier that I had read “The Best of Fritz Leiber,” and a lot of those stories really do end with a twist where the hero does not come out well in the end. A lot of those stories were published in Galaxy, so I think they were really trying to set themselves apart from some of the stuff that had perhaps come before in Astounding or Amazing or something like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think even for some of the other stories we will be covering this episode, not necessarily in the way of the hero not coming out well in the end, but there are other tropes that I feel like you see in science fiction that are being subverted and made into something different.
Yeah, I think that is an interesting part of the story. I know earlier, Nate, you had said about this kind of being “Idiocracy,” except the so-called protagonist is just a very horrible person. I agree a bit with J.M., where it is like, I think that makes this a little less insidious than “Idiocracy” is, where it is like, oh, well, obviously this is the worst person in the story. This is the one where we do see this sort of commentary against that mindset that people like Ayn Rand would be pushing. And I feel, in a way, that it does kind of grapple with a similar stance against eugenics that you see in something like “Alas, All Thinking”, where we may be following a character who may have this idea of pro-eugenics, but it is a narrative that is very clearly showing the disastrous consequences of such an ideology.
Nate:
And I guess the other major difference between this and “Idiocracy” is that in “Idiocracy,” Joe, the protagonist, is really the only person in the world who has, I guess, normal-for-the-modern-day intelligence, whereas in “The Marching Morons,” it is certainly the minority, but it is a very present minority. They are kind of doing things behind the scenes while—
JM:
Yeah, and again, it is very much like that whole “Atlas Shrugged” thing, where it is like, well, there is a bunch of smart, quick-thinking, fast-moving men who are being held down by everybody else, and they have to take a stand and fix things. Ayn Rand is very uncritical of this, whereas Kornbluth is actually the reverse, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I feel like in this story, there is almost this self-awareness of, we do have this group of people, this poor aristocratic intelligent group, that is running everything for the hordes, you know? They are the ones who are in charge of everything. And there are ways that they could help these people and educate them and go through their media, and yet we do not really see them trying to do that. They are simply trying to appeal to the simpler tastes, or maybe trying to keep them in such a state, rather than actually trying to do anything productive.
Nate:
Right, and that element just is not there at all in “Idiocracy,” where Joe and—I forget the female lead’s name—basically just come and fix the society, and that is it. Everybody has a happy ending, and that obviously is not what we get here.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I mean, we tried our best to talk about it. I think I conveyed the tone of the story, but the only way to really get this and immerse yourself in it is just to read it. I think there is enough humor, and I think that is a really good thing, because if you read a story like this and it was super dry, and it was like, yeah, I mean, I am sorry to all the Ayn Rand fans, but like “Atlas Shrugged,” right? It would just kind of annoy most of us, I think. And when you hear the news broadcast, it is pretty funny, especially when they talk about that rocket crash in the ocean or something like that, and it is like the pilot was too busy buzzing herds of sheep or something, and he was not paying attention to what he was doing, and they crashed. Then all these people went to dive and rescue the crew and passengers, but they died too because their diving suits were full of holes. And, like, that is very “Idiocracy” too, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
The tone, there are so many funny little things to latch onto here.
Gretchen:
I have to say that going into the story, I was a little wary. I was kind of expecting it to be mean-spirited and maybe to have this pro-eugenics-ish stance. I was a little nervous that I would come out of it not really enjoying it at all. But I think it is because of that very absurd level of mean-spiritedness, and this taking it to the most extreme and revealing the issues with that kind of stance, and the same mean-spiritedness in the characters, that it really elevates it more in a way that I appreciate.
JM:
Yeah, there is just so much to talk about with all these. It is really just a fascinating bunch of little trips here because we are really just doing short stories, but there is a lot packed into all of these. I think this is one of the few stories we have done on the podcast that I have read enough times that, yeah, I am pretty familiar with it now. I have seen some of the counterarguments where people say they do not really like this story, and I get it. But it is something that you really need to read and think about a little bit, and it is still very powerful now.
It is just funny because Roberts points out in his book that he does not understand how, so soon after World War II and all this, somebody could write a story like this and be so uncritical. I mean, I am not putting down Roberts, because his book is really, really good, especially for the early, early stuff, where he has good perspectives. But when he talks about “A Voyage to Arcturus,” too, he does not seem to read it all in the same way that we did. It is just really interesting seeing multiple perspectives at play here. It just so happens that when we do this podcast, we are usually more or less on the same page. Maybe somebody likes something a little more than somebody else, but eventually we just talk about it, and we usually come to a kind of accord, and it turns out we thought the same way about a lot of stuff. So it is interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, I certainly like this. I mean, yeah, definitely a lot darker and more mean-spirited at its core than I think “Idiocracy” was, which, like I said, I have seen at least a dozen times before going into this, and I did not re-watch it for this just because I feel like I could just play the whole movie from front to back. But yeah, this was a good counterpiece to that, and I am legitimately curious if Mike Judge had read this or had it in his mind when he made that, because there are definitely a lot of major similarities, even though there are some very crucial differences. Certainly, for this, I would like to see the film “Babies Are Terrible,” at the very least, because that is just a great title.
JM:
Yeah.
So I think I first came across this in “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame,” which was a two- or three-volume series edited by Robert Silverberg and Ben Bova, I think, where they basically took stories from before the Nebula Awards and tried to create, I guess, the corpus of earlier science fiction that was very important. It was mostly American, but they had “The Time Machine” in there and stuff too, and this story and “The Little Black Bag” were in the two different volumes, and those were the only two Kornbluth representations. I think that is where I first read this. So you can see this anthologized in a lot of places. It is not a story that will make you feel very comfortable, maybe, but it is definitely worth a read.
There are lots of places you could find this, and of course, when you look online, you can easily come across it. But I really do recommend the huge Kornbluth collection, “His Share of Glory,” if you really, really want to get a sense of what this guy was like as a writer. I have had this for a bunch of years and dipped in and out of it over the years. There was a time there in the late 2000s, maybe before 2009, when I read a good half of that huge collection. Really interesting different types of stories. It is often not perfect. It is funny because I often do feel like he was a writer who was restricted by certain things.
There is this one really interesting story from the late 1950s called “The Slave,” and it starts out so remarkably well. It is kind of an alien invasion story, but with a really, really different concept to it. It is such a cool premise, but then in the last few pages, he ends it with a whimper, and just like, oh man, it is so disappointing that it did not go to any of the places that I thought it might. And I kind of wonder, was he restricted by deadlines, by the format he was working in? Sometimes he is one of those guys who has to end his story with a twist, right? He has to end with the punchline. Sometimes that is really fun. Sometimes maybe it holds your story back a little bit if you always feel compelled to do that. I do not know. But it is something he does seem to have mostly gotten over. I think it is a lot of the really early stories that have that.
I think one of his first stories is called “The Rocket of 1955,” and I think I saw that in “100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories,” edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander. There are like a hundred stories in there or something because, yeah, they are all super short, and that one is in there. It is about this rocket taking off in 1955. I think it was one of his earliest stories, and it ends with some ridiculous pun, and you are just kind of like, oh really?
The quality of the stories varies, but again, it is interesting to see him working in all these different things. There are some really silly stories. There are the occult stories, which are different and really interesting to see. Yeah, it is a shame he died so young. Thirty-four is no age to die. Take care of yourself.
So yeah, cool. Thanks for putting up with the mean spiritedness. I think we will move on to a nicer story now.
Yeah, yes. Just a little more wholesome, perhaps, written by Zenna Henderson.
Bibliography:
Knight, Damon - "The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction 'Family' of the 30's That Produced Today's Top SF Writers and Editors" (1977)
Pohl, Frederik - "The Way the Future Was by Frederik Pohl" (1978)
Pohl, Frederik - introduction to "The Best of C. M. Kornbluth" (1976)
Pohl, Frederik - introduction to "His Share of Glory" (1997)
Pohl-Weary, Emily - "Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril" (2002)
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