C. M. Kornbluth (1923–1958)

This is one of the classics of the genre during the early 50s (in fact, it was included in the Library of America omnibus American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956). I'll admit that I thought it was going to be about a trading spaceship visiting different planets, but it's nothing like that. The book is set in a near future (for the 50s) where humans live in a dystopian society, heavily controlled by corporations and where the environment is very deteriorated. In fact, environmentalists are considered social deviants and ruthlessly persecuted. A big corporation specializing in marketing buys the contract for the colonization of Venus (which in the book is a very inhospitable planet but not as much as we now know it to be). The first thing they need to do is create a marketing campaign to convince people that they want to volunteer as colonists. We follow the point of view of the executive in charge of this campaign. In the meantime, there are plots by commercial rivals and by an underground environmentalist organization that try to interfere.

One problem with SF written before the computer era is that the futures they depict fail to predict how ubiquitous computers have now become, and the implications for humanity. I do not really consider this a failure, because these people are writers, not fortune tellers, but when reading it it's true that nowadays we need to suspend disbelief in this sense and accept this "retrofuture" with no internet and no smartphones. Also, socially it's extrapolated from the 50s, so the marketing companies depicted work a bit like what we see in the Mad Men TV show.

Pohl did work as a marketing copy writer, so he knows his stuff and it shows. The dystopian element is also very relevant now, with echoes of Huxley's Brave New World. Unlike Brave New World, this novel adds a thriller/action plot, so it's not going to be considered respectable literature. It's well-written, and although it does have outdated elements I still thought it entertaining and worth-reading, particularly if you enjoy classic SF.… (more)

The Best of C.M. Kornbluth contains 19 short stories and novelettes, with interesting notes by the editor, his friend and fellow science fiction author, Frederik Pohl.

*** 'The Rocket of 1955' was first published in 1941. Our narrator claims the rocket scheme was Fein's, but he was blackmailed into helping. So was a well-regarded Viennese professor. Contributions totalled $152,285,248.22 in 2024 money. Then they got to work building that rocket. How successful was it? The author was still in his teens when he wrote this story.

**** 'The Words of Guru' has an almost 12-year-old protagonist named Peter. He's obviously a prodigy because Peter had been able to talk clearly since he was two months old. He can see things that normal people can't. He was still a baby when he first summoned Guru. Guru is willing to teach him things. The words Guru teaches Peter have power. The things Peter gets up to with the words Guru has taught him are scary. The last word taught is the most frightening.

***½ 'The Only Thing We Learn' was published three years after the end of World War II.The protagonist of this story is a history professor giving a lecture to the students in his Archaeo-Literature 203 class. He talks about the battle that led to the formation of their empire as known through old, middle, and new epics. He tells them that what they learned before wasn't exactly true, as archaeology has shown. We get snippits of the epics. I was not impressed. The scene suddenly shifts to the historical battle from the Home Suns People's point of view. I was a history major in college, so I gave this story an extra half-star for the professor pointing out what science has shown was wrong in the old epics.

***½ 'The Adventurer' is from 1953. It is set both in a United States of America that appears to be a republic in name only. It's even called 'the Republic'. The presidency has become hereditary. The Soviet Union is the Republic's principal opponent. Premier Yersinsky is its current head. There's a balance of power between the two, which is why the Moon and Titan are Republic, Mars and Ganymede are Soviet, and Jupiter's Io and Callisto are each half and half. Part of the action is set in New Pittsburgh, the main settlement of the Repulbic half of Io. Some scenes are with Presidents Folsom XXIV and XXV. Others are about Tom Grayson, from being a child with an abusive alcoholic for a father, as a cadet, and as a successful ensign. I was not expecting the revelations at the end. They are what prompted the extra half-star.

**** I've read the 1950 'The Little Black Bag' in other collections, but I don't recall its adaptation on 'Night Gallery'. Old Dr. Bayard Full lost his right to practice in 1941 because he was bilking patients. The scene introducing him cuts to the future. This is a future where people of subnormal intelligence have outbred the people of normal and supra normal intelligence.Dr. Hemingway is a stupid general practitioner. Good thing that his medical bag has been made as idiot proof as possible. He's chatting with Walter Gillis, Ph.D., a stupid physicist, who got a tip from a secretly brilliant physicist. Gillis demonstrates his time machine using Dr. Hemingway's medical bag. The bag turns up in Dr. Full's apartment. The bag helps him save a little girl's life. A sharp blonde named Angie guesses that the bag isn't his and blackmails him into letting her be his assistant. After a time as a success, Dr. Full has an altruistic plan, which he tells greedy Angie about. It does not end well.

***½ 1952's 'The Luckiest Man in Denv' is another story set in a dystopian future America. Our protagonist is Reuben, known as 'May's Man Reuben,' because he works for three-star General May on the eighty-third level. Reuben is an Atomist. A plot General May told him about does not go as the plotters planned. Another attempt is made against Reuben. This was a very unpleasant story about a very unpleasant future. I didn't expect the end, but it was fittingly unpleasant.

**** 1950's 'The Silly Season' is a story about reporters. According to Mr. Pohl's introduction, Mr. Kornbluth was a reporter. The silly season is usually in the late summer, when there aren't major stories happening, so the media puts out stories that aren't serious. Sam Williams needs a story. The control bureau in New York is nagging. He gets one from a stringer (freelance journalist) named Benson in Fort Hicks, Arkansas. It's a weird story, with a mysterious death involved. Williams passes it on.The strange phenomenon gets a lot of news coverage until the baseball World Series comes along. The next year there's a different weird happening, but it doesn't attract much attention, as a letter from Benson had predicted. The year after that, yet another weird happening gets no attention even though one person was killed. The end is as Benson predicted, based on one of Aesop's best-known fables. I'm sure the characters wish he'd been wrong.

**** 1953's 'The Remorseful' gives us yet another dystopian future Earth. The Lonely Man, apparently the last man alive on Earth, roams around what was the USA. He keeps talking to himself because he breaks down and sobs when speech fails him. Extra-terrestrial aliens called 'the Visitors' (creatures made up of a billion little insect-like creatures with a hive mind) come to Earth. On Earth they keep meeting males and females with weak wave trains that ignore them before they meet the Lonely Man. The Visitors get what information they can from a library, which gives them the name of those they've encountered.
Do NOT read this story if you're depressed.

**** 1955's 'Gomez' has a Puerto Rican teen genius for its hero, which I appreciate, considering the way many people treat Puerto Ricans these days (and it was probably worse back then). Gomez is paid to use his genius regarding atomic energy for the government. I'm glad he turned out to be so ethical.

*** According to Mr. Pohls' introduction to 1958's 'The Advent on Channel Twelve,' Mr. Kornbluth and his two small sons watched 'The Mickey Mouse Club'. He says we'll be able to figure out what the author thought of the Mickey Mouse mania back then by reading this story. It's written in old-fashioned Biblical style. Pity Ben Graffis and what some bankers made him do with his creation, Poopy Panda.

***** I'm giving 1951's 'The Marching Morons' five stars not because I like the story, but because it's stuck in my mind for decades. This is a similar dystopian future Earth to the one in 'The Little Black Bag'. Instead of a doctor's bag from the future arriving in the present, a 20th century real estate developer named 'Honest' John Barlow is awakened from accidental suspended animation in the future. 3 million brilliant humans are vastly outnumbered by 5 billion humans with an average IQ of 45, which means they are moderately mentally disabled. The smarties hope that John Barlow can help them with the population problem. The problem is solved and Barlow gets his reward.

*** 1957's 'The Last Man in the Bar' is a fairly weird story. Most of the action takes place in a bar where a loner named Edward is hiding out, continuing to order drinks. The loner has visited the future and swiped something important. Galardo and a 'mouse-eyed lassie' are trying to get it back to prevent the Century of Flame starting. Will they succeed?

**** 1950's 'The Mindworm' is a creepy bit of science fiction horror. The Mindworm was born a telepath because his unmarried parents were a little too close to an atomic test before mating. Over the years he wanders, killing people, feeding on their emotions. We get to know only a few of his victims. He winds up in a small place with quite a few Eastern European immigrants.
Notes: Here 'native-American' means a person born in the USA. Calling indigenous people 'Native Americans' started in the 1960s. This story takes place before birth control pills were available and an unmarried woman who got pregnant was a scandal.

**** 1951's 'With These Hands' seems even more timely with the advent of artificial intelligence art. Poor Roald Halvorsen is a genuine artist in a post-nuclear war [Europe, anyway] era in which the public would rather have 'art' by stereopantograph, using a machine called an 'esthetikon'. At the end of the story, Halversen finally fulfills his wish to see Milles' Orpheus Fountain, which is real, but it's in Stockholm, Sweden, not Copenhagen, Denmark (as I found out when I looked it up). That isn't quite a happy ending.

***½ 1953's 'Shark Ship' is a disturbing novelette about yet another dystopian future Earth. It's been generations since the convoys of gigantic ships, each with 20,000 inhabitants, left the land to live in the Atlantic ocean. We're dealing with the 75 ships of the Grenville Convoy. It's the southern spawning season, and everyone old enough to work is working hard. If they don't harvest enough food to last for six months (until the northern spawning season), they'll starve. Captain Salter of Ship Starboard 30 has to help his people when their vital net is lost in a storm. The ship makes its way to New York City. What they find there (and the flashback that tells us how it got that way) is worthy of a horror movie. I do appreciate the fact that Yeoman Jewel Flyte is the quickest and most imaginative thinker among the team.

**** 1951's 'Friend to Man' is set on an unnamed planet. We're invited to call the main human character 'Smith'. He's an evil man. He's attempting an escape when his ship crashes in a desert. A native of the planet takes him to her burrow. She gives him food and water and tends him. Smith is actually thinking of reforming when Karma comes knocking. I really liked this story!

**** 1952's 'The Altar at Midnight' is set in a future that's pretty much as things were in the 20th century, except we have regular space travel - at least to the moon, Mars, and Venus. Spacer pay is high because spacers become disfigured. The narrator meets a young spacer and takes him to the skid row area to spend time with disabled former railroad workers, who won't give him looks. The narrator sees to it that the young man gets safely to the Y.M.C.A. We learn what wrecked the narrator's life.

*** According to Mr. Pohl's introduction, 1953's 'Dominoes' was inspired by a conversation between Messrs. Pohl and Kornbluth about the causes of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It's April, 1975 and stock broker William 'Will' J. Born is worried that the Great Boom of 1975 is going to crash. He's even paid money to inventor Loring to build a time machine so he can go to the future and find out when that crash will be. The time machine works. It's what Born does with his knowledge that earns him his unhappy ending.

**** 1958's posthumously published 'Two Dooms' has a dystopian future, but a conditional one. Protagonist Dr. Edward Royland is a theoretical physicist working on the Manhattasn Project. (I'm pleased that women using adding machines for calculations are mentioned.) The latest calculations would work, but Royland is worried about what an atomic bomb could do. Dr. Royland visits his Hopi medicine man friend, Charles Miller Nahataspe, on his reservation. Charles gives him mushrooms called 'God Food'. Charles thinks it will be safe because whites' eyes are 'clouded'. They do not see clearly, as Hopi do. Charles is horrified to find out that Royland does see clearly. Royland finds himself in the year 2105, 150 years after the War of Triumph (1940-1955). Royland learns how the Germans and the Japanese won and what happened after. To say that things are not well (unless one is German or Japanese) is putting it mildly. At least Royland can understand because the conquerors insisted all use American speech so that no subjected race's language is dominant. Will Royland be able to make it back to 1945? If he does, will he have changed his mind about the atom bomb?

Most of the stories in this book are very good, but they're so cynical that I don't recommend reading more than one of two stories a day -- and watch or read something funny as a mind cleanser.… (more)

1958's posthumously published 'Two Dooms' has a dystopian future, but a conditional one.

Protagonist Dr. Edward Royland is a theoretical physicist working on the Manhattasn Project. (I'm pleased that women using adding machines for calculations are mentioned, even if Dr. Royland would have rather have a differential analyzer machine.) One of the women brings Royland the latest calculations. He realizes it will work, but is horrified contemplating what an atomic bomb could do.

Dr. Royland visits his Hopi medicine man friend, Charles Miller Nahataspe, on his reservation. Charles gives him mushrooms called 'God Food'. Charles thinks it will be safe because whites' eyes are 'clouded'. They do not see clearly, as Hopi do. Charles is horrified to find out that Royland does see clearly.

Royland finds himself in the year 2105, 150 years after the War of Triumph (1940-1955). Royland learns how the Germans and the Japanese won and what happened after. To say that things are not well (unless one is German or Japanese) is putting it mildly. At least they insisted on using American speech so that no subjected race's language is dominant.

Royland puzzles the folks in charge whom he meets because he has no tattooed numbers. He escapes, spends some time in a village of mostly Chinese and Hindu people, has to escape again, and makes his way to a city. I really liked his rant about the way women are treated in that village. Will Royland be able to make it back to 1945? If he does, will he have changed his mind about the atom bomb?

Notes:

'The Dogpatch Legend' and "Abnerites' might be a reference or in-joke regarding Al Capp's then-popular comic strip, 'Li'l Abner', about a hillbilly from a fictional mountain village called Dogpatch, USA.

Bloom was correct that there was a woman who allegedly made lampshades from the tattooed skins of concentration camp prisoners. Her name was Ilse Koch. There was no evidence she did it at her trial. She hanged herself. I did read about some of the Nazi medical experiments in 'The New England Journal of Medicine,' decades ago, when I was a medical librarian, but not Bloom's story about women being used to revive frozen men.

It was a very good story.… (more)