William Tenn (1920–2010)

William Tenn is a science fiction writer who ought to be better known. He was an influential editor and a masterful short story writer with a sly, acerbic wit. Tenn is the pen name of Philip Klass. Klass wrote nonfiction under his own name and should not be confused with Philip J. Klass, who denied the existence of flying saucers. Though he lived until 2010, Tenn wrote most of his science fiction in the 1950s and ‘60s. He wrote only one novel, Of Men and Monsters (1968), that reads like an extended short story. It is a single-gimmick story in which humanity is conquered by giant aliens who quickly strip the planet of resources and move on to their next target. Human survivors must decide whether to go with them and occupy an ecological niche in alien culture similar to cockroaches in human culture. Many of the short stories in this omnibus collection have equally sardonic ideas.
Each story has an afterword by Tenn in which he explains what inspired it, how it was received, and what he thinks of it at the end of his career. He also provides the dates of composition and publication for each story—a practice that I wish more anthologists would adopt. “The Masculinist Revolt,” for example, was written in 1961, two years before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, but not published until 1965. It describes a future in which men begin wearing codpieces as political symbols: “There are men people and women people—and what’s the difference anyway? They want something that does what the codpiece does, that tells them they are not people, they’re men!” Tenn says he lost an agent and friends of both sexes over the story—a woman called it a castration fantasy, and a man called it a manifesto. Tenn said the story was meant to be “gently but encompassingly satiric” in the manner of E. B. White. One editor at Playboy said he should expand the story into a novella for the magazine, but another editor sent the story back because he saw it as a satire aimed at the Playboy empire. Tenn concludes, “All right, maybe it’s not the stuff of immortality, but I still think it is pretty good and pretty funny.”
I would say the same for the entire collection.… (more)