Man Plus

Frederik Pohl Man Plus (1976)
I've read most of the stuff he co-wrote with Kornbluth including short stories, and at least a couple of his own short stories, but Man Plus is somehow my first full length undiluted Pohl. It's nothing life-changing - and I have to wonder what else was up for a Nebula award that year - but is nevertheless a reasonably solid read. Our main guy is named Roger Torraway, an astronaut undergoing surgery and cybernetic augmentation so as to allow him to live on Mars, and we need to live on Mars because Earth is fucked. It's hard science-fiction without being too much of a dick about it, and Pohl writes well - so well that it's fairly easy to see why he was such a great match for Kornbluth, and Man Plus makes good use of just the sort of ludicrously ambitious ideas which put the lead in Cyril's figurative pencil; and Man Plus has the added advantage of being free from the sort of incoherent jabbering to which Kornbluth succumbed from time to time. Classic may be an overstatement, but it's nevertheless very satisfying.

Gladiator-at-Law

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth Gladiator-at-Law (1955)
I've been trying to read this one since last April, having started it maybe five or six times, never once generating momentum sufficient to stave off the temptation to read something else. It's been praised as a classic in many places, and whoever last claimed it to be the greatest thing ever written did so in such a way as to bypass my laboriously constructed defences. I wasn't really intending to bother with any further Kornbluth. Beyond Wolfbane, Search the Sky, and maybe a couple of the short stories, I've found the rest mostly an uphill slog. He could write for sure, but too readily descended into a sort of self-congratulatory jabbering, or at least jabbering which felt self-congratulatory to me, like a man having a conversation with himself, or one of those fucking tedious Marx Brothers routines comprising somebody saying something stupid very fast over and over and over. Each time I came back to this one, I had no fucking idea of who was who, what was happening, or what any of it was supposed to mean, and this was usually by page twenty.

This time, vaguely recalling some of the characters from the previous five or six attempts, I felt I had a bit of a handle on it and was duly able to take some enjoyment from reading the thing, but I remain mystified as to the classic status. It's a legal drama in so much as that it's the story of a lawyer involved in a number of dimly related cases, and it's sort of witty here and there, but I still haven't got a fucking clue as to what happens or why. It's set in a future society with a pronounced class divide, the lower tier of which is kept in line with bread and circuses, and it's obviously a metaphor for rampant consumerism and the way America seemed to be heading in the fifties. Maybe the message seemed more profound at the time, because Gladiator-at-Law feels very much like a period piece given that the future has turned out arguably worse than predicted, with its street gangs seemingly resembling the juvenile delinquents one used to see depicted in older issues of Mad magazine, all Brylcreem and chewing gum. The book is not without merit, but it probably would have helped had I not been expected to accommodate some new character with a comedy name every five pages or so.

The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native (1878)
I've had several run ups to Pohl and Kornbluth's allegedly classic Gladiator-at-Law, and whilst I can see that it's well written in terms of elegant sentences, I just can't seem to give a fuck about anything happening within the narrative. Now on my second or third attempt, I make it to chapter eleven and notice that I have no idea what's happening to who or why; then somehow I find myself reading this instead, a big fat Victorian novel of such volume that copies could be used to weight sacks containing stool pigeons destined for large rivers or other bodies of water. No sentence is less than two-hundred words long, typically describing the moral import of some minor feature of someone's face, and nothing happens for the first quarter of the book, or what felt like it - just a bunch of people stood around a bonfire gossiping about some woman being no better than she ought to be, amongst other things; and yet unlike Gladiator-at-Yawn, it's positively gripping.

The story is spun around the doomed marriages of two couples. Clym has been living in Paris but, having decided it was all a bit too fancy, now returns to his beloved and rustic Egdon Heath to marry Eustacia, who only marries him because she hates Egdon Heath and assumes he'll change his mind and will take her to live in Paris. Naturally it all ends in tears, ultimately concluding with lessons learned.

Derwent May's introduction seems to spend a lot of time refuting D.H. Lawrence's assertion that the main character of The Return of the Native is the landscape itself, as described in his Study of Thomas Hardy. Without actually having read Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy, I'd say he seems to have a point.

The first part of the book serves to define its cast as ephemerals within a much larger and essentially mysterious landscape across which bonfires are lit from one hilltop to the next in this pre-technological era, itself only a moment in the depths of geological time, with references to arrowheads, bronze age tribes, and Biblical times provided for the sake of scale.

The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.

Being a Victorian novel, Native pays the same laborious attention to detail as any Pre-Raphaelite painting and is similarly loaded with meaning and allegory - possibly even to the point of the term native - here referring to Clym Yeobright - being a single letter removed from naive. Whilst the principal characters of the novel are not without depth, they are primarily described in terms of how they relate to their environment to the point that we may as well regard them as expressions of the same. Clym's defining characteristic is that he left the heath and has, as Hardy sees it, come to his senses, and it seems significant that we learn hardly anything about his time in Paris beyond that he'd had enough. Here we find this kinship expressed as the one time scholar is reborn back on his home turf as a common labourer who goes accordingly unrecognised by his own mother.

The silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.

Clym's relationship to the land from which he was sprung is an instinctive rather than considered aspect of his psychology.

He already showed that thought is a disease of the flesh, and indirectly bore evidence that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional development and a full recognition of the coil of things.

It's not difficult to see how this would have appealed to D.H. Lawrence, particularly as a forerunner of his own ideas about blood consciousness, as he termed it, as expressed by Don Ramón in The Plumed Serpent.

'Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it... And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.'

Returning to the theme of how the characters serve as extensions of their environment, Eustacia is defined more or less entirely by her desire to escape from the heath; and then we have the Reddleman, Diggory Venn, an avatar of the land in the sense of Swamp Thing being an avatar of the bayou. Venn is coloured red from head to toe as a consequence of his work, extracting red ochre from the ground with which to mark sheep. Having no fixed abode, he comes and goes in the fashion of a wandering spirit, a parallel which is emphasised in the first part of the book by reference to a red ghost seen at large on the heath.

The lesson of The Return of the Native may, on the surface of it, seem typically Victorian and conservative - stick to what you know, stay home, honour thine parents, and so on and so forth. Clym shouldn't have gone to Paris in the first place, and his moderately unpleasant wife probably shouldn't make too many assumptions about the grass being greener over there; but I suspect this may be a misreading, or at least an unbalanced emphasis in so much as that it's not really the point of the book which seems too complex to be boiled down to any single, simple lesson. Some of it concerns fate, or what we understand to be fate, and the related dispensation of blame for the occasional shitty hand which we may be dealt.

'But you can't charge yourself with crimes in that way,' said Venn. 'You may as well say that the parents be the cause of a murder by the child, for without the parents the child would never have been begot.'

So, I guess it's about personal responsibility in the sense of suggesting that human agency plays a greater part in how our lives work out than any nebulous ideas of destiny, such as - for example - those which may seemingly root us to a specific patch of earth.

Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.

The strength of The Return of the Native is not that any of this is necessarily spelled out, but that it allows us to piece these ideas together by whichever terms make most sense to the reader, avoiding the somewhat didactic qualities of, for example, Dickens, not to mention his cloying excess of sentiment.

We open with a sort of death, something coming out of the night, Thomasin returning stillborn to Egdon in the Reddleman's funereal conveyance as bonfires are lit in homage to the death of Guy Fawkes; then conclude with the Mayday rebirth of Spring, Diggory Venn who has scrubbed up fairly well and is no longer bright red, and Clym at last finding his calling as a preacher, but one who prefers not to simply spout doctrine or to go through motions determined by any external influence.

He left alone creeds and systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than enough to occupy his tongue in the opinions and actions common to all good men.

It's therefore about facing the future, I suppose, or something along those lines. It could have been shorter. I'm not sure I don't prefer the sound of the conclusion Hardy submitted for the earlier serialisation, wherein Venn remains a mysterious, borderline supernatural figure; but this 1912 iteration nevertheless holds together well, possibly excepting the laborious distended arse-ache of Diggory Venn and Thomasin Yeobright finally brought together by agency of a missing glove.

The Space Merchants

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth The Space Merchants (1952)
It has been impressed upon me for the last couple of years, or at least since I read New Maps of Hell, that this was the Kornbluth collaboration I really needed to read. I therefore kept looking, despite A Mile Beyond the Moon and others; and at last, here we are.

I thought it would be funnier, and I'm not sure it entirely lives up to expectations - although my expectations were fairly nebulous - but otherwise, yes - I can see that the hype is at least partially justified. Written in the fifties, The Space Merchants predicts a future which has turned out unfortunately like the present and, oddly, foreshadows Philip K. Dick's projections of where capitalism was headed - could be either the influence of this book or great minds thinking alike. Where Dick would incorporate the occasional scene of advertising drones attaching themselves to the hood of one's flying car and attempting to sell you toothpaste while you're trying to concentrate on driving, here the emphasis is much heavier, darker, arguably more sarcastic - maybe like a more overtly dystopian take on Mad Men.

The writing is lively and literate without ever quite crossing over into the jabbering of which Kornbluth was occasionally guilty, and it has the feel of one of those science-fiction novels you can usually smuggle in under the radar of those who might ordinarily wrinkle noses unless it's Wells or Wyndham. Our tale relates the story of an advertising executive who falls from grace and ends up fighting for survival at the bottom end of the economic totem pole, a victim of those forces he once helped perpetuate. Inevitably, his fall from grace brings an awakening, although I have to admit I found the last quarter - from chapter fourteen onwards - a little bewildering and hence unsatisfying in comparison with that which went before, although not enough so as to diminish the whole.

As an aside, the suffering underclass here depicted as justifiably disgruntled bordering on heroic suggests that Kornbluth's supposed sympathy for eugenics - as implied by The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag - is far from being so cut and dried an argument as his critics have alleged. For my taste The Space Merchants could have used a bit more atmosphere, but it's otherwise decent.

The Best of Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson The Best of Jack Williamson (1978)
Earlier in the year I read a collaboration between this guy and Frederik Pohl which impressed upon me the notion that I should probably make an effort to read something by Jack Williamson, his having been somewhat off my radar up until that point; except it appears that I have imagined the whole thing and can find no trace of whatever the collaboration may have been or my having read anything of that description. It would be nice if this were like something from a story written by Jack Williamson, but sadly it isn't.

Jack Williamson was going at it way back when we were still calling it scientifiction. His early tales tell of Gernsbackian science-heroes having the sort of adventures which kept Edgar Rice Burroughs in business, with one foot firmly planted in the nineteenth century, a world in which men were men, women were glad of it - even the liberated sciencey ones, and the canals of Mars seemed plausible. Occasionally he'd throw in a fistful of nosebleed physics just to keep it interesting, but mostly it was about as good as you'd expect.

Nonstop to Mars sees Earth imperiled by a sort of space tornado which sucks Earth's atmosphere off to the red planet, and the protagonist of the story saves the day by flying his light aircraft along the tunnel formed by the distended eye of its storm.

We return to Mars in The Crucible of Power, wherein our rosy-cheeked, two-fisted hero bests the alien weirdies by much the same terms as white people bested Africans back when we weren't quite sure whether or not they were human.

My father gathered his five or six allies at the crest of a low yellow dune, and waited for the charge. As the yelling lancers came down the opposite slope, he walked boldly out alone to meet them, with the grave statement that he was their new ruler, sent from the Sun.

Breakdown examines the rise and fall of civilisations as the process by which revolutionary tendencies ossify and become the status quo, which would be nice had Williamson chosen to build his future society on something besides labour unions with too much power, because even the term makes me uncomfortable, it being one of those phrases which has taken on the same sort of resonance as I'm not racist but...

This being said, it seems Williamson was nothing if not adaptable, and there's a massive improvement in his writing after the second world war, and so With Folded Hands reads like the work of a different author and is as such not only readable, but even enjoyable. This generally elevated standard is more or less maintained for the rest of the collection; although after another couple of hundred pages it becomes apparent that simply being better than Nonstop to Mars probably isn't enough in and of itself. The Equalizer seems to go on forever, and I had no idea what it was actually about, and thus gave up about twenty pages before the end. The remainder are of more reasonable length and more engaging content, but still tend towards the sort of creaking twist ending in which it all turns out to have been a dream, or they're actually androids, or any other variation on the kind of thing which got well and truly hammered into the ground by Tharg's Future Shocks and others.

Jack Williamson wasn't without talent or ideas, and he wrote well for the most part, but otherwise I dread to think what the turkeys must have been like if this was genuinely his best.

Galaxy volume two

Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg & Joseph D. Olander (editors)
Galaxy volume two (1980)
I have a vague impression of Galaxy as having been one of the better magazines in the same way that Fantasy & Science Fiction seems to be one of the better magazines for short science-fiction which may or may not involve robots, spaceships, aliens, and the like. I suspect this impression mainly comes from my having noticed how many of Philip K. Dick's short stories first appeared in Galaxy; although rummaging around on Wikipedia, it seems the magazine probably deserved its reputation for having broken new ground, and for maintaining a certain standard.

This collection - presumably along with the first volume, of which I don't have a copy - seems to represent a sort of post-mortem, a greatest hits set published in the year of cancellation. Either the anthology is nothing like so good as it should be, or I'm approaching science-fiction saturation point. It's not a bad collection, and maybe the first volume is amazing, but given the names invoked on the cover, it should surely be a lot more fun than it is.

Dick's Oh, To Be a Blobel! is obviously wonderful, but is unfortunately of such quality as to make the stories which follow seem for the most part cranky, fussy, poorly conceived, and written by people who don't get out much. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Day Before the Revolution is still at least as great as it seemed last time I read it; and Harlan Ellison's Cold Friend is pretty damn sparky; and I've never read any John Varley, but after Overdrawn at the Memory Bank I shall be keeping an eye open for more; but as for the rest, I'm sat here looking at the contents page. I read the lot and yet I can't remember a single thing about any one of them. Actually, that's not strictly true. I recall that Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's collaborative The Gift of Garigolli felt like being stuck in an elevator with Groucho Marx and made no sense whatsoever, so I stopped reading it. Maybe these stories just seemed better at the time, back when they still had the shock of the relatively new on their side. Maybe I need to come back to this one in a more receptive frame of mind.

The Wonder Effect

C.M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl The Wonder Effect (1962)
I bought this collection on the assumption that I'd probably already read it all in His Share of Glory, a car battery sized compendium of every short story Kornbluth ever wrote. I'd dedicated myself to His Share of Glory from start to finish over the course of a week, then concluded that most of the material, for all its wonderful qualities, would probably have been better digested in smaller doses; so I picked this up, it being just nine shorts and an introduction, and because I liked the cover. Happily, closer inspection revealed that due to these being collaborative works written with Frederick Pohl, I hadn't already read them after all. I'm familiar with a couple of the novels the two wrote together, and they're pretty great, leaving me with just the mystery of the title, The Wonder Effect, which doesn't actually refer to any of the stories within. I suppose it might be something to do with the sense of wonder instilled by the best sort of science-fiction short story but, to make the obvious joke for which I apologise in advance, it might just as well refer to the reader wondering why the hell these stories in particular should have been chosen.

Okay. That's unfair - a comment made mainly because the title was giving it away, and there's nothing here I'd describe as terrible. Unfortunately nor is there anything I would necessarily describe as amazing.

It's a mystery, as Toyah memorably observed. Kornbluth and Pohl were great together for Wolfbane, Search the Sky, and presumably the other collaborative novels which I haven't yet read. The same magic is evident here in lively, talkative, witty prose of a kind you don't often find in books with either a spaceship or an alien on the cover. It's intelligent and literate, and Nightmare With Zeppelins and The World of Myrion Flowers - an early and convincing indictment of segregation and racism in America - both hint at how great this collection really should have been. It's difficult to say what the problem could be or why. I assume it's some side effect of a collaborative process either failing to work as it should, or which is simply a poor fit for the short form despite having yielded great novels, resulting in stories which simply seem to go on about nothing for far too long, and narratives which slip the mind even as you're reading them. Paragraphs studied in isolation appear fine, but it is difficult to square the bland porridge of the whole with the author of The Marching Morons and the like.

Unless it was just me.

Search the Sky

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth Search the Sky (1954, revised 1985)
Kingsley Amis has impressed upon me the wisdom of picking up anything I see by Pohl and Kornbluth, and although I was sort of looking for The Space Merchants, obviously I wasn't going to just walk past this one.

Search the Sky isn't either quite so bonkers or so convincing as Wolfbane but is mostly of the same generally high standard and takes a similarly Swiftian angle. Humanity has spread itself across the universe, with contact between increasingly isolated colonies rendered impractical by sheer distance. A ship arrives from one of the nearest colonies - as is anticipated every few hundreds of years - but the distant descendants of the original crew - the people on board the ship back when it first began its journey - seem idiotic. Ross, a young trader, wonders if this degenerative state has befallen the other outposts of humanity, just as it seems to have befallen both the visitors and the stagnating culture of his own world; and so he is let in on an extremely well-kept secret, namely that there is one ship which can travel faster than light, and thus is he charged with answering his own question.

Ross visits a succession of human colonies, each more ridiculous than the next, each sunk into ruin by failing political systems. Here the scope for parody is considerable, and the authors have a lot of fun with it, not least with the gerontocracy in which only the most aged are presumed to possess wisdom sufficient for leadership.

There was sickening fright on Helena's face. 'Didn't you hear? We have to vote for the best man. Oldest is Bestest, you know. That's what Democracy means, the freedom of choice. They read us the ages, and we choose which is oldest. Now please, Ross, hurry before somebody starts asking questions!'

Each failing society is characterised by the infantilisation and repression of the majority by a minority elite, although some examples make for better metaphors than others. Whilst the society encountered immediately following the gerontocracy makes its points through the agency of a matriarchal dictatorship, the lightness of tone steers it a little too close to The Worm That Turned from The Two Ronnies.

Finally we end up back on Earth to find a technologically advanced human civilisation apparently comprised of dunderheads, Laurel & Hardy fall guys, the inhabitants of a thousand sight gags ending with some guy left holding a tin tub up against the ceiling with a broom handle. These are more or less the people encountered in Kornbluth's The Marching Morons, so it's fairly entertaining. I must admit to a certain degree of unease when dealing with anything suggesting that an excess of stupidity is to the ultimate detriment of the human race - despite what I myself may or may not have implied about the devotees of certain television shows during the course of previous reviews. It's a sentiment which can sometimes appear to steer a little too close to eugenics for my liking - see also shitty neofolk acts bemoaning the fall of European culture without actually naming any names just in case anyone gets the right idea. Thankfully here the fall from grace is deduced as having arisen from the state of isolation experienced by the dividing branches of humanity, so scapegoats are mercifully absent.

Search the Sky is no Wolfbane, as I say, and the point of the narrative is sometimes defeated by its own meandering tone if you really want to be picky; but it's otherwise a decent read, and it's funny in all the right places.

New Maps of Hell

Kingsley Amis New Maps of Hell (1960)
The Trillion Year Spree of Brian Aldiss and that other guy seems to be the title which always comes up when anyone mentions they're after some sort of history of science-fiction. New Maps of Hell appears to have less of a reputation, and I had assumed this would be due to it being earlier - hence less up to date - and shorter; but no, it's probably because it's not a history of science-fiction so much as an analysis which inevitably incorporates a level of historical detail.

By history of science-fiction, I'm referring to the written form, having all but given up on other media - possibly excepting comic books - and having read this, I feel I have a better understanding of why I should have all but given up on other media. Amis himself, writing in 1960, didn't see much of a future for science-fiction as moving image, although he refers to the BBC's Quatermass as a positive development. Taking his mapping of the history of written science-fiction as logical and roughly reflective of the evolution of the genre, I'd suggest it could be argued that film and television have developed as something almost entirely separate and have as such become stuck at the Edgar Rice Burroughs stage, despite that brief evolutionary surge of early 1970s brainy films which was pretty much killed off by Star Wars.

Anyway, Amis may cover less ground than Aldiss, but I find this the more likeable text. It's a while since I read Trillion Year Spree, so my recall of some details may be off kilter, but the tone here seems significantly friendlier. As an author, Kingsley Amis had no horse in this particular race, and he writes with enthusiasm and nothing to prove, nor any axe to grind. He acknowledges certain works as being unreadable in such kindly, almost indulgent terms as to make Aldiss' slagging of John Wyndham sound like some glass-jawed pub bore endlessly droning on about all the fights he's won and just who should be glad of not yet having crossed his path. In addition, Amis lays down a convincing argument for Gulliver's Travels as the first science-fiction novel, which I personally regard as a better choice than Frankenstein as proposed by Aldiss.

Anyway, regardless - as I say this is an analysis of science-fiction as a genre rather than a history in conventional terms, presenting a snappy summation of its purpose, how it works, why it works, and why it sometimes falls on its arse whilst additionally acknowledging that sometimes it can be just ripping yarns of rockets and bug-eyed monsters. Amis clearly loved his subject, so there's no anthropological sneering, and he patently had no desire to get into fist-fights. The argument remains conversational whilst presenting something resembling academic rigour. I personally think he misses the joy of both van Vogt and Simak, and I suppose that's my only criticism, but this is otherwise a lovely read; and one that has convinced me I need to be on the lookout for more by Frederik Pohl.

Wolfbane

Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth Wolfbane (1959, revised 1986)
Whilst there was a hell of a lot of His Share of Glory, the definitive short story collection published by the wonderful NESFA Press, even with a few of the tales included being less satisfactory than others, it was obvious that Kornbluth had been an exceptional talent, and that his name should not be allowed to fizzle away into obscurity. To this end I picked up Wolfbane on the recommendation of Chris Browning, this being a full length novel written in collaboration with Kornbluth's fellow Futurian, Frederik Pohl.

The story takes place on a future Earth which has been dragged away from the sun, off into the depths of space by forces unknown occupying the mysterious rogue planet with which it has formed a gravitational partnership. These aforementioned forces unknown have kept what is left of humanity alive by somehow igniting the moon, turning it into a miniature sun giving out just enough heat to keep the permafrost north of the Mason-Dixon line, and Mount Everest has been levelled off by something or other so as to form a platform on which is now sat a vast, presumably alien pyramid; and once this environment is established, the story really takes a turn for the weird.

Wolfbane reminds me a little of Kornbluth's Two Dooms at least in terms of an absolutely unfamiliar world portrayed with complete conviction, and which becomes entirely believable regardless of whatever craziness comes next. Humanity, for example, is reduced not to the clichéd survivalists whom Bruce Willis leads to roaring victory on the surface of that other world, but to adaptation as a strangely formalised society reminiscent of the popular image of dynastic China with the preservation of precious calories becoming a common goal of near-religious significance. I'm not at all familiar with Frederik Pohl's writing, but the distinctive flavour of Kornbluth is immediately recognisable throughout, and this novel reveals his many strengths as he tells a story which, practically speaking, could only really be told as a novel, one for which the sheer bizarre nature of what happens would distract and even diminish the whole were it presented in a visual medium. For example, what becomes of Glenn Tropile as he discovers the true purpose of the pyramid structure is probably as anatomically stomach churning as any horrible centipede film, and yet the poetry of the writing keeps it from becoming mere spectacle.

On another level, this is as eloquent an analogy of western society as I've read, with people fighting for the cause of their own exploitation, reduced to components in a vast carnivorous machine driven entirely by its own continuation. In fact, in some respects it could be read as a precursor to The Matrix, but better, obviously. I'm almost surprised that this one hasn't crossed over to become one of those science-fiction novels that achieves popularity amongst people who don't really read science fiction, and clearly Kornbluth was one of the all-time greats.

His Share of Glory

C.M. Kornbluth His Share of Glory (1997)
As a fairly general rule I tend to approach an author of unfamiliar stripe by first dipping into the short stories, from which platform I then attempt to assess whether or not I'm likely to enjoy lengthier works. His Share of Glory seemed nevertheless a slightly daunting proposition because although it does indeed collect the short fiction of the highly praised C.M. Kornbluth, it collects all of it, or at least almost all he wrote alone and extracurricular to collaborative efforts with Frederik Pohl, Robert A. W. Lowndes, and others; so it's a 670 page hardback of such constitution that ne'er-do-wells could quite easily use it to smash the windows of jewellery stores. Reading His Share of Glory has therefore, in some respects, been a less casual undertaking than I would like, but being a birthday present from the world's greatest mother-in-law - who presented me with the Ace Double edition of Fritz Leiber's The Big Time on a previous occasion - it would have been churlish to get too sniffy about it, and not least because Kornbluth was clearly a remarkable writer.

As his still glowing reputation attests, Kornbluth was patently amongst the more talented of the Futurians - a moderately political New York based science-fiction fan group with a membership roster including Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim and others; and it's probably worth noting that he died relatively young and said reputation is thus founded on less than two decades of paid work. His characters tend to be lively, believable, and informed by strongly literary sensibilities. The stories they inhabit tend to be playful, rich in imagery and memorable phrasing, with the jerky narrative motion of van Vogt played more for comic than traditionally pulpy dramatic effect, so there's occasionally a faint tone of Marx brothers lending an absurdist spin to the proceedings, and the sort of bizarre embellishments which suggest Kornbluth's fiction as ancestral to Michael Moorcock's stranger material, or even that of Terry Pratchett in a certain light. One further element he at least had in common with these two is that of genre never once being allowed to take precedent over the progression of the narrative, or over its author taking infectious pleasure in the process.

Of Kornbluth's short stories, The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag seem to be the best known, and understandably so, but he had plenty others of equivalent quality where those came from. Shark Ship predates Neal Asher's nautically themed weird fiction by nearly half a century; and Two Dooms divided the United States between Japan and the Third Reich a couple of years before The Man in the High Castle, and to more chilling effect for my money. The final eight stories of the collection were written to specific commissions and as such read a little like Kornbluth channelling E.E. 'Doc' Smith in terms of concessions to fifties space opera, but generally it seems he would have had trouble had he ever been asked to write a dull sentence; for example, The Last Man Left in the Bar:

'Bartender,' in a controlled and formal voice. Shot of Red Top and a beer at 9:09, the hand vibrating with remembrance of a dirty green El Greco sky which might be Brookhaven's heavens a million years either way from now, or one second sideways, or (bow to Method and formally exhaust the possibilities) a hallucination. The Seal snatched from the greenlit rock altar could be a blank washer, a wheel from a toy truck, or the screw top from a jar of shaving cream but for the fact that it wasn't. It was the Seal.

Of course, 670 pages of this would be disorientating, which is probably the only weakness of either this collection, or the fact of my having attempted to digest it in one go over the duration of a couple of weeks. Kornbluth possibly shouldn't be read in such huge chunks, at least not his short stories, being as some of those more eccentrically narrated lose cohesion without due concentration. At least that was how it seemed as I worked my way through, although considering the sheer volume of material here, the guy is entitled to have fired off a few blanks now and then.

In the event of this reading like an ambiguous verdict, the points to remember are that at his best, Kornbluth was fucking tremendous, and there's quite a lot of his best to be found here.

This collection was produced - by the way - by NESFA Press who've been doing some good work keeping certain authors in print, producing similarly exhaustive short story collections by the likes of Judith Merril, Murray Leinster, A.E. van Vogt, Cordwainer Smith and innumerable others; and I've encountered a rumour of their perhaps presently wrangling over the rights to gather together all of Clifford D. Simak's short fiction, volume or volumes I would crawl naked over broken glass to own, as they say, should the rumour turn out to be true. Aside from anything else, this should therefore be considered an enthusiastic recommendation.