Collected Short Fiction
C. M. Kornbluth
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Collected Short Fiction
C.M. Kornbluth
(custom book cover)
Jerry eBooks
Title Page
About Cyril M. Kornbluth
“Cyril”
Pseudonyms
Bibliography
Short Fiction Bibliography: chronological
Short Fiction Bibliography: alphabetical
“C.M. Kornbluth: A Memorial Bibliography”
Fiction Series
1939
The Rocket of 1955
The Purchase of the Crame
The Ill-Advised Abracadabrations of Magus Heslich
1940
Lurani
The Song of the Rocket
Stepsons of Mars
King Cole of Pluto
Before the Universe
The Return of the Indefatigible Minimum
Nova Midplane
Trouble in Time
1941
Vacant World
Dead Center
Thirteen O’Clock
The Psychological Regulator
The Martians are Coming
Return from M-15
The Reversible Revolutions
Callistan Tomb
Exiles from New Planet
A Prince of Pluto
The Castle on Outerplanet
The Doll Master
Dimension of Darkness
No Place to Go
What Sorghum Says
Best Friend
Forgotten Tongue
Mr. Packer Goes to Hell
The Worlds of Guru
Kazam Collects
Fire-Power
Interference
The City in the Sofa
Mars-Tube
Sir Mallory’s Magnitude
1942
The Perfect Invasion
The Golden Road
Masquerade
Einstein’s Planetoid
Crisis
The Core
An Old Neptunian Custom
The Extrapolated Dimwit
1943
R.A.F. Wings East
1947
X Marks the A-Bomb
1948
Goldbrick Solitaire
Blood on the Campus
1949
Homicidal Hypo-Man
The Only Thing We Learn
1950
The Little Black Bag
Iteration
The Silly Season
The Mindworm
1951
Friend to Man
The Marching Morons
Mars Child (Installment 1)
Mars Child (Installment 2)
Mars Child (Conclusion)
With These Hands
1952
That Share of Glory
Gunner Cade (First of Three Parts)
Gunner Cade (Second of Three Parts)
Gunner Cade (Conclusion)
The Luckiest Man in Denv
Gravy Planet (Part 1 of a 3 Part Serial)
Gravy Planet (Part 2 of a 3 Part Serial)
Gravy Planet (Conclusion of a 3 Part Serial)
Make Mine Mars
The Altar at Midnight
The Goodly Creatures
1953
The Mask of Demeter
Time Bum
Dominoes
Sea-Change
The Adventurer
The Meddlers
Everybody Knows Joe
The Remorseful
1954
I Never Ast No Favors
Takeoff (Part One of Three Parts)
Takeoff (Part Two of Three Parts)
Takeoff (Conclusion)
Gladiator-At-Law (Part 1 of a 3 Part Serial)
Gladiator-At-Law (Part 2 of a 3 Part Serial)
Gladiator-At-Law (Conclusion of a 3 Part Serial)
Gomez
1955
The Adventurers
1956
The Cosmic Charge Account
The Engineer
1957
The Education of Tigress McCardle
The Unfortunate Topologist
MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie
The Slave
The Last Man Left in the Bar
Wolfbane (Beginning a 2-Part Serial)
Wolfbane (Conclusion a 2-Part Serial)
1958
The Events Leading Down to the Tragedy
Virginia
Reap the Dark Tide
Two Dooms
Theory of Rocketry
Passion Pills
The Advent on Channel Twelve
Nightmare with Zeppelins
1961
A Gentle Dying
The Quaker Cannon
The World of Myrion Flowers
A Hint of Henbane
1962
Critical Mass
1970
Thirteen O’Clock
1972
The Meeting
1974
The Gift of Garigolli
Mute Inglorious Tam
Cyril M. Kornbluth was born July 2, 1923 and grew up in the uptown Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, in New York City. He was of Polish Jewish descent, the son of a “second-generation [American] Jew” who ran his own tailor shop. According to his widow, Kornbluth was a “precocious child”, learning to read by the age of three and writing his own stories by the time he was seven.
As a teenager, Kornbluth became a member of the Futurians, an influential group of science fiction fans and writers. While a member of the Futurians, he met and became friends with Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, Robert A. W. Lowndes, and his future wife Mary Byers. He also participated in the Fantasy Amateur Press Association.
C.M. Kornbluth graduated high school at thirteen, received a CCNY scholarship at fourteen, and was “thrown out for leading a student strike” before graduating.
Kornbluth served in the US Army during World War II (European ‘Theatre’). He received a Bronze Star for his service in the Battle of the Bulge, where he served as a member of a heavy machine gun crew. Upon his discharge, he returned to finish his education, which had been interrupted by the war, at the University of Chicago. While living in Chicago he also worked at Trans-Radio Press, a news wire service.
In 1951, Kornbluth started writing full-time, returning to the East Coast where he collaborated on novels with his old Futurian friends Frederik Pohl and Judith Merril.
He used a variety of pen-names; and it is suspected that not all of them have been discovered. The “M” in Kornbluth’s name may have been in tribute to his wife, Mary Byers; Kornbluth’s colleague and collaborator. Frederik Pohl confirmed Kornbluth’s lack of any actual middle name in at least one interview.
Frederik Pohl, in his autobiography The Way the Future Was, Damon Knight, in his memoir The Futurians, and Isaac Asimov, in his memoirs In Memory Yet Green and I. Asimov: A Memoir, all give vivid descriptions of Kornbluth as a man of odd personal habits and vivid eccentricities. Among the traits which they describe:
• Kornbluth decided to educate himself by reading his way through an entire encyclopedia from A to Z; in the course of this effort, he acquired a great deal of esoteric knowledge that found its way into his stories . . . in alphabetical order by subject. When Kornbluth wrote a story that mentioned the ballista, an Ancient Roman weapon, Pohl knew that Kornbluth had finished the A’s and had started on the B’s.
• According to Pohl, Kornbluth never brushed his teeth, and the
y were literally green. Deeply embarrassed by this, Kornbluth developed the habit of holding his hand in front of his mouth when speaking.
• Kornbluth disliked black coffee, but felt obliged to acquire a taste for it because he believed that professional authors were “supposed to” drink black coffee. He trained himself by putting gradually less cream into each cup of coffee he drank, until he eventually “weaned himself” (Knight’s description) and switched to black coffee.
C.M. Kornbluth died at age 34 in Levittown, New York on March 21, 1958.
Scheduled to meet with Bob Mills in New York City to interview for the position of editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Kornbluth had to shovel out his driveway, which left him running behind. Racing to make his train, he suffered a heart attack on the platform of the train station.
A number of short stories remained unfinished at Kornbluth’s death; these were eventually completed and published by Pohl. One of these stories, “The Meeting”, was the co-winner of the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Short Story; it tied with R.A. Lafferty’s “Eurema’s Dam.”
Cyril
by
Frederik Pohl
In the late 1930s a bunch of us New York City fans, tiring of being members of other people’s fan clubs, decided to start our own. We called it “the Futurians.” As nearly as I can remember the prime perpetrators were Don Wollheim, Johnny Michel, Bob Lowndes and myself, but we quickly acquired a couple of dozen other like-minded actifans and writer wannabees, and among them was a pudgy, acerbic fourteen-year-old from the far northern reaches of Manhattan whose name was Cyril Kornbluth.
All the Futurians had an attitude; it was what made us so universally loved by other New York fans. Even so, Cyril was special. He had a quick and abrasive wit, and he exercised it on anyone within reach. What he also had, though, was a boundless talent. Even at fourteen, Cyril knew how to use the English language. I think he was born with the gift of writing in coherent, pointed, colorful sentences, and, although I don’t think any of his very earliest writing survives, some of the stories in this book were written when he was no more than sixteen.
Most of what Cyril wrote (what all of us Futurians wrote, assiduously and often) was science fiction, but he also had a streak of the poet in him. Cyril possessed a copy of a textbook—written, I think, by one of his high-school teachers—which described all the traditional forms of verse, from haiku to chant royale, and it was his ambition to write one of each. I don’t think he made it. I do remember that he did a villanelle and several sonnets, both Shakespearean and Petrarchan, but I don’t remember the poems themselves. All I do remember of Cyril’s verse is a fragment from the beginning of a long, erotic poem called “Elephanta”—
How long, my love, shall I behold this wall
Between our gardens, yours the rose
And mine the swooning lily?
—and a short piece called ‘Calisthenics’:
One, two, three, four,
Flap your arms and prance
In stinky shirt and stinky socks
And stinky little pants.
By 1939 a few of the Futurians had begun making an occasional sale to the prozines. Then the gates of Heaven opened. In October of that year I fell into a job editing two science-fiction magazines for the great pulp house of Popular Publications; a few months later Don Wollheim persuaded Albing Publications to give him a similar deal, while Bob Lowndes got the call to take over Louis Silberkleit’s magazines. These were not major markets. None of us had much to spend in the way of story budgets—Donald essentially had no budget at all—and we were at a disadvantage in competing with magazines like Amazing, Astounding and Thrilling Wonder for the work of the established pros. What we did have, though, was each other, and all the rest of the Futurians.
I think Cyril’s first published story was a collaboration with Dick Wilson, “Stepson of Space,” published under the pseudonym of “Ivar Towers” (the Futurian headquarters apartment was called “the Ivory Tower”) in my magazine, Astonishing Stories. He and I also collaborated on a batch of not very good stories for my own magazines, mostly bylined “S. D. Gottesman” at Cyril’s prompting-—I think he was getting back at a hated math teacher of that name—but his solo work, under one pen-name or another, generally appeared in Don Wollheim’s Stirring and Cosmic. Most of them are herein.
Then the war came along.
Cyril, who had worked now and then as a machinist, got into uniform as an artillery maintenance man, working in a machine shop far behind the lines to keep the guns going. He probably could have survived the war in relative comfort there, except that the Army had an inspiration. In its wisdom it imagined that the war would go on for a good long time, that it would need educated officers beyond the apparently available supply toward its final stages and that it would be a good idea to send some of its brighter soldiers to school ahead of time. The program was called “ASTP,” and Cyril signed up for it at once. It was a very good deal. Cyril went back to school at the Army’s expense quite happily . . . until the Army noticed that the war was moving toward a close faster than they had expected, with some very big battles yet to be fought. The need was not for future officers but for present combat troops. They met it by canceling ASTP overnight and throwing all its members into the infantry, and so Cyril wound up lugging a .30-caliber machine gun through the snows of the Battle of the Bulge.
The war did finally end. We all got back to civilian life again, and Cyril moved to Chicago to go back to school, at the University of Chicago, on the G.I. Bill. Meanwhile Dick Wilson had also wound up there as a reporter for the news wire service Trans-Radio Press; he was their bureau chief for the city, and when he needed to hire another reporter he gave the job to Cyril. For a couple of years Cyril divided his time between the news bureau and the university, somehow finding enough spare hours to write an occasional short story for the magazines (all of them herein).
Then he came east on a visit. He stayed at our house just outside of Red Bank, New Jersey, for a while, and I was glad to see him because I needed help on a project.
The project was a novel I had begun about the future of the advertising business. I had been working on it desultorily for a year or so and succeeded in getting about the first third of it on paper. I showed that much to Horace Gold, then the editor of Galaxy, and Horace said, “Fine. I’ll print it as soon as I finish the current serial.” “But it isn’t finished,” I said. “So go home and finish it,” said Horace.
I didn’t see how that was possible in the time allowed, and so Cyril’s arrival was a godsend. When I showed what I had to him and suggested we try collaborating again he agreed instantly; he wrote the next third by himself, and the two of us collaborated, turn and about, on the final section. After some polishing and cleaning up of loose ends we turned it in and Horace ran it as “Gravy Planet”; a little later Ian Ballantine published it in book form as The Space Merchants and so it has remained, in many editions and several dozen translations, ever since.
Working with Cyril Kornbluth was one of the great privileges of my life. First to last, we wrote seven novels together: The Space Merchants, Gladiator-at-Law, Search the Sky and Wolfbane in the field of science fiction, plus our three “mainstream” novels, Presidential Year, A Town Is Drowning and Sorority House (that last one published under the pseudonym of “Jordan Park”). I can’t say that we never quarreled about anything—after ail, we were both graduates of the feisty Futurians—but the writing always, always went quickly and well. As editor, agent and collaborator I have worked with literally hundreds of writers over the years, in one degree or another of intimacy, but never with one more competent and talented than Cyril. Even when we were not actually collaborating we would now and then help each other out. Once when Cyril complained that he wanted to write a story but couldn’t seem to come up with an attractive idea, I reminded him that he had once mentioned to me that he’d like to write a story about medical instruments from the future somehow appearing tod
ay; “The Little Black Bag” was the result. And after that was published I urged him to do more with the future background from which those instruments had come, and that turned into “The Marching Morons.” And I am indebted to him for any number of details, plot twists and bits of business in my own stories of the time.
All the while we were writing together, of course, he had other irons in the fire. With Judy Merril he wrote two novels, Marschild and Gunner Cade; he continued to pour out his own wonderful shorter pieces, and he wrote half a dozen novels all his own. Some of them were mainstream—Valerie, The Naked Storm and Man of Cold Rages—but three were science fiction. They were, of course, brilliant. They are also, however, sadly, somewhat dated; Takeoff was all about the first spaceflight, Not This August about the results of the anticipated Russian-American World War III, which in his story the Russians had won. By 1958 he had larger plans, with two novels in the works. Neither was science fiction; both were historical. One was to be about the life of St. Dacius, and that is all I know about it; if any part of it was ever on paper it has long since been lost. The other was to be about the battle of the Crater in the Civil War, and for that one Cyril had done an immense quantity of research. He completed several hundred pages of notes and reference material . . . but that’s as far as it got. The Battle of the Bulge finally took its toll.
By the mid-1950s Cyril began having medical problems. When at last he took them to a doctor the diagnosis was bad. It was essentially malignant hypertension, the doctor said, probably the result of exposure and exhaustion in the Ardennes Forest, and it was likely to be terminal. If Cyril wanted to live much longer, the doctor told him, he would have to give up cigarettes, alcohol and spices of all kinds, and take regular doses of the rauwolfia extracts that were all the pharmacopeia of the day had to offer for that condition.
Cyril did his best to follow orders. When he came out to visit, Carol, my wife at that time, baked him salt-free bread and served him spiceless health foods and we never, never offered him a drink. It wasn’t good enough. The dope he was taking relieved his tension, but it also made him stupid; this quick, insightful mind had become woefully slow and fumbling. When I ventured to show him a novel that was giving me trouble in the hope that he could help, he read it over ponderously, then sighed. “Needs salt,” he said gloomily, and handed it back.
