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Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume 2
Contains the rest of Tenn's short fiction (not included in Volume 1), the novel Of Men and Monsters, the essay The Fiction in Science Fiction, and several other long pieces. Introduction by Robert Silverberg. Afterword by George Zebrowski. Dustjacket art by Rolf Mohr.
545 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2001
3 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
About the author
William Tenn
306 books49 followersWilliam Tenn is the pseudonym of Philip Klass. He was born in London on May 9, 1920, and emigrated to the United States with his parents before his second birthday. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. After serving in the United States Army as a combat engineer in Europe, he held a job as a technical editor with an Air Force radar and radio laboratory and was employed by Bell Labs.
He began writing in 1945 and wrote academic articles, essays, two novels, and more than 60 short stories.
His first story, 'Alexander the Bait' was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946. Stories like 'Down Among the Dead Men', 'The Liberation of Earth', and 'The Custodian' quickly established him as a fine, funny, and thoughtful satirist.
Tenn is best-known as a satirist, and by works such as "On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi" and "Of Men and Monsters."
His stories and articles were widely anthologized, a number of them in best-of-the-year collections. From 1966, he was a Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University, where he taught, among other things, a popular course on science fiction.
In 1999, he was honored as Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at their annual Nebula Awards Banquet.
More information at: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topi...
He began writing in 1945 and wrote academic articles, essays, two novels, and more than 60 short stories.
His first story, 'Alexander the Bait' was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946. Stories like 'Down Among the Dead Men', 'The Liberation of Earth', and 'The Custodian' quickly established him as a fine, funny, and thoughtful satirist.
Tenn is best-known as a satirist, and by works such as "On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi" and "Of Men and Monsters."
His stories and articles were widely anthologized, a number of them in best-of-the-year collections. From 1966, he was a Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University, where he taught, among other things, a popular course on science fiction.
In 1999, he was honored as Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at their annual Nebula Awards Banquet.
More information at: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topi...
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 15, 2016
Just like it says on the label, this continues (and completes) NESFA's reprinting all of William's Tenn SF works and while you can probably make a case for one volume being better than the other, frankly if you're dedicated enough of a SF reader to a) remember who William Tenn is in 2016 and b) buy a giant hardcover from a smallish press reprinting stories that can average over fifty years old, chances are the question is more whether you buy both volumes at once or save one for later?
The slight difference with this volume over the first one is that in includes Tenn's only two longish works "A Lamp for Medusa" and "Of Men and Monsters" (the former more of a short novel, the second an actual novel) with the rest of the book filled out with all the stories that didn't make it into the first volume. I wondered at first if the long stories were going to be the reason for getting this volume and they had dumped all the so-so tales just to fill out the space, but surprisingly there was a number of stories I liked way more than the first volume, or at least hit me harder.
The stories here are organized more thematically this time out so sometimes when you're on like the fourth time travel story in a row you wish they had mixed things up more thoroughly but if they're not going to do it chronologically then you might as well impose some order on the proceedings. For some reason though I found his style less . . . "tongue-in-cheek" I guess? this time out and it made some of the stories a bit easier to swallow at times, especially when you're reading a bunch of them in a row (SF satire probably needs to be taken in small, manageable doses) but I also feel like in this group Tenn was satirizing SF without being as obvious about it . . . a number of the stories in the first volume practically scream "we are inverting your genre bound expectations!" but here it seems to flow more naturally. Again, that may be me just getting used to the style so if I had read the second volume first I might not feel this way.
But these are fun. The first set has to do with people dealing with aliens, which range from stuff like "Bernie the Faust" (basically Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" except humorous, although its a viciously dark humor by the end), the similarly themed "Betelgeuse Bridge" (which starts out like a slyer "Bernie the Faust" and ends up feeling like a Heinlein story), "The House Dutiful" (the house only wants to give you what you want . . . and it isn't a horror story) and the rather savage "There Were People on Bikini, There Were People on Attu", which definitely has a more scathing feel about it (the word "Bikini" should tip you off where its going). Something about these stories seems sharper, where he's consciously using his tweaking of the genre to make wider remarks about the world in general.
The fantasy stories come next and even Tenn admits they weren't his strongest, with attempts at a vampire and Gothic type tales, although "The Malted Milk Monster" gets some mileage about being kind of terrifying despite the title and "Everybody Loves Irving Bommer" is an entertaining story version of "Love Potion Number Nine" (though Tenn's recollection of a movie basically stealing the plot wholesale isn't as fun for him) . . . but overall its clear why he stuck with SF for his fiction. His afterwords do give insight into what he was thinking with the stories and they're just as witty as the first time around, as he spices up the stories behind the stories with personal anecdotes and background as to what went into the stories at the time he was writing them.
Which is good because you also get a chunk of stories fittingly called "For the rent", basically his version of hackwork. And while they are indeed written for the money what's interesting about the stories in this section is how even when Tenn is writing to pay the bills, he can't help but come into his tales at odd angles ("Hallock's Madness" seems like a twisted version of "The Malted Milk Monster", "The Puzzle of Priipiipii" seems like someone trying to make fun of Lovecraft) that set it slightly above just churning it out for the pagecount.
The time travel tales wind up benefiting from that off-kilter sense. We saw in the first volume how much fun Tenn has with that subgenre ("Winthrop Was Stubborn") and here he goes all out again, giving his the tale of someone visiting his favorite artist ("The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway"), the idea of time travellers setting up stations in different times ("Sanctuary", not far from what a number of other writers have done since . . . Swanwick's "Bones of the Earth" comes to mind immediately plus some random Doctor Who novel whose name I can't remember), two different stories where different versions of the same person mess up time ("Me, Myself and I" and "It Ends With a Flicker"), a rare late period tale probably needed one more run through for impact ("The Girl With Some Kind of Past. And George") and some general weirdness for old time's sake ("Errand Boy", "Flirgleflip"). Its probably the richest run in the book since despite making fun of all the time travel stories stuck in one place earlier, there's a definite sense of him messing around and trying to find different ways to tweak the general premise and for some reason seeing him try again and again is like watching a good jazz musician improvising over the same riff.
And then comes the longer stuff. "A Lamp for Medusa" isn't really that long (maybe fifty pages?) and concerns a guy who winds up being sucked out of his apartment into Ancient Greece with all the myths intact. Before too long he's tasked with attempting to kill Medusa, reenacting the feats of Perseus in the process. Its well done and there are some science-fictional elements in it but overall it felt like a missed opportunity, basically a slightly longer version of his fantasy tales without too much genre tweaking involved . . . its got a small sense of "we are being clever" here that sometimes can undermine the drama at play . Maybe I've read so many versions of "let's treat the Greek myths as real!" that I've become jaded, or maybe reading Zelazny's "Lord of Light" ruined anything with a pantheon for me for all time but I didn't feel this one as much. It was better than Dan Simmon's mixing of SF and Greek mythology, probably doing more in fifty pages than he did in eight hundred but it doesn't make it one of my favorites.
"Of Men and Monsters" is a different kettle of fish entirely and hands down probably the best thing he ever did (or at least the one that impressed me the most). Its definitely worth a fuller review than what I'm going to give here, but I'll try to do it justice.
I always approach short story authors writing novels with some trepidation because you never know if they can pull off the format change but he nails it here, along the way yanking the story through several different subgenres, some of which it feels like he invented. We start off with a tribe called Mankind living in burrows in the earth, and a young man named Eric about to make the official leap from boy to man via the rituals of his tribe, much of which seems to involve sneaking out of the burrows and stealing food from the "monsters" that have taken over the world, and if you think that sounds like a SF version of "Tom and Jerry" you may not be too far off at first. Although Eric is young and the tribe's view of the world is somewhat limited, you get glimpses of how society has shaken out even as you get the sense that not everything is as it seems (those who have read other SF novels may have a leg up here). Rest assured before too long those eerie feelings pay off as his world shifts when Eric goes on his man-making food run and all heck breaks loose. His world literally expands and while all along you may have been waiting for a twist along the lines of Brian Aldiss' "Hothouse" (everything is as it appears, but its not what you expect!) what you really find is that everyone is living in a version of "Fraggle Rock".
I know that sounds silly but its brilliant, really. Tenn upends the role of man and then proceeds to give Eric the opportunities to learn the new rules of existence on the fly, while giving us aliens that are so successful at being invaders they don't even bother to interact with the humans, and in fact just seem to regard them as annoying. But it goes beyond subverting expectations into dashing them entirely and rebuilding something new from the rubble, as he both crams in and tosses off ideas regarding a world that has radically shifted itself without having to spend a thousand pages depicting that world (in fact one of the more intriguing scenarios is put forward in a tossed off line near the end of the book and is never referred to again because the book really isn't concerned with it). He gives us a new society from the ashes of an old one and then shows us how that society changes again, all in less than two hundred pages. What makes it work for me is the constant unpeeling of what we know, as every person that Eric meets not only reinforces what he already thought he knew but also gives him the information and the means to reevaluate the world again and again. Couple that with some rather surprising scenes of brutality (I don't know they termed "hardcore" in the late sixties but its pretty hardcore in parts) and a touching romance that gets bonus points for showcasing ladies in 60s SF that isn't completely embarrassing and you have an extremely satisfying read that still holds up today as well as any of the other classic authors from that era do.
If you get anything from these two volumes its that Tenn is worth getting to know. He's good enough that I have to agree with others that say its a shame that writing SF wasn't able to hold his interest to give him a lengthy career but what I get out of him is that he was extremely consistent. Even the "hackwork", such as it is, is professional and thought out. I think the biggest knock on Tenn is that he never had a flat out gut-wrenching masterpiece the way the generally acknowledged greats did but that just means he had to be consistent (Sturgeon had a number of duffers in his time but the highs are so high you forgive them) or else he'd only be remembered as a guy who wrote a handful of satirically biting tales and that's it. That's not to say he has nothing that belongs in the all time canon ("Of Men and Monsters" definitely qualifies and I'd easily put "Down Among the Dead Men" for audacity alone) its just that reading him is a somewhat even experience. The absolute best way to appreciate Tenn is probably to read him the old way, in a magazine or an anthology, where surrounded by other authors you can see his stories leap out at you and get a real sense of how hard it was to do what it did, time after time, tale after tale, to stay sharp when taking stabs at a genre that tends to bite back when irritated. He's another name that won't be a household word amongst the people who think SF begins and ends with "Star Wars" but if you're trying to get a real sense of the evolution of the genre, he's as essential as anyone else.
The slight difference with this volume over the first one is that in includes Tenn's only two longish works "A Lamp for Medusa" and "Of Men and Monsters" (the former more of a short novel, the second an actual novel) with the rest of the book filled out with all the stories that didn't make it into the first volume. I wondered at first if the long stories were going to be the reason for getting this volume and they had dumped all the so-so tales just to fill out the space, but surprisingly there was a number of stories I liked way more than the first volume, or at least hit me harder.
The stories here are organized more thematically this time out so sometimes when you're on like the fourth time travel story in a row you wish they had mixed things up more thoroughly but if they're not going to do it chronologically then you might as well impose some order on the proceedings. For some reason though I found his style less . . . "tongue-in-cheek" I guess? this time out and it made some of the stories a bit easier to swallow at times, especially when you're reading a bunch of them in a row (SF satire probably needs to be taken in small, manageable doses) but I also feel like in this group Tenn was satirizing SF without being as obvious about it . . . a number of the stories in the first volume practically scream "we are inverting your genre bound expectations!" but here it seems to flow more naturally. Again, that may be me just getting used to the style so if I had read the second volume first I might not feel this way.
But these are fun. The first set has to do with people dealing with aliens, which range from stuff like "Bernie the Faust" (basically Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" except humorous, although its a viciously dark humor by the end), the similarly themed "Betelgeuse Bridge" (which starts out like a slyer "Bernie the Faust" and ends up feeling like a Heinlein story), "The House Dutiful" (the house only wants to give you what you want . . . and it isn't a horror story) and the rather savage "There Were People on Bikini, There Were People on Attu", which definitely has a more scathing feel about it (the word "Bikini" should tip you off where its going). Something about these stories seems sharper, where he's consciously using his tweaking of the genre to make wider remarks about the world in general.
The fantasy stories come next and even Tenn admits they weren't his strongest, with attempts at a vampire and Gothic type tales, although "The Malted Milk Monster" gets some mileage about being kind of terrifying despite the title and "Everybody Loves Irving Bommer" is an entertaining story version of "Love Potion Number Nine" (though Tenn's recollection of a movie basically stealing the plot wholesale isn't as fun for him) . . . but overall its clear why he stuck with SF for his fiction. His afterwords do give insight into what he was thinking with the stories and they're just as witty as the first time around, as he spices up the stories behind the stories with personal anecdotes and background as to what went into the stories at the time he was writing them.
Which is good because you also get a chunk of stories fittingly called "For the rent", basically his version of hackwork. And while they are indeed written for the money what's interesting about the stories in this section is how even when Tenn is writing to pay the bills, he can't help but come into his tales at odd angles ("Hallock's Madness" seems like a twisted version of "The Malted Milk Monster", "The Puzzle of Priipiipii" seems like someone trying to make fun of Lovecraft) that set it slightly above just churning it out for the pagecount.
The time travel tales wind up benefiting from that off-kilter sense. We saw in the first volume how much fun Tenn has with that subgenre ("Winthrop Was Stubborn") and here he goes all out again, giving his the tale of someone visiting his favorite artist ("The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway"), the idea of time travellers setting up stations in different times ("Sanctuary", not far from what a number of other writers have done since . . . Swanwick's "Bones of the Earth" comes to mind immediately plus some random Doctor Who novel whose name I can't remember), two different stories where different versions of the same person mess up time ("Me, Myself and I" and "It Ends With a Flicker"), a rare late period tale probably needed one more run through for impact ("The Girl With Some Kind of Past. And George") and some general weirdness for old time's sake ("Errand Boy", "Flirgleflip"). Its probably the richest run in the book since despite making fun of all the time travel stories stuck in one place earlier, there's a definite sense of him messing around and trying to find different ways to tweak the general premise and for some reason seeing him try again and again is like watching a good jazz musician improvising over the same riff.
And then comes the longer stuff. "A Lamp for Medusa" isn't really that long (maybe fifty pages?) and concerns a guy who winds up being sucked out of his apartment into Ancient Greece with all the myths intact. Before too long he's tasked with attempting to kill Medusa, reenacting the feats of Perseus in the process. Its well done and there are some science-fictional elements in it but overall it felt like a missed opportunity, basically a slightly longer version of his fantasy tales without too much genre tweaking involved . . . its got a small sense of "we are being clever" here that sometimes can undermine the drama at play . Maybe I've read so many versions of "let's treat the Greek myths as real!" that I've become jaded, or maybe reading Zelazny's "Lord of Light" ruined anything with a pantheon for me for all time but I didn't feel this one as much. It was better than Dan Simmon's mixing of SF and Greek mythology, probably doing more in fifty pages than he did in eight hundred but it doesn't make it one of my favorites.
"Of Men and Monsters" is a different kettle of fish entirely and hands down probably the best thing he ever did (or at least the one that impressed me the most). Its definitely worth a fuller review than what I'm going to give here, but I'll try to do it justice.
I always approach short story authors writing novels with some trepidation because you never know if they can pull off the format change but he nails it here, along the way yanking the story through several different subgenres, some of which it feels like he invented. We start off with a tribe called Mankind living in burrows in the earth, and a young man named Eric about to make the official leap from boy to man via the rituals of his tribe, much of which seems to involve sneaking out of the burrows and stealing food from the "monsters" that have taken over the world, and if you think that sounds like a SF version of "Tom and Jerry" you may not be too far off at first. Although Eric is young and the tribe's view of the world is somewhat limited, you get glimpses of how society has shaken out even as you get the sense that not everything is as it seems (those who have read other SF novels may have a leg up here). Rest assured before too long those eerie feelings pay off as his world shifts when Eric goes on his man-making food run and all heck breaks loose. His world literally expands and while all along you may have been waiting for a twist along the lines of Brian Aldiss' "Hothouse" (everything is as it appears, but its not what you expect!) what you really find is that everyone is living in a version of "Fraggle Rock".
I know that sounds silly but its brilliant, really. Tenn upends the role of man and then proceeds to give Eric the opportunities to learn the new rules of existence on the fly, while giving us aliens that are so successful at being invaders they don't even bother to interact with the humans, and in fact just seem to regard them as annoying. But it goes beyond subverting expectations into dashing them entirely and rebuilding something new from the rubble, as he both crams in and tosses off ideas regarding a world that has radically shifted itself without having to spend a thousand pages depicting that world (in fact one of the more intriguing scenarios is put forward in a tossed off line near the end of the book and is never referred to again because the book really isn't concerned with it). He gives us a new society from the ashes of an old one and then shows us how that society changes again, all in less than two hundred pages. What makes it work for me is the constant unpeeling of what we know, as every person that Eric meets not only reinforces what he already thought he knew but also gives him the information and the means to reevaluate the world again and again. Couple that with some rather surprising scenes of brutality (I don't know they termed "hardcore" in the late sixties but its pretty hardcore in parts) and a touching romance that gets bonus points for showcasing ladies in 60s SF that isn't completely embarrassing and you have an extremely satisfying read that still holds up today as well as any of the other classic authors from that era do.
If you get anything from these two volumes its that Tenn is worth getting to know. He's good enough that I have to agree with others that say its a shame that writing SF wasn't able to hold his interest to give him a lengthy career but what I get out of him is that he was extremely consistent. Even the "hackwork", such as it is, is professional and thought out. I think the biggest knock on Tenn is that he never had a flat out gut-wrenching masterpiece the way the generally acknowledged greats did but that just means he had to be consistent (Sturgeon had a number of duffers in his time but the highs are so high you forgive them) or else he'd only be remembered as a guy who wrote a handful of satirically biting tales and that's it. That's not to say he has nothing that belongs in the all time canon ("Of Men and Monsters" definitely qualifies and I'd easily put "Down Among the Dead Men" for audacity alone) its just that reading him is a somewhat even experience. The absolute best way to appreciate Tenn is probably to read him the old way, in a magazine or an anthology, where surrounded by other authors you can see his stories leap out at you and get a real sense of how hard it was to do what it did, time after time, tale after tale, to stay sharp when taking stabs at a genre that tends to bite back when irritated. He's another name that won't be a household word amongst the people who think SF begins and ends with "Star Wars" but if you're trying to get a real sense of the evolution of the genre, he's as essential as anyone else.
July 29, 2017
Reading this book just reminds me how much I miss Phil Klass. William Tenn was one of his subpersonas, and probably the most interesting satirist in SF history. I had been putting off finishing this volume (I got about a hundred pages in, before he died in 2010) because I didn't want to say goodbye.
This second volume of the NESFA Press _Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn_ (all praise to Jim Mann, Mary Tabasko, and everyone else involved in making that happen) contains his two novels (A Lamp for Medusa, Of Men and Monsters), and my reviews of them have been on the Internet for decades, so I'll leave those alone.
Several of the classic Tenn stories are in this collection ("Bernie the Faust" "There Were People on Bikini, There Were People on Attu" "The Malted Milk Monster" "The Human Angle"), though more of them are in the first volume. My favorite of the others was "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway," which has roman à clef origins, as Tenn explains in an afterword. This is only one of several time-travel comic pieces in this collection, and I found myself admiring the Master. I've got a list of objections to time-travel stories, and Tenn has made fun of each of those problems, pretty much one per story; while at the same time having a satirical point to make, along with the comic point.
I should note that I was reading a Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction anthology at the same time I was reading this collection, and I sometimes became confused as to which story was in which collection. Despite being written in the 50s and 60s, mostly, the quality would fit, seamlessly, in a Best Of anthology from this century. The only thing that has "dated" is some of the slang, and a few (but not that many) of the cultural references. I particularly noticed the strategic similarity between "It Ends with a Flicker" and Terry Bisson's novella "Dear Abbey," which could go along with Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" and a few others into a nice genre study.
Tenn disparages some of the stories, and one section is called "For the Rent" to indicate that they were attempted hack work (Tenn claims not to have had enough energy to be a successful hack, which is a stance I can empathize with); but I have to say that the pieces were fun. Good fun, and always something extra going on, no matter how light the tale.
I should also pull a quote out of the Mathaway story, because it's the best description (for outsiders) of the Pittsburgh Yinzer accent that I've ever come across. As a child living in Pittsburgh I heard it often, but not all Pittsburghers had it, and I thought of it as being from New York City. Tenn has this line in the story: "...he'd talk for hours, in the accents that sound like movie Brooklynese, but are actually pure Pittsburgh." Yep, that about covers it.
Let me also flag Tenn's afterword, on page 254, to the story "Sanctuary." He makes the point that "all good science fiction, from H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Cliff Simak, Brian Aldiss, and Connie Willis, is about history -- past history, future history, or alternate history..." and he finishes with the interesting formulation that "the science in science fiction is actually history. Nothing more and nothing other." One could get a couple of good college papers out of that one.
The essay "On the Fiction in Science Fiction" hews so closely to my view of SF's place in Literature, that I wonder if I may have read the thing in my youth. I remember a piece by Chip Delaney being formative, but I suspect I was influenced by this very essay, either at first or at second hand. Hmmm.
[My students should be warned that this is probably a 20-grimace collection; written in the heyday of the grimace. See my "Orations Against Grimace" for discussion.]
As I am composing this, the Pittsburgh SF Conference, Confluence, is just days away. Confluence used to hold the promise of a few long, fascinating conversations with William Tenn. I have notes from many of them, because they were the kind where you took notes afterward. If you didn't have that experience, then the best you're going to be able to do is the two volumes of his Complete SF. Tenn was very influential in the field, all out of proportion to his fame. These books will let you know why.
This second volume of the NESFA Press _Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn_ (all praise to Jim Mann, Mary Tabasko, and everyone else involved in making that happen) contains his two novels (A Lamp for Medusa, Of Men and Monsters), and my reviews of them have been on the Internet for decades, so I'll leave those alone.
Several of the classic Tenn stories are in this collection ("Bernie the Faust" "There Were People on Bikini, There Were People on Attu" "The Malted Milk Monster" "The Human Angle"), though more of them are in the first volume. My favorite of the others was "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway," which has roman à clef origins, as Tenn explains in an afterword. This is only one of several time-travel comic pieces in this collection, and I found myself admiring the Master. I've got a list of objections to time-travel stories, and Tenn has made fun of each of those problems, pretty much one per story; while at the same time having a satirical point to make, along with the comic point.
I should note that I was reading a Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction anthology at the same time I was reading this collection, and I sometimes became confused as to which story was in which collection. Despite being written in the 50s and 60s, mostly, the quality would fit, seamlessly, in a Best Of anthology from this century. The only thing that has "dated" is some of the slang, and a few (but not that many) of the cultural references. I particularly noticed the strategic similarity between "It Ends with a Flicker" and Terry Bisson's novella "Dear Abbey," which could go along with Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" and a few others into a nice genre study.
Tenn disparages some of the stories, and one section is called "For the Rent" to indicate that they were attempted hack work (Tenn claims not to have had enough energy to be a successful hack, which is a stance I can empathize with); but I have to say that the pieces were fun. Good fun, and always something extra going on, no matter how light the tale.
I should also pull a quote out of the Mathaway story, because it's the best description (for outsiders) of the Pittsburgh Yinzer accent that I've ever come across. As a child living in Pittsburgh I heard it often, but not all Pittsburghers had it, and I thought of it as being from New York City. Tenn has this line in the story: "...he'd talk for hours, in the accents that sound like movie Brooklynese, but are actually pure Pittsburgh." Yep, that about covers it.
Let me also flag Tenn's afterword, on page 254, to the story "Sanctuary." He makes the point that "all good science fiction, from H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Cliff Simak, Brian Aldiss, and Connie Willis, is about history -- past history, future history, or alternate history..." and he finishes with the interesting formulation that "the science in science fiction is actually history. Nothing more and nothing other." One could get a couple of good college papers out of that one.
The essay "On the Fiction in Science Fiction" hews so closely to my view of SF's place in Literature, that I wonder if I may have read the thing in my youth. I remember a piece by Chip Delaney being formative, but I suspect I was influenced by this very essay, either at first or at second hand. Hmmm.
[My students should be warned that this is probably a 20-grimace collection; written in the heyday of the grimace. See my "Orations Against Grimace" for discussion.]
As I am composing this, the Pittsburgh SF Conference, Confluence, is just days away. Confluence used to hold the promise of a few long, fascinating conversations with William Tenn. I have notes from many of them, because they were the kind where you took notes afterward. If you didn't have that experience, then the best you're going to be able to do is the two volumes of his Complete SF. Tenn was very influential in the field, all out of proportion to his fame. These books will let you know why.
December 8, 2022
A collection of fun science-fiction short stories and one novella, kind of at the border of 'modern' SF and golden-age SF. Fun adventures, a tiny bit of social critique, but heavy emphasis on the adventure part.
The best part, and what makes this book so good, is that every story has a brutally honest afterword from Tenn. They're the opposite of your typical artist's nonsense of inspiration and muses. 'Some author cancelled last-minute, so the SF magazine needed a 2,000 word story, they asked me to write this in a night, which I did since I didn't have that month's rent yet, and now you read it too!'
These afterwords don't hold back when it comes editors 'messing' with his work, or agents' perception of his work:
It's worth it for these afterwords alone. Now I need to find Volume 1!
The best part, and what makes this book so good, is that every story has a brutally honest afterword from Tenn. They're the opposite of your typical artist's nonsense of inspiration and muses. 'Some author cancelled last-minute, so the SF magazine needed a 2,000 word story, they asked me to write this in a night, which I did since I didn't have that month's rent yet, and now you read it too!'
These afterwords don't hold back when it comes editors 'messing' with his work, or agents' perception of his work:
[....] she has told me she was going to sell me to Harper's and The New Yorker and points north; she sent it back to me by return post. "Don't just tear this up, Phil," she said, "but keep it near you and look at it from time to time, and ask yourself, 'How could I, a gifted professional writer, come to write such a piece of shit?'"
It's worth it for these afterwords alone. Now I need to find Volume 1!
March 20, 2024
A few classic stories and his one (mostly very good) novel here, but most of the classic stories are in Volume 1, and a block of early work in the middle -- also, grouped by theme thus repetitive as well as not up to his standard -- bogs down. But if you don't have another way to read "Bernie the Faust" and "Of Men and Monsters", you do need it.
August 11, 2018
I could not appreciate the short stories of Tenn as other readers have, but the novel Of Men and Monsters is a SF masterpiece and well worth the reason to check out this compilation.
August 5, 2024
Entertaining assortment of sci-fi stories.
BCID 950-12873152
BCID 950-12873152
April 26, 2012
Finished this book last night. Despite the author's claim that it contained inferior works, or works that HAD to be written for rent or food, I found most of the stories vastly enjoyable. The novel and the novella were tricky, since the thrust kept on changing (as admitted by the author in his interesting end-words), and the endings remained somewhat open (which perhaps adds to their allure, since they were unpredictably different from contemporary pulp fiction). Overall, I enjoyed the stories. Readers with a penchant for stories written by Eric Frank Russell and Robert Sheckley should lap up this wonderful volume brought out by NESFA press. Highly recommended.
February 1, 2009
Excellent stories ranging from the quirky to the profound.
August 9, 2012
Beyond good for what it is, i.e. genre fiction, it's just plain good. Brilliant even. And often hilarious.
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