Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

by Frederik Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth

Edited, with an introduction, afterword, and essays about the stories by Frederik Pohl. Stories Trouble in Time; Mars-Tube; Critical Mass; The World of Myrion Flowers; The Engineer; A Gentle Dying; Nightmare with Zeppelins; The Quaker Cannon; Gravy Planet (Excerpt); Mute Inglorious Tam (19th place, 1975 Locus Poll Award, Best Short Story); The Gift of Garigolli (15th place, 1975 Locus Poll Award, Best Novelette); The Meeting (winner, 1973 Hugo Award; 1973 Locus Poll Award; 9th place, Best Short Fiction).

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories

286 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1987

About the author

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine IF winning the Hugo for IF three years in a row. His writing also won him three Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993.

Reviews

[Lost Planet Airman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best of the collaborations between Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth.
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Critical Mass
The World of Myrion Flowers
The Engineer
A Gentle Dying
Nightmare with Zepplins
The Quaker Cannon
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Trouble in Time: a humorous time-travel adventure with a female protagonist
Mars-Tube: hard to describe.
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Gravy Planet - an alternate, slightly deus ex machina ending to The Space Merchants
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Mute, Inglorious Tam: sci-fi fandom in the 14th century. 19th in Locus Poll (short fiction, 1975);
The Gift of Garigolli: spacefarers studying Earth find more sit-com than sci-fi. 15th in Locus Poll (novelette, 1975)
The Meeting: a posthumous collaboration, from a fragment by Cyril Kornbluth, about decisions after a parent-teacher meeting at a school for handicapped children. Definitely dated by some characteristic attitudes toward disability and parenting, still relevant and deserving of the awards it garnered: 9th in Locus Poll (short fiction, 1973); Hugo winner (short story, 1973)

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Read as part of my 2019 Frederick Pohl "Grandmaster" review of award-winning (and award-nominated) SF&F.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A recent reference in the New York Times to Kornbluth’s provocatively titled “The Marching Morons”—which I had read twice, 50 years ago and within the past five years—prompted me to wonder again why it was that Kornbluth’s name was not more familiar. His death was decidedly premature, a heart attack at age 34 in 1959. He’d been writing half his life, and many of his works were collaborations with Fred Pohl and others. Outside the collaborations with Kornbluth, I knew Pohl as an erudite editor of several sci-fi short story collections, which I read avidly as a young teenager. Their novel The Space Merchants was one I’d read when I was young, and it left an abiding impression of savvy, smart satire, even though I read it 15 years after its publication in 1953.

Suddenly, I was interested in seeing if there were other things in their oeuvre that I might have missed, thinking maybe I’d discover Kornbluth had been his generation’s Kit Marlowe. I bought a couple of Kornbluth short story collections (this one included), a novel by Kornbluth (Not This August, 1955), and another collaborative novel with Pohl (Presidential Year, 1956). Both of the novels straddle sci-fi and mainstream fiction and are dark extrapolations of contemporary trends. (I’m particularly interested in seeing just what sort of early insights into politicking were evident to these authors in 1956, 13 years before Joe McGinnis’ ground-breaking The Selling of the President 1968 (about the image makeover of Richard Nixon).

This collection is peculiarly-named, as “Our Best” would suggest that Pohl has curated the best of the joint fiction they’d written. Instead, most of the stories are posthumous, with Pohl resurrecting fragments, scraps, and unfinished stories, reworking them into publishable form. Pohl takes a good deal of license in this sort of collaboration, and there’s no real way to determine the actual contributions each made, though Pohl does describe an early method where they tag teamed, each writing 600 words. Later the process involved more brainstorming and swapping turns with drafts.

The juvenilia, two stories they’d written in the 40s, are not particularly good. “Trouble in Time” is a time-travel story (or is it?) and a Martian invasion story and it employs a narrator with too-snappy dialogue. “Mars-Tube” seemed a pointlessly drawn-out adventure story embedded in an interesting premise (the Martians, with whom Earth has waged war, have all died, but their cities remain intact and are being explored).

Pohl reworked many of Kornbluth’s posthumous pieces into stories that appear in a section called Stories of the Sixties. These are all a competent blend of dual premises, marked by irony and satire. “Critical Mass” is set in a world where the cold war paranoia has metastasized into a way of life, and a series of accidents occurring to random people catalyzes a new perspective. “The World of Myrion Flowers” proposes a powerful, supercilious, and domineering Black man who acquires the ability to hear other minds and is driven mad by a torrent of hate (the racial implications are broached but not articulated). “A Gentle Dying” shows us the death of the world’s last old man, the sentimental author whose wealth earned from children’s books funded the research to genetically end senescence.

The epilogue to The Space Merchants is an interesting curio, since it does not appear in the published novel. It’s easy enough to conjure something of the novel’s premise and the events preceding this epilogue, but there’s not enough, however, to make this a stand-alone story.

The final three stories have origins similar to the Sixties stories, but they did not appear until after that decade. “The Meeting” actually won for its authors a Hugo award, and it speaks compassionately of the moral/emotional toll imposed on a man whose son is mentally disabled but whose body is a perfect match for a child whose brain lies in a wrecked body. “The Gift of the Garigioli” is a comic piece made intriguing by the miniature aliens’ attempts to give humans something they’d like. “Mute, Inglorious Tam” limelights a medieval serf who’s a dreamer, a nascent sci-fi teller out of time, without words to properly articulate his fantastic visions. The premise is suggestive, and the idea of people’s lives being frustrated because they can’t articulate their visions/sentiments/intimations has range beyond the story’s medieval setting.

All in all, an entertaining five or six hours of reading, an occasion for discerning readers to interpolate (ie, reverse-engineer) the history and social contexts that prompted these extrapolations.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I keep wanting more from these two big names. This didn't give me any.
Rather pulp, rather dated... not in the classic sense but instead in the expired sense.
Not horrible, but don't bother looking for it.

[Will Sargent · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars. One for the sf history buffs. warm introductions from Pohl about his friendship with Kornbluth, how they wrote together, a few pages in turn, to create one of those monster drawings with head, body and legs scribbled by two different people then unfolded to reveal the full gangly beast at the end.

A few too many ww2 US army tales for my liking. As with the X-files tv series, I tend to ignore the somewhat dull UFO government conspiracy stories by Chris Carter and head straight for the kooky one-offs by Vince Gilligan and Morgan and Wong.

Same here. myriam flowers, a gentle dying and the last three quick shorts were the best. Too much chippy US blokey military chat and too few ideas in large chunks of the book, but admittedly this is good writing. Part of the fun I suppose is guessing who wrote which bit.

Tough to be impressed after a selection of stunning, thought-provoking Tiptree shorts if I'm honest. Your previous book can affect hugely your opinion of the next.

Flying through Pohl's Gateway to see how the old sf editor holds up late in his career without Kornbluth's magic next (then man plus).

[bluetyson]

Best of C M Kornbluth by Frederik Pohl (1976)