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.
To live like that, Cyril decided, was no life at all. So he went against the doctor's orders. He stopped the drugs and resumed the cigarettes and the spices. For a while he was the old Cyril again …and then, on one snowy morning a few months later, I got a despairing phone call from Mary, his wife. Cyril had shoveled snow to get out of the driveway of their home on Long Island, then run to catch a train to the city, and dropped dead of a heart attack on the station platform.
By the time I got there, a few hours later, there was nothing left to do but to try to console his widow and his sons. Mary and I went to the crematorium to watch Cyril's body roll into the chamber; the shutters closed; and that was the last anyone ever saw of Cyril Kornbluth. He was then just thirty-four years old and, I think, only beginning to hit his stride as a writer.
When Cyril died he left behind a few fragments of notes and uncompleted stories. Some of them I completed and published as our final collaborations — The Quaker Cannon,' 'Critical Mass' and 'Mute, Inglorious Tam' among them. There was one other. That was a very short piece called 'The Meeting.' For one reason or another it was years before I saw how to deal with that one. But at last I did, and when awards time came around the next year 'The Meeting' won a Hugo. It was the only such award ever given to Cyril's work, and it was not enough. He deserved much, much more.
Editor's Introduction
'Who is C. M. Kornbluth?' I asked. We had just seen the movie
'Robocop' in 1987, and I asked, 'Where have I read the line 'I'd buy that for a dollar!'?' To which my wife Ann (my encyclopedia of all SF
knowledge) replied without a pause, 'It was 'Would you buy it for a quarter?' in 'The Marching Morons.' It's sort of a sequel to 'The Little Black Bag' by …Kornbluth, C. M. Kornbluth.'
I had recognized the tag line but not the author. That was the genesis of this book. Shortly after that I bought a second-hand copy of The Best of C. M Kornbluth, that Fred Pohl edited and Del Rey published in 1976
(by then out-of-print). I inhaled the collection and looked for more.
Alas, neither the library nor the bookseller could help me. Eventually, I discovered that some of his other works had been published in even older and more difficult to obtain out-of-print collections: Thirteen O'clock and Other Zero Hours, A Mile Beyond the Moon, and The Mindworm. I bought or borrowed these old, yellowed, brittle-paged paperbacks and enjoyed them as well.
In 1990 at a NESFA Other Meeting, Mark Olson first proposed that NESFA publish classic SF authors whose work had gone out of print, and were therefore unavailable to new SF fans or to anyone without a vast library of old pulps. Mark selected Schmitz, and the first of the NESFA's Choice books was published: The Best of James H. Schmitz.
My proposal was C. M. Kornbluth.
In the preparation of this book I've had the good fortune to speak with many of Cyril M. Kornbluth friends and contemporaries. He seems to have been your typical literary genius: amusing, smart, quick-witted, but acid- tongued. His photograph on the back flyleaf shows a cocky young man, blithely smoking, perfectly confident—yet he is only a boy, sixteen or seventeen years old. Here are cynicism and maturity, characteristics that were present from the beginning of his career to its sudden end.
Why a complete collection? Cyril Kornbluth was widely known for writing under various pseudonyms: Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, etc.
Several of his pennames were house names, used by other writers for the same magazine, some were also collaborations. I searched the usual sources to construct as complete a bibliography of solo Kornbluth stories as possible. Looking at that list and reading the stories, I realized that I couldn't bear to cut out any of them; they all had a unique insight into human nature, and most were very good. A small number had been written hastily, at the last minute to fill space in a pulp magazine being edited by a fellow Futurian, but even the (bad) ones were impressive work for a teenager writing 'to spec' on a tight deadline. Some of these early stories I have put in the back section of the book.
Why not include collaborative material? Kornbluth was an extensive collaborator. In the early forties, he collaborated with several of the Futurians: Don Wollheim, Robert A. W. Lowndes, etc. Later, under the pseudonym of Cyril Judd, he collaborated with Judith Merril on the Gunner Cade/Mars Child series. And, of course, throughout his career he collaborated extensively with Fred Pohl. Recently Pohl edited a collection of their collaborative efforts, Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M Kornbluth. Pohl and Kornbluth wrote in a unique voice which was neither Pohl nor Kornbluth. I was interested in presenting Kornbluth's perspective.
To determine which stories were really Kornbluth, I consulted the usual indexes to early SF. The most useful source of bibliographic information I found was, Cyril M. Kornbluth: The Cynical Scrutineer by Phil Stephensen-Payne Gordon Benson, Jr. (ISBN# 1-871133-03-3), a good bibliography that also includes non-SF works. I also conferred with Ken Johnson (an expert on pseudonyms in SF), who had managed to view some of the original receipts from some of the early publishers, and from him I learned that Kornbluth did not write 'Hollow of the Moon,' a story written under the byline Gabriel Barclay. The Shakespeare quotation at the beginning of 'Two Dooms' only appeared in the first occurrence, in the magazine Venture (7/58) and not in any subsequent reprints. In the magazine Galaxy (12/51) there is a variation of the story 'With These Hands' with a rather contrived ending, which doesn't appear in other editions of the story. I believe the Galaxy ending to be an editor's addition, and have chosen to include the more widely used variation. There was a heavily abridged version of 'The Silly Season' in the collection The Mindworm. The complete version appears here.
This book has been part of my life for three years. Throughout this time, it is the stories that hold my attention. Witty, pointed, telling, honest, gutsy. It is through these stories that we see Kornbluth's view the clearest. A universe of intrigue and absurdity, of con-men, of suckers, of justice, his justice, his truth, his vision. The stories that follow are his share of glory.
That Share of Glory
YOUNG ALEN, one of a thousand in the huge refectory, ate absentmindedly as the reader droned into the perfect silence of the hall.
