At McFarland, editors had been expressing fears that I would fail to find material sufficient to fill a book for their line. The day arrived, however, when they discovered what they described as a cement brick on their doorstep: my manuscript, all 240,000 words of it, in a large cardboard box.
I gave my book a somewhat morbid title: Kornbluth and the Death of Science Fiction. In my preliminary efforts, before conducting interviews or becoming aware of archival caches, I was attempting to place Kornbluth's works within the larger history of the earlier wonder stories and the later science fiction. Since I was accepting Northrop Frye's suggestion that a distinctly Modern age extended from around 1860 to around 1960, it seemed striking to me that the "science fiction" pulp-magazine field in the United States, within which Kornbluth worked, arose quite late as an expression of Modern culture. The fact also struck me that, by the early 1950s, older observers had begun bemoaning a falling-off of quality within the field — and that, by decade's end, they were speaking of the death of science fiction. The closely spaced deaths of Henry Kuttner and Kornbluth helped set the latter tone. The science fiction field, as long-time readers knew it, was reaching its end, to be supplanted by a different field, in which such figures as Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny could flourish and rise to prominence. The stories "The Mindworm," the magazine version of "With These Hands," and "The Last Man Left in the Bar," all by Kornbluth, offer direct antecedents to the stylistic audacity of the New Wave writings in science fiction that were to appear after his death.
Even as my book slowly blossomed in the biographical direction, this narrative strand about the waning of the traditional science fiction wonder story remained an important one. All the same, McFarland editors felt that the "death of science fiction" title did injustice to the book's scope. I accepted their title: C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary.
I failed to give my all to the book: for, after all, I survived — penniless, but alive. And yet I did give all I could, driven by haunting questions, including one unanswerable one. If I failed to place possession of Cyril's story where it belonged, who else could? For his story belonged not in my hands; it belonged in the reading public's hands. I believed and believe this. Kornbluth is mine; Cyril Kornbluth, not. His works have an importance that makes him, the author, belong to all of us. I wrote the book motivated by that idea.
This claim to achievement anyone may feel free to dispute. For with C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary I believe I succeeded.
I placed his life in the right hands.
The End
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Notes
Quotation from Frederik Pohl: "When we came to Bahai Hall," p. 77, The Way the Future Was, Ballantine Books: New York, 1978. From Cyril Judd: "Put him in with Fledwick," p. 57, Gunner Cade, Simon and Schuster: New York, 1952; or p. 45, Dell Publishing Co.: New York, 1969.
I dedicated my biography of Cyril to his brother Lewis, for several excellent reasons. This essay, though, I dedicate to Martha and our late, lamented Lorna.
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