Cyril may have died too young

kw: book reviews, science fiction, megapack series, anthologies, short stories, collections

Cyril M Kornbluth didn't have a middle name, but his friends have written that his use of "M" was a tribute to his wife Mary. This wasn't his only quirk, but this piece isn't mainly about him but about what he wrote. He died at the age of 34, of a heart attack, after shoveling snow and then running to catch a train. During the nineteen years during which published stories and novels, his writing was characterized by sideways thinking that still stands out. He published nearly ninety stories, nine novels, and seven works of non-fiction.

The e-book The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack: Featuring the Classic Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth contains 18 of his stories, a sci-fi novella The Syndic, and a non-science fiction novella The Naked Storm. I did not read The Naked Storm, the longest piece in the collection at 179 "pages". From the outset it began to go in a disturbing direction, so I skipped it. The total volume contains 868 "pages", about twenty of which are devoted to advertising for the Megapack series, so there was plenty of other material for me to enjoy. Note: On my phone, with the type size I like to use, a "page" includes between two and four screens, because page counts shown in a footer are based on whatever publication the series publishers scanned, whether a paperback or an octavo volume.

In the 1950's, just before I began reading a lot of science fiction, Galaxy was one of numerous "pulp" magazines full of space opera, which has a special place in my heart. Kornbluth was a mainstay of the genre, and in this issue he wrote as Cyril Judd, one of his many pen names.

I encountered a few old friends in this Megapack, including "The Marching Morons", based on the observation that people with more education and intelligence tend to have fewer children. In 1951, when Earth's population was about 2.6 billion, Kornbluth imagined a "far future" era with twice that population, most of whom would be idiots; he surmised an average IQ of about 45. The teeming billions are cared for by a small, decreasing number of intelligent folk, who seek ways to remedy the situation. It is still worth reading, even though population zoomed past 5.2 billion in 1990, and is presently pushing 7.7 billion. Average IQ also hasn't dropped precipitously, but CQ ("caring quotient", as in "Why should I care?") is much lower in the present generation, at least in affluent societies. I wonder what Kornbluth might write about that?

I had also read "The Syndic" long, long ago, so long that it was almost a new book to me. It contains a powerful idea, stated by the rather philosophical F.W. Taylor, Godfather of The Syndic and uncle of the protagonist:

"A strange thing—people always think that each exchange of power is the last that will ever take place."

A story left nearly finished when Kornbluth died, tidied up and finished by Frederick Pohl and published in June 1958, is "Shark Ship". It posits a different "solution" to the dilemma of a planet over-filled with people: convoys of ships that sail the seas, forever excluded from land-based society, catching and living upon plankton. The rigid society that must result is too fragile to survive when one ship loses its net, unless the unfortunate ship and the thousands aboard it are shunned and left to die of starvation. The story ends shortly after the ship diverts to approach land, to see if there is a new way of life possible there; the land is nearly abandoned, and there is hope. This has the flavor of a good beginning to a novel, but the author didn't live to develop it. The rather neat wrap-up is apparently Pohl's work. 

This and other stories indicate that Kornbluth had a rather pessimistic view of the coming decades and centuries. Did he die too young? Were he living he'd be 97. Even had he lived "three score and ten", it would have been until 1993, and a very different sort of science fiction was in vogue then. Maybe he'd have reveled in it, and become as productive as Asimov. Or, maybe it is best that he went when he did, a man already a little out of his element.