C. M. Kornbluth
Born Cyril Kornbluth on July 2, 1923, in New York City, the second child of Samuel Kornbluth, an accountant, and Deborah Ungar Kornbluth, the daughter of a tailor. (Later added the initial “M.” to some of his bylines, after his wife Mary.) Grew up in upper Manhattan, graduating from George Washington High School in 1940. While still in high school, attended Futurian Society fan meetings in New York, meeting Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, and others, and contributing poems and stories to Futurian-edited magazines. Began earning money for his stories, often writing collaboratively (with Robert Lowndes, Pohl, Wollheim, Dirk Wylie, and others) and publishing under pseudonyms, including S. D. Gottesman and Cecil Corwin. Enrolled at City College, but after a few months dropped out to write professionally. In 1942–43, apprenticed as a machinist under the National Youth Administration, worked in a Connecticut machine shop, and enrolled in a military training program; married Mary Byers, with whom he would later have two children. Called to active duty in the Infantry, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, earning a Bronze Star; developed combat-related health problems, including chronic tinnitus and hypertension, that would persist until his death. After his Army discharge, moved briefly to a farm near Springfield, Ohio; wrote detective stories for 10 Story Detective, Black Mask, and Dime Detective. Relocated to Chicago, enrolling at Wilson Junior College and then the University of Chicago, without earning a degree. Worked as a news writer for Trans radio Press Service. Urged by Pohl, took up science fiction again, publishing “The Little Black Bag” (1950, later adapted for television three times), “The Silly Season” (1950), and “The Marching Morons” (1951). With Judith Merril, collaborated on Outpost Mars and Gunner Cade; finished solo novel Takeoff (all 1952). Returned to the New York area, ultimately settling in the small town of Waverly. With Pohl, collaborated on Gravy Planet (1952; later retitled The Space Merchants, 1953), Search the Sky (1954), Gladiator-At-Law (1955), and Wolfbane (1959), as well as the non–science fiction novels A Town Is Drowning (1955), Presidential Year (1956), Sorority House (1956), and The Man of Cold Rages (1958), some under the pseudonym Jordan Park. Writing independently, he published The Syndic (1953) and Not This August (1955); story collections The Explorers (1954) and A Mile Beyond the Moon (1958); and non–science fiction novels The Naked Storm (1952, as Simon Eisner), Valerie, and Half (both 1953, also as Jordan Park). At the end of 1954, accepted position as assistant curator for Tioga Point Historical Society Museum, in nearby Athens, Pennsylvania; began Civil War novel The Crater (never published) using museum documents and records. Attended 1956 Newyorcon (14th World Science Fiction Convention) and the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference. At the latter, joined in an “oracular” all-night encounter with Algis Budrys, James Blish, Damon Knight, and Jane Roberts; profoundly moved, they later referred to each other as “The Five” and began a round-robin exchange of letters exploring their interconnectedness. Gave 1957 lecture on “The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism” at the University of Chicago. Moved with family to Levittown, New York. Prepared to assume consulting editor role at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but died of a heart attack on March 21, 1958, in Levittown. Works collected posthumously in The Wonder Effect (1962) and His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth (1997), among other volumes.
Theodore Sturgeon
Born Edward Hamilton Waldo on February 26, 1918, in Staten Island, New York, the second son of Edward Molineaux Waldo, a paint and dye manufacturer, and Christine Hamilton Waldo, a Canadian-born teacher. Name legally changed to Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon at age 11 following his mother’s remarriage to William Dickie Sturgeon, who taught at Drexel College in Philadelphia. An unexceptional student who excelled in gymnastics, Sturgeon was stricken at age fifteen by rheumatic fever, ending his aspiration to become a circus acrobat. He entered Pennsylvania State Nautical School but dropped out after one term, shipping out as an engine room laborer on a freighter. During three years at sea, began writing stories and poems. Published crime stories and other short fiction with McClure’s newspaper syndicate beginning in 1938. “Ether Breather,” his first science fiction story, appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in September 1939. Married Dorothy Fillingame in 1940; they had two daughters, divorcing in 1945. Published little between 1941 and 1946: managed a resort hotel in the West Indies, sold doorto-door, organized military mess halls, and operated a bulldozer in Puerto Rico (leading to the 1944 story “Killdozer!”). After returning to New York, became an advertising copywriter and literary agent; worked for Time and Fortune. Won a prize competition sponsored by British magazine Argosy with story “Bianca’s Hands” (1947). Was married briefly to singer Mary Mair. In 1951, proposed “Sturgeon’s Law” (“Ninety percent of SF is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud”). In 1953, married Marion McGahan, with whom he had four children. His first story collection, Without Sorcery (1948), was followed by E Pluribus Unicorn (1953), A Way Home (1955), Caviar (1955), A Touch of Strange (1958), Aliens 4 (1959), Beyond (1960), Sturgeon in Orbit (1964), Starshine (1966), Sturgeon Is Alive and Well . . . (1971), The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (1972), Sturgeon’s West (1973), Case and the Dreamer (1974), Visions and Venturers (1978), and Alien Cargo (1984). His first novel, The Dreaming Jewels (1950), was followed by More Than Human (1953); I, Libertine (1956, under the pseudonym Frederick R. Ewing, in response to a radio hoax by Jean Shepherd, who invented the name and title); The Cosmic Rape (1958); Venus Plus X (1960); the vampire novel Some of Your Blood (1961); and two pseudonymous “Ellery Queen” novels, The Player on the Other Side (1963) and The House of Brass (1968). He also published a novelization (Amok Time, 1978) of one of three scripts he wrote for the television series Star Trek. (Two of these, “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time,” aired in 1966–67; the third, “The Joy Machine,” was later novelized by James Gunn.) From 1969 to 1974, he lived with journalist Wina Golden; they had a son. He subsequently lived with Jayne Tannehill Englehart. He died of pneumonitis in Eugene, Oregon, on May 8, 1985. His novel Godbody was published posthumously in 1986, followed by a 13-volume Complete Stories (1994–2010). In 2000 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Leigh Brackett
Born Leigh Douglass Brackett on December 7, 1915, in Los Angeles, California, the only child of William Franklin Brackett, an accountant and aspiring writer, and Margaret Douglass Brackett. Her father died in 1918 during the flu pandemic and she was raised by her mother and maternal grandparents in Santa Monica, where she attended a private girls’ school. Declined a college scholarship because of family financial difficulties. In 1939, joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, meeting Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Willy Ley, and others; attended gatherings of Heinlein’s Mañana Literary Society. Published first story, “Martian Quest,” in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. Her first book, the detective novel No Good from a Corpse (1944), drew the attention of director Howard Hawks, who hired her to work with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman on screenplay of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (released 1946). Busy with this screenplay, she asked Bradbury to complete her novella “Lorelei of the Red Mist,” and it was published jointly in 1946. The same year, married author Edmond Hamilton; they bought a house in rural Kinsman, Ohio. Remained under contract with Hawks and Charles Feldman for more than two years, and would later earn screenwriting credit for Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado (1966), Rio Lobo (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Empire Strikes Back (1980, with Lawrence Kasdan), and several works for television. Her first science fiction novel, Shadow Over Mars, had appeared in the magazine Planet Stories in 1944, but did not appear in book form until 1961, as The Nemesis from Terra; similarly, Sea-Kings of Mars was first serialized in 1949 and then published as The Sword of Rhiannon in 1953. In science fiction, she would go on to write The Starmen (1952), Alpha Centauri or Die! (1953; as book, 1963), The Big Jump (1955), and The Long Tomorrow (1955). Also wrote crime no
vels, Westerns, and other fiction, including An Eye for an Eye (1957, later basis for CBS series Markham, 1959–60), The Tiger Among Us (1957; filmed as 13 West Street, 1962), Rio Bravo (1959, novelization of the film), Follow the Free Wind (1963), and Silent Partner (1969). Returned to science fiction themes in The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976). The Best of Leigh Brackett, edited by Edmond Hamilton, was published in 1977. She died of cancer in Lancaster, California, on March 18, 1978.
Richard Matheson
Born Richard Burton Matheson on February 20, 1926, in Allendale, New Jersey, the third child of Bertolf Matheson and Fanny Swanson Matheson (nee Svenningsen), both Norwegian immigrants. Grew up without his father, who abandoned the family. Graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1943. Served as an infantryman in Germany during World War II, then earned a journalism degree (1949) from the University of Missouri. Sold his first story, “Born of Man and Woman,” to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1950, followed by “Third from the Sun” (later adapted for the television series The Twilight Zone) and others the same year. Moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1951; married Ruth Ann Woodson, with whom he would have four children, in 1952. Worked as a postal clerk and at an airplane factory, writing stories and two suspense novels, Fury on Sunday and Someone Is Bleeding (both 1953), in his spare time. Published Born of Man and Woman (1954), the first of many story collections. His third novel, I Am Legend (1954; filmed as The Last Man on Earth, 1964; The Omega Man, 1971; and I Am Legend, 2007), gained him wider attention. For his fourth, The Shrinking Man (1956), he also wrote the screenplay (a condition he insisted on when he sold the film rights), beginning a long-sought career as a film and television writer; it was filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). Traveled to London to write a screenplay, ultimately blocked by the British censor, for a Hammer Studios version of I Am Legend. Published supernatural novel A Stir of Echoes (1958, filmed 1999), suspense novel Ride the Nightmare (1959), and semiautobiographical World War II novel The Beardless Warriors (1960). From 1959 to 1964, wrote fourteen episodes for The Twilight Zone, with two more adapted from his stories, also contributed to many Western and fantastic television series, including Star Trek (“The Enemy Within,” 1966), and wrote a number of screenplays, most notably adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for director Roger Corman, 1960–63. His short story “Duel” (1971) became the basis of Steven Spielberg’s first feature film, made for television the same year. Later novels, many adapted for film, include Hell House (1971), Bid Time Return (1975), What Dreams May Come (1978), and most recently Other Kingdoms (2011). His Collected Stories was published in three volumes in 2003–5. Won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984 and was inducted into Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010. Lives in Calabasas, California.
Note on the Texts
This volume collects four American science fiction novels of the 1950s: The Space Merchants (1953) by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, More Than Human (1953) by Theodore Sturgeon, The Long Tomorrow (1955) by Leigh Brackett, and The Shrinking Man (1956) by Richard Matheson. A companion volume in the Library of America series, American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels, 1956–1958, includes five later works: Double Star (1956) by Robert A. Heinlein, The Stars My Destination (1957) by Alfred Bester, A Case of Conscience (1958) by James Blish, Who? (1958) by Algis Budrys, and The Big Time (1961) by Fritz Leiber. (Though it did not appear in book format until after the decade had ended, The Big Time was published in Galaxy magazine in 1958.) The texts of all of these novels have been taken from the first American book editions.
The Space Merchants.
In his memoir The Way the Future Was (1978), Frederik Pohl claimed responsibility for the first piece of what would eventually become The Space Merchants. By the summer of 1951, after some earlier false starts, he had written about twenty thousand words of “the beginning of a science-fiction novel about advertising” titled Fall Campaign. “I didn’t know where I was going with it,” he confessed. But with the encouragement of Horace Gold—who would be the first to publish the novel, as Gravy Planet, in Galaxy in June, July, and August 1952—he enlisted Cyril Kornbluth’s help as collaborator. Pohl and Kornbluth had collaborated extensively in the past, publishing their first joint efforts in 1940 under the pseudonym S. D. Gottesman, and Pohl served as Kornbluth’s literary agent. Pohl showed Kornbluth his fragmentary Fall Campaign and they talked about possible directions for the book; Phil Klass, a fellow writer of science fiction who had also read Pohl’s fragment, suggested “having the hero do the Haroun al Raschid bit, wandering around the planet as a plebeian instead of an upper-crust advertising executive.” Kornbluth and Pohl later discussed the novel during one or more story conferences at Gold’s apartment-office in New York. Gold reportedly disliked the title Fall Campaign and may have been responsible for Gravy Planet.
Gold would later say of Pohl and Kornbluth’s collaborations that “it was impossible to tell who produced what parts of any story, so closely did they work.” But the surviving contemporary correspondence and Pohl’s recollections indicate that Kornbluth substantially rewrote Fall Campaign and added at least the middle third, or more probably almost all of a new draft of Gravy Planet. Pohl remembered writing the last third of the novel “turn-by-turn,” but his papers, now at the Syracuse University Library, include two undated letters from Kornbluth that show Kornbluth had advanced the novel up to its last chapter. (He left this for Pohl to write “for the good of your soul,” he said, and “in the hope that you can wind up the thing with your own peculiar stamp on it.”) Kornbluth urged further work on at least one section first written by Pohl (“You’ve got to change the scene in the basement of the Met”), noted parts of the novel he himself had written that might need more work, and conveyed new comments from Gold: “Horace also says some of the earlier touches are unclear, that it’s not always self-evident . . . that public agencies have been supplanted by for-profit firms.” After sending the last of these letters with his nearly complete draft, Kornbluth probably left all further revision to Pohl. As on other occasions when the pair worked together, Pohl finished a final typescript, putting “the whole thing through the typewriter one more time.” (“After the rough draft . . . was done, he was out of it,” Pohl said of their habitual division of labor; “I always did the final revisions . . . and I always did all the dealing with editors and publishers.”)
On February 15, 1952, Pohl wrote Kornbluth with the news of “a kind of hitch” in their project: the novel was several thousand words shorter than they had agreed with Gold it would be, and he “promised to add enough” to bring it to contractual length. By the end of April these “added chapters,” probably by Pohl, were complete and awaited Gold’s review. In the interim, Pohl had submitted the novel to at least two book publishers, both of whom rejected it. At Double day (he explained to Kornbluth in March), Walter Bradbury complained: “There are holes in the story that put a strain on the credulity of the reader and the unshaded black-and-white political situation removes it even farther from reality and, for my part, interest.” At Simon and Schuster (he wrote Kornbluth in April), Orrin Keepnews “liked GP as far as he got but is terribly worried because Lester del Rey once wrote a story about a midget rocket pilot.” Finally in October, having shown the novel to at least one and probably several additional publishers, Pohl received a favorable response from Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books, who was eager to publish it and within a few weeks had sent a contract.
Stanley Kauffmann, the Ballantine editor assigned to the novel, gave it an “immediate and careful line-by-line reading in preparation for a final story conference,” Pohl recalled online (in a post on The Way the Future Blogs, “Great Subject, Really Lousy Book,” November 7, 2010; accessed October 20, 2011). After a “long, friendly, and intelligent” conversation over the phone in which Kauffmann proposed and all three agreed on a number of revisions, Kauffmann “penciled the corrections onto the manuscript an
d sent it off to the printer.” Pohl assumed both he and Kornbluth would have checked the proofs of the novel before it was published, but he had no particular memory of having seen them. “We were two kids with our first big break,” he remembered, “and about all I am sure of is that whatever changes Ballantine Books asked us for, we agreed to.” It was probably Kauffmann who suggested The Space Merchants as a new title for the novel; by mid-February 1953, Pohl was referring to it as “The Space Merchants née Gravy Planet.” Ballantine published the novel in a simultaneous hardcover and paperback edition in May 1953.
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