William Tenn
William Tenn was the pseudonym used by Philip Klass (1920-2010). The bulk of
his SF was published between 1946 and 1967, with only five stories published
during the last forty years of his life. Although
primarily a short story writer, Tenn produced one short and one full length
novel. The short was the fantasy, A Lamp for Medusa, which was first published
in 1951 and has also appeared in shorter form as Medusa Was a Lady. It
was written very quickly to a deadline and is an Unknown style humorous fantasy.
The protagonist is Percy Yuss (Perseus) who rents an apartment whose previous
tenants have all disappeared. While taking a bath he and the bathtub are
transported to a fantasy version of ancient Greece where he is greeted by a
talking sea serpent as a "son of Danae." The human inhabitants, however, decide
he's either an impostor or a disguised monster and take him prisoner. He fully
expects to be executed by the local ruler, who has decreed the death penalty for
almost anything. Somehow he manages to understand the local language but he is
unable to talk himself out of predicament and is thrown into a cell to await
execution. His cellmate turns out to be a woman and former tenant of the same
apartment, stranded like him. They are rescued by Hermes and taken to another
expatriate from their own time, who explains that they are in a far future where
by chance ancient Greece is being recreated. The various monsters and gods are
aliens from other planets or realities. Percy finally agrees to slay the gorgon,
but ultimately discovers that the gods are lying to him as well. Cute at times
but much too long for its content.
Of
Men and Monsters (1968) was Tenn's only full length novel, an expansion
of "The Men in the Walls" from 1963. Aliens have conquered the Earth,
a species so advanced that their technology is incomprehensible. Scores of
humans survive as almost literally rats in the walls, scavenging on the
"monsters". The humans, reduced to barbarism, are split between two religions.
The dominant one speaks of reclaiming lost human technology, even though that
was demonstrably inadequate. The suppressed one believes that humans need to
steal alien technology in order to defeat them. The young protagonist, Eric, is
about to make his ritual first solo steal from the aliens, a rite of manhood,
when his uncle admits to being a secret member of the latter group. He also
learns that there is a secret organization working across tribal boundaries.
Unfortunately, the traditionalists get together and organize a purge which
leaves Eric with a band of strangers out in monster territory. Eric is captured
by monsters, escapes, and finally finds a tribe which understands alien
technology to a limited extent and is smuggling groups of human colonists onto
their starships so that we can infest other planets. Not the glorious ending
that similar novels offer and a humbling look at one possible human destiny.
Of
All Possible Worlds (1955) was his first collection. The opening story
is "Down Among the Dead Men", which is probably the very first rationalized
zombie story. Humans are losing a war against an insectlike species who have
invaded the solar system. In order to produce enough soldiers to hold the line,
all human protoplasm is saved and refashioned into new soldiers, using several
patterns established from famous heroes. The protagonist is a still living
commander of a small vessel who arrives to meet his first crew of reconstituted
crewmen - called variously blobs, zombies, etc. - and finds them just as hostile
to him as he is uncertain of them. He finally establishes a bond when the
realize that he is sterile just like them. The science is silly. Building new
bodies out of miscellaneous flesh has got to be inefficient even if it was
plausible, and Tenn never tells us where they get their personalities and
emotions. It does however make a pretty obvious statement about the inhumanity
of war and the way prejudice works. Tenn rarely wrote about space travel and
this is about as close as he usually gets. "My, Myself, and I" was the earliest
written of Tenn's published stories, although it didn't appear until some years
later. It's a time travel paradox story, but a very good one, in which a rather
dim man is sent back through time to move a single stone, which has dramatic
effects in the future. When he's sent back to reverse things, he gets into an
argument with his first self, and further complications arise. One of the best
of its kind. "The Liberation of Earth" is also a commentary on warfare,
specifically in this case the Korean War. It was apparently mildly controversial
at the time. Earth is
"liberated" by an alien species which wants to use the planet as a fortress
opposed to a rival race. They insist they are freeing us from an evil threat and
just want us to stay out of their way while they make their preparations. Then
the other race occupies the planet and explains that their predecessors are
lying tyrants. As the planet repeatedly switches hands, most of the human race
is killed and the planet itself is rendered unstable.
"Everybody Loves Irving Bommer" is a comic fantasy about a man who takes a massive overdose of a potion designed to make him more attractive to women. It even begins to work on men and he is swamped at his job selling kitchen utensils in a department store by a horde of adoring women. He is finally crushed by the mob. I remembered most of this story even before I re-read it despite the lapse of more than fifty years since the first time I did so. "Flirgeflip" (aka "The Remarkable Flirgeflip") is another humorous time travel story. A man from the future is sent back to our time against his will and finds that he is so specialized in a field of knowledge that doesn't even exist in our era that he is unable to convince anyone that he is sane or from the future, except for a newspaper reporter who turns out to be a time agent. No paradox in this one but it's still a clever tale. "The Tenants" is another fantasy, this one about a mysterious duo who rent the thirteenth floor of an office building that has no thirteenth floor. This is another one I still remember from my teens. "The Custodian" is about the last man on an Earth about to be destroyed by the sun going nova. The rest of humanity has migrated and it was illegal for him to remain behind. His private deathwatch is interrupted when his detectors start periodically indicating that there is other human life on the planet, although the alarms are always very short. Finally he discovers a hidden group of people who also refused to leave, but an accident has killed all of them except an infant. He refurbishes an abandoned ship, fills it with artwork that was left behind, and flees with the child just before the sun explodes. Tenn considered this his favorite of his stories.
The
Human Angle was Tenn's second collection. "Project
Hush" is a very short piece about an army mission to the moon that discovers a
secret navy mission to the moon. "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway" is another
time travel story. A scholar from the future comes to the past seeking a famous
artist and has to take over his life when he discovers the man is a fraud.
"Wednesday's Child" is an odd story about a woman with no navel and other odd
physical characteristics who attracts the attention of a predatory man. "The
Servant Problem" is a depressing future planetary dictatorship where the ruler
is secretly manipulated by a member of his staff, who is secretly manipulated by
his psychiatrist, who is manipulated by a technician, who has been conditioned
to do whatever the ruler wants. "Party of the Two Parts" involves a criminal
amoeboid creature who visits Earth and sells what are, for his race,
pornographic photos which are used in a high school biology book, resulting in
an interstellar squabble about the interpretation of the law. Fun but minor.
"The Flat-Eyed Monster" is one of my all time favorites, a reversal of the
"bug-eyed monsters" that were once prevalent in SF. A professor of literature is
involuntarily teleported to a world of multiple tentacled creatures who
communicate telepathically. Although he can hear their thoughts, he cannot get
them to "hear" his own. He discovers that his eyes emit some kind of
ray which dissolves his captors and he escapes into the night. The title story
is a minor vampire tale. "A Man of Family" is an interesting story set in a
society where the number of children you can have is regulated and has become a
status symbol. When the protagonist loses his job, his pay cut makes it
necessary for him to put one child up for adoption. Overall this is very nearly
of the same high quality as the first collection.
Next
came Time in Advance (1958), which
contained only four stories, opening with "Firewater." Enigmatic, highly
advanced aliens have settled in various deserts on Earth and the few humans who
manage to communicate them emerge with odd mental powers but appear to be insane
and have difficulty communicating with unaffected humans. The protagonist is a
businessman who barters with them for nuggets of information they may have
gleaned from the aliens, a practice which is frowned upon by the world
government. The businessman solves the crisis by making contact with his alien
counterpart. The title story has an interesting premise. The law is changed so
that you can serve your sentence before committing a crime. Two men are released
after pre-serving their time for murders but through various circumstances
neither one of them is able to go through with their planned crimes. The first
expedition to Mars finds an abandoned but still functioning automated city in
"The Sickness." They are infected with what seems to be a fatal disease
but instead it gives them extraordinary mental powers. The final story is
"Winthrop Was Stubborn" (aka "Time Waits for Winthrop"). Five people win a
journey to the 25th Century, but one of them - Winthrop - decides not to go back
to his own time, even though the transfer requires that all five participate.
Since by law no one can be compelled to do anything, they have to find a way to
convince him. Every effort fails but fortuitously Winthrop dies and his dead
body works just as well as if he had been alive.
The
Wooden Star (1968)
opens with "Generation of Noah," a story about a survivalist family's reactions
when the bombs begin to fall. I've never cared for it. "The Brooklyn Project"
however is one of my favorite time travel stories. Despite warnings that changes
wrought in the past would be undetectable because people in the present would
assume they had always been the case, an experiment leads to the replacement of
humanity by intelligent amoebas. In "The Dark Star" the man chosen for the first
flight to the moon has to decide whether to bow out when he learns that he will
almost certainly be sterile by the time he returns because of inadequate
shielding. "Null-P" is a satiric future history in which humans glorify the
average following a nuclear war and civilization declines into boring sameness
until we are finally replaced by intelligent dogs. "Eastward Ho!" is one of my
favorites. After the collapse of civilization, Native American tribes rebound
and conquer North America. A very funny satire. "The Deserter" involves a Jovian
deserter in a war with Earth who believes his own race has been ruined by
militarism, only to discover that humans have the same problem. "Betelgeuse
Bridge" is about a race of intelligent snails who swindle the human race out of
all of its radioactive minerals. Furious, humanity develops artificial
substitutes and turn the tables. "Will You Walk a Little Faster" is very minor.
Kobolds turn out to be aliens waiting for humans to die off so they can have our
planet. Two time travelers try to perform opposite tasks to save the world from
disaster in "It Ends With a Flicker." "Lisbon Cubed" is a very funny
story about a man who discovers that various alien spies are walking around in
people suits. "The Masculinist Revolt" is, as you might expect, a clever satire
on feminism, male privilege, marketing, fads, and life in general. This was a
very high quality collection.
The
last two Tenn collections prior to the NESFA omnibus edition was The
Square Root of Man (1968) and The Seven
Sexes (1968). The first opens with Tenn's first published story, "Alexander
the Bait," in which a scientist fakes data from the moon in order to spur human
space travel. "The Last Bounce" is a space opera bout the discovery of an
anomaly in space. "She Only Goes Out at Night" is a minor supernatural
tale of a man who falls in love with a reluctant vampire. "My Mother Was a
Witch" is actually about dueling non-magical curses but it's quite clever. A
joke writing robot conducts a series of pranks in "The Jester." "Confusion
Cargo" is a moderately good problem story set on a spaceship. "Venus Is a Man's
World" is a spoof of gender stereotyping, sometimes funny, sometimes not. Two
unlikely fishermen are abducted by aliens to staff an interplanetary way station
in "Consulate." The final story is "The Lemon-Green, Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite
Dribble Day" is about the day when most of New York City was dosed by LSD placed
in the water supply. It's rather fun, but this is the weakest of Tenn's
collections, drawn mostly from his earliest work.
The
Seven Sexes opens with "Child's Play," which was
his most frequently reprinted short. It's one of those stories where a piece of
technology from the future inadvertently ends up in the present, in this case a
set children use to build living things, including duplicate humans. The
recipient unwisely tries it out. "The Malted Milk Monster" is reminiscent of
Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life." A spoiled young girl can move people into her
own private universe where she is all powerful. The protagonist fails to escape.
"Errand Boy" is another technology from the future story, and not a particularly
good one. "The House Dutiful" concerns an alien artifact that manifests itself
as a house that is completely subject to the wishes of its owner, but it
modifies its owner's thoughts to determine what those wishes are. "Mistress Sary"
is a horror story about a bigoted teacher who runs afoul of a young voodoo
sorceress. In "Sanctuary" a rabid eugenicist criminal seeks sanctuary at an
embassy from the next century, which leads to complications in the future.
"Venus and the Seven Sexes" is a longish story about an intelligent species on
Venus that has seven different sexes, and a rather odd attitude toward visitors
from Earth. It's quite funny. The collection ends with "Bernie the Faust." A con
man gets taken by an alien, but eventually gets the last laugh.
In
2001, NESFA Press published the complete SF of William Tenn in two volumes,
Immodest Proposals and Here Comes Civilization. In addition to the
stories already mentioned, they include several that were previously
uncollected. NESFA also published a collection of essays titled Dancing Naked.
The first includes "The Ghost Standard", a minor piece about cannibalism and a
convoluted legal and linguistic question. "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi" is one
of Tenn's best stories, set on a Venus where all the Jewish people have
migrated. In the second volume is "There Were People on Bikini," a parable in
which Earth is evacuated so a new explosive device designed by aliens can be
detonated. "A Matter of Frequency" is a light tale of an experiment that
inadvertently irritates an alien civilization. A distressed starship finds a
strange star system in "The Ionian Cycle" and "Hallock's Madness" involves a man
experiencing bizarre phenomena. "Ricardo's Virus" is a minor adventure story set
on Venus and "The Puzzle of Priipiirii" is a very light other worlds adventure.
"Dud" is mildly cute satire about aliens and legal problems. "The Girl with Some
Kind of Past. And George" is mildly humorous. Only one of these is exceptionally
good, but almost all of his previous collected fiction is worthwhile.