(At first it was just a lark – bribing the stewards to ste...)
At first it was just a lark – bribing the stewards to steal food, bribing the conductors to steal blankets, raiding the club car. But then--then they began stealing morphine, and after that they began swapping mates, and finally the lights went out
(The science fiction story about the brilliant young ceram...)
The science fiction story about the brilliant young ceramics engineer and scientist, Dr. Michael Novak, who stumbled into a storm center of intrigue and violence when he accepted employment with the widely derided American Society for Space Flight
(Torn from today's headlines this novel takes you right in...)
Torn from today's headlines this novel takes you right into the heart of the new flood country, the Northeast United States which has generally been free of hurricanes and attendant floods
(In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses h...)
In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge transnational corporations.
also known asC. M. Kornbluth, Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner, Jordan Park, Arthur Cooke, Paul Dennis Lavond, Scott Mariner
Cyril M. Kornbluth was an American writer of science fiction associated with the Futurians. He rose to prominence as a prolific contributor to the many science fiction magazines of the 1940s and 1950s.
In his independent writings and frequent collaborations with Frederik Pohl, Kombluth often examined the darker aspects of human existence, satirizing modern institutions while warning of possible dire consequences of 20th-century trends.
Background
Ethnicity:
Kornbluth’s parental ancestors immigrated to America from Lemberg, Galicia (the current territory of Russia). His mother, born in Poland, became a naturalized British subject at the end of 1890s.
Cyril M. Kornbluth was born on July 2, 1923, in New York City, New York, United States. He was the second son of Samuel H. Kornbluth, an accountant and auditor, and Deborah Kornbluth (maiden name Ungar).
Cyril received his name after his mother’s grandfather.
Kornbluth had an elder brother Lewis Mitchell Kornbluth.
Education
Cyril M. Kornbluth spent his childhood in the Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, New York City. As his wife once said, he was a wunderkind who could read at the age of three and wrote his original short stories at seven. He finished high school in 1936 and obtained City College of New York scholarship. He was expelled for the participation at a student strike.
Later, Kornbluth pursued his education at the University of Chicago.
Cyril M. Kornbluth began his career in 1939 when his first solo story ‘The Rocket of 1955’ was published in Richard Wilson's fanzine ‘Escape’. A year later, the result of his collaboration with Richard Wilson, ‘Stepsons of Mars’, saw the print at the April 1940 issue Astonishing. It was this time when the young Cyril became a part of the Futurian Society group, which gathered science fiction fans and authors. As members of the group gained recognition for their work and assumed control of various small science fiction publications, Kombluth was provided with ample opportunities to have his stories published. It was also as a member of the Futurians that Kombluth first cultivated the practice of collaboration that would characterize most of his career.
During the Second World War, Cyril M. Kombluth served in the United States Army as a member of a heavy machine gun crew. After discharge, the writer worked in the newsroom of Trans-Radio Press for a few years before returning to the East Coast in 1951 to resume his writing career.
Already a recognized writer of short stories, Kombluth began to produce novels, the first two – ‘Gunner Cade’ and ‘Outpost Mars’ – written in collaboration with Frederik Pohl’s wife Judith Merril, under the joint pseudonym Cyril Judd. Soon afterward, Pohl invited Kombluth to co-author another novel, which was first serialized in Galaxy magazine under the title ‘Gravy Planet’ and later published as ‘The Space Merchants’. The novel enjoyed wide popularity not only among readers of science fiction but also among the public at large.
Kornbluth and Pohl subsequently collaborated on six more novels, three of them in the science fiction genre. Critics generally consider ‘Gladiator at Law’ the best of these. Continuing the authors’ exploration of the oppression of humanity by mercantile interests, the story once again presents a society exploited to the point of disintegration by corporations, this time with an added insult: the horrors of gladiatorial competition have been greatly augmented through the use of high-tech innovations.
In the 1950s, Kornbluth also wrote three independently written science fiction novels. ‘Takeoff’ tells the story of the construction of a rocket ship and its threatened sabotage by enemy agents, combining cold-war paranoia with a classic Kornbluth portrait of a morally corrupt society. ‘The Syndic’ published one year later and praised by some as the best of Kornbluth’s independent novels, presented a world in which a benign crime syndicate has seized control of the east coast of the United States. In ‘Not This August’, Kornbluth predicted dire consequences of the moral laxity and intellectual gullibility of modern America in the form of an invasion by the combined Communist forces of China and the Soviet Union.
Continuing to publish in various journals throughout most of the 1950s, Cyril M. Kornbluth produced several masterpieces of the short science fiction genre, including ‘Marching borons’ wherein the planet has become overcrowded with people of inferior intelligence, and ‘The Black Bag’ in which humanity’s selfishness and stupidity lead to the destruction of a lifesaving gift.
Kornbluth died of heart failure at the age of thirty-four at the peak of his creative powers.
Achievements
Credited with expanding the parameters of the genre greatly, Cyril M. Kornbluth gained wide recognition as one of the most talented writers of science fiction. His works are praised for their intellectual sophistication, particularly when compared to the adventure-based ‘space operas’ which dominated the genre in the 1940s.
His ability to fuse mordant and pointed satire with humor in a variety of ways helped him to create well-crafted, thought-provoking and entertaining stories which made a significant contribution to the history of science fiction. In 1973, Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl received the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for his collaboration of ‘The Meeting’.
Many of his writings, such as ‘The Space Merchants’ and ‘The Syndic’, remain highly regarded nowadays. In the first one, more recent commentators have remarked on the prescience of its portrait, especially, its warnings about commercialism, environmental pollution, and overpopulation. Besides, many critics have praised in particular the skillful construction of Kornbluth’s stories, like in ‘The Explorers’ collection highly estimated by Damon Knight and Edmund Crispin.
Kornbluth’s ‘The Little Black Bag’ was the subjects of several adaptations. First, it was used in 1952 for TV show ‘Tales of Tomorrow’. Eleven years later, the BBC adapted it for its Out of the Unknown TV series. Finally, Rod Serling used the story for one of the episodes of his Night Gallery series.
The majority of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s stories were gathered after his death in such collections as 1977 ‘The Best of C.M. Kombluth’ and 1997 ‘His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth’.
Quotations:
"With almost lunatic single-mindedness we made everything in our future America that could be touched, tasted, smelled, heard, seen, or talked about bear witness to the dishonesty of the concepts and methods of today’s advertising."
Personality
Cyril M. Kornbluth never had a middle name. The letter ‘M’ might be added to celebrate the writer’s spouse and colleague, Mary Byers.
Many of Kornbluth’s friends and colleagues, including Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, and Isaac Asimov noted that their common friend was somehow eccentric person with strange habits. So, he educated himself by reading through a whole encyclopedia from A to Z. He later used the odd words he learned in his stories.
Pohl claimed that Kornbluth’s habit of holding his hand in front of his mouth during the conversation was caused by the fact that Cyril never brushed his teeth.
Cyril M. Kornbluth detested black coffee but drank it from time to time as he thought that it was the holy obligation for all professional writers.
Quotes from others about the person
"Cyril’s work was lucid, inventive, economical, and informed. He had a great deal to say, and he said it all tersely, wittily, and with grace. I do not think we shall soon see his like again." Frederik Pohl, American writer
Connections
Cyril M. Kornbluth was married to Mary G. Byers. They had two children.
