Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (104 page)

And in the shower it was that I first thought of her: Rachel Esthersdaughter. She would speak for me; she would explain the book to me. I hurried back to Sixth Avenue and completed the novel in several all-day and all-night sessions, not doing my duodenal ulcer any particular good.

I showed it to Fruma, who liked it even more than I. And then came the rewriting, making the first two parts mesh with the all-essential third, removing every solecism and cheapness Fruma and I could detect. (I did not remove as many of them from the first part as the second: after all, that was where the immature, half-formed characters had their domain.)

Here, I was interrupted by the most important event of my adult life, after my meeting and marrying Fruma—the move from the Village to State College, Pennsylvania, so that I could start teaching at Penn State. How much I was to find that I loved teaching is, I suppose, neither here nor there in this essay; but for what it's worth, those twenty-three years of teaching completed the construction of the person who's writing this essay.

So—before I go on—I have to say it again: teaching was the only thing I ever did that was as good as writing when the writing was going at its best. And it was wonderful living among colleagues who spent their lives pursuing truth and beauty—however much many of them in the course of this were brutally chasing truth and beauty away.

I had acquired a new agent, Henry Morrison, who sold the novel and several short-story collections, as a package, to Ballantine Books for enough money so that Fruma and I could buy our first house.

We loved that house. Gray Pennsylvania stone. We adored it.

And I was proud of the novel, something not usually true of my attitude when pieces of mine get published. I felt it was a pretty fair book, and the few reviews I got tended to agree with me. Judy Merril, in
Fantasy & Science Fiction
, and George Zebrowski, in
Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers
, were especially nice about it.

Of Men and Monsters
did enjoy a couple of printings, a couple of foreign translations. But it was really not noticed very much.

And it made very little money for the publisher. Or for me.

But, dammit, I've reread the book as it is printed here. And it was worth the writing.

Written 1965——Published 1968

"The incredible William Tenn," as he has been dubbed by Brian Aldiss, began the whole school of comic and satiric SF in the 1940s. Or, one might say, he restarted a tradition that began with Jonathan Swift.

Usually, we hold Verne and Wells, along with Mary Shelley, to be the great foundations of modern SF. There was "Swiftness" even in them, but in Tenn it ran purer than in any other SF writer of his generation. He quickly seized upon a way of looking at things, at once funny, bitter, and serious, that made him the natural heir to the more softly celebrated tradition of Voltaire and Swift. Eric Frank Russell, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, Robert Sheckley, Fredric Brown, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Harlan Ellison, Norman Kagan, R.A. Lafferty, Barry Malzberg, and Douglas Adams, among others, have all echoed Tenn's work one way or another, as his ways influenced them, often through inexplicit ways. I find it humorous when reviewers of Tenn bollix up their timelines and speak of Tenn's stories being influenced by ones that were published later.

Although Tenn is serious humorist, ever alert at catching the reader's understanding before he has a chance to object, Tenn's swift reason has had a double problem. The science-fiction genre has always made it difficult to tell the serious writers from the entertainers, through the manner of publication and because the entertainers often claim to be serious, or have it claimed for them; also, satirists and funny men have rarely risen high in the genre (in terms of awards and sales) purely on the strength of this kind of work. Tenn was a pioneer whose example was imitated by writers who developed in different ways, and who also became known for the angle opened up by Tenn, thus diffusing the effect he might have had if his plumage had not been confused with that of imitators; which is to say that he was a monarch butterfly mistaken for a viceroy (viceroy butterflies taste bitter to birds, monarchs sweet, but you won't know which is which until you bite into one); which is to say again that Tenn was influential, for better and worse.

One can also say that Tenn imitators might have been more acceptable to some editors of the 1950s, because they were milder versions of Tenn—less serious and not so critical of the world and human nature. Tenn's stories are always deceptively disturbing at some level, even when they are breathlessly readable, amusing, or cute. His conventionality of form is all surface, while his critical radicalism flows deeply, gleefully washing away our preconceptions.

An outgoing but sensitive man, Tenn fell silent by the end of the 1960s, even as his work was gathered and reprinted several times into an impressive, though editorially limited, six-volume set from Ballantine Books (1968). I had the feeling, from conversations with him, that he sometimes imagined his work to be unworthy. He went on to become an award-winning college teacher, leaving behind a body of work sufficient to secure the reputation of any major writer in the field.

He published one notable story in the 1970s, "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi," which had long been expected. He had been talking about it since the 1950s. I urged Jack Dann, who was then editing
Wandering Stars
(Harper & Row, 1974), to extract the story from the author. The story was well received, garnering awards nominations and appearing in a best-of-the-year collection.

It should be noted that Tenn contributed to the thinking that is so necessary to accomplished science fiction.
Children of Wonder
(1953) was his pioneering foray into editing a theme anthology. It was notable for its variety of stories and selection of authors from outside the genres, and for its introduction and notes. The anthology was a first-year selection of the Science Fiction Book Club. Two incisive essays, "On the Fiction in Science Fiction" (1955), and "Jazz Then, Musicology Now" (1972) remain required reading for anyone who cares about the ideals of literate science fiction.

Tenn's first two decades include a number of notable stories:

"Brooklyn Project" was called by Fritz Leiber a "marvelously cynical" time-travel story.

"Firewater" is one of the most sophisticated stories ever published by John W. Campbell. It has the distinction of having made Campbell relax his ban on stories in which human beings are bested by aliens, and features the unforgettable lament by Larry for the loss of what he was and what he will never be, as humanity struggles to keep its sanity before the seemingly superior aliens who have taken up residence on earth. This story should have taken all the awards in its year of publication. Read it along with the later "There Were People on Bikini, There Were People on Attu."

"Generation of Noah" is one of the finest atomic threat stories ever written. Along with "Firewater," it was reprinted in best-of-the-year collections.

"It Ends With a Flicker" (originally "Of All Possible Worlds"), "Wednesday's Child" (a fascinating sequel to the often reprinted "Child's Play"), "Time Waits for Winthrop" (also known as "Winthrop Was Stubborn"), "Eastward Ho!", and "The Malted Milk Monster" drew honorable mentions in Judith Merril's best-of-the-year collections; "Bernie The Faust" took pride of place as the first story in the 1964 collection. "Winthrop" shows a remarkable use of exotic ideas, among them fairly advanced biological concepts, another feature of Tenn's stories that makes them unusual for the 1950s.

"The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway" shows an insight into the successful creative process that is too often banally presented. Jacques Sadoul called it "the most beautiful example of a temporal paradox offered by science fiction."

"The Custodian," with its plea for the blending of art and utility, and "Down Among the Dead Men," with its clever use of offstage space opera, both manage to do what few SF stories ever do—move us emotionally and intellectually.

Although the description of "satirist" does fit much of Tenn's work, his stories ("Firewater" and "Brooklyn Project," for example) also feature a level of verisimilitude not usually seen in the "just kidding" school of satire, which in the minds of many dulls the edge of dramatic materials. Tenn is always a master of situations, which at first prod and intrigue us, then provoke a deeper curiosity, make us laugh, then explode into some thoughtful irony or observation. Once you catch on to a Tenn situation, you can't stop reading. The satirical ironies, mockeries, slapstick, and occasional bitterness do wonders for genre materials, because Tenn joins these materials to human experience outside the insular worlds of wish-fulfillment and power fantasy. The science-fictional themes are all there, strong and clear, but just as you are about to accept the story at its face value, Tenn hits you with something close to home and painful. He's a very sly writer, inserting polished, precise narratives into our minds through unexpected channels. Many of his stories blossom into a single line of beauty and recognition; but always the aesthetic fires are banked by irony and wit; above all, eloquent wit, behind which sits the authority of an author who knows what he wants to say, who believes as Oscar Wilde did, that eloquence and wit alone can make the scales fall from human eyes. One spies an author laughing and crying at the same time, writing, exhibiting intellect and dramatic talent within the confines of a marketplace that never knew what to do with his work—so it just left him alone. Fortunately, the tyranny was never perfect, and Tenn's work slipped through into our sight, as did much of science fiction's best.

"A Matter of Frequency," a story satirizing the constant threat of "dumbing down," is just as relevant today as it was in 1951. It's absolutely bone-chilling to realize that this is exactly the way things are, with corporate money hiring "Nuts" to think for them, while dividing the "Nuts" in every field of accomplishment from the "normal" people. Shudder even more while recalling that our constitution recognizes the obligation to educate citizens, because without such an electorate we cannot have a genuine democracy. Our major citizens today are the artificial citizens known as corporations, whose rights exceed that of every other "citizen." To educate everyone would be to give away power and wealth.

Tenn's two long works are the novel
Of Men and Monsters
(1968,
Galaxy
magazine version, 1963), and the short novel
A Lamp for Medusa
(1968; magazine version, 1951). If you are reading this afterword before reading these novels, I recommend the short novel as a place to start. Funny, atmospheric, and wonderfully paced, this neglected work has seen only a shabby paperback appearance. It is not surprising, given Tenn's tendencies, that the story recalls the poise of fantasy fiction from John W. Campbell's
Unknown Worlds
magazine tradition, which was the only sizable market for humorous work of the early 1940s, and Tenn's only antecedent within the genres.

Of Men and Monsters
, a story of humanity living in the walls of houses belonging to giant aliens who have occupied the earth, is a vivid, energetically paced story which best embodies one of Tenn's major themes: that humanity is not what it imagines itself to be in its religious and political myths; that implicit in our biological history is a nature not of our making; we may glimpse it, even understand it at times, but it may be a while before we can remake it entire, if ever, because even our heart's desire is not free.

In his awareness of biological and anthropological complexities, Tenn has at the center of his work the most thoroughgoing of science fictional methods: the collision of the possible with the actual, with the actual displaying fantastic staying power. Eric the Eye, the Lilliputian viewpoint character of the novel, learns that his society is not what he thought it was, that its rights of passage are a sham, and finally that human beings have only limited choices to make. Since change on a radical scale seems unlikely, he accepts his newly revealed humanity and joins the plan to make of it something pervasive and powerful. Eric becomes part of the reverse invasion of human vermin as they begin the infestation of the great alien starships, and later the worlds of the alien empire. One thinks of the small mammals, our ancestors, who ate the eggs of the great saurians and survived the great asteroid strike.

I am also reminded of Robert A. Heinlein's "Universe," in which humanity has forgotten that its world is a starship, destined to reach a far star after many generations have lived and died. Both Tenn and Heinlein remind us that we don't know ourselves; that in fact our generations lapse into amnesia, and have to be reminded that we too live on a generation ship parked in orbit around a star; that we have come out of a deep past on our way into a deeper future, and that only knowledge, unblinkered by wishes and myths, has any chance of helping us. Many an unwelcome Galilean and Darwinian revelation waits for us, as developments in cosmology and biology suggest.

Of Men and Monsters
is a colorful story. The characters are charming (Eric meets Rachel Esthersdaughter, one of the nicest nice Jewish girls in all science fiction). The death of Eric's uncle is shatteringly presented. There are great wonders and awesome confrontations, sharply realized. Most important, there is anthropological sophistication in the depiction of social systems; the aliens are terrifying, puzzling, and
other
. Tenn's moments of romance, compassion, and hard-bitten sentimentality do not detract from his bitter truth-telling about a pathetic and deluded humanity.

Although he was much imitated (one paperback novel blatantly copied
Of Men and Monsters
), Tenn's new fiction became scarce in the late 1960s and the decades ahead, just when it seemed that the continuous practice of his craft, coupled with his acute and constant rethinking of the nature of fiction and science fiction, would certainly have produced a still mightier development of his skills. To me he still seems poised to start his most mature period. When I recall that Jack Williamson is still writing worthy books in his nineties, I remind myself that Phil is a generation younger than Jack. Tenn can do anything he chooses, when Phil lets him, except hack work ("I have no talent for it," he has said).