Fantastical Andrew Fox

Return to Part 1, Introduction

Return to Part 2, The Space Merchants

Search the Sky
Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
Original book publication (simultaneous hardback and paperback): Ballantine Books, 1954
Most recent publication: (paperback) Baen Books, 1990; (Kindle) Wonder Publishing Group, 2009

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By the time Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth turned to writing their second of four science fiction novels together, Search the Sky, written a year after The Space Merchants, they had worked out a new working mode for their writing partnership. This was a very challenging and efficient system, a kind of a forced march of alternating four-page writing stints around the clock until a project was completed – a working method which relied heavily on their friendship, their basic compatibility, their physical proximity, and the excitement each got out of setting up writing challenges for the other to overcome. Pohl vividly described their working partnership to Alfred Bester in a conversation recorded in 1978:

“…[W]ith Cyril, because we had this background of common experience and common attitudes, writing was almost painless on most of what we wrote. We published altogether I think, seven novels and maybe 30 or 40 short stories. … Mostly what we did was talk to each other for a while. He’d come out to my home in Red Bank, where we kept a room for him with his own typewriter, and we’d sit around and drink for a while, and when the booze ran out we’d start to talk seriously about what sort of book we’d plan to write. And we’d think about a situation and talk about a few characters and what might happen to them, and as long as the conversation was flowing we’d keep on talking. We didn’t put anything on paper.

“And then when we were beginning to flag, and it felt like it was ready to write, we’d flip a coin and the loser would go up to the third floor — Cyril’s typewriter was in one room there and mine was another — and he would write the first four pages. And then at the end of those four pages, which would stop in the middle of a line or a word sometimes, he’d come down or I’d come down, and say, ‘You’re on. ‘

“We called it the ‘Hot-Typewriter System’ — just keep the thing going day and night — and we did in fact usually work straight through. … A couple of times when we were towards the end of a novel and getting a little giddy we’d play tricks on each other. There was this scene at the end of one novel when, at the bottom of the last page I had somebody look through a microscope and the next line was, ‘What did he see?’ and I said it was Charlie Chaplin in a bowler hat. Then I went down and said, ‘Take it from there.’

“But he fooled me — he just crossed out that line. Usually we didn’t even cross out a line, we just drove from line to line. Page 5 to 8 would be Cyril’s and page 9 to 12 would be mine; we just kept on going until we came to the end of the book. This was rough draft and it always got rewritten all the way through, by one of us, almost always by myself except for the case of one novel, Wolfbane, which was the last writing Cyril did before he died, and there was quite a lot of revision involved in the rewriting. But basically, when we were finished, the novel was there, and it would sometimes only take five or six days to do a whole novel, because we’d work straight through for 24 hours a day.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in those rooms on the third story of the Pohl residence in Red Bank, New Jersey! Later in the conversation between Pohl and Bester, the latter asked how long each of the collaborators generally took to write his four pages. Pohl responded that the time taken averaged about two hours per shift, each writer being eager to hand the thing off to his partner. What quality of sleep could Pohl and Kornbluth have gotten during their two-hour respites? Imagine what sort of shape each man must’ve been in at the end of a week spent writing a novel around the clock!

Let’s take a look at their second novel-length collaboration, the first written using their “Hot-Typewriter System” – Search the Sky. This book has not received the acclaim accorded to The Space Merchants, Gladiator-at-Law, or Wolfbane. There’s a simple reason for that; it’s not as good a novel as those others. But even the runt of the litter has worthy qualities, considering the pedigree of the “puppies’” parents and the overall lofty standards of the litter as a whole.

Where does Search the Sky fall down in comparison with the other three Pohl-Kornbluth novel-length collaborations? In two key areas, I think – the characterization and motivation of the book’s protagonist (space trader, resident of Halsey’s Planet, and eventual starship pilot Ross), and the episodic structure of the plot, wherein the individual episodes don’t really build upon one another, but rather stand apart, almost like character-linked but otherwise separate short stories. (In fact, a great many science fiction novels have been what are called “fix-ups,” or amalgamations of related short stories that share characters and settings; even such classics as Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight started out as a series of stories – but not Search the Sky).

Ross, in my estimation, simply isn’t a very interesting, dynamic, or especially well-motivated character (certainly not in comparison with the protagonists of the other three Pohl-Konbluth SF novels). His primary motivation for setting out on his interstellar quest for fellow human planetary civilizations which have fallen out of contact is boredom, plain and simple. Boredom, by its nature, doesn’t make for a very interesting motivating force. Oh, and he gets tricked into boarding the faster-than-light scout vessel by the owner of the Haarland Trading Corporation, Halsey’s Planet’s chosen keeper of the secret of faster-than-light travel. (One of book’s key conceits is that the inventors of faster-than-light travel have kept the existence of FTL ships a secret from the entire human race, which had been spread across the galaxy by comparatively slow-moving generation ships, in order to avert the possibility of interstellar wars breaking out; only a single family on each inhabited planet has been made aware of the existence of FTL ships.)

Ross’s mission, as set forth by Mr. Haarland, is to reconnoiter with a FTL scout ship all or most of the planets inhabited by humans which have stopped trading and communicating with each other and determine the reason or reasons why this has happened. This plot device led to a novel which Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, in their May, 1954 review of Search the Sky in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, called “a series of Voyages imaginaires in the Eighteenth Century tradition” rather than a truly unified work of fiction (the standout example of the type of book they refer to is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels). Ross ends up visiting four planets once he leaves Halsey’s Planet, with his final stop being Earth. The inhabitants of each planet, in isolation both cultural and genetic, have fallen into differing sociopolitical or cultural dead-ends, which Boucher and McComas described as “cautionary exaggerations of certain sociopolitical trends.”

On the first planet, extreme age is worshipped and rewarded, to the great detriment of all citizens under the age of fifty. On the second planet, 1950s-style gender roles have been reversed, with the women all acting as domineering female chauvinists. On the third planet, a lack of genetic diversity has resulted in a war between the Joneses, who all look and think alike, and everyone else on their planet. On the fourth and final planet Ross visits, Earth, the future society of Kornbluth’s stories “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons” is reprised and elaborated on, with a tiny, hidden cognitive elite trying to avert societal disaster for the great majority of inhabitants, who have moron-level intelligence. On each stop, Ross picks up a new fellow traveler, somewhat in the same fashion Dorothy picks up the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion as she travels about Oz in The Wizard of Oz. And on each stop, Ross gets in trouble with the locals, is either imprisoned or cast into some form of servitude, and must find a way to escape back to his FTL ship and continue his mission by traveling to the next planet on his list. The repetition of this pattern becomes a bit wearying to the reader (at least it did to this reader).

All of this is not to suggest that the book lacks its redeeming pleasures. Of the four planetary visitation episodes, my favorites are the first and the fourth. I heartily enjoyed the first segment, the visit to the planet where extreme age is venerated, because it so flies in the face of everything I’ve experienced in American society since I was a child (I was born in 1964, at the tail end of the Baby Boom, and all I have ever known is the idealization of youth and youthfulness and the efforts of marketers of all stripes to convince older Americans to adopt the attitudes and styles of the young). The humor is not overdone, and the elements of that off-kilter society are thoughtfully and intricately delineated (without becoming overly elaborated to the point of boring the reader). The fourth segment is also highly enjoyable, being a further exploration of the future world Kornbluth had earlier described in his classic short stories. The difficulties the book’s protagonists, all of high or at least average intelligence, find with blending into a society where the average IQ is fifty are humorously drawn; and the conundrums faced by the small group of relative geniuses who run things from behind the scenes are described both compellingly and with great compassion.

I found the two middle segments to be problematic, however. The second planetary visit, the one to the world dominated by female chauvinists, achieves the double whammy, to this twenty-first century reader, of both reflecting an extreme caricature of the out-of-date, stratified gender roles of the 1950s (think James Cagney mashing a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face for mouthing off in Public Enemy) and, in inverting it for satirical effect, making it even more grotesque than it was in the first place. The authors simply take the most brutal and simplistic portrayals of male chauvinists and make them women. This would not doom the segment, necessarily, were it not for rushed, unclever plotting which does not lead the protagonists nor the minor characters they meet to do anything interesting or particularly exciting.

The third planetary visit, the one to the world dominated by a society made up of persons of a near-identical genotype, promises more in the way of humor and social extrapolation than it manages to deliver. Virtually all the members of the society Ross and his friends find themselves in are named Jones and are tall, lanky, and have red hair. This segment comes across, unfortunately, as a joke which isn’t terribly funny the first time it is told and which is then subsequently repeated another dozen times.

It is reasonably likely that the two authors each contributed two ideas for “planetary social scenarios” apiece to the series of travels. Given that the fourth scenario pretty obviously comes from Kornbluth, my best guess is that they alternated their contributions, with Pohl dreaming up the age-worshipping planet and the Jones planet, and Kornbluth suggesting the female chauvinist planet and the “Marching Morons” planet (which is Earth). In this estimation, they each end up with one winner and one stinker of an idea (which isn’t a bad percentage, when one thinks about it). My second-best guess would be that Kornbluth suggested the fourth scenario and Pohl came up with the first three (since Pohl appears to have been the master plotter of the two of them).

In any event, this uneven book represents the nadir of the Pohl-Kornbluth collaboration (apart from their earliest shared short stories, most of which were hurriedly written in 1939-41 to fill holes in the various low-budget science fiction magazines which featured Futurians as editors). The next two books they wrote together, Gladiator-at-Law and Wolfbane, are each as satisfying and memorable in their own way as The Space Merchants.

But before we examine those two novels and their collections of shared short fiction, it might be profitable for us to take a look at two solo novels written by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth during the 1950s, in order to gain a better picture of their individual strengths and weaknesses as novelists and what each contributed to the partnership.

Next: The Syndic by C. M. Kornbluth and Drunkard’s Walk by Frederik Pohl

The Space Merchants
Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
First published in serial form as Gravy Planet in Galaxy Science Fiction, 1952
Original book publication (simultaneous hardback and paperback): Ballantine Books, 1953
Most recent publication: (paperback) St. Martin’s Press, 2011

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(return to Part 1: Introduction)

According to Frederik Pohl, one of the most significant literary collaborations in the history of the science fiction field got its start due to deadline pressure.

Pohl had started writing a mainstream novel about the advertising business while serving in the U.S. Army during World War Two, but he abandoned the project when he realized he really didn’t know anything about his subject. Following the war, he set out to rectify this. He worked for several years as a copywriter for the small advertising firm of Twing and Altman, mainly working book accounts. He ended up with a good bit of insider knowledge about the advertising business, but author Fred Wakeman had just published a novel called The Hucksters about advertising, so Pohl felt the idea of a story about the advertising business was no longer fresh; at least not as a mainstream novel. But as a science fiction novel…? That field was yet unplowed.

He spent a year or two writing the first 20,000 words, then showed what he had written to Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy Science Fiction. Gold had just finished serializing Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man and was anxious for another high profile serial to follow it up with. He wanted to publish the first 20,000 words of Pohl’s novel immediately, in the upcoming issue of Galaxy – on the stipulation that Pohl could turn in the second and third installments of the novel in a week’s time.

Pohl was stuck, however. He didn’t know where to take the book’s plot next. Desperate to finish the novel within the very tight deadline he’d been given, he turned to his close friend, Cyril Kornbluth, who was then staying with the Pohls at their home in Red Bank, New Jersey. Kornbluth offered to help. They ended up working their collaboration on The Space Merchants (first titled Gravy Planet for the novel’s serialization in Galaxy, and expanded the following year for book publication by Ballantine) in a different fashion from the method they worked out for later shared works. Kornbluth read over the first 20,000 words and made some revisions. Then he wrote the middle third of the book on his own, which was in turn revised by Pohl. The two writers alternated four-page bursts of the last third. They made their deadline. (Pohl related the story in his introduction to His Share of Glory: the Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth.)

The future society which Pohl designed and which Kornbluth helped to flesh out is a sort of inverse of fascism. In the fascism of Italy under Mussolini and Germany under Hitler, authoritarian central governments allowed private industry and commerce to continue, but placed their direction under state control. In the future society of The Space Merchants, government has been colonized and is being completely controlled by commercial interests, the most powerful of which are the giant advertising agencies. Things have reached the point where, rather than being identified as, say, the representative from North Dakota, an elected official is referred to as the representative from Fowler Shocken, the powerful ad firm which employs the novel’s protagonist, Mitch Courtenay, a “Copysmith Star-Class.” In this vastly overpopulated future society (where members of the middle class sleep in stairwells of the giant office towers in which they work and the most powerful and wealthy executives can afford only a two-room apartment; in this, The Space Merchants was a precursor of Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!), the population is divided into executives, producers, and consumers, and the advertising agencies teach the vast majority of the swollen population from birth to dying day to be happy with their role as consumers. Virtually every bit of the Earth’s surface is devoted to either production or consumption, even the polar regions, which play host to resort and amusement areas where constricted populaces can briefly enjoy comparatively endless vistas out on the frozen tundra. This society does have its rebels, a secret society of saboteurs and terrorists called the Consies, or Conservationists. Named, of course, to remind readers of the Commies (the book was written in 1952), the Consies are remarkably predictive of the radical elements of the contemporary worldwide Green movement.

At the book’s outset, Mitch Courtenay is handed management of his company’s biggest and newest account — convincing thousands of Americans to become colonists on Venus, a harsh, forbidding world, which may remain an exceedingly inhospitable planet for human beings for generations, until planetary geo-engineering manages to transform Venus into something more akin to Earth. Only one man has previously set down on Venus and returned to Earth safely, a midget astronaut named Jack O’Shea. Pohl utilized his experience in the advertising business to great effect in his depiction of the early interactions between O’Shea and Courtenay, who has been assigned the task of extracting from the astronaut any useful information about the environment of Venus; useful for selling the desirability of serving as a colonist, that is. For Courtenay is selling “space” in two senses of the word — the excitement and romance of”outer space,” and the possibility for ordinary citizens to acquire “living space” far in excess of anything known by even the wealthiest men in America. In exchange for selling Venus to potential colonists, the firm of Fowler Shocken is promised all of the mineral and raw materials rights of Venus. Other ad firms also covet those rights, and they are willing to go to extreme measures to acquire them. Courtenay is opposed in his work by agents and saboteurs both from a rival ad agency, Taunton Associates, and the Consies. And he finds that these agents and saboteurs may include his friends, coworkers, and possibly even his wife.

Keen observers of science fiction recognized the significance of The Space Merchants almost immediately. The New York Times upon the book’s initial publication, at a time when major newspapers virtually never paid attention to science fiction, praised the two writers for their “slide rule precision” in their creation of a plausible future society and called the book “a novel of the future that the present must inevitably rank as a classic.” British novelist and critic Kingsley Amis devoted nine pages of his pioneering work of SF criticism from 1960, New Maps of Hell, to The Space Merchants, saying the book “has many claims to being the best science fiction novel so far.” Amis writes:

“The Space Merchants, clearly, is an admonitory satire on certain aspects of our own society, mainly economic, but it is not only that. It does not simply show the already impending consequences of the growth of industrial and commercial power, and it does more than simply satirize or criticize existing habits in the advertising profession… Beyond all this, the book seems to be interested in the future as such, to inquire what might result from turns of events that are possible and are not invalidated by being unlikely, to confront men and women with a thing, as I put it, which may put them into a situation without precedence in our experience.”

Of particular relevance to the subject of my essay, which is an attempted disaggregation of the Pohl-Kornbluth partnership and the strengths contributed by both, Amis has this to say:

“I will leave to the L. Sprague de Camps of the future the final determination of which partner is responsible for which scenes, but a check of Kornbluth’s individual work — Not This August, in which America retrieves a total defeat by Russia and China, or [The] Syndic, a chronicle of minor wars following upon a major one — soon suggests that his part in The Space Merchants was roughly to provide the more violent action while Pohl filled in the social background and the satire. … The closing scenes, on which I suspect the hand of Kornbluth lies heavily, offer little but adequate excitement and are not altogether a conclusion to the issues raised in the opening chapters. To provide a solution to these is not what would be expected from Pohl, who like the best of his colleagues is far more concerned to state, with as much elaboration as possible, ‘the case against tomorrow’ than to suggest any straightforward mitigations. … Even The Space Merchants relies, as it goes on, more and more heavily upon Kornbluthian elements — there is a quite gratuitous scene with a female sadistic maniac who totes a sharpened knitting needle.”

Although I agree with Amis that The Space Merchants ranks high in the pantheon of significant SF works, I strongly disagree with him on his evaluation of what he terms the book’s “Kornbluthian elements.” A tremendous admirer of Frederik Pohl, he sought to downgrade Kornbluth’s contribution to the book to mere word padding and mixing in some thrills for the cheap seats (an assessment I’m sure Fred Pohl would be the first to disagree with). It seems clear, both from Amis’s judgement of what Cyril Kornbluth contributed to the partnership and the critic’s citing of Kornbluth’s novel-length works only, that Amis was unfamiliar with Kornbluth’s short fiction, where his writerly skills and his outlook on the world can be viewed in their clearest light. “The Little Black Bag,” perhaps Kornbluth’s finest story, is filled with wonderful prose, rich in felt physical detail and penetrating characterization. Its ending is the kind of ineluctable and entirely fitting horror to be found in the best of Poe. To judge from much of his best short fiction, including “The Marching Morons,” “The Silly Season,” and “The Luckiest Man in Denv,” Kornbluth did not have a very high regard for the morality and worthiness of his fellow human beings. His outlook could be described as misanthropic, but it was also very, very sharp and funny. For example, whether or not Kornbluth was indeed responsible for the scene late in The Space Merchants involving the woman sadist who tortures Mitchell Courtenay — and I believe it was likely this was a Kornbluth contribution (a number of his solo works feature scheming or malevolent women) — I disagree that the scene was gratuitous and added only for shock value. The scene and the warped character of Hedy both have a point to make (pun only partly intended). Taunton’s use of Hedy illustrates the advertising mogul’s ruthlessness. Also, in the world of The Space Merchants, men and women have become so trained to adhere to the pleasure principle by the world’s advertising agencies that Copysmith Star-Class Mitchell Courtenay reflects that murderers, assassins, and torturers have virtually disappeared, due to fear of punishment. Yet Taunton reminds him, just before deploying Hedy, that humanity has always contained rare individuals who actually seek out pain and punishment, and that with the enormously inflated population of the book’s future society, such extreme masochists are much more common than they once were. Such seekers of punishment are the deadly tools the advertising agencies utilize in their low-level wars with their rival agencies.

Also, I have the benefit of Pohl’s recollections of how he and Kornbluth tackled the writing of The Space Merchants, which were not available to Kingsley Amis in 1960. According to Pohl, he was primarily responsible for the book’s first third, and Kornbluth was primarily responsible for the middle third, with the final third having been split between them in small work increments of four or five pages. With this knowledge, we can perhaps better separate out what each man brought to the novel.

The book’s first third belongs primarily to Frederik Pohl. In it, he delineated the outlines of his future society, its economy, its politics, and its major social problems (according to him, working out all the details of the book’s first third took between one and two years, a very extended period of development for an otherwise quick writer; in contrast, the two collaborators finished the second two thirds of the novel in one week!). Pohl’s skills of social and economic extrapolation, also seen in his short works of the period, such as “The Midas Plague,” really shine in this section. He also makes very effective use of his insider knowledge of the advertising business, seasoning his descriptions of the Fowler Shocken Agency with telling bits of dialogue between coworkers, the rituals of advertising campaign proposals, and office infighting and politics. Some of his portrayals, particularly of the agency’s “yes men,” are overly broad, bordering on stock types and caricatures, but they work well in context. Interestingly, and not common for SF works of the period, the protagonist, Michael Courtenay, and his wife Kathy (apparently they are in the midst of a trial marriage, because Michael begs her to make it permanent at the end of the trial period in a few months), are shown to be in an unstable, tempestuous relationship, on the brink of foundering. I’m not sure whether this is a detail Pohl contributed, or an element which Kornbluth introduced in his revision of the first third. The reason I suspect it might be Kornbluth’s doing is that Kornbluth featured unhappy or rocky romances and marriages in many of his solo stories and longer works.

Pohl wrote this about his friend Cyril Kornbluth in his introduction to The Best of C. M. Kornbluth:

“[Cyril] was also a sardonic soul. The comedy present in almost everything he wrote relates to the essential hypocricies and foolishnesses of mankind. His target was not always Man in the abstract and general. Sometimes it was one particular man, or woman, thinly disguised as a character in a story — and thinly sliced, into quivering bits. Once or twice it was me.”

Kornbluth was primarily responsible for the book’s middle third. This is the section of the novel, I’ll admit, that I found the most enjoyable and entertaining. In The Way the Future Was, Fred Pohl relates that at some point when he was struggling to come up with a way to continue the book beyond its initial twenty thousand words, Phil Klass (who wrote under the pen name William Tenn) suggested that one way to go might be to have Michael Courtenay lose his privileged position as a Star-Class Copysmith and experience the world from the vantage point of a lower class producer and consumer. Fred liked the idea, and when Cyril Kornbluth offered to help with finishing the book, Fred suggested Phil Klass’s idea, and Kornbluth liked it, as well. So Michael finds himself shanghaied by an untrustworthy coworker and dumped into steerage on a tramp freighter bringing menial workers to a gigantic food processing plant in Costa Rica, his identity erased and replaced by that of a peon virtually without rights of any kind. From the comparative lap of luxury, Michael is thrust into the lower depths; the reader can tell that Kornbluth had tremendous fun with this set-up, because the reader has tremendous fun along with him. The Space Merchants is meant to be a satire, a comedy. I found the book’s funniest bit to be when Michael finds himself gradually succumbing to a circular, triple addiction designed by his own advertising agency to ensnare the consumer class. The harsh physical labor dehydrates Michael, and the only beverage of any kind available to quench his thirst is Popsie, an addictive soda. The soda makes him hungry, and the only snack available is Crunchies, which cause withdrawal symptoms that can only be quelled by more sips of Popsie. But drinking too much Popsie makes Michael crave Starr cigarettes, and smoking those makes it impossible for him not to eat more Crunchies… As comedy, it’s brilliant, and as a satire of Western consumer mores, it is biting and spot-on.

The work unit Michael finds himself shanghaied into is the United Slime-Mold Protein Workers of Panamerica, working for Chlorella Proteins, whose principal product is a kind of genetically engineered poultry. Michael is comically exploited by both the company and his union. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner consist primarily of slices of Chicken Little, the gigantic, headless, limbless chicken-thing that regrows its protein-saturated mass as quickly as workers of Chlorella Proteins can slice hunks of it off (Michael’s initial job is to harvest the slime molds which are utilized as Chicken Little’s feed stock). Around the book’s middle point, Kornbluth has Michael pretend to sign on with the secretive, underground Consies in order to gain a reassignment to New York City, so that he can reestablish his old identity and reclaim his place in his old advertising firm (where his bosses and most of his coworkers believe he is dead, killed in an accident at a resort at the South Pole). In one of the book’s strangest, most vividly described passages, Michael meets the Consies in their underground lair — the entrance to which is hidden beneath Chicken Little. The method with which Michael and his Consie handler make their way through Chicken Little to the hatchway is to utilize a hypersonic whistle, which, when blown, causes Chicken Little to involuntarily pull away from the vector in which the sound is directed. Thus, the two men travel through a “bubble” that moves through a hundred-ton mass of living protein… perhaps one of the weirdest images in the history of science fiction, and a minor triumph of Cyril Kornbluth’s fertile (and bizarre) imagination.

I found that the novel becomes somewhat less involving (and thrillingly strange) in its final third, when Michael returns to New York City. This is the third which Pohl and Kornbluth wrote together in alternating four-page sections (which Pohl then went back and revised). This is not to say that the book’s conclusion lacks its thrills and pleasures; the scenes set in the stairwells of the Taunton Associates Building are as strong as any earlier in the book. The Consies play an important role in the book’s climax. Interestingly, the environmental radicals are portrayed in a much different light within the novel’s final twenty pages than they were in the book’s middle third. Kornbluth portrayed the Consies as somewhat bumbling, rather comical extremists. Whoever wrote the novel’s last pages — and I suspect it was Pohl — showed the Consies to be mankind’s likeliest saviors, a secret alliance of the enlightened that would preserve a terraformed Venus as a pristine wilderness, one which can replace the Earth’s lost natural spaces, Terran wildernesses which were raped and processed out of existence by corporate entities such as Fowler Shocken. Frederik Pohl has always had an element of utopianism in his work. He vividly described the few years he spent in the late 1930s as a member of the Young Communist League in his memoir, The Way the Future Was. He abandoned the Communist Party after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but he never abandoned his support for and belief in left-liberal causes. Cyril Kornbluth, however, to judge from his solo work, particularly his short fiction, was no believer in the gradual perfectability of human society. No utopian, he. He seemed to believe, rather, that men would always find a way to foul things up, no matter how advanced their technology might become.

This thematic tension between the collaborators, the tension between the optimistic utopian and the pessimistic misanthrope, is what gives The Space Merchants much of its zing and what sets it apart from nearly all of its contemporaries. It is a novel in argument with itself. This disagreement between the two writers’ outlooks is also a large part of what sets the three best collaborative novels of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth shoulders above any of the solo novels either of them wrote during the 1950s. Kornbluth provided the ying to Pohl’s yang.

Next: Search the Sky

Cyril Kornbluth

Frederik Pohl

Introduction

Most science fiction critics and historians would agree, I believe, that the most significant writing team in the field’s history, most productive of enduring, classic works, was the unfortunately brief collaboration between Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. Their collaboration had its roots in the friendship they shared during their teen days in the late 1930s (Pohl was born in 1919 and Kornbluth in 1923); it reached its zenith in the 1950s before being cut tragically short by Kornbluth’s death at the age of 34 in 1958. I would venture to say the only SF collaboration which has come close in significance to that between Pohl and Kornbluth was the team of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Niven’s and Pournelle’s collaborative novels, best sellers all, have sold many multiples the copies sold of Pohl’s and Kornbluth’s four SF novels (although Pohl has pointed out that The Space Merchants has been translated into twenty-five languages, and he estimates that in its various editions, it has sold about ten million copies — so maybe the sales discrepancy between Pohl/Kornbluth and Niven/Pournelle isn’t as big as you’d think). But Pohl’s and Kornbluth’s shared works have had a far greater impact on the field’s development and the writers who followed.

Science fiction has long been rich in collaborations, much more so than most other realms of fiction. I think this is due to the fact that, at least since the 1920s and the commercialization of science fiction as a genre with the founding of Amazing Stories, science fiction writers and fans (many of whom grow up to become writers themselves) have been intensely social with one another (at least relative to writers in other genres). Their earliest efforts to reach out to one another were through the letters columns of the early science fiction magazines. From these remote connections, they formed clubs, and those clubs, beginning in the late 1930s, began sponsoring conventions. A group of fans who called themselves the Futurians even established communal living arrangements in the depths of the Depression. An amazingly high percentage of the Futurians went on to become prominent writers and editors in the science fiction field. Two of the most active Futurians, in terms of writing, editing, and reportage, were Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. They were also very close friends.

During the 1950s, beginning with The Space Merchants in 1952 (first published in shorter form as Gravy Planet in Galaxy Science Fiction), they published seven novels together. Four of these were science fiction; The Space Merchants was followed by Search the Sky (1954), Gladiator-at-Law (1955), and Wolfbane (1957 in Galaxy; reprinted in longer form by Ballantine Books in 1959). The first of their novel-length collaborations (they also published numerous short stories together) and the latter two are considered classics; all three have been reprinted multiple times. A collection of their shared short fiction, The Wonder Effect, was published in 1962, four years after Kornbluth’s death.

During their six-year period of intensive collaboration, they both published novels and stories outside of their team, either with other collaborators or singly. Kornbluth published two science fiction novels in collaboration with Judith Merrill, Outpost Mars (1952) and Gunner Cade (1952). He also published three solo science fiction novels, Takeoff (1952), The Syndic (1953), and Not This August (1955). During his lifetime, his short fiction was collected in several volumes, The Explorers (1954), The Mindworm and Other Stories (1955), and A Mile Beyond the Moon (1958). Pohl wrote the Undersea Trilogy with Jack Williamson, another frequent Pohl collaborator; these were Undersea Quest (1954), Undersea Fleet (1956), and Undersea City (1958). He also wrote Preferred Risk (1955) with Lester del Rey (which, according to Pohl’s lengthy recorded conversation with Alfred Bester in June, 1978, was a much less pleasurable and frictionless experience than his collaborations with either Kornbluth or Williamson). Pohl’s solo novels during this decade included Slave Ship (1956) and Drunkard’s Walk (1960), and his story collections included Alternating Currents (1956), The Case Against Tomorrow (1957), Tomorrow Times Seven (1959), and The Man Who Ate the World (1960).

None of the novels Pohl and Kornbluth wrote during the decade of the 1950s, either singly or in collaboration with writers other than each other, achieved anywhere near the acclaim accorded three of their jointly written novels, and none of them are much remembered or read today. Pohl went on to write other novels on his own, starting with Man Plus in 1976 and including Gateway (1977) and Jem (1979), which could be considered the equal of his best collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth. But these were written two decades or more after the books he did with Kornbluth, in a renewed period of novel writing which followed fifteen years of serving as editor for Galaxy Science Fiction, Worlds of If, and Bantam Books.

What made the Pohl-Kornbluth collaboration so magical? What skills and attributes did each bring to the team, attributes which meshed so well and so memorably together? Why were neither of them able to capture that same magic when working separately in the 1950s, at least not in long-form works? (They were more successful as soloists on short pieces; at least half a dozen of Kornbluth’s short stories can be counted among the best short science fiction of the 1950s, and several of Pohl’s short pieces from the decade are very highly regarded, as well.)

Fred Pohl has written frequently about his collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth, in his memoir The Way the Future Was (1978), his introductions to The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (1976), Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (1987), and His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth (1997), and on his very entertaining blog, The Way the Future Blogs. Cyril Kornbluth, unfortunately, did not live long enough to leave us with reminiscences of his working relationship with Fred Pohl (Kornbluth strained his heart carrying a fifty caliber machine gun throughout the Battle of the Bulge and died of a heart attack fourteen years later, after shoveling snow from his driveway and then running to catch a train). In the articles to follow, I will review their joint work and compare it with some of their contemporaneous solo work. Between that effort and taking into consideration some of Pohl’s remarks about their collaboration and Kornbluth’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer, I’ll attempt to separate out the elements that they each brought to their shared works. In this way, I’ll try to illustrate their differing but complementary modes of craftsmanship and explicate the magic of their collaboration.

Next: The Space Merchants

Drunkard’s Walk
Frederik Pohl
Original Edition: Ballantine Books, 1960 (following serialization in Galaxy Science Fiction)
Most Recent Edition: Ballantine Books, 1973

Kampus
James Gunn
Original Edition: Bantam Books, 1977
Most Recent Edition: Kindle, 2010

Over the past thirty years, the level of interest in science fiction shown by academia has grown at least tenfold, with hundreds of campuses now offering courses on science fiction as literature or science fiction as a prominent branch of popular culture, and a handful of universities offering full degree programs in science fiction. However, the level of interest running in the opposite direction – the interest of science fiction authors in extrapolating the future of academia—has been rather lower. Few major works of science fiction have taken up potential future developments in higher education as their primary subject. I find this to be a bit surprising, given the not insubstantial contingent of science fiction writers who currently earn the majority or a sizable portion of their income serving as university faculty.

Examining potential futures for academia and the university system is a timely endeavor. America’s university system, long considered one of the crown jewels of the nation’s economic and social infrastructure, now finds itself at the confluence of powerful societal trends, technological, economic, and political in nature, which will almost certainly reshape much of that system within a decade or two into forms which may be drastically different from the norms we as a society have become accustomed to since the Second World War and the granting of the G.I. Bill educational benefits to veterans.

Much has been written in recent years about the suspected inflation of a higher education bubble which mimics in many of its aspects the housing bubble whose bursting brought on the 2008 recession. Since 1985, the cost of college tuition and fees has increased nearly 500%, versus a 115% increase in overall consumer prices. Student loans, a majority of which are backed by the federal government, are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and many students find themselves graduating from a four-year program of liberal arts study with the equivalent of a home mortgage (debt loads for many graduates of private universities approach a quarter of a million dollars, with the graduates of public universities not far behind). Even worse off than the graduates are the more numerous drop-outs; they are saddled with sizable debt burdens but have no credential in hand to assist them in finding work which will allow them to repay their loans. Many observers feel that current trends in higher education are unsustainable and that a crisis, or a combination of crises, will force the system into radical change.

What might those changes look like? Two prominent science fiction authors, Frederik Pohl and James Gunn, have painted portraits of potential futures for the higher education system. Their novels were published seventeen years apart – Pohl’s Drunkard’s Walk in 1960 and Gunn’s Kampus in 1977. Giving credence to the truism that science fiction is more about the present than it is about the future, each book strongly reflects the academic milieu which was prevalent during the period of its writing: for Pohl’s, the Sputnik Era, fear-driven lionization of the hard sciences and the concurrent dedication of significant government funding to basic research efforts at the universities; and for Gunn’s, the student radicalism and participatory democracy and identity group power movements of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, which, by 1977, had mostly retreated from large-scale public protests to their bases on university campuses.

Drunkard’s Walk was originally serialized in a shorter form in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1960. Pohl’s novel has the feel of a typical late-1950s Galaxy story: a surface urbanity and wit, many clever turns of plot, and characterization about as deep as that found in a Twilight Zone episode of the same era. The novel-length Drunkard’s Walk, although not a long book, suffers some from excess padding glued to its flanks during the effort to expand it from a novella to a novel; many of the chapters told from the vantage point of a supporting character, Master Carl, feel tacked on and unnecessary. The primary problem faced by the protagonist, Master Cornut, a mathematics professor at an unnamed University, is both original and compelling—during periods of partial consciousness, such as when he is on the verge of falling asleep, has just woken up, or is distracted by the progress of one of his own lectures, Cornut is plagued by an autonomous compulsion to commit suicide, despite being a happy, privileged, and well-adjusted individual. He is forced to rely upon the watchfulness of those who live adjacent to his on-campus living quarters, initially students and later his student wife, to keep himself from slitting his own throat or hurling himself over the railing of his apartment’s balcony. Where the plot ultimately heads is less fresh, at least from the present vantage point of an additional half-century of science fiction stories and films, involving as it does the trope of a conspiracy of secret immortals who seek to wipe out potential rivals before those rivals can realize their own power.

For today’s reader, the primary draw of Drunkard’s Walk may be its setting, the University where Master Cornut teaches. Pohl paints the University as a refuge from the overcrowded, tumultuous outside world, where a sizable portion of the American lower middle class is forced to live on “texases,” off-shore platforms originally constructed as early-warning radar installations, which are now used for dirty jobs such as manufacturing and raw materials processing (each texas produces its own power from the wave energy that crashes continuously against its support legs). The book’s most accurate extrapolation is Pohl’s envisioning of distance learning; each professor’s lectures are taped and broadcast, reaching audiences of millions, those who either aspire to degrees of higher learning or who desire access to knowledge:

“Cornut had more than a hundred live watchers—the cream; the chosen ones who were allowed to attend University in person—but his viewers altogether numbered three million. …

“For education was something very precious indeed.

“The thirty thousand at the University were the lucky ones; they had passed the tests, stiffer every year. Not one out of a thousand passed those tests; it wasn’t only a matter of intelligence, it was a matter of having the talents that could make a University education fruitful—in terms of society. For the world had to work. The world was too big to be idle. The land that had fed three billion people now had to feed twelve billion.

“Cornut’s television audience could, if it wished, take tests and accumulate credits. … Almost always the credits led nowhere. But to those trapped in dreary production or drearier caretaker jobs for society, the hope was important. There was a young man named Max Steck, for example, who had already made a small contribution to the theory of normed rings. It was not enough. Sticky Dick said he would not justify a career in mathematics. He was trapped as a sexwriter, for Sticky Dick’s analyzers had found him prurient-minded and creative. There were thousands of Max Stecks.

“Then there was Charles Bingham. He was a reactor hand at the 14th Street generating plant. Mathematics might help him, in time, become a supervising engineer. It also might not—the candidates for that job were lined up fifty deep. But there were half a million Charles Binghams. …

“These, the millions of them, were the invisible audience who watched Master Cornut’s image on a cathode screen.”

Pohl places the University’s professors, or Masters, at the top of his social pecking order. Masters may take advantage of a sort of droit de seigneur regarding the University’s students. Conjugal relations between professors and students are encouraged, being viewed as beneficial to each, and what are called “term marriages” are common, which may last (presumably on the Master’s prerogative) as briefly as a few weeks. There is a strict separation between Town and Gown, with the latter acting in many ways as a sort of hereditary landed aristocracy, but one which sometimes opts to absorb very talented members of the former into its ranks (as scholarship students).

That strict separation between Town and Gown is mirrored in James Gunn’s Kampus, but the relative status of the two is nearly inverted. Gunn, born in 1923 (four years after Frederik Pohl), is a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas and the director of its Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Following an estimable career as a science fiction author and anthologist, he became one of the pioneering academicians to teach science fiction. He was a personal witness (from the faculty side) to the campus upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and the first third of Kampus takes place on the University of Kansas campus at some point early in the twenty-first century. A series of social upheavals has caused state governments to essentially surrender their university campuses to student control. Walled off from the surrounding communities, the campuses act as holding pens for the revolutionary young adult offspring of the middle and upper middle classes, who are free to act out their anarchistic, communitarian, or socialist fantasies within the walls. Symbols of authority are still present, in the form of Kampuskops, but these are more actors in revolutionary theater than agents of bureaucratic control, present mainly to give the student activists and revolutionaries someone to act against.

In contrast to the University portrayed in Drunkard’s Walk, within the universities of Kampus the professors have virtually no social status at all. In the absence of state financial support, they are reduced to competing with one another for paying students, each trying to outdo the others with promises of lurid classroom content, skills to be gained in manipulating peers, and drug experimentation. Professors must be transported to and from their classrooms in armored cars, since campuses are rife with plots to kidnap them and demand various forms of ransom. Students live in self-righteous squalor, mostly unaware that small cadres of student leaders pull their strings and benefit from unlimited sexual partners and access to endless supplies of psychoactive drugs. These cadres keep the student populations entertained and distracted with violent demonstrations on campus and destructive raids into the surrounding communities, which hate and fear the students.

Very little in the way of active learning takes place. Students are supplied with their degree parchments on the first day of their matriculation; they are also issued learning pills that encode the peptides of popular professors and allow some forms of knowledge to be effortlessly passed on. The novel’s protagonist, Tom Gavin, enrolls in a philosophy course offered by one of the few traditional professors remaining on campus. He becomes so enthralled with the Socratic experience that he plots to kidnap the Professor in order to extract peptides from his blood and create new learning pills that will allow Tom to internalize all of his knowledge. The kidnapping leads to a regrettable denouement, but before it does, the Professor has an opportunity to deliver a potted history of the devolution of higher education:

“‘Here I stand,’ the Professor said, ‘tearing my breast to bleeding shreds like the fabled pelican to feed you ungrateful chicks, in a place where learning has fled, where man has retreated from intellectual activity to ritual. I have lived through it all. I have seen the University retreat from educational standards and academic freedom through autonomous black-studies curricula, general studies, and student participation in University governance to total lack of concern for objective educational criteria and to the abandonment of the campus by serious scholars and scientists. Where has learning fled?

“‘How many of you know that when you matriculate in this University you are automatically awarded a degree? Of course, most of you stay around to play in the sandbox you call a university, and a few of you, to seek out an education. Where has learning fled?

“‘The practice of students hiring and paying their own teachers goes back to the first university, at Bologna, founded in the eleventh century, but it soon was recognized as the pure bologna it was. Students do not know what they need to know; if they knew, they would not need teachers. Well, the Dark Ages returned as public support for higher education gradually was withdrawn from campuses, enrollments began declining, and faculty became increasingly dependent upon student fees; the ancient pattern of student control and student hiring, firing, and payment of faculty reestablished itself. The result, you see around you–not teachers but charlatans, pimps pandering to student lusts in the name of relevance. Relevance–that’s what we call it when our prejudices are reinforced. A basic principle of education is that you cannot learn anything from someone with whom you agree.'”

Student rivalries and the machinations of StudEx, the student leadership executive board, force Tom to leave the University of Kansas once he has become a threat to StudEx’s power. He sets out across the country, Candide-like, confident in his revolutionary-socialist-egalitarian ideals, to see for himself the semi-legendary University of California at Berkeley, the font of the student revolutionary movement. He falls in with a young female companion of a much more practical bent, an orphan who graduated from the school of hard knocks and who has no patience for Tom’s high-flown ideals, but who loves him and tries (not always successfully) to protect him from the consequences of his own naiveté. On the course of their travels, we readers discover “where the learning has gone:” practical, technical instruction has migrated to a system of highly automated community colleges, matriculating a mostly lower class and working class student body who are motivated to achieve wealth, not social equality, and theoretical and applied research have left the universities for secluded mountain havens funded by philanthropic billionaires.

Kampus is a more ambitious novel than Drunkard’s Walk. Its characters, at least the protagonists, are drawn with greater psychological depth than those of the earlier book. Pohl’s prose is sturdy and workmanlike, never flashy or evocative, whereas Gunn’s frequently achieves real beauty. If Kampus can be said to have a significant flaw, it is that too many of its well delineated and highly entertaining episodes teach the same lesson to Tom Gavin, who, until the book’s end, seems stubbornly resistant to learning what is endlessly rubbed in his face – that beautiful ideals may often hide venal motivations, and that violence, rape, and theft committed in the stated pursuit of a more egalitarian society are still violence, rape, and theft. Many readers will be tempted to give up on Tom halfway through the novel, but the charm and vividness of Gunn’s prose, plus his deft hand at keeping his plot moving, will keep them on board through the end. Some reviewers have remarked that the scenarios extrapolated in Kampus are dated and were dated even when the book was written in 1977. However, the recent saga of Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy movements around the country makes many of the events and actors of Kampus feel very current.

Which of the novels is more relevant to the situation faced by higher education today? Pohl was certainly on to something with his description of the ubiquity of distance learning, and Gunn made prescient points concerning the growing divide between teaching and research and the likelihood that, should colleges and universities abandon the teaching of the practical arts, other institutions (such as the Internet) will rise to fill the gap. Interestingly, whereas the earlier book portrayed the professors as the top of the heap and the latter book did the same for the students, in actuality a third group, hardly mentioned by either novel, appears to have been the biggest beneficiary of the enormous growths in university budgets over the past thirty years – the administrators. As the numbers of tenured faculty have plummeted at most colleges and universities, replaced by adjunct or part-time instructors, the numbers of administrators and managers, in new areas like environmental compliance and diversity observance, have skyrocketed, and many of those administrators enjoy salaries and power well beyond those extended to professors.

My own recent novel No Direction Home posits a third possible future for higher education. In the mid-twenty-first century, much of the middle class has abandoned the old American Dream of homeownership and college education. A large portion of the population has taken up a nomadic existence, living as gypsies in their electric cars and moving between short-term jobs, flowing wherever the demand for labor arises. Most states, strapped for cash, have closed their public universities. College education has reverted to what it was prior to the Second World War – a status good, a privilege available primarily to the wealthy. Most gypsies obtain what training and education they need for their short-term jobs from the Internet setups built into their vehicles, and they are guided in their courses of learning by one-time professors, laid off from public universities, who now accompany the gypsy crews on their travels. Those gypsies who wish to pursue non-vocational learning attend roadside seminars and salons offered by the professors, after-work perks provided by the organizers of the crews.

So the future I’ve envisioned for higher education combines elements of Frederik Pohl’s extrapolations (universities limited to the wealthy and/or privileged; widespread distance learning) with those of James Gunn’s (teachers as migrant free agents offering their services to students; practical training provided in electronic form). For what it is worth, I wrote my novel prior to reading either Drunkard’s Walk or Kampus. The confluence between my book and theirs proves to me yet again that science fiction is a conversation carried out over decades, with effective exchanges taking place even in the absence of direct influence or knowledge; a form of telepathy between writers, perhaps, or at least of the convergent modes of thinking that arise from the practice of science fiction.

In a recursive hall of mirrors, professors who are science fiction writers may teach science fiction books about the future of academia… wherein science fiction writers teach books extrapolating the future of academia…