Cyril M. Kornbluth was a member of the Futurians, a loose-knit group of science fiction creators that also included Isaac Asimov and Damon Knight. He lived from 1923 to 1958, but if his life was short his career was productive.
Listen to my sounding all knowledgeable, but I had never actually read Kornbluth before. Now I'm reading The Best of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by his friend Frederik Pohl, another Futurian. It includes "The Marching Morons", which is probably his best known story. It posits that over time stupid people swamp smart people because of their relative fertility rates. A little pat, but not a terrible fictional premise. It's often thought of as an inspiration for Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and contains a game show so similar to one in Robocop that I have to wonder if Paul Verhoeven had to pay royalties.
Some of the more obscure stories are quite worthy as well. "With These Hands" is a melancholy story about a sculptor in a future where his art is no longer appreciated. The story's dominant art form, stereopantograph, seems to combine three technologies undreamt of in Kornbluth's lifetime: AI, CAD, and 3D printing. A lighter work is "Gomez", about a teenage Puerto Rican dishwasher who's also an off the charts math genius. He and his brain become government property, and how he deals with that situation is heartening and entertaining.
2 comments:
I first discovered science fiction in the early and mid 60s and very likely read Kornbluth then, but I can't say I remember his work in particular. I guess he and Frederick Pohl being friends as well as collaborators it was natural that Pohl would complete some of the stories Kornbluth had been working on when he died and that he put together this anthology.
Wikipedia informs me that the Marching Morons was a follow-up to a story presented in the (approximate) present, The Little Black Bag that posits advanced medical equipment in a container that allows idiots to be doctors. Some years later we end up with 5 billion people and just a few clever people to run the show. Sounds like the way our current elite prefer to see themselves, doesn't it? We've been noticing signs of Idiocracy made real for a while now and it's more fun in the movie.
An interesting thing about the early science fiction authors was that since they were inventing a whole new genre they were able to envision a number of developments that nobody else saw as possible. Technology was developing fast after ww2 and they were able to imagine where some of the advances might lead. Their writing groups, like the Futurists, must have been great places to discuss the ramifications. What was common among many of the early sci-fi authors was their view of the human condition. Some of them, like Pohl and P.K. Dick, cared less for interstellar empires or vast alien invasion fleets, instead they poked and prodded the human soul to see what was underneath, good or bad. Kornbluth sounds like one of them.
It sounds like a lucky circumstance that lead you to the book since it appears to have last been printed in 1977.
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If you'll excuse a change of subject it occurs to me you might enjoy watching a few minutes of Bill Maher and Jordan Peterson in 2018.
My impression is that Pohl didn't have to do that much completing. Most of the stories had been published somewhere before. It's true that Kornbluth wasn't available for the editing process, but I'd guess that was mostly copyediting.
"The Little Black Bag" is in this book too. It's a rather humorous story as well. Apparently--I haven't seen the episode--it was adapted for Rod Serling's Night Gallery, with Burgess Meredith and Chill Wills. From what I've seen of NG it wasn't nearly as good as the original Twilight Zone but I am curious how it turned out. Mike Judge accomplished something with Idiocracy. A movie about people getting stupider and suggesting that it's already started doesn't sound like it would be popular entertainment, but people quote it all the time. (As well as sometimes imitate it without meaning to.)
It was a time of postwar abundance, in part because after the sacrifices that had been made there was very little choice but to spread the wealth around a little. A lot of people were investing in things like hi-fis, TVs., washer-driers: machines that, even when they weren't brand new, were new in terms of the broader population owning them. That may have been a prompt to the imaginations of science fiction writers as well. Certainly Ray Bradbury was inspired to write Fahrenheit 451 by the spread of television. A lot of technological developments they foresaw did come to pass. That also includes the underside of technology and its effects on people.
Oh, it's definitely a book from the 70s, given the psychedelic artwork on the cover. Luckily the library has held onto it.
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Peterson's a good guest. I have to appreciate his willingness to be blunt, which most people don't associate with such an obvious Canadian accent.
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