The Anthology Anthology: Kornbluth collection and monster anthology

 

It's time for the mid-week post, and I decided it was time for another post on anthologies. Here's a pair I've meant to get to for a while, which I have come to associate in my own mind. The first is The Best of C.M. Kornbluth, part of the 1970s Nelson Doubleday wave of anthologies, edited by the author's friend and frequent collaborator Frederik Pohl. The other is a more eclectic collection titled Bug Eyed Monsters, edited by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg, an assemblage of 13 stories published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, a publisher I otherwise knew for their textbooks. To keep a running start, here's some artwork from BEM, which features a cover by one Ruby Mazur and a selection of art by the great Gahan Wilson.

Moving in, one thing these books have in common is the 1951 story "Friend To Man", a savage yarn that is indeed one of Kornbluth's very best. It's the tale of a very unlovable rogue who is either rescued or taken hostage by a native of a desert planet where he is stranded. While he tries to figure out the mysterious alien's motives, we learn through flashbacks of his amoral exploits, particularly a petty scheme that brought tragedy and moral ruin to a damsel. The punchline reads like a prototype of a certain famous film that cannot be mentioned without a spoiler. I have been more intrigued by the barely repentant and perhaps unredeemable anti-hero, surely a satire of the Victorians' fixation on the noble highwayman. It's an idea that turns up with some frequency in "Golden Age" pulps, but only really came into its own in the deconstructionist 1960s and '70s. This story in particular was a major reason I suggested Kornbluth as at least an indirect influence on Lincoln F. Stern in the course of reviewing Heavy Metal. As a further footnote, the story has turned up on at least one public-domain website, which I am posting a link to since it's under the reputable Project Gutenberg banner, but the legal status remains clear as mud.

Turning to the Kornbluth book, it's certainly the better collection, yet not necessarily the most interesting. It predictably includes "The Marching Morons", which I ranted about reviewing Idiocracy, and other regularly reprinted "classics" like "The Little Black Bag", "The Silly Season" and "Two Dooms". Of these high-profile pieces, the one I've come to appreciate most is "Shark Ship", about the same length as "Morons" but far deeper in its worldbuilding and in my opinion probably a lot more revealing of Kornbluth's real thought on population control, the media and the nuclear family. Then there are short pieces that are otherwise fairly hard to find, like the especially bleak post-apocalyptic tale "The Remorseful" and the Disney send-up "The Advent On Channel Twelve", which again prominently features Kornbluth's conflicted outlook on parenthood. The most memorable of the short pieces is "The Words Of Guru", a proto-psychedelic piece from the perspective of a child prodigy gone absolutrely psychotic. What I have always found interesting is that virtually everything could be reinterpreted as hallucination or at least beyond the mortal plane, if not for the narrator's insistence that he can and has used his growing powers to harm and kill real people. Of course, we are under no obligation to take his word for this or anything else, yet it remains a convincing portrait of the intricacy and inscrutability of madness met on its own terms.

Turning to the other book, this is a compilation that runs the gamut of time and subgenres, from the Gernsback era to the 1960s and somewhat beyond. What's striking is that few if any really live up, or more accurately down, to the title and stated theme. We come closest with the earliest tale, "The Miracle Of The Lily" by Clare Winger Harris from 1927, a tale of a war between humans and insects that becomes tragic irony as the victorious humans reach out to explore neighboring planets. Also fitting to the theme is Donald Wollheim's "Mimic", which I discussed on reviewing Mimic 2, and Robert Bloch's "Talent", about an orphan with a strange ability to imitate others. Things get more nuanced with stories like "Stranger Station" by Damon Knight and "Puppet Show" by Fredric Brown, both featuring apparently altruistic but still unsettling extraterrestrials. Things take a more mature turn starting with "The Other Kids" by the perennially underrated Robert F. Young, followed by later entries such as "The Faceless Thing" by Edward D. Hoch, "The Last One Left" by Pronzini and Malzberg themselves, and the last and longest, "Hostess" by Isaac Asimov. In the midst of it all, Kornbluth's entry serves as a kind of bridge, ultimately revealing an alien whose actions are no more horrific and far more justified than its human counterpart.

With that, I've really done what I meant to do, in a lot less space than I thought I would need. I still haven't done much with this feature, and this post has been a reminder why I started it. It's always nice to revisit old books, even if they don't live up to my memories, and these two volumes have if anything gotten better with time. If you have them or can get them, by all means enjoy. That's all for now, more to come!