I first saw his name on the contents page of the July 1949 issue of the now forgotten pulp magazine Startling Stories. I was a high-school sophomore then, reading too much science fiction when I should have been studying my geometry and Latin. His short story, “The Only Thing We Learn,” probably made little impact on my adolescent self, because—as I observed when I read it last week—it’s a subtle, oblique, elliptical, sardonic piece of work. Those adjectives apply to most of what Kornbluth wrote during his short, brilliant career, but I was only mildly interested in subtlety in those days, and in that issue I was probably more impressed by George O. Smith’s slam-bang lead novella, “Fire in the Heavens.”
I encountered the Kornbluth byline again a few months later in a second-hand issue of The Avon Fantasy Reader, the superb bi-monthly anthology/magazine that Donald A. Wollheim was editing, devoted to reprints of weird, horror, and fantasy classics. The Kornbluth story was “The Words of Guru” of 1941, from a pulp magazine that Wollheim had edited before the war. Wollheim explained that in his pre-war career Kornbuth had employed an assortment of pen names—S.D. Gottesman, Cecil Corwin, Kenneth Falconer, etc. What he did not say was that this reprint of “Words of Guru” used Kornbluth’s own byline for the first time in any science fiction magazine, because all his pre-war work had been done under pseudonyms. He also didn’t tell me that Kornbluth had been not quite sixteen, a junior in high school, when he wrote it. I probably would not have been happy to know that, because “The Words of Guru” is a taut, crisp, perfectly executed story with a final sentence that hit me so hard when I first read it that I have never forgotten it. I would be happy to write a story that good today. I had my own teenage writing ambitions back there in 1949, but I could never have come within a mile of what Kornbluth had accomplished in that precocious masterpiece.
That one story taught me to keep my eye out for the work of C.M. Kornbluth. He turned up again in the July 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction with “The Little Black Bag,” which even at the time I recognized as something special. It was destined to be anthologized many times over, and in 1967 the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America chose it for the definitive anthology of great short stories, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Six months after “Little Black Bag” came “The Mindworm,” in the first issue of Damon Knight’s splendid, short-lived magazine, Worlds Beyond. Knight believed that SF could be something more than fast-paced pulp fiction, and that December 1950 issue contained not only stories by regular science-fictionists like Jack Vance, Fredric Brown, and Kornbluth, but reprints of work by Franz Kafka, Graham Greene, and Philip Wylie. Kornbluth’s story, lean and frightening and driving relentlessly on to a surprising but inevitable conclusion and an aphoristic final sentence, fully lived up to the two great ones of his I had read in the previous year.
By then I knew he was a short-story writer endowed with wit, grace, a powerful imagination, and—not so common back then—a distinctive, immediately recognizable style. For the next seven years I pounced on his work wherever I encountered it. As a young would-be writer I met him at a small science fiction convention, and he treated me kindly. We became friends.
And then, in 1958, he died. He was only 34.
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You probably haven’t read any of C.M. Kornbluth’s work. You should. He was one of the masters. There are two essential books that will tell you all you need to know about him. One is Mark Rich’s magisterial biography, C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, published in 2009 by MacFarland & Company. The other is His Share of Glory: the Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by Timothy P. Szczesuil and published in 1997 by NESFA Press.
The Rich book, 437 large, densely packed pages, is the product of fifteen years’ research. It follows this short-lived genius from his birth in 1923 through his adolescence as a science fiction fan, his eerily precocious ventures into writing, his boyhood friendships with such later great figures of the science fiction world as Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Damon Knight, Isaac Asimov, and Donald A. Wollheim, his arduous military service in Europe during World War II, and his glorious though troubled post-war career as a first-rate science fiction writer, on to his miserably early death, on a railway station in a suburb of New York, after he had overexerted a heart that most probably had been damaged by the stress of his military life. It’s a fascinating, chilling story, full of marvelous literary gossip about the science fiction world of the forties and fifties, some of it new and startling even to me, though I was part of that scene myself during the last four years of Cyril’s life (and was one of the many sources interviewed for the book).
The NESFA book is even bigger: 670 pages, 56 stories, going back to his early pseudonymous work for the pulp magazines of 1940-42, and continuing on beyond the wartime hiatus to his great postwar work and the superb posthumously published stories of 1958 that indicate the even greater unrealized accomplishments that surely lay ahead. Even then the book, though it claims to include his complete short fiction, may not include it all, for seven other early pulp stories, all of them hastily written hackwork, were collected in the 1980 paperback Before the Universe, published as being by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, but—so Mark Rich believes—written entirely or mostly by Kornbluth. According to Rich, Pohl supplied outlines for most or all of these stories, but Kornbluth did the actual writing. Back then they both lived in a sort of science fiction writers’ commune, along with Blish, Knight, Wollheim, and various others, and after a lapse of nearly seventy years it’s impossible to determine who wrote what in that milieu of free-floating collaboration. But my own recent rereading of those stories leads me to think that they are mainly the work of the teenage Kornbluth, though far from his best work even at that time.
Even that early hackwork, knocked out overnight at top speed, holds some interest, though. The plots derive from the formula pulp SF of the day, the characters are strictly cardboard, the dialog is full of comic-book clichés like “What the—” and “That tears it!” But there is a sparkling inventiveness throughout, and sly little touches (in one story a character quotes a line from Dante, without attributing it, as she views the stars from her ship) that reveal the young prodigy, slumming.

I suspect his best-known story is “The Marching Morons,” from 1951. Even people who have never heard of Kornbluth are familiar with its basic idea. He first proposed it, obliquely, in his 1950 classic, “The Little Black Bag”: that after centuries in which the least intelligent members of our species reproduced incessantly and the brightest ones rarely had children at all, the human race would consist of billions of morons shepherded by a tiny high-IQ elite that would constantly be at wits’ end to keep the world functioning. He told that story first by having a bag of futuristic medical equipment, designed so that any dope could use it to perform advanced medical techniques, accidentally sent back in time to 1950. In “The Marching Morons” he reversed the theme, sending a twentieth-century man forward in time to the moron-dominated world of three or four hundred years from now. Rereading it last week with the sharp eyes of someone who has been writing science fiction for two decades longer than Cyril Kornbluth’s entire lifespan, I noticed certain plot problems in it that I hadn’t spotted on earlier readings: the solution to the Too Many Morons problems that the story proposes, not very different morally from the Hitlerian Final Solution to the Jewish Problem, doesn’t really make sense in terms of Kornbluth’s own stated story information. But that hardly matters. The fundamental point of the story remains intact, and there is no way to find fault with Kornbluth’s elegant narrative style. As for the moronic world of the far future that he depicts for us, it is all too uncomfortably similar to our present-day culture of idiotic TV reality shows, crudely ungrammatical newspapers, and unending texting by barely literate teenagers. He saw the future that lay ahead for us better than anyone except, perhaps, Philip K. Dick.

The NESFA collection—not, alas, arranged chronologically—also shows us the late masterpieces, the 1958 stories, that indicate where Kornbluth may have been heading as an artist. “Theory of Rocketry,” about a boy who wants to be an astronaut so badly that he is willing to commit any betrayal necessary, was science fiction in its day; time and the space program have made a mainstream story out of it now. “Shark Ship,” showing the world transformed by ecological disaster, may seem familiar today, but it was a dazzling extrapolation fifty years ago, and is a gripping story even now. And “Two Dooms,” perhaps his most mature work, portrays a United States conquered by Japan and Germany with a vividness that has only been matched by Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle of six years later. Judging by the quality of his prose and his insight into character, Kornbluth in his final year had grown restless with the limitations science fiction imposes and was looking toward the mainstream of fiction.
I haven’t even mentioned the collaborative novels—The Space Merchants and two others done with Frederik Pohl, Mars Child and Gunner Cade with Judith Merril, the three (The Syndic, Takeoff, Not This August) he did on his own, or the six pseudonymous mainstream books. He crowded a lot of living and a lot of writing into a very short time, did Cyril Kornbluth. Then on a winter day in 1958 he shoveled snow from his driveway and hurried to catch a train and died of a heart attack, at thirty-four, at the railway station. Stanley G. Weinbaum (“A Martian Odyssey”), an earlier precocious genius of science fiction, died at thirty-five. Mozart did also. What any of them might have created in the later years of life that were denied them belongs in the realm of alternative history. But we are grateful that Weinbaum and Mozart wrote what they did; and I think you will add C.M. Kornbluth to their number when you discover his stories.