{"id":1340,"date":"2018-07-23T20:45:52","date_gmt":"2018-07-24T01:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2018-07-23T20:45:52","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T01:45:52","slug":"an-observance-of-c-m-kornbluths-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/an-observance-of-c-m-kornbluths-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"An Observance of C. M. Kornbluth’s Birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Ninety-five years ago today, on July 23, 1923, Cyril Kornbluth was born in New York City.\u00a0 The middle initial was added later.\u00a0 Although he has faded into relative obscurity today, Kornbluth was one of the best science fiction writers of the 1950’s.\u00a0 He died on March 12, 1958 of a heart attack.\u00a0 He was on his way to an interview with Robert P. Mills for the editorship of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Kornbluth was primarily a writer of short fiction.\u00a0 He only wrote a handful of solo novels.\u00a0 The rest of his novels were collaborations with Judith Merrill and Frederik Pohl.\u00a0 His most famous collaboration with Pohl was The Space Merchants<\/em>.\u00a0 While he also wrote at least a book’s length worth of short stories in collaboration with Pohl, the bulk of his short work wasn’t collaborative.\u00a0 Pohl and Kornbluth were founding members of the famed (and infamous) Futurians.<\/p>\n

Kornbluth’s work is marked by a bitter cynicism and often contained some pretty dark satire.\u00a0 (Maybe that’s why he appealed to me when I encountered it as a teenager.)\u00a0 His most famous stories are “The Little Black Bag”, which resembles Kuttner and Moore’s “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” in that an object from the future is sent back into the past (our present), and its sequel “The Marching Morons”.\u00a0 The latter takes place in a future where a few elite control a population of morons, and there are no common characters between the two stories.\u00a0 “The Marching Morons” is as relevant today as it was when it was written.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>NESFA Press collected all Kornbluth’s short fiction in His Share of Glory<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 It’s also available in an audiobook.\u00a0 I read it years ago; it’s due to be dusted off and read again. \u00a0 I’ll try to take a closer look at one of his stories later this week.\u00a0 There are some gems in this collection.\u00a0 Kornbluth needs to be more widely read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ninety-five years ago today, on July 23, 1923, Cyril Kornbluth was born in New York City.\u00a0 The middle initial was added later.\u00a0 Although he has faded into relative obscurity today, Kornbluth was one of the best science fiction writers of the 1950’s.\u00a0 He died on March 12, 1958 of a heart attack.\u00a0 He was on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[296],"tags":[775,778],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthday","tag-birthday","tag-c-m-kornbluth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-lC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1343,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/1343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}