review of
Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth's Critical Mass
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 30, 2012

Another great bk by Kornbluth & Pohl, reinforcing their place in my pantheon of favorite sf writers. In my adult yrs this pantheon consisted originally of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, & Samuel Delaney. The Strugatsky Brothers were added, then Stanislav Lem. Sometimes 'James Tiptree, Jr'. Vladimir Savchencko & Michel Jeury on the strengths of the single bks I've been able to find by each of them. Other people drifting in & out from time to time. But Pohl & Kornbluth are in there solid now.

Kornbluth was born July 2, 1923, 4 yrs later than Pohl, but had the misfortune to die March 21, 1958. Pohl was born November 26, 1919 & is, as far as I 'know' still alive today. W/ each new successive Pohl introduction to their collaborative works that I read, I feel the loss more of Kornbluth as a major talent more. This particular collection is the most poignant one yet in that respect b/c all of the collaborations were finished by Pohl from works of Kornbluth unfinished &/or unpublished as of Kornbluth's death. From Pohl's introduction:

"Cyril had always been a little plumper than was strictly good for him. When the Army made him a machine-gunner, lugging a 50-calibre-heavy MG around the Ardennes forest, they shortened his life. Exertions damaged his heart, and in his midthirties his doctor told him that he had a clear choice. He could give up smoking, drinking, spices in his food, a lot of the food itself, irregular hours and excitement; or he could die of hypertension.

"For a while Cyril tried doing what the doctor told him. he took his medicine: tranquilizers, mostly, the not-quite-perfected tranquilizers of the fifties, which had such side-effects as making him a little confused and a little intellectually sluggish. He followed the diet rigorously. He came out to visit us during that period, and my wife cooked salt-free meals and baked salt-free bread. We couldn't do much writing. He was not up to it. But I showed him a novel I was having problems with. he read the pages of the first draft and handed it back to me. "Needs salt," he asaid, and that was all.

"So I suppose Cyril made his choice. In his place, I think I might have made the same one. he went back to coffee and cigarettes, gave up the medication, went back to writing, finished the revisions to Wolfbane, wrote two or three of his best novelettes, signed on as an editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - his first experiment with editing, rather than writing, science fiction, and one which he enjoyed enormously. ...And then on a snowy March morning I had a phone call from Mary, his wife, to say that Cyril had shoveled out their driveway to free his car, run to catch a train and dropped dead on the station platform.

"He left behind a bundle of incomplete manuscripts and fragments, some of which I was later able to revise and complete. Most of the stories in this volume came out of that bale of paper, and were published after his death."

This was the 1st collection of Kornbluth/Pohl stories that included non-SF. One of these is "A Hint of Henbane" wch Kornbluth had finished but not sold. Pohl reworked it & sold it to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Then there's "The Meeting" about wch Pohl wrote:

"A few years before his death, Cyril wrote a story about a school for "exceptional" children. It was not science fiction; it was not exactly a story, for that matter (being more description than event) and no one seemed to want to buy it. But it came out of Cyril's heart, because one of his children was in just such a school."

All in all, this is a diverse collection: "Mute Inglorious Tam", eg, is set in medieval England w/o being a time travel story, "The World of Myrion Flowers" has black characters (for wch it was criticized despite it's being anti-racist), "The Engineer" is a tale of politicking interfering w/ function - something I witness all the time in the museums where I work. Kornbluth's imagination was fertile, Pohl's still is, I only wish Kornbluth had lived as long. ( )