Critical Mass

Afterword

Some person who is not me will have to decide how great a writer Cyril Kornbluth was. I was too close to him, as collaborator in many ways, and as friend.

In all, we wrote four science-fiction novels together*, plus three novels which were not science fiction and, in various permutations, with and without other collaborators, several dozen stories.

There are still in my files a few fragments of stories, and one huge chunk of a novel, not science fiction, about the Civil War. For technical reasons I do not think the novel is likely ever to be finished and published by anybody. None of the other fragments have enough in them to go on, and so unless some unexpected treasure trove turns up there will be no more.

So I think that this volume, which contains stories published as long as a decade and a half after his death, contains the last of the work of Cyril Kornbluth which is ever likely to see print; and I regret very much the loss to all of us, and personally and particularly to myself, of this bright and rewarding talent.

*There was a fifth, Marschild, which began as a short story of mine but was otherwise written almost entirely by Cyril and my then wife, Judith Merril.