The Wonder Effect

Introduction

Cyril Kornbluth, who was my good friend as well as my collaborator over a period of two decades, was seventeen years old when we first began writing stories together, was not quite twenty. Neither of us was entirely an amateur – I was editing two science-fiction magazines, long since perished, and Cyril had already published three or four science-fiction stories – but we were so near to it as made no difference, and many of our writing habits were formed at the same time, writing the same stories.

In all, we wrote together seven published novels and perhaps thirty-five short stories. The short stories were what we did first, and most of them are awful. Of the thirty or so of these which we wrote from 1939 to 1943 at least twenty-five will forever remain buried under the pseudonyms under which they were first published, if I have anything to say about it; but a few of them do seem to be worth another look, and they are included in this collection.

Then we both went into the Army in World War II. The idea of writing anything, particularly science fiction, seemed pretty remote to both of us. I recently came across a letter Cyril wrote to me while he was a machine-gunner in Belgium and I was a weatherman near Foggia in which he said, 'I'm afraid science fiction has had it, killed by radar and the sniper-scope.' I don't remember whether I agreed or not. Certainly it seemed like a logical point of view at the time. Science had caught up with science fiction and there didn't seem to be much future for the art ... Less than a year later we were both civilians and both writing science fiction again; but Cyril was in Chicago, a newsman employed by a wire service, and I was writing advertising copy for an agency in New York, and we didn't collaborate again until 1951, when we wrote The Space Merchants.

A number of reviewers have speculated, and readers from time to time ask, what the mechanics of collaboration were between us. I take this to condone the vanity of supplying an answer. There isn't one single answer, though, because we tried everything. At first I made up plots, Cyril fleshed out the stories and I rewrote them in final form for publication. That was the technique that produced the bulk of the early stories which I now hope to see forgotten. It was not a very good way of writing a story, and we never wrote a complete story that way after 1942. (I do retain some fondness for a few stories produced under that scheme. Best Friend, Mars-Tube and Trouble in Time were written that way.)

The Space Merchants was written on an entirely different basis. I had written the first twenty thousand words of this story with the intention of doing it all by myself; but I showed it to Horace Gold, editing Galaxy Magazine, who wanted to publish it as a serial – not in ten years or when I got around to finishing it, but soon. Cyril had just come East. I showed him the part I had written and asked if he wanted to come in on it; he did; he went home and wrote the next twenty thousand words or so and then, turn and turn about, we wrote the last third of the book together.

That turned out to be a remarkably pleasant way to write a book. As we ultimately refined the process, we would spend a day or two talking out ideas and plot and then go on a concentrated, around-the-clock schedule, one working while the other slept, of producing manuscript in five-page chunks. What emerged was a good, healthy first draft. There were always revisions, which I usually did; but the changes were mostly cosmetic. The watch-on watch-off writing was generally done at my house in New Jersey, where Cyril had a room permanently set aside for him, and thus, in alternate increments of 1,500 words or so, we constructed Search the Sky, Gladiator-at-Law and most of our three novels which were outside the science-fiction field. (Two of these were done wholly in this way. The third was like The Space Merchants in reverse; Cyril had begun a novel and was behind schedule and we finished it together.)

I don't know how well this system would work for anyone else. We had the advantage of long practice – and of having done some of our growing up together, so that our attitudes were more or less similar. Quite often a species of telepathy seemed to come into it. Several times 1 ended a page in the middle of a sentence and discovered, when it came my turn again, that Cyril had used the exact wording I had had in mind to complete it.

Wolf bane was a different sort of story. We planned it as a 15,000 word novelette—and wrote it that way, too, turn and about. But it was almost unreadable, far too telegraphic and compressed; and I opened it out to about 40,000 words, in which form it was published as a magazine serial; whereafter Cyril expanded it to about 60,000 words for the final book version. This was almost the last writing Cyril did before his death.

Of the stories in this volume, The Engineer was the only short we wrote together in the period between The Space Merchants and Wolf bane, and it was an accident. (In a different form, it was intended to have been a sequence in one of the novels.) A Gentle Dying, which was one of the last of our stories to be published, was actually almost the first we wrote. The manuscript was misplaced for years and did not turn up again until Cyril had died. The remaining stories in this book are all projects which were incomplete at his death, and which I subsequently completed. There are still one or two lost manuscripts, but it isn't very likely that they will turn up at this date, and barring such event there will be no more.

As this is not an obituary for Cyril Kornbluth but only a note on some of the stories we wrote together, I do not suppose it fitting to dwell on personal matters. But Cyril was a good, man: intelligent, able, illuminating every gathering in which he took part. It was a pleasure to work with him. I cannot say how much I regret that it is over.

Frederik Pohl