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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 11, No. 12 |
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The Amazing WILLIAM TENN 1921-2010
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His literary voice was unique in the sci-fi genre
of TheColumnists.com
Not many headlines proclaimed the sad news that William Tenn, one of the great writers from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, quietly died Feb. 7 at the age of 89. His passing was not widely mourned outside the sci-fi field.
However, if you are among those of us who grew up on the sci-fi pulps and paperbacks of the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was a very sad day indeed for William Tenn has, for us, always remained a giant.
William Tenn was a masterful short story writer, whose imagination and sense of humor led him to carve out a much respected, but most unusual niche in the history of science fiction. He was writing brilliant short fiction at the same time Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. were blazing their own trails in that literary genre that really boomed in the wake of the atomic explosions in Japan and in the years when NASA was still just a radical idea in corridors of the U.S. government.
I met William Tenn in the summer of 1970 when he and a host of other sci-fi writers came to a literary conference at Stanford University that put focus on the form of writing that Tenn preferred to call "projective fiction." I was a news bureau reporter then, but wangled permission to cover the sci-fi conference in search of good feature stories for my newspaper. I wound up with a slew of them. The other writers I talked with privately included the great Curt Siodmak, author of "Donovan's Brain" and creator of Universal's "The Wolf Man" character; Frank Herbert, whose novel "Dune" was already the hottest property in the sci-fi universe; Harry Harrison, whose novel "Make Room, Make Room" became the legendary sci-fi movie "Soylent Green"; Jack Williamson, a pioneering figure in sci-fi, whose novel "The Humanoids" remains a classic of the genre; Harlan Ellison, the brilliant young writer who was then writing radical TV criticism for an underground newspaper in L.A., but soon would create TV's "The Starlost" series; and, amazingly, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., just then becoming a literary superstar, who seemed quite surprised I'd actually read his satircal little masterpiece called "The Sirens of Titan."
I took a great liking to William Tenn almost immediately, especially after he explained his real name was Philip Klass, then told me how he came to be called William Tenn. It seems he started writing under the false assumption that ALL writers had to have pen names, so he put a different fake name on each new short story he sent out and the first one he sold was under the name "William Tenn."
Klass chuckled when he explained that the publisher naturally wanted more stories from this guy William Tenn. So, he supplied him with a batch, taking all the other pen names off the manuscripts and turning them all into William Tenn originals.
"When I tried to publish something under my own name, the editors always refused," he told me. "They told me William Tenn sold books, but Philip Klass didn't."
(Eventually, he was able to publish under his own name and used it for several books he wrote about UFO's.)
Tenn/Klass was a scholarly-looking man and wore eyeglasses and a Van Dyke style beard or goatee. So, it was no surprise to learn that he was a professor of literature at Penn State University under his real name. In that role, he was to become an inspiration to scores of young writers who knew of his other identity. One of them was a writer I've admired for years--David Morrell, whose sensational first novel "First Blood" became the launchpad for the John Rambo character that Sylvester Stallone turned into a movie franchise. Morrell has always credited Phil Klass with giving him his start as a novelist.
I decided right off the bat that this man was a great character unto himself. I described him in that news feature I wrote about him as looking "like the scientist in the science fiction movie who is called in at the last minute to find a way to stop the giant grasshopper from eating the Brooklyn Bridge."
I still love to revisit his stories and especially his first novel--"Of Men and Monsters," which speculates about a future Earth in which giant creatures take up residence, unaware that humans are anything more significant as vermin. His heroes live in the walls of the aliens' homes, desperately trying to hold together what remains of human culture. It's a tongue-in-cheek masterpiece that's also quite a thriller.
I also loved his story "Null-P," in which dogs evolve into the dominant species and train humans to become retrievers. Anoother great one is "Party of Two Parts," which involves an inter-galactic amoeba that gets into trouble for selling protozoan pornography to earthlings. As you can tell, this man's imagination knew no boundaries.
The London-born Klass was a devout Socialist and predicted a nuclear weapons standoff between nations of Earth eventually might lead to a very repressive world society. I met him at a time when American college campuses were erupting with anti-Vietnam War violence. He told me he had worked hard to "cool" student radicals at his own campus. When I asked him if he knew a certain radical leader at Stanford whose brand of politics was Maoism, Klass said he was aware of the chap and considered him, "one of the many brilliant young Neanderthal thinkers who are working in a laboratory where new chains for the spirit are being forged."
He did, though, have a optimistic view of the future, even though he thought we might indeed wind up a "prison world." He believed that the human spirit would survive intact and that writers of imaginative fiction "will always be needed for progress."
Now that he's gone, it seems the right time for me to conduct my own personal revival of William Tenn. I'm now in the process of rounding up all those yellowed paperback editions of his stories that I'm sure glad I never threw away. I'm absolutely certain I'm going to be enthralled by them all over again.
©2010 by Ron Miller. The photo of Philip Klass is courtesy of the website in his name operated by his family. The book cover reproductions are courtesy of the publishers and Amazon.com. This column first posted March 15, 2010.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series.
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