William Tenn
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The tiny lifeboat seemed to hang suspended from its one working rear jet, then it sideslipped and began to spin violently downwards to the sickly orange ground of the planet. Inside the narrow cabin, Dr. Helena Naxos was hurled away from the patient she was tending and slammed into a solid bulkhead. The shock jolted the breath out of her. She shook her head and grabbed frantically at an overhead support as the cabin tilted again. Jake Donelli glared...
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THE FLAT-EYED MONSTER (August 1955) is exemplary of the story of distorted or skewed perspective which fascinated Horace Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine. Call these "reversals" in which the use of uncommon perspective skews the material under observation into a new formulation. Here, the "alien" is human, the "predicament" is one which the aliens face in his presence and the mysterious, alien forces exerted by the protagonist are as seemingly...
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Horace Gold's editorial persona at GALAXY magazine was devoted to the proposition that the only way to tell the truth was through the back door and in costume; PARTY OF THE TWO PARTS (August 1954) is the most savage meditation on and destruction of pornography and its industry which had been published at the time it appeared, but William Tenn made sure that it was so funny that it could slide by as wicked comedy. By mid-1954 Philip Klass, the purveyor...
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It was Eric's birthday, the day he became a man. And that could only mean one thing. It was time for him to steal for mankind. The aliens had subjugated humans with technology so far in advanced of anything that mankind had ever developed that it was unthinkable that man would ever claim back his home planet. Or was it?
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Women rule because of their greater ability to use and understand logic while men can't be trusted to be anything other than emotional. 'Venus Is a Man's World' takes you on a humorous, satirical romp that only William Tenn could pull off. Wry, witty, and intelligent.
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Originally published in the August 1956 issue of GALAXY, this novelette shows William Tenn (pseudonym for Phillip Klass) at the peak of his career in science fiction. Sardonic, profoundly disillusioned and fashioned in the form of a classic deductive mystery, the work was enormously influential and its central plot premise has been appropriated by others over many decades. Original to science fiction--perhaps to the entire body of literature--is the...
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It was a good job and Max Alben knew whom he had to thank for it-his great-grandfather. "Good old Giovanni Albeni," he muttered as he hurried into the laboratory slightly ahead of the escorting technicians, all of them, despite the excitement of the moment, remembering to bob their heads deferentially at the half-dozen full-fleshed and hard-faced men lolling on the couches that had been set up around the time machine.
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In an afterword to this story when it was reprinted over a decade ago in his three volume complete works, Phillip Klass (who used the pseudonym "William Tenn" for his science fiction) noted that he had been paid originally $790 for this 23,000 word novella which was, before he sold BERNIE THE FAUST for $5000 to Playboy a few years later, the largest amount he had ever received for a single work. Such was the science fiction market in the 50's (and...
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Tenn's second contribution to GALAXY and his first of a series dealing with interstellar racketeering, BETELGEUSE BRIDGE was first published in the April 1951 issue. Its baroque humor, Runyonesque portrait of corruption and narrative ingenuity foreshadowed Tenn's dominance of GALAXY for the next decade. Appearing in the same issue as Poul Anderson's INSIDE EARTH and Cyril Kornbluth's THE MARCHING MORONS, Horace Gold had made it an important part of...
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These are three imaginative science fiction stories by an author I admire a lot, William Tenn. Venus is a Man's World: Women rule because of their greater ability to use and understand logic while men can't be trusted to be anything other than emotional. 'Venus Is a Man's World' takes you on a humorous, satirical romp that only William Tenn could pull off. Wry, witty, and intelligent. Project Hush: We were stuck with calling it Project Hush and we...
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Earth is ruled by women. In fact it was worse than that! Only women could be Earth Citizens these days ever since the Male Desuffrage Act. Men must 'belong' to a woman to have a say in anything and have become weak and somewhat silly. William Tenn tells a delightful story here of the future where women indeed rule earth, but an entire shipload of women are on a space ship going to Venus looking for husbands because they have heard that real men are...
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What would happen is men's and women's roles were swapped in future culture? If women naturally were assumed to be in leadership roles and basically in charge of everything while men .... well men, poor things, would just do what they could with the limited gifts they had. The first story, Venus is a Man's World, explores this intriguing thought. His second story is just as off beat and involves using time travel to 'fix' a terrible world situation....
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"If his great-grandfather had not volunteered for the earliest time-travel experiments way back in the nineteen-seventies, back even before the Blight, it would never have been discovered that he and his seed possessed a great deal of immunity to extra-temporal blackout.
And if that had not been discovered, the ruling powers of Earth, more than a century later, would never have plucked Max Alben out of an obscure civil-service job as a relief guard...