Pseudonym of UK-born academic and writer Philip Klass (1920-2010), whose American parents brought him to the US in his infancy; he taught writing and sf at The Pennsylvania State University between 1966 and 1988. After serving in World War Two, Klass began writing sf as by William Tenn, the name he used for all his fiction, publishing his first work of genre interest, "Alexander the Bait", for Astounding in May 1946. It is a tale that demonstrates the pointed (and, in terms of the sf shibboleths of 1946, iconoclastic) intelligence of his work in its Prediction that Space Flight would be achieved institutionally rather than through the efforts of an individual inventor-industrialist-genius (> Edisonade) – a prediction that sf as a whole was remarkably loath to make, and with the reality of which it proved subsequently loath to live. He soon followed it with what remains his most famous story, the brilliant (but ultimately scathing) Time Paradox tale "Brooklyn Project" (Fall 1948 Planet Stories), which fell foul of the 1940s zeitgeist, being rejected by John W Campbell Jr and others. In conspicuously easy to decipher code [for Aesopian Fantasy see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], the tale conflates the technophilic triumphalism of the 1940s with bureaucratic thought control, suggesting en passant that the enterprise of Western Civilization might give birth to monsters.
From the first, Tenn was one of the genre's very few genuinely comic, genuinely incisive writers of short fiction, sharper and more mature than Fredric Brown and less self-indulgent in his Satirical take on the modern world than Robert Sheckley. From 1950 onwards he found a congenial market in Galaxy, where he published much of his best work before falling relatively quiet after about 1960, perhaps (John Clute has suggested) because he found the apparent freedom to speak freely in the late twentieth century very similar to what Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) defined as "Repressive Tolerance" (the essay so entitled appears in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, anth 1965, ed anon). Tenn was perhaps, in other words, a writer who worked most freely in a world whose censoring strictures were explicit. Despite his cheerful surface and the occasional zany Humour of his stories, Tenn, like most real satirists, was fundamentally a pessimist, a writer who persisted in describing the bars of the prison; when the comic disguise was whipped off, as happened with some frequency, the result was salutary.
Among the finer stories assembled in his first collection, Of All Possible Worlds (coll 1955; with 2 stories cut and 3 added, rev 1956), were "Down Among the Dead Men" (June 1954 Galaxy), about the use of Androids reconstituted from human corpses as front-line troops in a savage interstellar war, "The Liberation of Earth" (May 1953 Future), in which liberation is imposed upon Earth alternately by two warring Alien races (in a prescient satirical model for much of the revolutionary activity of later decades), and "The Custodian" (November 1953 If), an effective variant on the Last-Man-on-Earth theme. Most of the contents of his five further collections date from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s: The Human Angle (coll 1956), Time in Advance (coll 1958), comprising four longer stories, The Seven Sexes (coll 1968), The Square Root of Man (coll 1968) and The Wooden Star (coll 1968), each containing at least some examples of his best work. In The Human Angle, for instance, can be found "Wednesday's Child" (January 1956 Fantastic Universe), in which a rather simple young woman's biological peculiarities climax in her giving birth to herself, and "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway" (October 1955 Galaxy), which involves Time Travel and (unusually in Genre SF) evolves into a serious look at the nature of the making of Art. Tenn's occasional post-1960 stories maintained the high calibre, comic manner and dark vision of his early work; but read less easily.
Of Men and Monsters (October 1963 Galaxy as "The Men in the Walls"; exp 1968), Tenn's only full-length novel – released at the same time and in the same format as the three 1968 collections listed above, and burdened with a title that seemed to indicate merely a further assembly – had little impact on publication, although its reputation has justifiably grown. Giant Aliens have occupied Earth and almost eliminated mankind, except for small groups living, like mice, as a Wainscot Society within the walls of the aliens' dwellings. These humans manage to survive, and even prosper after a fashion – though the rites of passage they engage upon, and the Conceptual Breakthroughs they experience, can only be seen as ironically reversing the implications of such moments as they occur in "normal" sf. As the novel closes, humanity is about to spread, again like mice, hiding in niches in the holds of the aliens' gigantic Spaceships, to the stars. Also published in derisory book form at this time was A Lamp for Medusa (October 1951 Fantastic Adventures as "Medusa was a Lady!"; 1968 chap dos), a fantasy-like tale in which a young American falls into a kind of Parallel World where, as Perseus, he is given an opportunity to rewrite human history.
Philip Klass is not to be confused with Philip J Klass (1919-2005), US electrical engineer and UFO debunker, for many years senior editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology, whose books include UFOs Identified (1968), Secret Sentries in Space (1971), UFOs Explained (1974), UFOs: The Public Deceived (1983) and UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1988). The sf community granted Tenn no awards until – three decades after he had effectively retired – the 1999 Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Author Emeritus award (> SFWA Grand Master Award). [JC]
see also: Automation; Children in SF; Comic Inferno; Ecology; Games and Sports; Great and Small; History of SF; Mathematics; Medicine; Miniaturization; Politics; Psychology; Secret Masters; Toys in SF; Transmutation; Zombies.
born London: 9 May 1920
died Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 7 February 2010
works
collections
series
Complete Science Fiction
individual titles
nonfiction
works as editor
about the author