In the late 1930s, a group of New York SF fans formed a writing group and became known as the Futurians. This group included such well-known names as James Blish, Donald Wollheim, and Richard Wilson. Another member of the Futurians was a teenager by the name of Cyril M. Kornbluth. This young man would go on to become one of the great minds of SF.
Born in 1923, Kornbluth sold his first story at the age of 16 to fellow Futurian and editor Frederik Pohl—with whom he would later collaborate on a number of short stories and novels. Of Kornbluth, Pohl said in his memoir The Way the Future Was: "Cyril Kornbluth was born with a trenchant phrase in his mouth. He was terribly young and inexperienced—around fifteen when I published his first story. But he was learning fast the technical skills of story construction, and he had never needed to learn to shape a sentence."*
Certainly Kornbluth came of age, just as Pohl indicated. Years later, another SF great and fellow Futurian, Isaac Asimov, said of him: "Cyril Kornbluth was, perhaps, the most brilliant and certainly the most erratic of the Futurians. He was, perhaps, more brilliant than I was..."
It is unfortunate and a loss to SF fans that his greatness was never allowed to reach its full potential. In 1958, at the young age of 35, C.M. Kornbluth died of a heart attack after shoveling snow and then running to catch a commuter train. As you will see from the bibliography at the end of this article, his output was prolific; and at the age of 35 there were surely many masterpieces that he was never able to write. What gems would he have bestowed upon us had
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