Before the Universe [Mass Market Paperback]

Before the Pearl Harbor incident American SF had an innocent and positive outlook on matters. After The War the American SF authors seemed to be as enamored, for a while at least, as the British in writing post-apocalypse, last man, alien invasion, dystopian and overall cautionary anti-science fiction tales where technology was a "bad thing" types of stories which were previously mainly the domain of the British SF authors.

This collection contains the stories Pohl and Kornbluth wrote together before going off to fight in that war, after which both men, and the genre(the entire world for that matter) would be forever changed.

These guys are perhaps* the best collaborators in SF history and it's neat to see in the introduction just how they went about this collaboration business of theirs. Pohl basically played editor, handing Kornbluth the outline with plot description and action sequences. Kornbluth would then write the story as he saw fit and turn it over to Pohl for revision and editing.

Rather than give extensive reviews of each story, I'll just say that each of these stories is really good-to-great and each one has a 'hook' or a big-time irony. I will give a review of the one story I enjoyed most.

My favorite story in this collection is the first one, MARS-TUBE. It would make a pretty neat novel with it's intricate system of underground rapid transit tunnels and a little more exploration into the details of how the war with Mars was fought would be a big bonus. As it is, its a lotta story packed into 30 pages and it moves pretty fast because all the suspense contained in this story really keeps you wondering what will happen next.

Kornbluth never was the same after the war. He didn't write another story on his own again until 1949 and then seemed to return to almost normal until the mid-fifties. He suffered from complications of what was diagnosed, by the military, as "exposure" as well as hypertension. He had to take pills which basically turned him into a zombie and killed his creativity. He eventually stopped taking these pills and regained his creative edge, but that killed him. He died from a heart attack in 1958 at 34 years of age.

These stories capture him at his best; before the war, before his illness, before the pills.

(*) see the stories written by husband/wife team Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore as Lewis Padgett which were the most popular stories being written during the war years while most of the other authors were "over there".

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see the review  5.0 out of 5 stars