illiam Tenn's career demands an explanation--or perhaps we demand an explanation from him. Both demands are the same demand. What we want to know from him is why he stopped writing SF. What we want to know about his career is why he stopped writing SF. I have a theory.
William Tenn, an urban Jew whose real name is Philip Klass, was born in 1920. He is alive today. He began writing SF while serving in World War II, and began publishing his tales in 1946, just before the Cold War began. From that year until the mid-1960s, he was a moderately prolific author, mostly of short stories and novelettes. He was a central figure in the dominant magazines of the time, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was witty, satirical, sharp-tongued. He was loved. In addition to the short work where he was most at home, there was also a novella, A Lamp for Medusa, and in 1968 a novel, Of Men and Monsters, a title hugely unfortunate in its consequences. Coming as it did from a man known only for short stories, the title of this book was so obviously the title of a collection that when it was published--along with three retrospective short story collections whose titles also sounded like short story collection titles--very few people ever knew a novel had been released.
Some thought at the time (I certainly had this thought in the years following 1968) that the disappointment that the near non-appearance of a long-meditated novel would inevitably cause might well explain Tenn's subsequent departure from the field. There are hints of this supposition in comments I've made in print lamenting the failure of SF to continue to interest a man of the stature of William Tenn.
But now that Immodest Proposals has appeared from NESFA, this thesis can take a rest. Disappointment at the invisibling of a precious novel may have been a factor; far more important, however, from a reading or re-reading of the 33 stories here assembled, is a sense that if, after 1970, William Tenn could hardly write SF any more, it was because the world of 1970 no longer needed his particular trick.
William Tenn's trick was Aesop.
Like Aesop--or Evgeny Zamiatin, or Strugatsky Brothers, or Stanislaw Lem, or Josef Nesvadba, or a hundred other 20th-century writers who lived under oppressive regimes whose owners were rightly terrified of the subversive power of naked story--William Tenn used the codes of SF to write what could be understood as beast fables about the real world, the world the commissars (or John W. Campbell Jr., or J. Edgar Hoover) could not permit to be described in clear, as though the empiry of the Cold War had no clothes. William Tenn, a left-wing Jew in Cold War America, became, therefore, American SF's one master of Aesopian language.
SF through the looking-Klass
As I said in an entry on the topic in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), Aesopian fantasy can be defined as a tale which normally uses talking animals to convey points about human nature--and that, moreover, whether or not talking animals appeared, for tales to be understood as Aesopian it was only necessary for their moral intent to seem to be concealed.
Here is an example.
The example--"Brooklyn Project" (1948, Planet Stories)--may be the most famous of Tenn's Aesopian tales. An ominous bureaucrat announces to a set of reporters that the Brooklyn Project has succeeded. In a few minutes, "man's first large-scale excursion into time will begin." A reporter asks the bureaucrat about the danger of modifying history by tampering--committing amnesia upon--the past. The bureaucrat makes it clear that a question of this sort is disloyal, and that certain scientists who had earlier expressed their own doubts on the subject had been summarily dealt with. The reporter quails and shuts up. The time machine begins to work, sending a kind of camera-eye in an oscillating pattern back through time, then back to the present, then back to a more recent period in the deep past, then back to now, then back to an even more recent period. As the ball progresses, affecting the past in almost inconceivably minor ways (this is also chaos theory before the fact), everything changes; but--as the reporter had feared--it is impossible to perceive this in the transformed present. After the experiment is over, the bureaucrat glows with success:
"See," cried the thing that had been the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations. "See, no matter how subtly! Those who billow were wrong: we haven't changed." He extended fifteen purple blobs triumphantly. "Nothing has changed!"
But Aesop had to feign innocence convincingly. He could not be seen pretending to feign innocence, and not be whipped (he was, after all, a slave, and probably blind). "Brooklyn Project" may be an Aesop's fable for the 20th century; but at the same time it so obviously pretends to be Aesopian, so obviously expects its readers to understand its political implications right off, that no warden of Cold War values could have been fooled into thinking the tale wasn't actually about the state of American in a time of plague. And indeed, when Tenn delivered the manuscript to John W. Campbell by hand, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction literally threw it back at him across his desk. Every other science fiction magazine--except, ultimately, the lowly Planet Stories--rejected it. They did not reject "Brooklyn Project"--which became one of the two or three most famous time-travel stories ever told--because it was bad. They rejected it because it only pretended to feign to tell the truth by accident. Tenn may have found an enabling engine in Aesop, a shape of telling that fired him into the fire of telling; but he was altogether too clear about what he was about.
In most of the Aesopian tales assembled in Immodest Proposals, Tenn is cooler than this, and most of his Aesop drag tales (as we discover from the highly informative notes he appends to each tale) slipped easily into print. And the best of them--those in this volume include "Generation of Noah" (1951, Suspense), "Down Among the Dead Men" (1954, Galaxy), "Time in Advance" (1956, Galaxy), "Winthrop Was Stubborn" (1957, Galaxy) and "The Custodian (1953, If)--almost invariably displace their gravamen.
So. In 1955, William Tenn could write SF stories which were really Beast Fables that Aesop might have told, had he been Blind Willie McTell. In 1970, after the dissolution of the moral and political shibboleths which had earlier governed the magazines, and after he became free to write anything he wanted in clear, he could no longer find any traction in SF. The late stories published here are not beast fables; they are sarcasms, undisguised, side-of-the-mouth witty, casual, uninterested.
William Tenn was bored with freedom, the freedom of America in 1970 which Herbert Marcuse defined as "repressive tolerance"; the freedom to publish your dissent with only one condition: that all profit and all power remain in the hands of those who publish whatever you want to write; the freedom to continue shopping which lacked--hey!--sufficient traction to allow William Tenn to tell the truth, so he left. He went on to other things. He is sorely missed. I do not think he will ever return.
