Cyril Kornbluth, Accidentally Encountered

Margaret Atwood‘s ecological-collapse novel Oryx and Crake, which I have just gotten around to reading, contains a concept that one might call accidentally derivative. Researchers in the book’s pre-collapse era, the setting (in flashback form) for much of the narrative, discover how to breed a giant, brainless lump of chicken cells, a sort of “chicken hookworm,” from which one can harvest meat at will. Long time science-fiction readers will note the similarity between Atwood’s idea* and an equally horrifying entity in The Space Merchants: Chicken Little, a huge poultry-flavored teratoma whose flesh feeds the corporate future’s proletariat. I think the similarity is an accident because I doubt Atwood read Cyril Kornbluth (1920-58) and Frederick Pohl’s novel; the profit-oriented, price-cutting logic of her future dystopia simply pointed in a similar direction. It is unfortunate, though, how few authors encounter Kornbluth’s ideas, if only so that they can build on rather than duplicate them. Not This August is a far grimmer version of “Soviets Invade America” than Red Dawn, whose one-dimensional Russian bad guys seem comically inept compared to Kornbluth's methodically murderous communists. “Two Dooms” imagined a bleakly believable Hitler Victorious future whose survival Kornbluth grounded in the mental and physical starvation of the helot class and the Nazis ' careful use of psychological manipulation. "The Marching Morons," in its cynical cruelty, still feels surprisingly modern - I remember first reading it in 1983 or '84 and thinking it was new. In one respect it is the exception to the above rule: it served as the unacknowledged basis for Mike Judge’s 2005 film, Idiocracy, though Judge played the scenario more for laughs. Atwood, like Judge, might benefit from doing a little more literary slumming.


*Granted, neither Kornbluth nor Pohl thought to have their chicken cancer colony turned into anything quite so memorably and lubriciously named as “ChickieNobs Bucket o’Nubbins.” Atwood can outwrite practically anyone else alive.

Blurb

At the second or third Arisia convention in Boston, back in Nineteen Ninety-Something-or-Other, Your Humble Narrator attended a panel on science fiction writing, a profession he  hoped one day to undertake. None of the panelists' advice left an impression, alas, but I do remember one author remarking that she had written several hundred blurbs for sci-fi novels. The other panelists asked about the logistics of such an operation; apparently it involves reading a lot of books' first and last pages. I recall thinking that while I might never become a fiction writer, there seemed to be a demand for blurbistes, and perhaps I might one day write one myself.

And so it came to pass! My first SF blurb* appears on Sue Burke's forthcoming novel Semiosis, a tale of interstellar colonization and first contact with an original, unforgettable alien species. I would say the book reminds me of, and compares quite favorably to, the early work of another prominent SF author, but I couldn't do so without giving away some surprises. Best to just read Semiosis and find out for yourself.


(Many thanks to Jennifer Goloboy for making the appropriate introductions here.) 


* Since someone will likely ask: yes, I read the entire book, cover to cover. Skimming isn't my strong suit.