William Tenn (1920–2010)

William Tenn is a science fiction writer who ought to be better known. He was an influential editor and a masterful short story writer with a sly, acerbic wit. Tenn is the pen name of Philip Klass. Klass wrote nonfiction under his own name and should not be confused with Philip J. Klass, who denied the existence of flying saucers. Though he lived until 2010, Tenn wrote most of his science fiction in the 1950s and ‘60s. He wrote only one novel, Of Men and Monsters (1968), that reads like an show more extended short story. It is a single-gimmick story in which humanity is conquered by giant aliens who quickly strip the planet of resources and move on to their next target. Human survivors must decide whether to go with them and occupy an ecological niche in alien culture similar to cockroaches in human culture. Many of the short stories in this omnibus collection have equally sardonic ideas.
Each story has an afterword by Tenn in which he explains what inspired it, how it was received, and what he thinks of it at the end of his career. He also provides the dates of composition and publication for each story—a practice that I wish more anthologists would adopt. “The Masculinist Revolt,” for example, was written in 1961, two years before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, but not published until 1965. It describes a future in which men begin wearing codpieces as political symbols: “There are men people and women people—and what’s the difference anyway? They want something that does what the codpiece does, that tells them they are not people, they’re men!” Tenn says he lost an agent and friends of both sexes over the story—a woman called it a castration fantasy, and a man called it a manifesto. Tenn said the story was meant to be “gently but encompassingly satiric” in the manner of E. B. White. One editor at Playboy said he should expand the story into a novella for the magazine, but another editor sent the story back because he saw it as a satire aimed at the Playboy empire. Tenn concludes, “All right, maybe it’s not the stuff of immortality, but I still think it is pretty good and pretty funny.”
I would say the same for the entire collection. show less

My reactions to reading this novel in 1968. Spoilers follow.

I enjoyed this famous Tenn novel about men living in the walls of the “Monster” alien race that conquered Earth.

This is Tenn so the story is humorous and almost savage in parts. The title comes from Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, but the inspiration and structure of the novel seems to come from the Brobdingnab section of Gulliver’s Travels. The plot starts as a variation on that favored by many stories and films show more featuring primitive (or post-holocaust primitives): a young man finds himself on the wrong side of tribal politics and questioning a religious taboo. Here that's that Ancestor-Science is not as efficacious in battling the Monsters as advertised. After all, as the uncle who initiates hero Eric the Only into the heresy points out, it didn’t do humanity much good in resisting the Monsters. But Alien-Science turns out to be, in part, a scheme by Eric’s uncle to become Chief, a scheme that leads to a brutally suppressed uprising. Eric takes up with the more advanced “back burrowers” only to find their technology and knowledge of Monsters impressive but their military skills lacking. Eventually, he meets, marries, and mates with a woman of the Aaron People (after a funny scene where he tries to act dignified while assessing his mate’s physical wiles).

In a way, this is one of those conceptual breakthrough stories. Eric learns that the tribal society he was born in was based partly on fraud - rigged visions used in naming initiate warriors and “enemy” chiefs who will band together to quell heretic Alien Sciencers. He also learns that not front or back burrower, Ancestor Science or Alien Science is a total solution, that other points of view have merit, that man lives in the walls of Monster houses (the whole novel is set in one Monster house before man leaves for the stars), and that a whole universe exists outside the Monster house, a universe which renders Monsters as inconsequential as man.

My favorite moments are when Tenn defies the clichés of this sort of plot. There is no claim that lost human science can ever defeat the monsters or bring humanity lordship of the Earth. In a discussion about why some ancients saw the Monsters as divine judgment, Rachel, Eric’s mate, remarks man was always guilty about how he treated other animals. How, she asks, can we judge the Monsters brutal (some of the book depicts experiments on humans in an alien Pest Control Lab) for their actions when man historically (and even in the course of this book) does just as brutal things to each other? Another of my favorite scenes is when Eric, told of the Aaron People’s plan to hope on a Monster starship and infest Monster dwellings throughout the universe, bitterly retorts they can’t expect man to become vermin. The Aaron replies that he already is a vermin of a most superior (like the rat and cockroach) kind. This is a condition Eric and everybody else cheerfully accepts at story’s end. show less

I'm sitting here feeling I've almost (not quite, but very nearly) failed some sort of intelligence test with this book. Having completely missed the huge clue in its title, some distance in I was still thinking, 'Well, I like the oddness of this, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere much' and it looked to be heading for a disappointing two stars.
   The set-up is this: after an invasion from space by gigantic aliens (called 'Monsters' throughout) what's left of humanity has been show more reduced to living in a maze of burrows and tunnels - scuttling to and fro behind the wainscotting so to speak - and risking their lives on expeditions out into Monster territory to steal food from the invaders' gigantic larders. The story itself follows raw initiate Eric the Only as he's transformed by his experiences into a resourceful leader; and, although actually published in 1968, it had a pleasantly nostalgic 1950s-or-so feel to it.
   It's a satire of course (the quote from Gulliver's Travels at the start was another Monster-sized clue I nearly missed). For 'men' read 'mice' and for 'monsters' read 'men' - the Monsters are us in disguise, while we are now the mice, annoying 'vermin' to be exterminated. 'See how you like it' is the theme, see how it feels to be a couple of inches tall and at the mercy of something a hundred times your size. And an alien invasion is a good metaphor for that: appearing as if out of nowhere (which, in evolutionary terms at least, H. sapiens certainly has), armed with incomprehensible weapons, suddenly here and taking over the whole world. The book does satirise other things too (religion for instance) but in essence it's about us humans seen from the terrifying perspective of a house mouse.
   So, in the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel as it climbed steadily all the way up to a solid four-star rating. I'm giving myself only one star though; I did get the point of Men and Monsters, did solve the maze and reach the cheese, but only (eek, eek!) by a whisker. show less

Where it's good, it's really good. Where it's corny, it's...well, embarrassingly corny. Where it's strange, it's intriguingly strange. And where it's profound, it is...I swear it...profound. Tenn's work may be uneven, but he is swiftly moving toward the top of my list of the heroes of golden age science fiction. My top Tenn list, perhaps.