Time Waits for Winthrop Read online

  Time Waits for Winthrop

  The Galaxy Project

  William Tenn

  Series Editor Barry N. Malzberg

  Copyright

  Time Waits for Winthrop

  Copyright © 1956 by Philip Klass, renewed 1984

  Time Waits For Winthrop: Introduction

  Copyright © 2011 by Robert Silverberg

  Jacket illustration copyright © 1954 by the Estate of Ed Emshwiller

  Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

  Special materials copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

  ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795321412

  Contents

  About Galaxy Magazine

  About Science Fiction Novelettes and Novellas

  About the Author

  About the Author of the eForeword

  About the Jacket

  eForeword

  Time Waits for Winthrop

  ABOUT GALAXY MAGAZINE

  The first issue of Galaxy, dated October 1950, already heralded to the highest standards of the field. The authors it published regularly contributed to the leading magazine Astounding, writing a kind of elegant and humanistic science fiction which although not previously unknown had always been anomalous. Its founding editor, H. L. Gold (1914–1996), was a science fiction writer of some prominence whose editorial background had been in pulp magazines and comic books; however, his ambitions were distinctly literary, and he was deliberately searching for an audience much wider and more eclectic than the perceived audience of science fiction. His goal, he stated, was a magazine whose fiction “Would read like the table of contents of a literary magazine or The Saturday Evening Post of the 21st century, dealing with extrapolation as if it were contemporary.” The magazine, although plagued by distribution difficulties and an Italian-based publisher (World Editions), was an immediate artistic success, and when its ownership was transferred with the issue of August 1951 to its printer Robert M. Guinn, it achieved financial stability for the remainder of the decade.

  Galaxy published every notable science fiction writer of its first decade and found in many writers who would become central figures: Robert Sheckley, James E. Gunn, Wyman Guin, and F. L. Wallace, among others. Galaxy revivified older writers such as Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester (whose first novel, The Demolished Man, was commissioned and directed page by page by Gold). John Campbell fought with Astounding and remained an important editor, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (inaugurated a year before Galaxy) held to high standards of literary quality while spreading its contents over two fields, but Galaxy was incontestably the 1950s’ flagship magazine for the acidly satiric, sometimes profoundly comic aspect of its best contributions. Galaxy had a lasting effect not only upon science fiction but upon literature itself. J.G. Ballard stated that he had been deeply affected by Galaxy. Alan Arkin, an actor who became a star after 1960 and won an Oscar in the new millennium, contributed two stories in the mid-fifties.

  At this point Gold was succumbing to agoraphobia, physical ills, and overall exhaustion (some of this perhaps attributable to his active service during WWII) against which he had struggled from the outset. (There is creditable evidence that Frederik Pohl was the de facto editor during Gold’s last years.) Gold would return some submissions with notes like: “Garbage,” “Absolute Crap.” Isaac Asimov noted in his memoir “Anthony Boucher wrote rejection slips which read like acceptances. And Horace wrote notes of acceptance which felt like rejections.” Despite this, the magazine retained most of its high standard and also some of its regular contributors (William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Pohl himself). Others could no longer bear Gold’s imperiousness and abusiveness.

  ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION NOVELETTES AND NOVELLAS

  In the view of James E. Gunn, science fiction as a genre finds its peak in the novella (17,500–40,000 words) and novelette (7,500–17,500 words). Both forms have the length to develop ideas and characters fully but do not suffer from padding or the hortatory aspect present in most modern science fiction novels. The longer story-form has existed since science fictions inception with the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, but Galaxy developed the form to a consistent level of sophistication and efficiency and published more notable stories of sub-novel length than any other magazine during the 50s…and probably in any decade.

  The novella and novelette as forms make technical and conceptual demands greater, perhaps even greater than the novel, and Galaxy writers, under founding editor H. L. Gold’s direction, consistently excelled in these lengths. Gold’s most memorable story, “A Matter of Form” (1938) was a long novelette, and he brought practical as well as theoretical lessons to his writers, who he unleashed to develop these ideas. (John Campbell of course, had also done this in the 40s and continued in the 50s to be a directive editor.) It is not inconceivable that many or even most of the contents of the 1950’s Galaxy were based on ideas originated by Gold: golden technology becomes brass and jails its human victims when it runs amok—is certainly one of his most characteristic.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “William Tenn” was the pseudonym for the science fiction of Philip Klass (1920–2010) who through the early fifties shared with Damon Knight, Robert Sheckley, Frederik Pohl, and Cyril Kornbluth the defining voice of Horace Gold’s Galaxy. A bitter and acute social satirist and a dark humorist of the first rank, Klass was never prolific, but his fifty or sixty short stories and his one novel, Of Men and Monsters (1968), comprise a lasting and irreplaceable contribution to science fiction at its mid-century peak. His complete works were collected by the NESFA Press in the early millennium. Klass sold his first story, “Alexander the Bait,” to John Campbell’s Astounding shortly after he left the military in 1945 and two years later published a novelette, “Child’s Play,” in the May 1947 Astounding, which is probably the most reprinted of all stories published within the confines of the genre. When Gold’s magazine of social extrapolation and satire opened for business, Klass was among the earliest pursued, and he became (with the few others noted above) integral to the magazine. In the mid-sixties Klass, always a painstaking, anguished writer, was glad to be invited to join the English faculty at Penn State University, and he spent the next quarter century there as an effective and much admired Professor of Creative Writing. In the last forty years of his life, Klass published a total of three short stories (and a scattering of nonficton). A 40,000-word interview with Eric Solstein, reprinted in the NESFA Dancing Naked, the collected nonfiction comes very close to a completely successful work of autobiography.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE eFOREWORD

  Robert Silverberg, the greatest living science fiction writer, is the author of more than 40 novels and 250 short stories in the genre. He has won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards and was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master title of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2004. Among his novels are Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, A Time of Changes (Nebula 1971), Up the Line, The Masks of Time, Shadrach in the Furnace, The Stochastic Man, and Lord Valentine’s Castle, the opening volume of his famous Majipoor series. He edited the original anthologies New Dimensions and Legends, and the second Universe series.

  ABOUT THE JACKET

  COVER IMAGE: “Granny Won’t Knit” by Ed Emshwiller

  Ed Emshwiller (1925–1990) was Galaxy’s dominant artist through the 1950s. His quirky images, perspective, and off-center humor provide perhaps the best rea
lization of the magazine’s iconoclastic, satirical vision. Emshwiller was—matched with Kelly Freas—science fiction’s signature artist through the decade and a half initiated by this color illustration. He and Carol Emshwiller, the celebrated science fiction writer, lived in Long Island during the period of his prominence in science fiction. (Nonstop Press published Emshwiller: Infinity × Two: The Art & Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller, a joint biography and collection of their work in visual and literary medium, in 2007.) In the early 70s, Emshwiller became passionately interested in avant-garde filmmaking, and that passion led him to California, where he spent his last decades deeply involved in the medium of independent film and its community. He abandoned illustration: in Carol’s words “When Ed was through with something he was really through with it.” He died of cancer in 1990. His son, Peter Emshwiller, published a fair amount of science fiction in the 80s and 90s.

  eForeword

  Some science fiction writers are novelists by preference and, perhaps, talent, and rarely if ever venture into the shorter lengths after the earliest years of their careers. Such names as Frank Herbert, E. E. Smith, Jack Vance, and Robert Heinlein come quickly to mind. And then there are the short story writers whose excursions into longer lengths are just as uncommon: for example, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, James Patrick Kelly. Philip Klass (1920–2010), who wrote science fiction under the name of William Tenn throughout his long career, belongs in that latter group. He wrote just one novel, 1968’s Of Men and Monsters. (A second novel, long promised, never appeared.) Of his many shorter works, very few reach even to novelette length: “Medusa was a Lady” (1951), “Firewater” (1952), “The Flat-Eyed Monster” (1953), and a couple of others, including 1957’s “Time Waits for Winthrop,” which at 20,000 words is one of the longest stories he ever wrote. (And the only one that ever was published, at least in part, under his real name. But more about that later.) Klass was a slow, careful, conscientious workman, masterly at short lengths, who plainly felt uncomfortable spinning a story out much past thirty or forty pages.

  I was a member of the New York science fiction scene back there in 1957, a very young contributor to Horace Gold’s glittering magazine Galaxy, when Klass was writing “Winthrop,” and so, like everyone else who attended the monthly meetings of the little circle of science fiction writers that called itself the Hydra Club, I was aware that Phil had a major project in the works and that he was having agonies over it. For week after week, he let it be known that he was writing a big story for Horace and that he was still stuck in it, occasionally making some progress between Hydra Club gatherings, occasionally making none, occasionally backing up and rewriting what had already been written. Then, lo and behold! It was done. And purchased by Gold. And, very soon thereafter, published in the August 1957 issue of Galaxy.

  I have always taken a very personal interest in “Time Waits for Winthrop.” (Which Phil called “Winthrop Was Stubborn,” a title that seems to me to fit the story at least as well as Horace’s and under which all later reprintings have appeared until this one.) Not only had I been hearing about the story since the earliest days of its conception, but, when it finally appeared, the issue that contained it also contained a story of mine! Klass, by then, had had ten or eleven superb pieces in Galaxy, but this was only my second, and I took every appearance of mine in that magazine very, very seriously indeed. So I have had an odd and wholly unearned proprietary attachment to “Time Waits for Winthrop” all through these many years.

  The story itself, which I fell upon and read eagerly, was not exactly what I had been expecting. During the months of Phil’s travail, I had heard enough about it to know that it was a time travel story, and—on no evidence other than that—I had begun devising in my own mind the sort of time travel story it would be, which was something on the order of Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” crossed with Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” But the actual story turned out to be nothing at all like that. There was none of Heinlein’s diabolical conceptual ingenuity, nothing of Bradbury’s poignant tragic passion. The theory of time travel, which plays such a key role in the Heinlein and the Bradbury, had not been Klass’s primary concern. No, the story was—as I should have expected, I guess—a comedy, a farce, even, a sort of parody of the classic time travel stories of earlier years. It wasn’t a new version of the Heinlein, nor was it another go-round of the Bradbury. (Klass had already brilliantly handled the Bradbury theme, in fact, about five years before Bradbury himself had in the mordant little “Brooklyn Project” of 1953.) No, it was a William Tenn story and nothing else but a William Tenn story.

  That we are intended to read the story at some distance from realism is shown right away by its author’s choice of stock characters, a cast of paper-thin caricatures. Five time travelers from the twentieth century are stranded in the twenty-fifth, but what he offers us is a grandmotherly Bronx housewife who speaks in stage Yiddish-American, a portly, self-important middle-aged public-relations executive, a blithery ingenue, a high-school science teacher whose main function is to explain technical matters to the others, and an embittered older man—Winthrop—who is the closest thing to a believable character in the story and the fulcrum about which the entire plot turns. We know from Klass’s other work, such stories as “Down Among the Dead Men” (1954) and “Eastward Ho!” (1957), that even when constrained by the magazine conventions of the time he felt no need to fill his stories out with the handiest stereotyped characters. But in “Time Waits for Winthrop” the depiction of character, plainly, was of little importance to him. Only Winthrop himself, who may have been a considerably disguised stand-in for the irascible, stubborn editor Horace Gold, shows any sort of individuation, and Winthrop is seen mainly through the eyes of the other protagonists. What Klass was after was something else: a vision, both comic and bleak at the same time, of the bewildering future, perhaps a sense of the sheer annoyingness of finding oneself forced to cope with a strange future era and with the possibility of having to spend the rest of one’s life living in it. Complexity of character is irrelevant to such a story, and might even be detrimental to it. (The in-your-face resolution of the plot indicates that the author’s mind was elsewhere than on conventional plot structure, although I should note here that Gold was fond of the deus ex-machina ending that contradicted a story’s own givens, the most notorious example of which was Damon Knight’s 1957 short story “The Man in the Jar”.)

  The original Galaxy publication of “Time Waits for Winthrop” provides one curious footnote to the writing career of the man who called himself “William Tenn.” So far as I know, Phil Klass never published any fiction under his own name, and it was generally understood that he had been saving the Klass byline for his “serious” fiction, which he never got around to writing. But on this one occasion his real name came peeking through anyway.

  In those days, Galaxy would end each story not with “The End” or with some typographical symbol, but with the author’s name—a style that Gold had borrowed from The New Yorker. (That magazine abandoned that style many years ago, as did Galaxy itself in 1969, long after Gold had ceased being its editor.) The August 1957 issue in which “Winthrop” appeared lists “William Tenn” on the contents page as the author of the story, and again on page six, where the story itself begins. But when the story ends, on page fifty-nine, the closing byline is, astonishingly:

  —PHILIP KLASS.

  I have no idea why Gold unmasked “William Tenn” in this startling and gratuitous way. Carelessness? Malevolence? A cruel private joke? Klass says nothing about it in the afterword to the story that he wrote for the 2001 edition of The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn. But I’m sure he wasn’t amused.

  —Robert Silverberg

  Time Waits for Winthrop

  That was the trouble right there—Winthrop was stubborn.

  Mrs. Brucks stared wildly at her three fellow-visitors from the twentieth century, “But he’s got to think of us, too! He can’t leave
us stuck in this crazy world!”

  Dave Pollock shrugged the shoulders of the conservative gray suit that clashed so mightily with the décor of the twenty-fifth-century room. He was a thin, nervous young man whose hands had a tendency to perspire.

  “He says we should be grateful. But whether we are or aren’t grateful isn’t important to him. He’s staying.”

  “That means we have to stay,” Mrs. Brucks said. “Doesn’t he understand that?”

  Pollock spread his moist palms helplessly. “What difference does it make? He likes the twenty-fifth century. I argued with him for two hours and I’ve never seen anyone so stubborn. I can’t budge him.”

  “Why don’t you talk to him, Mrs. Brucks?” Mary Ann Carthington suggested. “He’s been nice to you. Maybe you could make him act sensible.”

  “Hm.” Mrs. Brucks patted her hairdo which, after two weeks in the future, was beginning to get straggly. “You think so? Mr. Mead, you think it’s a good idea?”

  The fourth person in the oval room, a stoutish middle-aged man, considered the matter for a moment. “Can’t do any harm. Might work. And we’ve got to do something.”

  “All right. So I’ll try.”

  Mrs. Brucks sniffled deep within her grandmotherly soul. To the others, Winthrop and she were the “old folks”—both over fifty. Therefore they should be able to communicate more easily. The fact that Winthrop was ten years her senior meant little to Mr. Mead’s forty-six years, less to Dave Pollock’s thirty-four and in all probability was completely meaningless to Mary Ann Carthington’s twenty. One of the “old folks” should be able to talk sense to the other, they were thinking.