His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth Hardcover – January 1, 1997

I've been reading science fiction for a long time, and there are a lot of memorable stories included here that are embedded in my memory that I didn't know Kornbluth had written. The stories are generally clustered into three periods. His earliest stories are from 1940-1942 when he was learning his craft. After a break for the war, there was a middle period from 1949 to 1953 or so when he came into his own as a great author. And then after break caused by illness, his final productive period ran from 1956-1958.The stories don't appear chronologically, and I think the reason is because his greatest stories were mostly written during the middle period. At his peak, he wrote no bad stories, most are inspired, and he contributed several classics including "The Little Black Bag", and "The Marching Morons." Several other stories including "The Altar at Midnight," and "The Only Thing We Learn" are among my favorites by any author. The early stories are generally very readable, but somewhat raw. And unfortunately, I don't think the output from his final years lived up to the middle period. Many of the later stories are facetious, self-referential, and lack the spark of creative brilliance that he'd had just a few years earlier. Perhaps he ran out of ideas or grew tired of science fiction. Or as Fred Pohl suggests in his introduction, perhaps he was unwell.You can make a good argument that at his best, Kornbluth was among the greatest authors of short stories science fiction ever produced. He certainly wrote many of the genre's darkest and most cynical stories. This collection is strongly recommended for fans.

Great collection of short stories. I've enjoyed the few already read and look forward to the rest of them.

Excellent.

This writer was first introduced to me by my grandfather. For a writer from the 50s, he called out the future like a man who had traveled time.His style is cynical and full of vengeful disdain for idiocy.Love it.

His Share of Glory:The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. KornbluthNESFA Press 1997$27.00; 670 pagesISBN 0-915368-60-9I picked up this volume because I had read the [almost] titular short story "That Share of Glory" in Jerry Pournelle's  Imperial Stars (Stars at War, Vol 1) . I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked just about every story contained within. I suppose I shouldn't be. Jerry Pournelle remains among my all time favorite writers, and I trust his judgment about other interesting authors.This book comes in at 670 pages, and it only represents the scfi short fiction of Kornbluth. Not his novels, and not short fiction in any other genre. That is an impressive corpus of writing for a man who only lived to be 34. As Tom Lehrer almost said, by the time Kornbluth was my age he was dead.Some of Kornbluth's short stories are famous. "That Share of Glory", "The Little Black Bag", and "The Marching Morons" are his best, and best known works. Another in this collection that I especially liked was "Gomez", the tale of an unlikely nuclear physicist who finds and then loses great power. The stories I didn't like as much, I still liked a lot. I even liked the stories the in back, set in a smaller font, that came with a warning that they were early works written quickly to fill space in pulp magazines. You have to be damn good to write stories that way that anyone wants to read 75 years later, and Kornbluth was.While most of these stories are scifi, there were a couple that reminded me a bit of Lovecraft and Howard: uncanny and disturbing. Judging by their frequency, this wasn't his specialty, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. His specialty seemed to be journalism. Stories like "The Silly Season" and "Make Mine Mars" show marks of Kornbluth's time as a wire-service reporter in Chicago. This is important, since I'm always interested in what makes a given author's work "hard" scifi.While Kornbluth wrote some space opera featuring technology nigh unto magic, most of the works in this volume focused on reasonable extrapolations from Kornbluth's encyclopedic knowledge. I mean that literally, since Kornbluth acquired his facts by reading an encyclopedia front to back. However, it isn't really the technology that makes this hard scifi. Kornbluth displayed a keen insight into human motivations, combined with a reporter's cynicism for the tawdriness of ordinary life. Sometimes scifi can be rightly castigated for incomplete or wooden characterization. This is not true of Kornbluth; he understood the human condition, and wrote about it with the authority of a jaded confessor.Kornbluth was taken from us too soon; he might have been a yet more remarkable author had he lived longer. What might have been is a fit subject for another story. In the meanwhile, you just need to read Kornbluth. This is what the golden age of science fiction is all about.

Everything I read in earlier reviews is true. Robert Silverberg's unsurpassable review of Kornbluth's work, "Rereading Kornbluth" in the December Asimov's <<[...]>> led me to check this book out at the Largo Library. I'd been fortunate enough to read a few of these stories before, and I was happy to do so again. Silverberg throws out the words, "subtle, oblique, elliptical," and "sardonic" at the start and he's right on the mark as far as he goes. Add to those words, "gritty, insightful, dark and incisive" to get a fuller picture.Benjamin Ivry tells readers that Kornbluth has been called a "strict Jewish moralist," <<[...]>> and that's on the mark as well. In Korbluth's stories, readers will find pure evil, noble heroes, dedicated servants of humanity, moral dilemmas, and sometimes justice. They will be confronted with prose, imagery, and clarity of vision that brings tears to their eyes. Amazingly, Kornbluth began writing perfect stories packed with all of this at the age of sixteen.Kornbluth was a genius whose career was cut short by a heart attack. His Share of Glory is 56 masterful science fiction stories. He dealt with issues such as population explosion, ecological disaster, nuclear proliferation, medical ethics, and the degradation of education-- issues still under discussion today. (He may well have invented allohistory with "Two Dooms.) To paraphrase Silverberg, you should read Kornbluth.

C M Kornbluth stories are not dark and sour… they are black as midnight and bitter as acid. They are also unique, compact, and intensely readable. Publishing from the age of 15, Kornbluth would live only 20 years more, before a heart attack resulting from the stresses of war took him. He would write 16 novels (half in collaboration) in his last 8 years, and produce 76 short stories during his career, 20 being collaborations. This book contains the 56 solo short stories, and it is an absolutely unmissable collection for anyone who likes science fiction.. or just good stories. Kornbluth won no awards in his lifetime, although Frederik Pohl later expanded a Kornbluth manuscript, and won an award for the collaboration; but he was, and he remains, a classic author, whose death – in the same year that took another master, Henry Kuttner, only weeks before- was a tragedy that still reverberates down the years.It is not possible to pick a best story, or even a favourite one; and you will have to investigate further to know why the M in his name doesn’t actually exist, or why he imprisoned one of his own pseudonyms in an asylum. Beyond this book, are the collaborations with Judy Merril and Frederik Pohl and half-a-dozen others, and the solo novels inside and outside of SF.. but first, this book.. buy it, read it, treasure it, mourn our loss.Ian

I am looking for the stories written by Kornbluth and Moore. Although this did not contain them, I was very pleased to read all these, some new, some old favourites