Consulate E-Book

William Tenn

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 54

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

While sailing on a new sloop, two men are kidnapped...not by modern pirates, but by a strange creature that looks remotely like a Portuguese Man-of-War. Scooped up with a bubble of air, the sloop and crew are transported to the planet Mars. The Galactic Federation, it seems, is hiring. And you don't get to say no when you are recruited for a job on Mars...

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

CONSULATE, by William Tenn

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CONSULATE,by William Tenn

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2023 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1948.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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INTRODUCTION,by John Betancourt

My introduction to the work of William Tenn came in the form of an old paperback book called Of Men and Monsters (1968), which I first read circa 1976 or 1977. I would have been about 12 or 13 at the time, stranded in a remote corner of the island of Crete in Greece. My father is an archaeologist, and throughout my childhood, we summered in such places every year while he worked: tiny villages in the middle of nowhere, most seemingly with more donkeys than people. This particular village was just entering the modern age: it had a couple of telephones, as well as a couple of televisions (around which the town elders gathered each night to watch Greek news and American TV shows like Hawaii 5-O and Dallas). They received one channel.

Each year we went, I got to bring a dozen or so books with me, always acquired cheaply at used-book stores in the weeks before we were to leave. (These mostly got left behind when we returned home.) Plus I sometimes found random British books at local stores. A gift shop at a museum nearby had a rack of Doctor Who paperbacks (nothing else). A paper-goods shop had stacks of early 1960s American comics (mostly Archies) that had been there for many, many years and were now marked down to near-giveaway prices. The newsstands stocked some fiction for tourists, but mostly carried German-language novels (I spotted some Perry Rhodans) and French-language titles (some Richard Blade novels among them). Occasionally, we went to the big city an hour away, which had an actual bookstore that catered to tourists. There, I could pick up old Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, and Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks. But overall, my reading choices remained extremely limited. One year, I resorted to reading Richard Blade novels in French, drawing on middle-school French classes and a French-English dictionary. The results were less than satisfactory, as might be expected.

Of Men and Monsters turned out to be the surprise winner my self-judged annual “best book” contest. It had everything that would appeal to a teenage boy: a young loner for a hero, who doesn’t fit in with his society and rebels against it. A world were humans have been defeated by enormous aliens, and now tribes of humans live like insects in the walls of the aliens’ houses. A daring against-long-odds plan to defeat the aliens. It’s a formula that has worked for ages, and Tenn played it out brilliantly.

Only years later did I grasp how the book functioned as a sophisticated satire, too. Tenn was sneaky that way. In a lot of ways actually. “William Tenn,” I eventually found out, wasn’t even his name.

He was actually Phil Klass (1920–2010), a British-born American science fiction author, as Wikipedia puts it, “notable for many stories with satirical elements.” Klass taught English and comparative literature at Penn State University for 22 years before retiring. Most of his fiction-writing stopped in the 1960s, after he accepted his teaching job. (Indeed, he published only 2 novels in his lifetime, both in 1968 while at the height of his storytelling powers, and both expansions of shorter works he had published in magazines.)

Over the years, I managed to track down all of his books, and his collections of short stories are terrific. It’s a shame he never made the leap to full-time writer—but perhaps he knew that publishing at the pace and volume needed to support yourself as a writer would have diluted the quality of his fiction. We may never know.

But here is a real gem: a short story from the June, 1948 issue of the classic pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. I have taken the liberty of editing a couple of word choices to give it a more modern feel. I would be quite happy to run across “Consul” as an original story today—65 years after it first appeared. That’s a sure sign of quality fiction: it withstands the test of time.

Enjoy.

CHAPTER 1

Sail in the Sloop

I see by the papers where Professor Fronac says that interplanetary travel will have to go through what he calls a period of incubation. He says that after reaching the moon, we now have hit so many new problems that we must sit down and puzzle out new theories to fit them before we can build a ship that will get us to Venus or Mars.

Of course, the Army and Navy are supervising all rocket experiments these days, and the professor’s remarks are censored by them. That makes his speeches hard to understand.

But you know and I know what Professor Fronac is really saying.

The Second Martian Expedition was a complete flop. Just like the First Martian Expedition and the Venusian ones. The ships came back with all the machinery working fine and all the crews grinning with health.

But they hadn’t been to Mars. They couldn’t make it.

The professor goes on to say how wonderful it is that science is so wonderful, because no matter how great the obstacles, the good old scientific approach will eventually overcome them. This, he claims, is the drawing of unprejudiced conclusions from all the data available.

Well, if that’s what Professor Fronac really believes, he sure didn’t act like it last August when I went all the way to Arizona to tell him just what he’d been doing wrong in those latest rocket experiments. Let me tell you, even if I am only a small-town grocer and he’s a big physics professor with a Nobel Prize under his belt, he had no call to threaten me with a jail sentence just because I slipped past the Army guards at the field and hid in his bedroom! I was there only because I wanted to tell him he was on the wrong track.