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  Nearly Complete

  Short Fiction

  William Tenn

  (custom book cover)

  Jerry eBooks

  Title Page

  About William Tenn

  Pseudonyms

  “Contributors . . .”

  Bibliography: Novels

  Bibliography: Magazine-published Novels

  Bibliography: Chapbooks

  Bibliography: Collections

  Bibliography: Nonfiction

  Short Fiction Bibliography: chronological

  Short Fiction Bibliography: alphabetical

  Fiction Series

  1946

  Alexander the Bait

  1947

  Child’s Play

  Mistress Sary

  Errand Boy

  Me, Myself and I

  Confusion Cargo

  1948

  Gotham Joins the Gold Rush

  The House Dutiful

  Dud

  Consulate

  The Ionian Cycle

  Brooklyn Project

  The Human Angle

  1949

  Venus and the Seven Sexes

  1950

  The Remarkable Flirgleflip

  The Puzzle of Priipiirii

  The Last Bounce

  Safe As Any Sap

  1951

  Generation of Noah

  Null-P

  The Quick and the Bomb

  Betelgeuse Bridge

  A Matter of Frequency

  Hallock’s Madness

  Venus is a Man’s World

  Everybody Loves Irving Bommer

  The Jester

  Medusa Was a Lady!

  “Will You Walk a Little Faster”

  1952

  Firewater

  1953

  The Deserter

  Ricardo’s Virus

  Liberation of Earth

  The Custodian

  1954

  Project Hush

  The Tenants

  Down Among the Dead

  Party of the Two Parts

  1955

  The Servant Problem

  The Flat-Eyed Monster

  The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway

  The Sickness

  1956

  Wednesday’s Child

  A Man of Family

  Time in Advance

  She Only Goes Out at Night . . .

  Of All Possible Worlds

  1957

  Time Waits for Winthrop

  The Dark Star

  Sactuary

  1958

  Eastward Ho!

  Lisbon Cubed

  1959

  The Malted Milk Monster

  1963

  The Men in the Walls

  Bernie the Faust

  1965

  The Masculinist Revolt

  1966

  My Mother Was A Witch

  The Quick and the Bomb

  1967

  “The Lemon-Green Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite-Dribble Day”

  1974

  On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi

  1983

  There Were People on Bikini There Were People on Attu

  1993

  The Girl with Some Kind of Past. And George.

  1994

  The Ghost Standard

  2004

  Anecdote

  Eleven P.M.

  The Apotheosis of John Chillicothe

  The Enormous Toothache

  The Bugmaster

  William Tenn (real name Philip Klass) was born on May 9, 1920 in London, England. Phillip Klass moved to New York City with his parents before his second birthday and grew up in Brooklyn, the oldest of three children. After serving in the United States Army during World War II as a combat engineer in Europe, he held a job as a technical editor with an Air Force radar and radio laboratory and was employed by Bell Labs.

  Phillip and Fruma Klass married in 1957, and they moved in 1966 to State College, Pennsylvania, where he taught English and comparative literature at Penn State University for 22 years.

  Klass’ wife, Fruma Klass, grew up in New York City and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn College to work as a lab technician, a medical editor and a Harper & Row copy editor. At Penn State, she was a writing instructor and a copy editor for the Penn State University Press.

  Klass published academic articles, essays, two novels and more than 60 short stories. He began writing while working at Bell Labs, and his radar lab experience prompted his first story, “Alexander the Bait”, about a radar beam aimed at the moon. It was published in Astounding Science Fiction (May 1946), and within months a Signal Corps lab bounced a radar beam off the moon, making his story obsolete. He commented, “It was a bad story, just good enough to be published. Others in the same magazine were much better, so I really worked hard on my second one. I did as well as I knew how.”

  Some of the nonfiction articles in the trade periodical TWX Magazine have been attributed to Klass during his employment at Bell Labs, although most were published without by-lines.

  His second story, the widely reprinted “Child’s Play” (1947), told of a lawyer who creates people with his Bild-A-Man kit, a Christmas gift intended for a child of the future. After publication in Astounding Science Fiction (May 1946), Klass was soon hailed as the science fiction field’s reigning humorist, and during the early 1950s, readers of Galaxy Science Fiction looked forward to issues featuring his satirical science fiction.

  Many stories followed, including “Venus and the Seven Sexes” (1951), “Down Among the Dead Men” (1954), “The Liberation of Earth”, “Time in Advance” (1956) and “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi” (1974). One of his non-fiction articles, “Mr. Eavesdropper,” was later collected in Best Magazine Articles, 1968. His essay and interview collection, Dancing Naked, was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Book in 2004. He was given the Author Emeritus honor by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1999.

  Klass wrote two novels, both published in 1968. Of Men and Monsters is an expansion of his story “The Men in the Walls”, originally in Galaxy Science Fiction (October 1963). A Lamp for Medusa was published as a double novel with Dave Van Arnam’s The Players of Hell. This novella was an expansion of his story “Medusa Was a Lady!” from the October, 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

  When Philip Klass retired, the couple moved to the Pittsburgh suburb of Mt. Lebanon in 1988, and she took a job as an editor with Black Box Corporation. That same year, her first short story, “Before the Rainbow,” was published in the anthology Synergy 3. In 1996, her second story, “After the Rainbow,” won a Writers of the Future prize; the story was published in Writers of the Future, Vol. XII. In 2004, she entered a worldwide essay competition, the Power of Purpose Awards, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. Competing against 7,000 entrants from 97 countries, she won $25,000 for her essay, “Streets of Mud, Streets of Gold.”

  Philip and Fruma Klass were members of the Pittsburgh Area Real Time Science Fiction Enthusiasts Consortium (PARSEC), and were frequent speakers at its local conference, Confluence.

  Klass was a Guest of Honor at Noreascon 4, the 2004 World Science Fiction Convention. He was the Author Guest of Honor at Loscon 33 at the LAX Marriott in Los Angeles in 2006.

  He has published most of his fiction as William Tenn and much of his nonfiction as Philip (or Philip) Klass.

  Klass was related to other writers, including his nieces, Perri Klass and Judy Klass, his nephew David Klass, and his brother Morton Klass. He is sometimes confused with UFO debunker Philip J. Klass, who was born six months earlier and who died August 9, 2005.

  Philip Klass died on February 7, 2010, of congestive heart failure, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was survived by his wife Fruma, daughter Adina, and sister Frances Goldman-Levy.

  PSEUDONYMS

  Philip Klass

  Phil Klass

  William Penn

  Kenneth Putnam

  E. V. Zinns

  Contributors . . .

  William Tenn is a serious, bespectacled young man with a talent for high comedy. This warring nature has landed him in a series of occupations notably diverse even for a writer; he has been, among other things, a merchant marine purser, a waiter, a department store salesman, a technical editor, and an Army interpreter of Serbo-Croatian stationed in Germany. This last was the climax of his army career, during the course of which he took basic training under every command except the Military Police and the Judge Advocate General, was a bridge carpenter until he fell off his second bridge and a rigger until it was discovered that the only knot he could tie was a bow.

  His major claim to immortality consists in having written his first science-fiction story, which dealt with a radarcast to the Moon, three months before the historic experiment was actually made.

  Originally appeared in Worlds Beyond, January 1951

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOVELS

  A Lamp for Medusa (1968)

  Of Men and Monsters (1968)

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  MAGAZINE-PUBLISHED NOVELS

  Medusa Was a Lady!, Fantastic Adventures, October 1951

  Firewater,