The Way the Future Blogs

Phil Klass

At the Philadelphia Worldcon of 1947 there was a lot of jabbering back and forth — mostly along the lines of “How’ve you been?” and “Where’d you serve?” because World War II was recently over and we generally hadn’t seen each other for years. But when that kind of talk was over, there was a different kind of question that came up pretty often, and that was, “Have you read ‘Child’s Play’?”

That was the name of a creepy-crawly and un-put-downable story that had just appeared in Astounding, signed by the unfamiliar byline of William Tenn. It was about a man who had somehow been given a children’s toy build-a-man set from the future and decided to see how it worked, disastrously, and it was written in a darkly sardonic style that combined real horror and laugh-out-loud comedy. The man who wrote it wasn’t really named William Tenn, of course. His name was Philip Klass, born in London but brought to Brooklyn as a baby and now a radio researcher, fresh out of the Army like the rest of us.

“Child’s Play” wasn’t the first story to appear as by “William Tenn” — that had been the very forgettable “Alexander the Bait” a few issues earlier in Astounding. But it was “Child’s Play” that created an instant demand for more of this kind of thing by that highly individual author. And the stories came — “Venus and the Seven Sexes,” “On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi” and many others in what seemed like an unstoppable stream. Many are currently in print in a couple of volumes of his collected works, and there were even a few quite good stories by Morton Klass, Phil’s kid brother, to show that the sf-writing gene is familial. The Klass brothers were friends and fellow poker players to much of New York fandom, until we lost Phil.

It wasn’t that he died then. What happened was that he got work as a college professor at Pennsylvania State University, lost to his New York friends by geography, since Penn State’s campus was smack in the middle of that very large state of Pennsylvania, and lost to writing because he discovered that teaching was more interesting and used up all his time. Phil taught, among other things, short story writing and was highly regarded by students and faculty through a respectable career. But when he started teaching, he stopped writing. Once he got comfortable in his new life in State College, Penn., he got active in sf writers’ organizations and the like, picking up several overdue awards, but the writing had stopped, and that was a great pity.