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From Publishers WeeklyHere Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume II, edited by James A. Mann and Mary C. Tabasko, celebrates the achievement of a preeminent SF author of the 1950s. With numerous stories published for the first time since their initial appearance in magazines, the complete body of Tenn's only novel and an analytic essay, this second volume should receive as much praise as the first, Immodest Proposals.

HardPress Classic Books Series

#01 Immodest Proposals contains the majority of William Tenn's short science fiction. It includes such classic stories as "Child's Play," "Time in Advance," "Down Among the Dead Men," and "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi."The next volume on the series, Here Comes Civilization, will contain the remainder of his short science fiction, the novel Of Men and Monsters, and the short novel A Lamp for Medusa.Tenn has long been considered one of the major satirists in the field. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls him "one of the genre's very few genuinely comic, genuinely incisive writers of short fiction." Theodore Sturgeon had the following to say:"It would be too wide a generalization to say that every SF satire, every SF comedy and every attempt at witty and biting criticism found in the field is a poor and usually cheap imitation of what this man has been doing since the '40s. [But] his incredibly involved and complex mind can at times produce constructive comment so pointed and astute that the fortunate recipient is permanently improved by it."  

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In an afterword to this story when it was reprinted over a decade ago in his three volume complete works, Phillip Klass (who used the pseudonym "William Tenn" for his science fiction) noted that he had been paid originally $790 for this 23,000 word novella which was, before he sold BERNIE THE FAUST for $5000 to Playboy a few years later, the largest amount he had ever received for a single work. Such was the science fiction market in the 50's (and so for the most part is the science fiction market today). TIME WAITS FOR WINTHROP, published in 1957, was the longest of Tenn's contributions to GALAXY and among his last (a short story, THE DISCOVERY OF MORNIEL MATHAWAY was to follow in 1958 and then THE MEN IN THE WALLS, the first third of his one novel, in 1963). It may be the most carefully worked and precise of his many contributions to the magazine. Superficially dealing with the tension overwhelming a group of corporately-displaced time travelers when one of them, the...

First published in Infinity Science Fiction magazine in 1955.

The building does not have thirteenth floor: fourteenth immediately follows twelfth. But three very strange-looking gentlemen want to rent it nevertheless.

First published under the title The Quick and the Bomb .