Born in New York City, Cyril M. Kornbluth crowded an impressive body of work into a writing career that spanned nearly twenty years and ended in 1958 with his untimely death from heart failure, at age thirty-four. Perhaps the most darkly perceptive and socially concerned science-fiction writer of the 1950s, author of at least two permanent classics in the genre (and collaborator on another), Kornbluth was a pioneer (with such writers as Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury) in developing an alternate body of first-rate science fiction in a field otherwise dominated by John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding Science-Fiction and its established group of authors.

Kornbluth's creative period is broken by his service in World War II into two distinct parts and divides rather neatly between the 1940s and 1950s. The first period was dominated by a desire to demonstrate productivity and range, as well as...