William Tenn is the pen name of Philip Klass, a native of Des Moines, Iowa, who received a B.S.E.E. from Iowa State University of Science and Technology in 1941. Though lacking any real literary background or training, he polished his skill by the continuous writing of short stories while he held a variety of engineering jobs. His first published story was "Alexander the Bait," (1946; collected in The Square Root of Man, 1968); between that date and 1964 he produced at least fifty stories. If frequent republication in anthologies is a sign of literary acclaim, the stories of William Tenn qualify: some have been republished as many as nine times. His essay "On the Fiction of Science Fiction" in the first collection of his stories, Of All Possible Worlds (1955), demonstrates an awareness of the intrinsic qualities of science fiction and a "passionate belief in science fiction as a means...