In the late 1930s a bunch of us New York City fans, tiring of being members of other people's fan clubs, decided to start our own. We called it "the Futurians." As nearly as I can remember the prime perpetrators were Don Wollheim, Johnny Michel, Bob Lowndes and myself, but we quickly acquired a couple of dozen other like-minded actifans and writer wannabees, and among them was a pudgy, acerbic fourteen-year-old from the far northern reaches of Manhattan whose name was Cyril Kornbluth.

All the Futurians had an attitude; it was what made us so universally loved by other New York fans. Even so, Cyril was special. He had a quick and abrasive wit, and he exercised it on anyone within reach. What he also had, though, was a boundless talent. Even at fourteen, Cyril knew how to use the English language. I think he was born with the gift of writing in coherent, pointed, colorful sentences, and, although I don't think any of his very earliest writing survives, some of the stories in this book were written when he was no more than sixteen.

Most of what Cyril wrote (what all of us Futurians wrote, assiduously and often) was science fiction, but he also had a streak of the poet in him. Cyril possessed a copy of a textbook—written, I think, by one of his high-school teachers —which described all the traditional forms of verse, from haiku to chant royale, and it was his ambition to write one of each. I don't think he made it. I do remember that he did a villanelle and several sonnets, both Shakespearean and Petrarchan, but I don't remember the poems themselves. All I do remember of Cyril's verse is a fragment from the beginning of a long, erotic poem called Elephanta"—

How long, my love, shall I behold this wall