A Town is Drowning, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

Historians generally say that science fiction grew up in the 1940s, when John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine, Astounding, began publishing mature, intelligent stories in an arena that previously had been rooted in juvenilia. I wouldn't argue the point, but SF started to become cool in the fifties. Writers like Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, and Philip K. Dick saw the rise and fall of the atomic bomb, and it drastically changed the way they and others thought, behaved, and created. Genre authors began to produce mind-altering, hip writing in the era of rock 'n' roll and beat fiction.

Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth had been prominent in the SF genre for some time before the fifties, but their greatest collaborations came forth in the post-Golden Age SF Eisenhower years. Their solo work was always among the best in the field, but together they reached satirical heights the genre had rarely known. They were cynical, scary, hip, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

I heard about mainstream books penned by Pohl and Kornbluth, but they were long out of print, and hard (if not impossible) to find. I like when genre writers stray out of their comfort zones, and I wanted to read the non-SF departures from them, but I chalked it off as unlikely.

Now, thanks to the modern miracle of print on demand technology, I was able to obtain one of their attempts to hit the big bestseller lists: A Town is Drowning. It didn't cost me an arm or a leg either.

A Town is Drowning is a matter-of-fact story of a small Midwestern town undergoing a devastating storm and the destructive flood that ensues. The prose is straightforward, and there isn't a lot of the wild biting humor that characterized their science fiction. It reminds me of something Philip Wylie might have written.

The novel doesn't chronicle the actual flood as much as the effects upon the citizenry. One thing hasn't changed. Parties in positions of power are unwilling to allow a good catastrophe to go to waste. Minor political figures immediately seek to use the emergency to their benefit. The signature Pohl-Kornbluth cynicism is on full display in A Town is Drowning.

Yet the heart of the novel portrays the real heroes of these type of situations. Shopkeepers, homeowners, students, all working together to fix the problems. Yesterday, as in today, officials appear to be incompetent or corrupt. Or both.

I wonder how many towns would see so much co-operation in the current climate, with communities becoming increasingly global, and people ignorant and distrustful of their neighbors.

A Town is Drowning is a good novel, if not a great one. I'd rather have seen Pohl and Kornbluth concentrate on more science fiction, but you can't blame people for trying to make a decent living. SF writers were notoriously impoverished at the time they wrote this novel. I'm not one of the sad fan-nerds who howl about their heroes selling out. As I heard Harlan Ellison say once, "FOR THE KIND OF MONEY THESE PEOPLE ARE PULLING IN, EVERYONE IN THIS ROOM WOULD SELL OUT THEIR OWN GODDAMN GRANDMOTHERS!"

Sadly, I don't think A Town is Drowning was particularly successful. It also is far from the best work of these two very talented writers. Fans of the SF novels and stories will nonetheless want to take a look at it. I doubt many will be too sorely disappointed.

Written by Mark Sieber