William Tenn (pseudonym of Philip Klass, 1920–2010) was a British-American writer of science fiction. After serving in World War II, Klass began writing science fiction as William Tenn, publishing his first work of genre interest, “Alexander the Bait,” for Astounding Science Fiction in 1946. He soon followed it with the brilliant and scathing time paradox tale “Brooklyn Project” (Planet Stories, 1948), which fell afoul of the 1940s zeitgeist, being rejected by prominent editors like John W. Campbell Jr. This type of rejection—along political lines—occurred more than once in Tenn’s career and reflects poorly on the science fiction field.
From the first, Tenn was one of the genre’s very few genuinely comic, genuinely incisive writers of short fiction. From 1950 onward he found a congenial market in Galaxy, where he published much of his best work before falling relatively quiet after about 1960, despite some stellar efforts like “The Ghost Standard” (1994), reprinted later in this volume. Despite his cheerful surface and the occasional zany humor of his stories, Tenn, like most real satirists, was fundamentally a pessimist, a writer who persisted in describing the bars of the prison; when the comic disguise was whipped off, as happened with some frequency, the result was salutary.
“The Liberation of Earth” was written as a response to the Korean War, although many readers, and later protesters, used it as a call to end the Vietnam War. The story was actually read aloud by student protesters in the 1960s at antiwar rallies. Yet in the beginning not one of the top science fiction magazines wanted to publish the story. It was eventually published in Future Science Fiction (1953), considered near the bottom of the barrel of science fiction markets. At the time of publication, the story received little attention, but it has gone on to become a much-reprinted standard.
In Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume 1, the author writes, “The period covered [by the Korean War] was roughly the same as the Red-scare years that began with the Dies Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a result, the organized Left inveighed against what it called ‘Truman’s War,’ and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle against the godless Communists. In writing the story, all I wanted to do is point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean (and later a Vietnamese) in such a situation.”
Today, “The Liberation of Earth” is considered one of the classic science fiction stories of all time.