William Tenn (pseudonym of Philip Klass, 1920–2010) was a British-American writer of science fiction whose famous story “The Liberation of Earth” appears earlier in this volume. Although Tenn’s output dropped after the early 1960s, he was still active and writing into the 1990s—and still writing fiction relevant to the times.
“The Ghost Standard,” published in Playboy in 1994, shows Tenn in a more playful mode than the biting “The Liberation of Earth,” with a rather amazing tale of alien contact. As Tenn wrote in his afterword to the story in Immodest Proposals, the first volume of his collected fiction, “An attempted definition of ‘humanness’ is what precipitated the story. If you believe, as I do, that we will shortly…be encountering alien intelligent life-forms and having to learn to live with them on various moral levels…you must be thinking also of the necessary distinctions in many areas that we and they will have to make.”
The “essential plot gimmick,” as Tenn put it, “is the variations the characters play on ‘dirigible,’ and ‘limousine,’ and the results thereof. It is based on an actual game of Ghost in which [the author] Daniel Keyes and my brother Mort were participants and used these variations against each other. I won’t tell who did which.”
“Ghost Standard” is a comic masterpiece, showcasing the ways in which science fiction and humor can be a perfect match.