The Marching Morons (collection)

The Marching Morons (and Other Famous Science Fiction Stories) is a collection of stories by Cyril M. Kornbluth, originally published in paperback by Ballantine Books in 1959. Ballantine reissued the collection in 1963. A Spanish translation, Desfile de Cretines, appeared in 1964.[1] In 1972, the novella from which the collection takes its name was selected by SFWA members as one of the ten best novellas published in the genre before 1966.[2]

The Marching Morons
Cover of the first edition
AuthorC. M. Kornbluth
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience fiction
PublisherBallantine Books
Publication date
1959
Media typePrint (paperback)
Pages158
OCLC4054077

Contents

"The Luckiest Man in Denv" was originally published under Kornbluth's "Simon Eisner" pseudonym.[3]

Reception

Amazing Stories reviewer S. E. Cotts found the stories "uniformly excellent", saying that Kornbluth "had an uncanny aim in his satire and social criticism; yet his writing was never blunt or obvious. He had a low-key way of presenting the consequences of rapid technological advance which was no less gripping for all its subtlety."[4] P. Schuyler Miller described the stories as "a prime sample of how science fiction can probe and tease at the innards of our society, and reveal the benign and malignant growths that we pretend aren't there".[5] Hans Stefan Santesson recommended the collection in Fantastic Universe, saying Kornbluth "was witty and he was satirical".[6] Frederik Pohl also reviewed the book favorably, saying "What is most notable about a Kornbluth story is that his characters are always perfectly at ease in their surroundings".[7]

gollark: Ah.
gollark: What? The only information I can find on rwasa is some random politician.
gollark: (also I may eventually want to use ARM)
gollark: On the one hand I do somewhat want to run osmarksforum™ with this for funlolz, but on the other hand handwritten ASM is probably not secure.
gollark: > Well, the answer is a good cause for flame war, but I will risk. ;) At first, I find assembly language much more readable than HLL languages and especially C-like languages with their weird syntax. > At second, all my tests show, that in real-life applications assembly language always gives at least 200% performance boost. The problem is not the quality of the compilers. It is because the humans write programs in assembly language very different than programs in HLL. Notice, that you can write HLL program as fast as an assembly language program, but you will end with very, very unreadable and hard for support code. In the same time, the assembly version will be pretty readable and easy for support. > The performance is especially important for server applications, because the program runs on hired hardware and you are paying for every second CPU time and every byte RAM. AsmBB for example can run on very cheap shared web hosting and still to serve hundreds of users simultaneously.

References
  1. ISFDB publishing history
  2. "Introduction", Ben Bova, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, New York: Doubleday, 1973, pp. ix–xi.
  3. Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections
  4. "The Spectroscope", Amazing Stories, September 1959, p.64
  5. "The Reference Library", Analog, January 1960, p.174
  6. "Universe in Books", Fantastic Universe, September 1959, p.99
  7. "Worlds of If", If, September 1959, p.98
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