2,000 word essay for english

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Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science
Fiction and Fantasy Research

journal.finfar.org

“The Mindworm”:
C. M. Kornbluth’s Post-War American Vampire Tale at the

Dawn of the Atomic Age

Kristin Bidoshi

Abstract: Through a close reading of C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm”
(1950), this paper focuses on the socioeconomic and political anxieties of post-
war America including: fears of uncontrolled technological development
(nuclear weapons), pathologies of consumerism (material affluence), and the
McCarthyite suppression of dissent (the second Red Scare and government
surveillance) to reveal the author’s significantly veiled anti-authoritarian
message. Published during the height of revived anti-Communist hysteria,
Kornbluth’s story challenges the legitimacy of American values of the 1950s,
including consumerism, patriotism and conformity. A reworking of the
traditional science-fiction narrative where the enemy represents the fear of the
Other (i.e. Communists), Kornbluth’s story exposes the real threat to American
democracy: the American government’s suppression of its citizens’ rights.

Keywords: science fiction, supernatural, post-war America

“The Mindworm” appeared in the first issue of the science-fiction magazine Worlds
Beyond (Dec 1950), edited by Damon Knight. Knight is said to have suggested to C. M.
Kornbluth the title and story, which would center on “a mental vampire” (Rich 151).
Upon first read, “The Mindworm” appears to be typical of the pulp science fiction
stories of the Golden Age: the characters seem to be almost indistinguishable and the
plot is relatively simple – a mutant vampire protagonist stalks and kills his prey and is
himself killed at the end.1 Kornbluth’s story, a beautifully crafted tribute to the author’s
conviction that science fiction can and should function as social criticism, is in fact a

1 This era was also noted for science-fictional vampires in films including The Thing (1951), Not of this
Earth (1956), and It (1958).

Kristin Bidoshi “The Mindworm”: Kornbluth’s Post-War
American Vampire Tale at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 29

critique of numerous aspects of post-war American culture. Through a close reading
of Kornbluth’s story, this paper focuses on the socioeconomic and political anxieties of
this “Age of Anxiety”, including fears of uncontrolled technological development,
pathologies of consumerism, and the McCarthyite suppression of dissent, to reveal
Kornbluth’s significantly veiled anti-authoritarian message. In Our Vampires,
Ourselves, Nina Auerbach famously declares that “every age embraces the vampire it
needs” (145). Careful attention to Kornbluth’s portrayal of the supernatural suggests
to what end his vampire reflects anxieties of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In
challenging the legitimacy of American values of the 1950s, including patriotism and
conformity, Kornbluth reworks the traditional science fiction narrative where the
enemy represents the fear of the Other (i.e. Communists) to reveal the real threat to
American democracy: the American government’s suppression of its citizens’ rights.

Kornbluth (1923–1958), who was of Polish Jewish descent, joined the Futurian
Science Literary Society (FSLS), a group of New York science-fiction fans and writers,
when he was 15 (Rich 10).2 He authored numerous short stories and several novels in
collaboration with fellow Futurians including Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, and
Donald Wollheim. Most of the Futurians were interested in the political applications
of science fiction. Kornbluth’s biographer Mark Rich explains that they valued global
awareness, activism, and democratic participation; he writes, “they were called
Communists … since one or two of them attended Communist meetings in the same
meeting hall, other evenings” (14). Wollheim, the founder of FSLS, was attracted to
Communism and believed that science-fiction writers and fans “should actively work
for the realization of the scientific world-state” (Carr 430). Some members took this
call very literally – Merril, for example, supported Trotskyism, and Pohl was a member
of the Communist Party. Other science-fiction authors of the 1950s who were
especially skeptical, like Kornbluth, took a “debunking position on society’s
infatuation with technological development”, usually, as Jonathan Lethem points out,
“in light of some instinctively Marxist sense of how capitalism corrupts the reception
of radical technology” (Luter 23).

Kornbluth’s most popular works, including the short stories “The Little Black
Bag” (1950) and “The Marching Morons” (1951), reprinted in The Best Science Fiction
Stories of C. M. Kornbluth, portray the United States as a “cynically conformist,
economically corrupt, militarily aggressive and politically authoritarian society”
(Latham 134). The novel he penned with Pohl, The Space Merchants (1953), about two
enormous advertising agencies and their domination of the future world, is “an
effective satire of the anticommunist oppression of the McCarthy era in which the book
was written” (Booker, Monsters 40). Kornbluth’s Not This August (1955; UK title
Christmas Eve [1956]) portrays a US that is invaded, divided, and enslaved by Sino-
Soviet armies (Seed, “Constructing” 75). Isaac Asimov and others have asserted that
“Kornbluth was a brilliant writer, and perhaps the most brilliant of them all” (qtd. in
Rich 5).

Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm” was published in 1950, during the height of
revived anti-Communist hysteria that had gripped the United States after World War
II. Very little critical attention has been paid to the story. In Monsters, Mushroom
Clouds and the Cold War, M. Keith Booker calls for “a more sophisticated – and more
political – reading of the science fiction of the 1950s than has generally been

2 Deborah, Kornbluth’s mother, was born in Kalisz, Poland; his father, Samuel, was a second-generation
American of Polish descent (Rich 16).

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30 Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research

attempted” (Booker, Monsters 3). David Seed writes extensively on the Golden Age of
science fiction, and specifically on Kornbluth, yet his manuscript American Science
Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film, which includes a lengthy chapter on
Kornbluth, makes no mention of the “The Mindworm” whatsoever. Rich’s 451-page
seminal study of Kornbluth’s life and works devotes one brief sentence to the story (on
page 158) and offers no critical analysis.

Kornbluth’s sometime collaborator Pohl has himself declared that “there is no
good science fiction at all that is not to some degree political” (7). Seed’s article on Pohl
and Kornbluth delineates how “the authors substantiate this conviction in their fiction
dealing with the area where politics and economics intersect” (Seed, American 93).
The central strategy of science fiction, as Darko Suvin has famously argued, is
“cognitive estrangement”. Derived from the Russian formalist concept of ostrananie
(defamiliarization), the literary technique of “making strange”, cognitive
estrangement in science fiction can be effective as a method of political commentary.
Booker explains that science fiction uses unusual settings (distant times and galaxies)
to “provide fresh perspectives from which to view the author’s (or reader’s) own time
and place” (Booker, Dystopian 27). Writing about science-fiction films of the long
1950s, which is generally considered to span the late-1940s beginnings of the Cold War
to the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Booker, Post-Utopian 1), Susan Sontag comes
to a similar conclusion: these films, she writes, “inculcate a strange apathy concerning
the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction …. The naïve level of the
films neatly tempers the sense of otherness, of alien-ness, with the grossly familiar”
(Sontag 225). Science-fiction writer and editor Barry Malzberg claims that during the
1950s science fiction was “among the very few mass markets where, sufficiently
masked, an antiauthoritarian statement could be published” (34). That Kornbluth
engages in implicit social criticism in his works can hardly be contested. In a letter to
Pohl dated July 30 1953 Kornbluth writes of a critic:

He doesn’t seem to realize, as Advertising Age, or Tide, or whoever it was, did, that
we are Consies pure and simple, out to bring down American Advertising even if we
are crushed in the ruins of the temple. Any other theory – e.g., that we were writing a
story for $10,000.00 and were interested mainly in giving editors and readers value
for the dough – is preposterous. (qtd. in Rich 201)

In his January 11, 1957 lecture at the University of Chicago, Kornbluth declared that
“science fiction … should be an effective literature of social criticism” and that “science
fiction … does contain social criticism, explicit and implicit” (Kornbluth, “Failure” 55,
75). Kornbluth’s recurrent concerns in his fiction are political and economic in nature;
he writes about the deep conflict created by the existence of weapons of mass
destruction and the crisis of American consumerism (see, for example, Take Off, Not
This August, “The Doomsman”, “The Words of Guru”, “The Marching Morons”, and
“The Last Man Left in the Bar”).

Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm” reflects the anxieties of his day: fear of possible
nuclear catastrophe, the second Red Scare, surveillance, and guilt at increasing
material affluence. The direct fear was of nuclear Armageddon based on the knowledge
of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In post-war America, anxiety about the
arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was rampant. In 1947
American President Harry S. Truman introduced the Truman doctrine to fight
Communism, and defined post-war US policy by pledging support for any nation
defending itself against communism (Fink 63). The spread of Communism abroad

Kristin Bidoshi “The Mindworm”: Kornbluth’s Post-War
American Vampire Tale at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 31

only served to increase anxieties and frustration at home. Anxieties about
collaboration with the enemy and the US government’s surveillance of its own citizens,
for example, reached new peaks of intensity in the US during this time. President
Truman signed the National Security Act, establishing a National Security Council in
1947. Steve Budianksy’s Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret
Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union examines the clandestine surveillance
activities that the government was conducting during this time (including Project
Shamrock, which operated uninterrupted for 30 years, from 1945 to 1975). In a 1948
article entitled “Loyalty among Government Employees” in the Yale Law Journal,
Professors Thomas I. Emerson and David M. Helfeld conclude that “no precedent is to
be found in foreign experience, outside the totalitarian states, for a comprehensive,
continuous system of loyalty surveillance similar to that instituted by the Loyalty
Order in the United States” (67).

The unique urgencies of the Cold War, and particularly fear of nuclear war,
affected writers’ perceptions of the changed status of science fiction. Isaac Asimov
dated the shift precisely: “The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 made science
fiction respectable” (qtd. in Seed, American 8). In “Empire of Liberalism: Cultural War
on the Social under Cold-War Liberalism and Neoliberalism” Miura Reiichi identifies
a Cold War literature of freedom that emphasises individualism against the social; of
the culture of the Cold War 1950s, he writes that it is “epitomized by the notorious
McCarthyism, suppressive, or even ironically and virtually totalitarian with its
recourse to the aggrandized threat of the Soviet Union and its totalitarian
communism” (11). Kornbluth’s story can certainly be classified as “literature of
freedom”, as in its criticism of the culture of the Cold War, it indirectly advocates for
an apolitical regime, or a more “perfect liberalism” (Reiichi 44). Sarah Daw, in Writing
Nature in Cold War American Literature, argues that many Cold War writers engage
in a subversive reexamination of the human relationship to its environment that was
occasioned by the dropping of the atomic bombs; these authors portray nature “as an
infinite ecological structure that is capable of containing both the human and the
nuclear within its expansive dimensions” (109). Her analysis highlights overlooked
literary portrayals of Nature as an “infinite ecology” and of nuclear science as
“something other than a final conquest of Nature” (300).

My analysis is informed by theory from the field of nuclear criticism. Jacques
Derrida famously claims that “nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred,
itself; it is a non-event” (23). Science fiction, Grace Halden writes, seeks to “represent
the future ‘non-event’ and craft a reality out of it” (5). In his examination of post-war
fiction in States of Suspense, Daniel Cordle asserts that cultural anxiety about nuclear
attack, along with the continued deferral of that attack, is the “signature mindset” of
the Cold War period (1). Post-war fiction, he writes, is “nuclear anxiety literature”,
fiction that exists in “states of suspense” and expresses “the experience of living in
extended anticipation” (2). Especially pertinent to my own analysis is Cordle’s
assertion that nuclear criticism can be understood as social criticism.3

3 For an insightful study on recent work in the field of nuclear criticism, see Kristin George Bagdanov’s
“Atomic AfroFuturism and Amiri Baraka’s Compulsive Futures”, in which the author discusses Atomic
Afrofuturism as a “historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing
nuclear apocalypse” (51). Bagdanov posits a new life for nuclear criticism that proceeds from Derrida’s
work to include Baraka’s “anti-nuclear jazz musical” Primitive World; Bagdanov theorises a new
grammatical category, the future compulsive tense, which she asserts allows Baraka to “rewrite the
future at stake, rather than merely readjusting its already present structures” (52).

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Kornbluth’s Mindworm is a mutant conceived during the first test of the atom
bomb at Bikini Atoll on July 1, 1946. A reinvention of the “supernatural vampire in
science fiction terms”, Kornbluth’s vampire is a fantastic representation of the new
alien: a direct result of biological and genetic engineering gone wrong (Meehan 51).4
The story opens:

The handsome j.g. and the pretty nurse held out against it as long as they reasonably
could, but blue Pacific water, languid tropical nights, the low atoll dreaming on the
horizon – and the complete absence of any other nice young people for company on
the small, uncomfortable parts boat – did their work. On June 30th they watched
through dark glasses as the dazzling thing burst over the fleet and the atoll …. Unfelt
radiation sleeted through their loins. (347)

The Mindworm attacks by scanning minds, feeding on the extreme emotions of his
victims and then killing them. As a psychic sponge, the Mindworm also threatens
individual identity as he drinks in, feeds upon, and ultimately destroys one’s most
intimate hopes and desires. At first he is a figure of pity: both his father and mother
abandoned him and he was forced to live with horrific foster parents as a child.
However, after the Mindworm’s first “attack”, in which he uses his powers to avoid
gang rape, he immediately becomes a predator. Of the first attack, Kornbluth writes:

He could read the thoughts of the men quite clearly as they headed for him. Outrage,
fear, and disgust blended in him and somehow turned inside-out and one of the men
was dead on the dry ground, grasshoppers vaulting onto his flannel shirt, the others
backing away, frightened now, not frightening. He wasn’t hungry anymore; he felt
quite comfortable and satisfied. (351)

Kornbluth’s vampire, a product of the atomic bomb, scans the thoughts of the people
around him, catching random inner monologues, ultimately using this information to
stalk and kill his prey. The fragments of thought that the Mindworm feeds on become
his means of introduction to his victims. The dialogue typically leads to an explosion
of uncontrolled emotion (lust, grief, love) in the victim and ultimately the victim’s
death. The atomic energy that surges through the Mindworm is a metaphor of
unlimited human technological capacity as it challenges humanity’s capacity to control
its force. The atomic bomb was, as Leonard Isaacs asserts, “humanity’s transcendent
creation” (66). At a 1949 Atomic Energy Committee meeting at which the hydrogen
bomb was being considered, one member commented of the bomb’s monstrous
potential that “we built one Frankenstein” (Reid 172).5 Time magazine, in its first
coverage of the bomb, declared, “With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity
… was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split
– and far from controlled” (“The Bomb” 19). Loss of control was one fear, and
fragmentation was another. The atomic bomb symbolised these two fears in one.

The Mindworm’s first use of telepathic force, on the drifters he encounters, is
accidental and almost forgivable. There is no question in the second attack, though,

4 In pop culture this was the great age of the superhero comics Superman, Captain Marvel, and the
British character Marvelman, whose magic word was “kimota!” – atomic backwards (Roberts 324). In
film, it was the age of science-generated monsters like the Thing, Godzilla, and the Giant Ants (“Them”),
most of which were said to be a direct result of nuclear attack. For a comprehensive study of 1950s Cold
War science-fiction films, see Cynthia Hendershot’s Paranoia, the Bomb, and 1950s Science Fiction
Films (1999).
5 The quotation is preserved as written; a more accurate statement is “We built Frankenstein’s monster”.

Kristin Bidoshi “The Mindworm”: Kornbluth’s Post-War
American Vampire Tale at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 33

that the Mindworm goads the elderly widowed glass-sculptor Sebastian Long into a
heightened emotional state:

Sebastian Long stared at him. “What the devil do you know about my Demeter
Bowl?” … As Long started for him, the stranger darted to the workbench and brought
the crescent wrench down shatteringly on the bowl. Sebastian Long’s heart was
bursting with sorrow and rage; such a storm of emotions as he never had known
thundered through him.

Paralyzed, he saw the stranger smile with anticipation. The engraver’s legs
folded under him and he fell to the floor, drained and dead. (353)

As the Demeter Bowl is symbolically smashed, the reader comes to understand that
Kornbluth’s transcendent creation wields power even over Demeter, the goddess who
presides over the natural sacred cycle of life and death.6 Kornbluth’s Mindworm preys
exclusively on the vulnerable: he attacks the drifters, the elderly widower Long, the
poor immigrant Dolly, and finally a community of marginalised Polish immigrants
(including a prostitute). Kornbluth’s narrative focuses on the home as the location of
the Mindworm’s attacks; the Mindworm breaks into Long’s workshop, which is
attached to his home; he picks Dolly up from the steps of her home; and he attacks the
Polish girl just outside her home. Cordle identifies the home as a key motif of Cold War
ideology; he writes, “nuclear anxiety was frequently expressed in images of threatened
domesticity” (126). Cordle further asserts that “family breakdown and self-
fragmentation are common tropes that symbolize the potential of nuclear weapons to
destroy both the individual and society” (127). The Mindworm’s third victim, the
young, naive Delores, a Spanish-speaking immigrant from Central or South America,
who prefers to go by the more Americanised “Dolly”, is preoccupied with domesticity.

Dolly, who “practices sexy half-smiles like Lauren Bacall in the bathroom
mirror” and can’t wait to get out of her mother’s home, is already at a ripe emotional
crisis when the Mindworm comes upon her. Her final words, as she storms out of the
house, are “‘I don’t know how many times I tell you not to call me that Spick name no
more!’” (353). Dolly is eager to embrace what she believes to be the American dream:

Then the miracle happened. Just like in the movies, a big convertible pulled up before
her and its lounging driver said, opening the door: “You seem to be in a hurry. Could
I drop you somewhere?” … Dazed at the sudden realization of a hundred daydreams,
she did not fail to give the driver a low-lidded, sexy smile … He wasn’t no Cary Grant,
but he had all his hair … kind of small, but so was she … and jeez, the convertible had
leopard-skin seat covers! (354)

The Mindworm uses Dolly’s innermost thoughts and desires to craft himself into the
man of her dreams: Mr. Michael Brent, convertible-driving, sweet-talking advertising
man, who is looking for a wife with whom to “share his town house in the 50’s, his
country place in Westchester, his lodge in the Maine woods” (355). They drive down
Long Island, lunch at Medford and find themselves at Montauk Point. As Dolly looks
out over the “last bit of the continent before blue water and Europe”, she answers the

6 Demeter is the Greek goddess of fertility and the harvest who presided over the sacred law and the
cycle of life and death. Mary Kornbluth was a potter and ceramicist (Rich 145). In 1950 the Kornbluths
moved from a Polish neighborhood to an upscale storefront apartment with a glass engraver for a
neighbor, where Mary pursued ceramics (D. Knight 198). “The Mask of Demeter” by Kornbluth and
Wollheim was published in Fantasy & Science Fiction (Jan 1953) without Kornbluth’s consent (Rich
221).

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Mindworm’s question “Darling, will you marry me?” with an emphatic “Oh, yes!”, and
then dies (355). On one level, Dolly’s story is a striking reminder that the threat of the
bomb (the Mindworm) is real and final, but unseen. Moreover, the Mindworm’s attack
comes from nowhere; it is sudden and finite. Kornbluth’s depiction of Dolly’s death
forges a direct connection between the Mindworm and the atomic bomb. Like the
threat of nuclear war, there’s an ominous intangibility to the Mindworm’s deadly
attack on Dolly; the effects of the attack are not directly experienced until it is too late.

Kornbluth devotes just two pages to Dolly’s story: a subtle but profound
depiction of the degradation of public life under the shadow of the bomb and a critique
of post-war consumer capitalism. Specifically, Dolly’s story focuses on the power of
advertising to corrupt and to promote conformity. Kornbluth places subtle hints
within the text that allude to this. Dolly is fascinated with American film stars: she
dreams of becoming Lauren Bacall, notices that the Mindworm “smiles shyly, kind of
like Jimmy Stewart”, and thinks that although the Mindworm “wasn’t no Cary Grant,
he’s still got all his hair” (355). Dolly’s sole desire is to live the American dream she
reads about in the magazines and sees on the big screen. Dolly is thrilled to learn that
the Mindworm likes “dark girls” and thinks that “the stories in True Story really were
true” (355). As a reader of True Story, Dolly would be familiar with the feature stories
of girls who had married wrongly as well as the numerous shampoo, toothpaste, make-
up items, and feminine-hygiene products advertised in its pages. 7 The Mindworm
anticipates Dolly’s deepest desires and fulfils her every wish:

“Advertising!” Dolly wanted to kick herself for ever having doubted, for ever having
thought in low, self-loathing moments that it wouldn’t work out, that she’d marry a
grocer or a mechanic and live forever after in a smelly tenement and grow old and
sick and stooped. She felt vaguely in her happy daze that it might have been cuter, she
might have accidentally pushed him into a pond or something, but this was cute
enough. An advertising man, leopard-skin seat covers … what more could a girl with a
sexy smile and a nice little figure want? (354)

Dolly’s story is an illustration not of conformity of the Soviet totalitarianism type, but
rather of the perceived loss of American individualism at the hands of new mass
standardisation. Kornbluth captures the essence of the corruption of American values
as he draws attention to the all-consuming power of the media and advertising to
shape Dolly’s thoughts and nourish her obsession to conform by concealing her ethnic
identity to “fit in”. Just after having learned that the Mindworm’s name is Michael
Brent, for example, Dolly “wished she could tell him she was Jennifer Brown or one of
those cute names they had nowadays” (354). Fiona Paton and Booker describe the
general tendency of Cold War science fiction to focus on the fear of exclusion. The
1940s and 1950s, Booker claims, developed a reputation for homogenisation, “not only
of material life, but of thought itself” which ultimately led to the fear of exclusion, a
fear of not fitting in (10). In her critique of William S. Burroughs’s controversial Naked
Lunch (1959), Paton points out that “1950s America also appears compellingly Gothic:
the monstrous rhetoric of anti-communism sets up a rigid opposition between
American and un-American, and into the category ‘un-American’ fell not only political
but also ethnic and sexual difference” (51). Dolly’s obsession with domesticity and

7 True Story, the first of the confession magazine genre, depicts the heroine as “a battered victim of
cruel forces beyond her control, which made a strong male leader upon whom she could depend for
strength an attractive source of salvation” (Honey 213).

Kristin Bidoshi “The Mindworm”: Kornbluth’s Post-War
American Vampire Tale at the Dawn of the Atomic Age

Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 35

consumerism is especially telling as it alludes to the sense of meaninglessness that
nuclear threat was casting over everyday life.

The Mindworm’s ultimate undoing occurs as he moves from threating
individuals to attacking a whole community. The wary predator is aware of drawing
too much attention to himself, yet is ignorant of the historical precursors of his
presence. The modern American society off which he feasts appears equally ignorant
of this and is unable to recognise the nature of the vampire in its midst. Instinct tells
him that he is safe in his pursuit of the young Polish virgin, but he is mistaken. His last
two attacks, and his own demise, occur in a small West Virginia town. Kornbluth
writes, “He got off at a West Virginia coal and iron town surrounded by ruined
mountains and filled with the offscourings of Eastern Europe. Serbs, Albanians, …