Consulate

By William Tenn and John Betancourt

While sailing on a new sloop, two men are kidnapped...not by modern pirates, but by a strange creature that looks remotely like a Portuguese Man-of-War. Scooped up with a bubble of air, the sloop and crew are transported to the planet Mars. The Galactic Federation, it seems, is hiring. And you don't get to say no when you are recruited for a job on Mars...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781434459985

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Table of Contents

CONSULATE, by William Tenn

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CONSULATE,

by William Tenn

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2023 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1948.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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INTRODUCTION,

by John Betancourt

My introduction to the work of William Tenn came in the form of an old paperback book called Of Men and Monsters (1968), which I first read circa 1976 or 1977. I would have been about 12 or 13 at the time, stranded in a remote corner of the island of Crete in Greece. My father is an archaeologist, and throughout my childhood, we summered in such places every year while he worked: tiny villages in the middle of nowhere, most seemingly with more donkeys than people. This particular village was just entering the modern age: it had a couple of telephones, as well as a couple of televisions (around which the town elders gathered each night to watch Greek news and American TV shows like Hawaii 5-O and Dallas). They received one channel.

Each year we went, I got to bring a dozen or so books with me, always acquired cheaply at used-book stores in the weeks before we were to leave. (These mostly got left behind when we returned home.) Plus I sometimes found random British books at local stores. A gift shop at a museum nearby had a rack of Doctor Who paperbacks (nothing else). A paper-goods shop had stacks of early 1960s American comics (mostly Archies) that had been there for many, many years and were now marked down to near-giveaway prices. The newsstands stocked some fiction for tourists, but mostly carried German-language novels (I spotted some Perry Rhodans) and French-language titles (some Richard Blade novels among them). Occasionally, we went to the big city an hour away, which had an actual bookstore that catered to tourists. There, I could pick up old Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, and Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks. But overall, my reading choices remained extremely limited. One year, I resorted to reading Richard Blade novels in French, drawing on middle-school French classes and a French-English dictionary. The results were less than satisfactory, as might be expected.

Of Men and Monsters turned out to be the surprise winner my self-judged annual best book contest. It had everything that would appeal to a teenage boy: a young loner for a hero, who doesn’t fit in with his society and rebels against it. A world were humans have been defeated by enormous aliens, and now tribes of humans live like insects in the walls of the aliens’ houses. A daring against-long-odds plan to defeat the aliens. It’s a formula that has worked for ages, and Tenn played it out brilliantly.

Only years later did I grasp how the book functioned as a sophisticated satire, too. Tenn was sneaky that way. In a lot of ways actually. William Tenn, I eventually found out, wasn’t even his name.

He