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Thirty-three gems, most of which still shine brightly, written between 1946–94, by the frequently anthologized, and highly original, science fiction master. Snappy, sarcastic, streetwise, and almost always hilarious, the pseudonymous Tenn (Philip Klass, English/Penn State) is one of the only writers the genre has produced who readily understands that it’s much harder and more rewarding to write well about funny things than to merely write funny. Though he did not invent any new styles of science-fiction storytelling, as Asimov did with his robot tales, Tenn invigorated tired pulp conventions with a literate intelligence and a sympathetic eye for working-stiff, salt-of-the-earth, urban underdogs (in one of the afterwords here, he admits to always taking the side of the natives when he played cowboys and Indians as a child). The fruits of this distinctive sensibility include such masterpieces of space opera as “Down Among the Dead Men” and a nice rendering of the last-man-on-Earth scenario in “The Custodian.” In her clumsy introduction, Connie Willis calls Tenn the “Scheherazade” of SF, but in truth he remains its best humorist. The London-born, Brooklyn-raised author uses a distinctly New York Jewish satirical voice in the hilarious “The Flat-Eyed Monster” (a spoof on the bug-eyed monsters on pulp magazine covers), in the post–nuclear holocaust tale “Eastward, Ho!,” and in his homage to Sholom Aleichem, “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi.”

The definitive collection of science fiction’s greatest humorist—and this is only the first volume.