With These Hands

Throughout his career Kornbluth like many science fiction writers of his generation struggled with the issue of art's role in an increasingly technologized and dehumanized society. Did the creative artist, the individual work, have any role in a culture which was increasingly devoted to replication, to the homogenization of audience, to the suppression of irregularity or individuality? Was art in fact necessary or merely a distraction? Kornbluth was never able to resolve this personally or in his fiction; perhaps if he had not died in his mid-thirties he would have reached some accommodation. WITH THESE HANDS was written at 27, very early in an ordinary career and a Biblical span, but already late career for Kornbluth and the story knows it. Kornbluth's painter (a surrogate as is so often the case in literature for the writer) struggles with this issue, with his relevance, with the issue of spirit and is forced to knowledge unwillingly. The story is an excellent example of the...