While Kate Wilhelm broke into professional writing with a good fantasy story, 'The Pint-Sized Genie' (1956), which Cele Goldsmith presumably pulled out of the slushpile at Fantastic, in the years in which Goldsmith attempted to actually do her job as editorial assistant even if Paul Fairman saw his as editor as more one of broker for sight-unseen purchases of unsurprisingly usually unimpressive work, famously particularly from a reliable quartet who could and would do better, but would do what was asked of them for now: Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett, and Milton Lesser (not yet officially Stephen Marlowe). Ted Thomas is one of the underappreciated writers in sf, although he's one with a story that's Caught On in such a way that when people approach librarians or booksellers (when they can, in these parlous times, find librarians and particularly booksellers), they often ask about That story, the one about driving tests.and they usually mean Thomas's punchy little vignette 'Test.' Though he wrote impressively and well in other work, with such as 'The Weather Man' and the short form from which this novel was expanded, as well as having a role in a lot of writerly organizing and conferencing in the late '50s and '60s (he's all over PITFCS, the Proceedings of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies, the volume collecting this fanzine of professionals' fannishness having been released by Advent in the 1990s-or is he? I suspect I'm having a middle-aged moment of conflation with his colleague Theodore Cogswell, who actually edited and published the newsletter-both Teds were active in the behind the scenes activities), he remains for most the not quite remembered author of 'Test.'

The Clone by Theodore L. Thomas