William Tenn, who wrote satirical science fiction at a time when few writers in the genre displayed a sense of humor, died at his home in Pittsburgh on Feb. 7. He was 89.

His death was announced by his niece Dr. Perri Klass, a pediatrician and a contributor to The New York Times.

Tenn, whose real name was Philip Klass, brought wit, intelligence and a supple prose style to science-fiction themes like time travel and alien-human interactions. A contemporary of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, he helped create modern sci-fi in the 1940s and ’50s, when the dominant form was the short story, published in magazines known as pulps, for their poor paper quality.