Beyond Apollo | 1972, Random House
The Men Inside | 1973, Prestige Books
Galaxies | 1975, Pyramid Books
(Note: all three of these books are out of print, but cheap used copies can be found. In Chicago, I bought Beyond Apollo for $2.95 at Myopic Books (in Wicker Park) and The Men Inside for $3 at Bucket O’ Blood Books and Records (Logan Square). Galaxies I purchased used through Amazon for $1.25 + s/h.)
1. On 15 August 2011, my pal Jeremy M. Davies emailed me and said that I should look for a book called Galaxies by Barry N. Malzberg because it was “seriously beyond belief.”
I’m ashamed to say it took me until earlier this year to pick up a copy and read it. However, once I got started, I finished it under 24 hours.
2. Barry N. Malzberg was born in 1939. Since 1968, he’s written at least 66 books, if not more. (He’s worked under ten different names that I know of, which complicates compiling a full list.) Dozens of them are science-fiction novels—at least in theory. He’s also written story collections, essay collections, movie novelizations, crime novels, and pornography.
3. Galaxies (1975) at first glance tells the story of a young astronaut, Lena Thomas, the sole crew member of the spaceship Skipstone. Her cargo is an immense tank of goo filled with 515 human corpses. It’s the year 3902 and a person can pay to have his/her body ferried into space after death in the hopes that cosmic radiation will revive them.
Midway through the voyage, the Skipstone falls into a black hole, and the majority of the novel’s plot deals with Lena’s attempt to escape the ensuing hallucinatory free fall. During that timeless time she repeatedly dies and is reborn, recalls her lover John, consults with cyborg engineers, and communes with the dead, who have psychically reawakened.
But that’s not really what Galaxies is about.
4. Rather, Galaxies is a work of metafiction, concerned with its own creation, and presented as Malzberg’s notes on how he would write the novel Galaxies, if only he could. (He maintains that the novel is impossible to complete with present knowledge.) As such, most scenes are outlined rather than dramatically depicted. For instance, Chapter 29 begins:
And here could run yet another moody flashback concerning Lena’s relationship with John, dropped in to provide color and poignance, augmenting the mood of despair. Long sexual passages here could alternate with painful streams of consciousness in the present. Sex and space, orgasm and isolation could run counterpoint, and the author’s gifts for irony, which are not modest, would be exhibited to their fullest range. Also, in the traditions of modern science fiction, the sex scenes could be quite titillating, render the novel some extraliterary interest. A construct like this could use all the extraliterary interest it could get.But even that’s not really what Galaxies is about.
6. Rather, Galaxies is about what science-fiction should look like in the year 1975. Malzberg is surveying contemporary literature and asking: How should science-fiction respond to the then-recent literary experiments of John Cheever, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, and others?
7. I’m not making this up. On page 48 Malzberg writes:
For instance, as the ship falls, there could be some elaboration on the suggestion that neutron stars might be pulsars which would be most intriguing, if the reader has not been intrigued sufficiently by the notion that all of “life” as we understand it when we glimpse the heavens may be merely an incidental by-product of the cycle of neutron stars.8. Malzberg calls those authors out again on page 85:
So there, Cheever, Barth, Barthelme, Oates. What in the collected works would touch that for angst?
“Madness,” Lena says, shaking her head, “that’s utter madness,” but the author, busily pulling the handles of this little dumb show, sweating behind the canvas, casting a nearsighted, astigmatic eye every now and then through the cardboard of the set to see whether the audience is paying attention, how the audience is taking all of this, is thinking take that Barth, Barthelme, Roth, or Oates! Pace Bellow and Malamud, and may your Guggenheims multiply, but what have any of you or those unnamed created to compare with this?9. If I haven’t convinced you yet to spend $2–3 on a used copy of Galaxies, you might as well quit reading now.
10. Besides Galaxies, I’ve also read Malzberg’s earlier novels Beyond Apollo and The Men Inside, both excellent. Beyond Apollo won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. That seems the highest honor that Malzberg has ever received.
He deserves more.
11. Malzberg is a master stylist. Early on in Galaxies he parodies Cheever’s (brilliant) Bullet Park (1969). Bear with me, but the entire page bears repeating in full. The context is that the author is debating whether or not to try writing Galaxies, knowing that it will be an impossible book to write, and knowing that, even if he writes it, it will not be appreciated as art:
“No,” I could have said like Cheever’s adolescent in Bullet Park, “No, enough of your breathtaking concepts, infinite distances, quasar leaps, binding messages from the Crab Nebula; be away with your light years, asteroids, Van Allen belts, methane systems and heavy planets. No, I am aware that there are those who find an ultimate truth there and would bend their lives toward their perception but this is not for me. Where is the pain, the remorse, the regret and guilt and terror? No, I would rather dedicate the years of my productive life which remain to an understanding of the agonies of this middle-class suburb in northern New Jersey. Until I deal with those how can I comprehend Ridgefield Park, to say nothing of Scarsdale, Shaker Heights of the unknown lands of the west? Give me not the year two million which I will not see; give me now. The year two million can say nothing to me, but I may address it if, of course, the collected works can be carefully preserved. At least one writer will survive from this era and if not the notorious Q or the obscure N or the unfortunate A, why could it not be me?”I’ve no idea whether Cheever ever read Malzberg.
Nicely put. Cheever’s adolescent would have approved, if not Cheever. Indeed, I found it convincing, until it occurred to me in one of those quick changes of consciousness which control the lives of all of us yet which may never be acknowledged in fiction that Ridgefield Park would forever be as mysterious to me as the swamp of lights perceived through the refinery smog which are known to my children as “stars” . . . and that one should never deny infinity to pursue a particular which until the day of one’s death—if not for longer than that—would always be a mystery.
So I decided to try Galaxies after all, although with some trepidation. I felt better when I came to understand that it did not have to be a novel but merely a set of notes for one. Knowing this I was not shamed nor did I grieve, for one’s life is merely a set of notes for a life and Ridgefield Park merely a rough working model of Trenton in which nonetheless several thousand people live unable to divine their right hand from their left, and also some cattle. Shalt thou have not pity on the cattle? For they too grew up and perished in a night.
12. Beyond Apollo, meanwhile, seems aimed more toward Donald Barthelme. Consider its first two (very brief) chapters, in which I hear echoes of “Me and Miss Mandible” and “Game“:
1It’s worth noting, though, that Beyond Apollo preceded The Dead Father by three years.
I loved the Captain in my own way, although I knew he was insane, the poor bastard. This was only partly his fault: one must consider the conditions. The conditions were intolerable. This will never work out.
2
In the novel I plan to write of the voyage, the Captain will be a tall, grim man with piercing eyes who has no fear of space. “Onward!” I hear him shout. “Fuck the bastards. Fuck control base; they’re only a bunch of pimps for the politicians anyway. We’ll make the green planet yet or plunge into the sun. Venus forever! To Venus! Shut off all the receivers now. Take no messages. Listen to nothing they have to say; they only want to lie about us to keep the administrators content. Venus or death! Death or Venus! No fear, no fear!”
He has also had, in the book, a vigorous and satisfying sex life, which lends power and credence to his curses and his very tight analysis of the personalities at his control. “We will find our humanity under the gases of Venus,” the Captain will say, and then the sounds of the voyage overwhelm him us and momentarily he says nothing more. I sit with hands clasped, awaiting further word.
The novel, when I write it, should find a large commercial outlet. People still love to read stories of space, and here for the first time they will learn the sensational truth. Even though it is necessary for me to idealize the Captain in order to make the scheme more palatable, the novel will have great technical skill and will make use of my many vivid experiences in and out of the program. The novel will be perhaps sixty-five thousand words long, and I will send it only to the very best publishers.
13. I’m quoting a great deal because I think that’s the best way to convey just how magnificent these books are. None of them contains a single boring sentence. And they are excellent science-fiction novels while at the same time comprising fabulous critiques of the limits of science-fiction—and, by extension, all writing. Indeed, that is the source of Malzberg’s artistry. Write science-fiction he must, but he remains adamant that he will write it on his own terms.
14. Malzberg’s writing is often quite erotic. His first dozen or so books were erotica/pornography, written primarily under the pen name Gerrold Watkins, and published by Olympia Press. Titles include the following: Oracle of the Thousand Hands, Southern Comfort, A Bed of Money, and A Satyr’s Romance.
15. Other early titles by Malzberg, written under the pen name Mel Johnson, include Love Doll, Instant Sex, Nympho Nurse, A Way with All Maidens, Horizontal Woman (aka The Social Worker), and Everything Happened to Susan.
These books sell now for considerably more money than Galaxies et al. (I count myself lucky that I recently found a copy of Screen, his second Olympia press novel, for $10 + s/h.)
We are very close to Venus now, some five hundred miles or less above the planet and the thin, high scent of the atmosphere causes our ears to ring, although we seem otherwise to be doing very well without breathing apparatus or shielding of any sort. Perhaps we could have withstood space travel all the time; it was only our inert sense of caution which made things so difficult. “Do you care for me, Leneh Venas?” I ask her, putting an affectionate arm around her shoulders, letting my fingers ease down to her breast as the two of us, five hundred miles high, look at the green and gaseous planet. “Do you?”Evans also repeatedly fantasizes about his captain, whom he possibly murdered during the voyage, then ejected from the spaceship to fall into the sun. Whether this is true the novel never clarifies, as the scene repeats a number of different ways. For instance, sometimes the captain attacks Evans, who wallops him with a wrench in self-defense.
“Well,” she says, “you took me on this interesting trip and have shown a lot of concern for me. I think that’s nice.”
“But do you love me? That’s the question which I asked you.”
“Well,” she says with a laugh, her fingers catching mine and drawing them subtly toward an arched nipple. “Love is very hard to decide. This is just our first date, you know. You have to give these things time.”
Very late in his narration, Evans claims that, before he disposed of the captain’s body, he committed upon it “a final, unspeakable act (which I will never, never tell).”
17. The Men Inside, meanwhile, begins with its virginal protagonist, Blount, shrunken to microscopic side and injected into the elderly millionaire Yancey, tasked with cleaning out colon cancer (i.e., he finds himself inside another man’s ass):
In medias res, folks, here comes Blount. He is on the run and full of fun, looking for a follicle of cancer. Consider him if you will, if you must: his indignity, his power: he is twenty-two years old at this time, still and always-to-be virginal, sliding through corpuscles and strips of intestine like a beetle, scuttling through all of the fields of darkness. At the ready is his little lance, in his helmet is his tiny light, both ready to aim and cut. Think of Blount if you will: he is a man of some potential, education and background. Does he really deserve to be in a position like this? Mote in the crazed and sleeping Yancey, eighty-three years old and there he lies in the Institute at some enormous expenditure to be cured of his diagnosis. The figure for treatment bedazzles Blount; he continues on his way.The Men Inside reminds me less of Cheever or Barthelme, and more of Pynchon, Coover, Hawkes.
The difference, though, is that Malzberg wrote each of his books in about a month. The Men Inside ends with the note “11-75.”
18. It also ends with a sex scene. Blount murders Yancey at the urging of that man’s granddaughter, Susan, into whose ready arms he then falls. However, their plot goes awry:
“Beautiful,” she says, standing, embracing him, throwing her arms around his neck and raising herself slightly so that he can seize a breast in his mouth. “Beautiful, beautiful,” and with beauty he parts her, with beauty he surges into her, the ancient strokes of generation overwhelmingly fresh to Blount for he has never done this before and he comes quickly, three or four of these strokes and already he is done but as she gasps and climaxes around him, holding his prick like a flower, he casts one eye back toward the bed then, as he knew he would, sees the dead eye of Yancey peering back at him . . . and with a cry tumbles into that wink, falling densely until finally he has toppled all the way inside Yancey and perched in the gut then like a tiny frog, pulls the blanket of the blood over him . . . and there, shielded from Susan’s unheard cries, he rests forever.19. Yeah.
20. How has this author gone so unnoticed for so long?
21. Malzberg resists writing many of the sex scenes in Galaxies, choosing to simply nod toward them instead. Had he tired of writing more graphic fiction by that point? “Space is asepsis,” he repeatedly claims by way of justification. But he strikes me more as an artist who’s trying to find his way out of his usual strategies and devices. Which should be the goal of any artist.
22. There is however one exception: in Chapter 22, Malzberg muses over including a scene in which, following a botched training session, John seduces Lena in order to calm her fears about embarking into space in command of so many corpses. Malzberg contemplates how he might best depict the ensuing coitus:
“Oh, my god, you must do it to me,” Lena would shriek, a little floridly, but floridity under stress is one of her more charming habits; she becomes more rather than less dignified when excited and indulges in archaisms of speech. “You must do it to me quickly, you must do it to me now, you must penetrate me swiftly to the core and make me close in upon you in the arc of my need,” her nipples bursting like little flowers, or, more in tune with the material, one might say that they are the dull purple of methane.I love Galaxies very, very much.
23. That scene sets up a later tour de force that echoes the work of another master stylist, William H. Gass. In chapter 37 Malzberg writes:
This accretion of sympathy can be managed through a bag of fictional techniques, some of them conventional, some more ambitious. Individuation through defining idiosyncrasy, for instance: tricks of speech, habits, mannerisms and so on. The kind of thing which could have been applied to the scene with the cyborgs if the writer had not such an excess of integrity. Stammer or lisp, hitch in pace, a sudden characteristic stumble or aversion to odors as she limps across the cabin to check the portholes. Rhetorical devices peculiar to her, as in the instances of sex with John where here rhetoric becomes florid. Little physical signs, a large bosom or cast in the eye if nothing of greater originality occurs. Keep those devices modest and visible, however; science fiction is bizarre enough without increasing the distance of the characters from the reader.24. Malzberg spent the late 60s and early 70s writing in dialogue with Cheever, Barth, Barthelme, Oates, Roth, Malamud, and others—but did any of those writers ever read Malzberg?
Sadly, the answer appears to be no. Unless I’m missing something, Malzberg only ever reached science-fiction fans, and then only for a little while. (Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg were notable fans.) Following the 1970s, his reputation fell, like the beautiful and spirited Lena Thomas, into decline.
25. Whatever. Fire the tachyonic drive. Tear free of the inescapable neutron star’s black hole. The dead will return to life as the future retakes the past.
Start reading Barry N. Malzberg now. - AD Jameson
REVIEW: Beyond Apollo by Barry Malzberg
By John DeNardo |
REVIEW SUMMARY: This is a puzzling book with a puzzling plot.
MY RATING:
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Astronaut Harry Evans returns from a disastrous Venus Mission and schizophrenically recounts the mission details.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: The story is presented as a challenging jigsaw puzzle, doling out pieces that may or may not fit together.
CONS: The fun puzzle of figuring out what really happened never culminates into any definable resolution.
BOTTOM LINE: An interestingly crafted book.
At the start of Barry N. Malzberg’s 1972 novel, Beyond Apollo, we know that Harry Evans is the sole survivor of a failed mission to Venus. What follows is a non-linear narrative in which Harry attempts to recount the details of the mission and lay the whole story out for the reader. But here’s the rub: Harry is in no mental state for any of this information to be reliable. In fact, several versions of the story are eventually told and it’s hard to tell which parts are true, and which parts are hallucinations. (Adding to Harry’s schizophrenia, he switches speaking between first- and third-person, sometimes within the same sentence.
Here’s what we do know: the narrative flips between several scenes, for example:
- Harry’s pre-flight training – in which Harry is subjected to rigorous training after being accepted as one of the two-man crew. He meets and befriends the Captain of the mission – a man who may or may not be crazy.
- Harry’s pre-flight relationship with his wife, Helen – basically a series of graphic sex scenes in which we learn that Harry may not love his wife at all.
- The flight itself – in which the Captain engages Harry in a guessing game as to the true nature of the mission.
- The encounters at Venus – in which the Venusians “speak” to Harry’s through mind control (or not) and ask Harry to change the ship’s course or risk Earth’s destruction (or not).
- The aftermath – in which Harry returns from the mission alone and is hospitalized and subjected to psychological examinations. Harry is mum about what happened on the disastrous voyage, and the agency enlists Helen to coerce the information from him.
And figuring out the truth is really the crux of enjoying the book. Malzberg says as much through a side story in which Harry promises to write down the events under a pen name in a book with – you guessed it – 67 short chapters:
…I believe that what happened can be indicated only in small flashes of light, tiny apertures which, like periscopes, will illuminate some speck of an overall situation so large that none of us can comprehend it. Parts of it will be true and some of it will be only as I conceive it, but in totality it will make the final statement about the Venus program and about myself.Indeed later, when talking again about this meta-fiction, narrator Harry goes on to say that the proposed novel, though from his own point of view, will be anything but personal. Maybe because the personal aspects are what the story’s really about. Harry not only talks graphically about his marital sex life (the c-word is used a lot) and the effects that space program training has had on it, he also professes a love for the captain. Venus and the theme of sexuality is not new to science fiction novels by any means, but the puzzling architecture of this particular story makes it intriguing. Did Harry’s homosexual desires play into the Captain’s demise?
Ultimately, reading Barry N. Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo is like building a jigsaw puzzle. It’s fun to do (if you like puzzles, of course) but it unfortunately never completes a definite picture. I get the feeling that this story is pure genius, but like many a Gene Wolfe story, it escapes me. You can read Beyond Apollo for free at Wowio. Let me know if you figure out what really happened.
INTERVIEW: Barry N. Malzberg and The Galaxy Project
Barry N. Malzberg‘s Beyond Apollo was in 1973 the winner of the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year; he twice won the LOCUS Award for nonfiction books of critical history and commentary on science fiction. Several short works have been final-listed for the Nebula and Hugo andEngines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins, the nonfiction works, were on the Hugo final ballot for Best Related Nonfiction as is his collaborative book with Mike Resnick, The Business of Science Fiction. He was sole judge of the 1980 Writers Digest Short Story Contest.Rosetta Books has recently released a collection of 23 e-books representing some of the great novelettes and novellas to come out of Galaxy Science Fiction during the 1950s. The Galaxy Project is curated by Barry N. Malzberg. The folks at SF Signal asked if I could interview Mr. Malzberg regarding this project and I jumped at the chance for three reasons:
- First, because it is an important and worthwhile project that attempts to save some great science fiction for future generations.
- Second, because Barry Malzberg is one of my favorite writers, regardless of genre, and certainly my favorite living writer.
- Third, because Barry has to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the field of science fiction that I have ever encountered (have you read The Engines of the Night?) and listening to him share some of that knowledge is a real treat.
Jamie Todd Rubin: You have described to me before that the Galaxy project is an effort to bring to e-book form stories that appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction during the decade of the 1950s. The first of these e-books are now available on Amazonand looking through the list, I see stories by Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Lester del Rey, William Tenn, and Walter Miller, Jr. to name a few. What criteria did you use in selecting the stories that appear in the project?Barry N.Malzberg: The criteria? Well, that’s too broad a term, at least for me (and a bit esoteric for this graduate program dropout): the hope was to bring to a contemporary audience not only the great novelettes and novellas which were Galaxy‘s great contribution in the 50′s, but to evoke through them the spirit of a time in which science fiction was a renewed and hopeful thing.Horace Gold edited Galaxy, he said, “As if it were a contemporary magazine from the future” and he shaped and encouraged a generation of writers who did this with frequent satiric gloss and craftsmanship. Galaxy was the best-written magazine of its time (maybe any time) and the most consistent in its editorial thrust; its writers new and old (many of its best were refugees from Campbell’sAstounding) were the best of their time. Furthermore, as Fred Pohl (one of those writers) noted later, “Galaxy was perhaps the only medium in Joseph McCarthy’s United States where the truth could be told.” The great Galaxy stories were science fiction, of course, but they were also careful and sometimes audacious simulcra of the culture from which they came.
Our first 23 reissued stories are among the best from that time. I wish we had more than one Robert Sheckley story and regret Theodore Sturgeon’s absence (uncooperative agents in both cases), they were central to the magazine. But we have Klass, Kornbluth, Damon Knight, Kurt Vonnegut. That’s not bad.
JTR: Hoarce Gold was known for being a rather cantankerous editor, but in the end he published some outstanding stories, many of which appear in the Galaxy Project. What do you think Gold brought to the table that allowed him to publish so many remarkable stories?
BNM: Gold was style-oriented like Boucher (but unlike Campbell) and cared about quality of writing (Campbell didn’t although published some extremely accomplished stories; style was to him always subsidiary to concept or plot). Also unlike Campbell Gold had been out in the world; he was a severely damaged WWII combat veteran and a writer who had struggled from pulp magazines and comics; his worldliness fed into his demands that writers confront the disjunctive, hypocritical, deceitful world into which veterans like himself had graduated. Horace was, as Mark Clifton wrote, a man who “feared and hated science” and in the post-bomb, Cold War, McCarthyite era there were worse qualifications for the editor of a science fiction magazine.
JTR: Your description of Gold might, with a few minor changes, characterize Kornbluth. In the eForward to “The Marching Morons” you describe Kornbluth as “an old genius trapped in the failing body of a sedentary war veteran with a bad heart.” Both Gold and Kornbluth were combat veterans (I believe Kornbluth served in the Battle of the Bulge). Pohl also served overseas as well. Could it be that Galaxy‘s success in publishing so many great novelettes and novellas was due in part to the coincidence of being established and publishing in the post-War years, after several of its writers were returning from combat?BNM: That is an interesting point. Phil Klass (1920-2010) who wrote (as “William Tenn”) on a grand level of execution for Galaxywas also a combat veteran who claimed not only the Battle of the Bulge but presence at the Liberation of Aufschwitz. And Robert Sheckley, a little younger than these (1928-2005) served in the Korean War and also claimed combat. I had never to this point looked at the Galaxy school of fiction as somehow a compensation for (or a manifestation of) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but if you stare at the work of those writers and their imitators and influences through that lens it looks, much of it, as a kind of carnival mirror set of distortions of the awful collision and sacrifice of combat. You might want to take a look at this as your own historical journey through the 1940-1950 Astounding brings you into the late forties and the work of Klass and Kornbluth. Klass’s “Child’s Play” (3/47 Astounding) is an almost clinical study of the loss of identity. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” (7/50), perhaps his greatest story, is another study of personal displacement facilitated by technology.
JTR: Your image of the carnival mirror and combat brought to mind some of the covers ofAstounding, in particular that first Rogers cover for Hubbard’s “Final Blackout.” As part of The Galaxy Project, each of the stories also contains artwork by an artist who produced covers forGalaxy. (“The Marching Morons” contains one by Ed Emshwiller.) You’ve talked in the past about the great Astounding covers. How do the covers to the 1950s Galaxy compare?
BNM: All of the Galaxy Project illustrations are by Emsh…we obtained permission from Carol Emshwiller for use of any or all of the approximately 50 covers he painted for Horace during that decade. Emshwiller was the default artist, the face of the magazine in that decade just as Hubert Rogers was interchangeable with Astounding from the early forties to his induction to service in 1942 and then again from 1947 to the end of the decade. Rogers was solemn, focused ad astra per aspera, his expressionless spacemen and flat backgrounds (take a look at the 2/50 cover of Astounding for Hubbard’s “To The Stars”) were the Campbellian metaphysic rendered in raw strokes. Emsh was playful for Galaxy, satiric, clearly a third-generation figure, Dali to Rogers’ Rembrandt if you will (a strained analogy but what the hell) and showed Horace’s readers a way into the magazine (the future as a crazyhouse version of the present, not so much threatening as silly). The first 23 covers posted include his 8/52 (alien tourists with cameras on the streets of NYC) and 2/55 (the intergalactic string quartet) which are the epitome of his whimsical art. He not only meshed with Galaxy, he was its popular face. (He was almost as important toF&SF and Astounding, the signature illustrator of the decade but Galaxy got, if not his best work, his most liberated and characteristic.)
JTR: Recently, Gollancz released, via their SF Gateway project, the back lists of dozens of science fiction and fantasy writers (including your own), many of which had been out of print for some time. The Galaxy Project is doing something similar with novelettes and novellas that appeared in the magazine. What both have in common is that the books and stories are being released exclusively in e-book form. I’d be interested to know your take on the value of releasing these stories as e-books. Do you see advantages or disadvantages? To me, at least, it seems like you tap into a younger generation who grew up with the Internet and may not have seen or heard of these stories before.
BNM: A large question with a simple answer. As the hooker said to the sailor: “This is what you get. You don’t like it? You know where the door is.” These reissues are coming to light in digital format and in none other. There’s no audience sufficient to make these viable as books. The Orion reissues – which of course embrace some masterpieces – are the end of the line for 90% of these novels. Their way or the highway. (“That means you, Messrs. Malzberg and O’Donnell.”)JTR: This last question is obvious, but it’s something that anyone who is a fan of these stories will want to know: will there be more than the 23 stories that have been released so far?
BNM: I hope there will be more beyond this original issue of 23. Response will determine (see my remarks under your penultimate question). This is a noble effort. I feel that we are part of a larger struggle to save science fiction. My dark outlook well documented in two widely spaced LOCUS interviews (2001 and 2010).
There’s more than a dance in the old dame yet but does she have anyone on her dance card?
(1939- ) US writer. For about seven years he was extremely prolific in the sf field, very quickly producing some twenty sf novels and over 100 short stories, and much other work; his sf output slowed dramatically towards the end of the 1970s, when he became disenchanted with the genre for reasons explained in his collection of essays The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties (coll 1982; much exp vt Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium 2007); the revision won a Locus Award in 2008. He has also written numerous non-sf works, including several notable erotic novels, and four excellent thrillers in collaboration with Bill Pronzini, including Night Screams (1979), which makes use of ESP. His early sf appeared under the name K M O'Donnell, apparently derived from the initial letters of the surnames of Henry Kuttner and C L Moore plus the surname of one of their joint pseudonyms. Other pseudonyms, used on non-sf works, include Mike Barry, Claudine Dumas, Mel Johnson, Lee W Mason and Gerrold Watkins. His first sf story was "We're Coming through the Window" as by O'Donnell for Galaxy in August 1967, which was quickly followed by the bitter novelette "Final War" (April 1968 F&SF) also as by O'Donnell, about an unwilling soldier trapped in a never-ending Wargame. Books under the O'Donnell name were the short-story collections Final War and Other Fantasies (coll 1969dos) and In the Pocket and Other Science Fiction Stories (coll 1971 dos), the novels The Empty People (1969) and Universe Day (fixup 1971), and two Recursive farcical Satiresfeaturing sf fans and writers in confrontation with Aliens: Dwellers of the Deep (1970 dos) and Gather in the Hall of the Planets (1971 dos).
The first sf novels to appear under Malzberg's own name were sceptical commentaries on the Apollo programme: The Falling Astronauts (1971), Revelations (1972) and Beyond Apollo (1972). The third caused some controversy when it won the John W Campbell Memorial Award despite its sarcastic and negative attitude to Space Flight. The three novels feature astronauts as archetypes of alienated contemporary humanity, struggling to make sense of an incomprehensible world and unable to account for their failure. All Malzberg's central characters are caught in such existential traps, and the measure of his versatility is the large number of such situations which he was able to construct in a half-decade of intense productivity using the vocabularies of ideas typical of sf and erotic fantasy. InScreen (1968) the protagonist can obtain sexual satisfaction only by projecting himself into fantasies evoked by the cinema, while in Confessions of Westchester County (1971) a prolific seducer obtains satisfaction not from the sexual act but from the confessions of loneliness and desperation which follow it. The situation of the racetrack punter, unable to win against the odds by any conceivable strategy, becomes the model of alienation inOverlay (1972), in which aliens take an actual part in the process of frustration, and in the non-sf novel Underlay (1974). Aliens threaten the Earth, and set absurd tasks to decide its fate, in The Day of the Burning (1974) and Tactics of Conquest (1974). In Galaxies (July 1975 F&SF as "A Galaxy Called Rome"; 1975) the central character is in command of a corpse-laden ship which falls into a Black Hole. The protagonist of Scop (1976) is a time-traveller (> Time Travel) trying desperately to change the history that has created his intolerable world. Even the situation of the sf writer, struggling to cope with real life and the pressures of the market, becomes in Herovit's World (1973) a metaphor for general alienation. In this novel, Galaxies and the introductions to some of his collections, Malzberg offers a scathing critique of the market forces shaping contemporary sf.
Malzberg's writing is unparalleled in its intensity and in its apocalyptic sensibility. His detractors consider him bleakly monotonous and despairing, but he is a master of blackHumour, and is one of the few writers to have used sf's vocabulary of ideas extensively as apparatus in psychological landscapes, dramatizing relationships between the human mind and its social environment in an sf theatre of the absurd. The few novels which he has published since 1976 include three fine novels featuring real historical characters. The hero of the black comedy Chorale (1978) becomes Beethoven, while that of the remarkably intense The Cross of Fire (1982) becomes Jesus Christ; both are in search of a better psychological balance but find their quests frustrating. The Remaking of Sigmund Freud(fixup 1985) has the father of psychoanalysis failing miserably to master his own difficulties while trying to assist Emily Dickinson, and subsequently – following his technologicalReincarnation – coming apart while failing to solve the problems involved in Communicationwith Aliens. His later short fiction – fully as intense and accomplished as his work of the 1970s – has been widely published; some of these stories have been assembled as In the Stone House (coll 2000). [BS] www.sf-encyclopedia.com/
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