"In these spaces, in all the partitions, hear our song. Let it be known that while given breath we sang until it drew the very breath from us and extinguished our light forever."
And then, in hopeless and helpless fury, Ruthven pushes aside the microphone and cries.
—1980: New Jersey
L'Envoi
MALZBERG, BARRY N. Science fiction writer; references: The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Contemporary Authors, Bibliography of Modern Science Fiction Writers, Who's Who in the East, 1975-1977 edition. Second violin section, North Jersey Symphony Orchestra since 1976. Vice-Chairman, Program Committee.
Son of L'envoi
This book won the highly predictive Locus poll in the spring of 1983 (for best nonfiction of the field published in the previous year) and was on the Hugo final ballot; I came to Baltimore with the feeling that I was the logical favorite for the prized gonfalon. Engines of the Night, consistent to the last, however, lost.
It finished fourth to Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, by James E. Gunn. Also ahead of it were The World of the Dark Crystal, a nice book of photographs, by Brian Froud, and Reference Guide to the Fantastic, edited by Baird Searles. Engines, however, did narrowly beat out Fear Itself: The Fiction of Stephen King and No Award.
I also quit the North Jersey Symphony Orchestra. I may, at this writing, be found at the first stand second violins Glen Rock Pops but this condition, hopefully, will not last.
Grandson of L'envoi
I soon quit—as predicted—the Glen Rock Pops Orchestra and have—a great gift to music this—not played violin in public in almost exactly twenty years. In April 1981, a few years earlier, I had returned to fulltime employment at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (see "Tripping With The Alchemist" in Volume Two) which seemed the only rational course of action for me to take predicated upon the assumptions and conclusions from which Engines of the Night reels. I lasted at the Agency more than eight years past Scott Meredith's death in February, of 1993 but a course of disaffiliation, commencing in 1998 under the successor ownership, became complete in July 2005. If the arc of my career as science fiction writing mimicked in crucial ways the arc of a certain kind of science fiction over the decades, so did the arc of the Scott Meredith Agency refract powerfully the course of American publishing through the 47 years between the end of World War II and the death of its founder. Engines of the Night is clearly the work of a man who had had enough; I was grateful to Scott Meredith for permitting the prodigal's return, I was grateful to hide out there for a long time. I did not, of course, stop writing. Breakfast In The Ruins is in evidence and there are more than 150 short stories since 1981. In 1985 there was one more novel, The Remaking Of Sigmund Freud and then I had really had enough.
Engines still looks okay to me all these years later. A collection of sf criticism published by Scarecrow Press last year contains three short essays and I read them without much embarrassment. "On the whole," I thought, "pretty sensible stuff, reasoned and temperate." I am surprised how controlled and temperate most of the work is; I certainly did not feel that way in its composition.
I think Blish and Knight as critics and visionaries did it better and Budrys sure had his moments early on but my book is still around, kind of, and may have taken its place with those progenitors. Good for me but—more importantly—good for science fiction, the Onlie Begetter.
December 2005
Footnotes
1Asimov reports that as of December 1949 he had received a total of slightly less than $12,000 for his entire output. Considering what Asimov had done and what his stature in the field was already by that time, there may be no need to say anything else about the forties in science fiction.
2And their due.
3It takes a writer of real literary background and ambition to make a major contribution like this.
4Neither writers nor stories are machinery, of course, and it can be presumed that Amazing preempted in certain cases some of the markets on the list, but certainly I was seeing nothing on first submission.
5You know the perversity of editors—or at least I do.
6The others, for the record, were Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, and L. Sprague de Camp.
7Asimov continued to appear in the magazines with diminishing frequency through the first half of the decade, but even the five or six serialized novels and fifty short stories represented a sharp cutback and the stunning expansion of the market diffused his proportionate impact. "Editors missed me a bit," he wrote laconically about the period.
8Bug Jack Barron, Stand on Zanzibar, Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, Black Easter, Thorns, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Camp Concentration; case rests.
9The payoff which Boucher, perhaps fortunately, did not live to see is that there is now in mass-market terms almost no audience for quality fiction at all, a fact not unnoted by science fiction editors—not, on balance, a dumb group.
10And it is important to point out that science fiction in the fifties was a magazine field: almost everything originated there. The book publishers fed off what had been and was running in the periodicals, and only the bottom-line houses, like Monarch, published much nonmagazine material and that simply because these books were too weak to have achieved serial sale. The fifties novels mentioned earlier had all appeared originally in the magazines and most of them were commissioned and directed by the editors.
11This is not quite fair. Although "Among the Dangs" appeared first in Esquire, it was a science fiction story which was reprinted in Fantasy and Science Fiction and several genre anthologies. But if it had appeared first in F & SF it surely would not have won second (or even 980th) prize in the 1959 O. Henry Awards.
12Bester confirms this speculation in a 1980 essay for Galaxy: 30 Years of Innovative Science Fiction, published by Playboy Press.
13Lord Keynes early had the late word on this.
14This has changed in the last few years . . . a major sf editor can be a major editor at some places now. But he has to stay in the field, just like the writers, again.
15Since I might be asked then I might as well put it here to refer to forevermore—the science fiction reading list limited to that dozen books: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Healy and McComas; The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volumes I, II, and IIA, edited by Silverberg and Bova; The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction, edited by Greenberg and Silverberg; The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, edited by John W. Campbell; The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin; Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison; The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester; More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon; A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; and The Best of Damon Knight.
16There were actually about forty such misguided souls in the audience, added to about 150 who had registered for a ten-session course called "The Writers Speak." Or mumble. Or drink. But never simultaneously if you want to be invited back.
17Say what, boss?
18This giggler was about infanticide.
19She was the only assistant Campbell ever had, joining him in 1938 and staying with the magazine until 1973—Catherine Tarrant died in Hoboken, New Jersey, in March 1980, unnoticed and unmourned at the time (the obituary appeared in the sf publications months later) by anyone in the science fiction community. Campbell let it be known many times that in his mind she edited the magazine, he only chose the stories.
20I say this because Schwartz is so clearly a loser; the narrator of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" is in conventional societal terms at least holding his own.
21Hexacon, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
22The 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston.
23This was a perfect summation of the situation just prior to the early seventies; now a good proportion of convention attendees are not readers at all but have been funneled in by Star Trek, Star Wars, and so on. Whether this is better or worse is for the writer to figure out; it's every man for himself in this game.
24Detroit and Chicago were competing bidders in 1980 for the 1982 world convention; no fools they—the fans went for Chicago. Or perhaps, fandom being self-renewing and ahistorical, the current bunch simply liked Chicago.
25Boston in 1980. Come on, Malzberg, bite the bullet.
