26In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Samuel R. Delany writes that the primary motivation of science fiction editors is to be assured that they are not doing anything wrong. "Since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them."
27Of course writers at the top are at the mercy of no one. They write what they wish. The point is that they got to the top by writing, deliberately or from cunning, that which intersected closely with what was perceived as safe and they are not now capable of writing otherwise, if they ever wanted to. Most, to their increase, never did.
28Liberation would take down the walls. No more science fiction. No more Analog, world sf conventions, First Fandom, portions and outlines, or editorial lunches. Just a bunch of writers among a larger bunch of writers, none of them being read by anyone. For God's sake, up the walls of the world!
29We've all reneged—Silverberg published a long novel, Lord Valentine's Castle in early 1980 and is at work on others; Ellison has published several stories in the genre and contracted out a few novels; I've done enough short stories to make up another book . . . but editors and publishers know what lying swine writers are, anyway, so no harm done.
30Harper & Row is Ursula Le Guin's publisher.
31Thomas M. Disch at this writing (September 1980) seems to have a small chance of being the significant exception . . . Disch has published much work in the prestige quarterlies (Paris Review, etc.), however, and it is this that has granted cachet to the science fiction, not the other way around.
32I have a best novel list footnoted elsewhere, and Harlan Ellison dared to name the ten best living writers in the field in a book review column for Fantasy and Science Fiction in May 1974. In fact, Ellison, who could never be accused of backing off a big fight to find a little one, ranked the writers.
33There is no way around this. One must face the truth at whatever age; to be born a fool is not to be mandated to stay a fool: a liberating discovery at forty-one. Anyway, of what use is unimplicated testimony?
34Robert Lindner, the late psychiatrist, in The Fifty-Minute Hour wrote memorably of a young science fiction reader who did not appear to have the fail-safe mechanism and it is for this reason alone that the chapter has become famous in science fiction, often referred to, occasionally anthologized. This is what happens to someone who really believes this shit is the word to the wise.
35Truth in packaging: Several science fiction writers have fallen apart and spent time in mental institutions . . . they all come out in pretty good shape, though, and the proportion of admissions in the field is probably less than amongst the general population.
36Everyone at a convention is in the hotel bar, usually simultaneously.
37Pace Niven, Pournelle and all the rest, I am talking about the cutting edge; that which came into the field which was not there before. Replication and reinforcement have always been the staple of any genre.
Interregnum: Preface to an Essay
Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction was one of my early declarations of departure from science fiction writing; it was also the most florid. My departure became a sabbatical and a short one; within two months of its publication I was attempting again to sell short stories and since publication of this essay there have been perhaps 150. And there were two more novels, Cross of Fire (1982) and The Remaking of Sigmund Freud.
In short, the essay was specious, the anger and disillusion were genuine but the unmasked cry for attention and reader regret which marked the truer purpose of the work do me little credit in retrospect. A bad idea altogether and although the essay was collected as an afterword in the 1976 Doubleday Down Here in the Dream Quarter I really wanted after that second appearance for it to go away. Certainly, this rather callow and self-serving plea had no place in The Engines of the Night as it was being assembled in the light of greater understanding at the beginning of the 1980s.
But Jim Baen, the publisher of this book and David Drake who is effectively its editor requested inclusion nonetheless. So here it is and since it falls well outside any literary or criminal statute of limitations (it was written more than 30 years ago) I feel that neither blushes nor recriminative outpouring are necessary. The publishing situation which gave justification to this essay hasn't, after all, changed much: a few serious science fiction writers who originated in the genre have achieved a kind of condescending authentication from that academic-critical nexus (cf: Phil Dick, Ballard, Le Guin) but usually for the wrong reasons. If I had 1975 to relive I certainly would not have perpetrated this essay but there's a lot in 1975 which I wouldn't want to perpetrate now.
The outrage which follows is, at least, genuine, it is not posturing. I hope. Then again, one critic noted that this essay constituted "Malzberg hanging around the coffin, waiting for mourners" which wasn't a nice thing to say. Truth, that bitch, is only nice on alternate Thursdays in the Winters of even-numbered years.
—November 2005
Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction
The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America, by Richard Kostelanetz. Sheed & Ward, $12.95; New York, 1974; 434 pp. plus bibliography and index.
Kostelanetz's basic theory, articulated over several chapters and with an occasional awesome specificity, is that a small cabal of (mostly Jewish) intellectuals now in their fifties and sixties seized control of the major publishing/critical/review outlets shortly after World War II, exert something approaching complete control over those who would have a major career in American letters and won't let anyone new in. Most specifically, Kostelanetz (himself now thirty-six) claims that almost no American writer under forty has been able to achieve a wide audience for serious work much less critical acknowledgement; with the exceptions of Renata Adler, Joyce Carol Gates and Thomas Pynchon (two women and an enigma) the youngest American writers of high reputation are Phillip Roth and Susan Sontag, both over forty.
The cabal, Kostelanetz states, has erased almost all competing schools—the southern agrarian, the old New England Protestant—by taking over the careers of a few of its more noted members and ignoring or suppressing the work of others. The most devastating weapon available to this cabal—which stretches from the offices of Random House to those of the Partisan Review to the editorships of many of the mass magazines like Harper's to the offices of certain literary agents to the New York Review of Books and the Sunday Times Book Review—is not to attack but to ignore, and its hold upon the small, tempestuous world which controls access to the observable literary media is so complete that it can virtually create, suspend or deny reputations as effortlessly as it can convene a cocktail party . . . at which most of the real business is contracted anyway.
The book was rather guiltily and prominently reviewed in most of the media which Kostelanetz attacks in a kind of unanimity of two-pronged response: 1) Mr. Kostelanetz is just jealous and envious of those who have succeeded; there is no cabal, just a bunch of nice, mutually helpful people some with common roots who are always looking for good new writers and good new work, just can't find enough of it but we're so fair-minded that we're reviewing this book right here, and 2) anyway, all those mostly unknown writers who Kostelanetz cites as being starved out of the markets aren't any good anyway, judging from the excerpts of their work he quotes. He just wants to promote his coterie which is less talented than those coteries which have made it, not that there are any coteries at all, of course. We're all just good friends here.
The book then disappeared into the basements of libraries (which is where I picked up my copy a year after publication) and to the remainder tables; it has never been paperbacked to my knowledge and has had no visible influence upon the course of the markets to say nothing of the people most concerned with it, those cited in The End of Intelligent Writing as being denied a future. The unknowns are still unknown, the unpublished still unpublished, the critically ignored and forgotten (Cecil Dawkins, Leon Rook) not yet selected for the Modern Library.
I came to this book late because of my almost automatic hostility toward what I took to be its central thesis (that the author's friends were being denied, but that if this situation were to reverse itself they would deny others; in short there was no objection to the system, merely its misapplication in the author's case) and my own suspicion that, since I am a commercial "pop" writer, Kostelanetz would regard me as being even a step further down the rung from the nexus and their excluded; as someone simply not worth mentioning or campaigning for at all. I was partially right but mostly wrong on both of these rather knee-jerk reactions, and I wish that I had come to this book a long time ago and I recommend it fervently to each and every one of you who buy this magazine for any reason other than to get through the next hour or so (not an objectionable reason at all; these are the readers who have kept science fiction alive) because it has a heart of darkness and a true message: we, meaning those who toil in the wilted vineyards of commercial fiction, may soon enough be the only ones left to perpetuate the form. If there are any left at all.
This is not quite what I wanted to say here however—nor did I want to spend much time investigating Kostelanetz, who seems to be essentially right although wrong-headed in many ways and in shocking ignorance of science fiction in particular. (For instance he says, "Of the periodicals founded in the late sixties by paperback publishers, the best of the lot, Delany and Hacker's Quark died much too soon after auspiciously introducing not only several good young writers but a valid new development in s-f that combines modernist literary values with speculative intelligence," an incredible hash of misstatement since Quark was not the best of the original anthologies but very likely the worst, was in a part a coterie publication for friends of the editors and collapsed while leaving the market for original anthologies as viable as it ever has been. He also includes several s-f writers in his list of four hundred writers born after 1937 to "watch" but manages to ignore Norman Spinrad while putting in Lawrence Yep, put in Panshin while neglecting Effinger, put in Terry Champagne while ignoring Dozois. Not critical judgment; ignorance is operating here.) No, in truth and upon the occasion of the publication in the same magazine that published my story "Final War" eight years ago to the day and gave me my career of what will be my last science-fiction story . . . actually I wanted to talk about myself.
Bet you never thought I'd get there.
"Seeking Assistance" will not be the last s-f story I will ever publish, I fear; several written earlier remain in the inventories of editors like Silverberg and Elwood. It is, however, in point of chronology the last I will ever write, and publishing it here in the magazine which has been central to my career, under the editorship of the man who, along with his late father Joseph Wolfe has been instrumental in keeping me psychically above ground seems the proper thing to do. I would have it no other way.
Reading The End of Intelligent Writing took me back ten years in time. It took me back past my decision in January of 1975 to cease writing science fiction; it took me past 1973 when I won the Campbell Award and was able for a brief period to sell as much s-f as I wanted at higher advances; it took me back twenty-two novels and a hundred and fifty short stories and the struggle to achieve what I am now deserting, to 1965 when my misguided and somewhat tragic career in science fiction began as the result of conscious decision.
Exposed in the early sixties in sub-acute form to the reality which Kostelanetz chapter, by angry chapter documents, I realized by June of 1965 that it would be impossible for me to make a career in what was my field of choice: as a literary writer. The quarterlies were impenetrable, the coteries omnipresent, the competition murderous, the stultifying control of the publishing houses' literary editors absolute. If I was ever going to achieve outlet as a writer of fiction, I saw I would have to go to the commercial markets, the mass or genre markets that is to say, and while partially converting myself to the strictures of category fiction sneak in my literary intentions.
Science fiction was what I chose because from the outset science fiction seemed to be that field in which one could sell stories of modest literary intention with the least amount of slanting: one could, if one touched the base of stricture, be paid a living wage for somewhat ambitious work. Historically the field has been open to new writers and approaches in a way that, say, the mystery never has been. Almost from the beginning I was a "success," that is in terms of my original ambition. As a writer who could write a little in a field where almost no one could write at all, as enough of a cynical hack to purposefully manipulate my work and as one who had an excellent understanding of the field by virtue of childhood reading (indispensable to any who would write a lot of this stuff) I was able, I say in all due modesty, to produce a body of work which is without parallel, quantitatively, in the history of the field. In less than seven years I sold the aforementioned number of works, about two million words in all, I won a major award, I even, for a brief period in 1973/4 had the exhilarating experience of almost making a living from the writing of s-f alone. (Only almost. And more than half of my published output has been out of the field from the outset.)
But, I discovered, I was invisible outside of the confines of the s-f market itself. Of course that was what I had wanted, what had attracted me to the field. Kostelanetz's academic/literary nexus either does not know we exist or patronizes us as pulp hacks for escapist kids; in any case they leave us alone and enable us to be probably the only medium (but less so than in years past) for dangerous, ambitious work. But if you win, you lose; my ambition had turned upon itself. I had beaten the system by getting out of the system, but the system wouldn't be beaten after all because it would not acknowledge that I existed and that made my work meaningless. Also I was getting knifed up pretty good inside s-f. Ambitious writers always do; historically the field has silenced or reduced to ineffectiveness its best writers. There is not a single American s-f writer over the age of forty-five whose work is the equal of what it was a decade ago, if it even exists.
So there I was: devil and the deep blue sea.
Denied as a literary writer, loathed and largely isolated within s-f. Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. Let us shed one tear and no more. Have mercy, friends, I suffered.
But I also decided to get out. Where yet I am not sure; perhaps to the field of the commercial novel, perhaps into something else, perhaps into light manufacturing or the processing of ceramic mix. Who is to say? One way or the other I will work my way through; I always have, this is my problem and not that of my audience (which, although small by s-f standards has been huge by literary standards and surprisingly loyal. Thank you all very much.) I am not to burden you. I come not to discomfit.
I come, folks, only to say, that this is for the last time: I am getting out. Kostelanetz, like all the rest of humanity, is a mixture of the good and the bad; he is right and he is wrong, he is dull and he is brilliant but the argument holds and so does mine. No future here. Perhaps no future for writing in our time. But thank you all very much.
Afterword
December 6, 1975: On this date, the first copies of my 38-story, 160,000 word Pocket Books collection, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg are available and in my hands and having them forces, in all fairness, a postscript to this bitter essay.
It is true that I must leave science fiction. As the vise of the seventies comes down upon all of us in every field of the so-called arts, there is almost no room left for the kind of work which I try to do. But it is also true that this collection—which is a major effort of at least intermittent literary intention and execution—would not even exist, nor would the career it capsules, have come to be had it not been for science fiction, which gave me a market, an audience, and a receptivity to my work that I would never have found elsewhere. In this sense I owe my career and large pieces of my personal life as well to science fiction. (Such a career as it has been.)
Where else could an unknown writer whose only virtues (other than a modicum of talent) were energy, prolificity and a gathering professionalism be able to write and sell twenty-three novels and five collections of some literary intention in a period of less than eight years? Even if I had satisfied my original ambitions I would have been dealing with a market which held me back, not only quantitatively but in terms of "artistic" growth. The only limits which sf imposed upon me (until 8/74 when the bottom fell out) were those framed by my willingness or unwillingness to turn out work of such pretension for what was, inevitably, an audience not intersecting with the academic/literary nexus. That is not a very large sin on the scale of things. Not at all.
