Page Created: 12/08/10. Last Updated: 05/13/11.
BARRY N MALZBERG
Nominations & Awards:
Winner:
Beyond Apollo (John W Campbell Memorial Award, Novel)
Breakfast in the Ruins (Locus Award, Non Fiction)
Engines of the Night (Locus Award, Non Fiction)
Nominees:
Breakfast in the Ruins (Hugo Award, Non Fiction)
Corridors (Nebula Award, Short Story)
Engines of the Night (Hugo Award, Non Fiction)
Final War (Nebula Award, Novelette)
A Galaxy Called Rome (Nebula Award, Novelette)
In the Stone House (Hugo Award, Novelette)
Understanding Entropy (Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon Award)
Fiction:
Novels:
Beyond Apollo
Chorale
Conversations
The Cross of Fire
The Destruction of the Temple
The Day of the Burning
The Falling Astronauts
Galaxies
The Gamesman
Guernica Night
Herovit's World
In my Parent's Bedroom
In the Enclosure
The Last Transaction
The Men Inside
On a Planet Alien
Opening Fire
Oracle of the Thousand Hands
Overlay
Phase IV (Movie Screenplay Adaptation)
The Remaking of Sigmund Freund
Revelations
Scop
Screen
The Sodom and Gomorrah Business
Tactics of Conquest
Universe Day
Collections:
The Best of Barry Malzberg
Down Here in the Dream Quarter
In the Stone House
Malzberg at Large
The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady
The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg
Out from Ganymede
Shiva and Other Stories
Criticism:
Breakfast in the Ruins
The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties
The Business of Science Fiction: Two Insiders Discuss Writing and Publishing (with Michael Resnick)
The Passage of Light (with Michael Resnick and Tony Lewis)
As K M O'Donnell:
Novels:
Dwellers of the Deep
The Empty People
Gather in the Hall of Planets
Collections:
Final War and Other Fantasies
In the Pocket and Other Stories
Universe Day
Collaborations with Bill Pronzini:
Novels:
Acts of Mercy
Night Screams
Prose Bowl
The Running of Beasts
Collections:
Night Freight
On Account of Darkness and Other Science Fiction Stories
Problems Solved
MEETING SUMMARY:
Meeting Date: May 14, 2011.
Meeting Site: Saddle River Valley Cultural Center, Upper Saddle River.
Official Attendance: 25.
Meeting Program: Talk by Science Fiction Writer / Critic.
Notes:
The following account is reprinted with permission from David vun Kannon's blog, Invisible Hand, http://dvunkannon.blogspot.com/
Barry Malzberg and the Immortalit​y of Winston K Marks
Barry was slow to warm up to his audience. He read a short (900 word) piece and insisted that anyone wanting to know the most cursory details of how he began in science fiction should look up his autobiographical essay, more of a biography of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, published several years ago in F&SF.
After this abortive attempt to be gruff, surly, and uncommunicative, Malzberg settled down to an engaging hour and half's conversation on science fiction, his own, its history and probable fate.
Malzberg's basic thesis was that science fiction is a literary genre that was explicitly and deliberately created by Hugo Gernsback. It had foreshadowings in European (Verne, Wells) literature, but as a genre existed to educate the reader in the process of thinking that would be most helpful in a technologically driven society. Society might not have known it needed this education, might have turned up its nose at the field, but science fiction nevertheless succeeded wildly. This 'purpose' beyond entertainment has allowed science fiction to survive, while other forms of genre fiction (Malzberg noted gothic, nurse, and western in particular) have died. However, the genre is threatened, deeply threatened, by several factors.
The first is the success of fantasy, and space fantasy edging out science fiction. This Malzberg encapsulated as "Tolkien, Star Trek, and Star Wars." But the fact that the market for these products exploded doesn't explain why.
Here Malzberg sees two trends. One is that science (and science fiction) succeeded. (Malzberg dates this to the moon landing.) Technology has become such a mainstream concern it is almost unnecessary as a separate field. (So Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, and Tom Clancy are mainstream authors, not SF.) If I read Wired, do I really need Analog? Secondly, the editors of science fiction magazines, books, and anthologies have developed different tastes than the mass-market.
Let me give my own example. Bride magazines can reprint the same 100 articles over and over, because they know that no-one reads a bride magazine for very long. The editor of a bride magazine is actually performing a public service to all brides by finding the best set of advice articles and constantly refining and updating them with new artwork, or links to current fashions. "Choose the Wedding Music That's Right For You!" is as valid editorially in 2011 as it was in 2010, 2009, 2008,....
But science fiction magazines that cater to long time readers are different. At least in the minds of their editors, they are. The difference is the difference in desire between wanting to publish the next robot/space ship/alien story and wanting to publish the next _kind_ of robot/space ship/alien story. The trouble is that there are many fewer kinds of stories than there are stories. If your editorial appetite for an entire kind/style/manner of story is exhausted by the first one, you quickly move into a very esoteric and rarefied space.
Seen as a business strategy, it is the difference between selling to an established base and selling to a steady stream of new customers. Even the established base will get fed up and leave (or die) if the editor chooses to please themself rather than the market.
So I see the Malzbergian malaise as an unwillingness or inability to track the Gernsbackian market segment. There will always be smart, introverted 15-30 year old nerds, just like there will always be brides. Rework the publishing channel however is necessary, a story a day downloaded to their cell phone, whatever it takes. Track that market and science fiction can live forever.
Barry also noted that even classic sf has a chance to live forever. As a working example, Barry gave Winston K Marks. Marks published a substantial number of stories in the 40s and 50s, mostly in second tier magazines. Malzberg was undoubtedly correct that until he mentioned his name, no one at the meeting had ever heard of, or read, Winston K Marks. "But if you Google him, you get 10,000 hits!"
A brief digression. The number of hits reported on the first page of a Google search is an approximation. When I first Googled "Winston K Marks", I got 24,000 hits. I went to page 2 of the listing, and the number went up to 64,000. But I know that this number is bogus, because even for a quoted string, Google will start finding partial matches eventually. So I jumped deeper into Google's results. It seems that there are many 'torrents' of science fiction collected from Project Gutenberg and other sources, which you can download if you don't mind also infecting your computer with malware.
At page 24, Google fessed up the truth. There are only 234 references to Winston K Marks on the internet, though publishing this blog entry will change that. As a matter of fact, this entry is destined to be one of the leading references to Winston K Marks, because he is mentioned in the title and very often in the text.
Marks currently has 11 stories available through lapsed copyright on Project Gutenberg. I went there and read "Mate in Two Moves", originally published in the May, 1954 edition of Galaxy. It was a fun and entertaining story. The science was dated but the story was still good.
So Malzberg is right. Lapsed copyright and content piracy will keep the work of Winston K Marks in circulation until the extinction of the species. And if it does that for Winston K Marks, it will also do it for Barry N Malzberg.
There was a lot more to the evening. Barry was a wonderful speaker, encyclopedic in his knowledge of science fiction. His analogies to musical periods and composers were well thought out. Isaac Asimov as the central voice of sf, in the same way as Bach. As Phil DeParto said at the end of the evening, it would have been easy to spend many more hours talking together.
Meeting Memories:
Newsletter Account
The following account is reprinted with permission from THE STARSHIP EXPRESS Copyright 2011 Philip J De Parto:
The monthly General Meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County was held at the Saddle River Valley Cultural Center in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey on Saturday, May 11, 2011. Writer / critic Barry N Malzberg was the featured speaker.
The evening began with our Animation Associates presenting the remaining episodes of SAMURAI 7, an anime adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI, begun last month. The Ice Nine discussion focused primarily on television science fiction series including FRINGE, LOIS AND CLARK, and SMALLVILLE, as well as series which had been proposed but passed on like TORCHWOOD INTERNATIONAL and WONDER WOMAN.
Barry N Malzberg is best known as a writer (about 75 novels in a variety of genres and over 350 short stories) and a critic, but he has also been a literary agent and an editor. he declined to get in front of the group, but instead talked and answered questions from a chair in the middle of the room. Long considered one of the field's incurable pessimists, our guest poured out his thoughts on the past, present and future of the genre.
Mr Malzberg agrees with author / critic Brian Stableford's thesis that science fiction evolved as a medium to help people understand and live in a world where change is driven by science. it is essentially a driver's manual for navigating this new reality. Jules Verne and H G Wells did not write science fiction. Science fiction as a genre was born with AMAZING STORIES. Science fiction is a bridesmaid to science, and the more science advances, the more science fiction becomes an embarrassment.
Science fiction (as opposed to sci-fi) writing is in its death throes. The genre has only been kept alive by dedicated editors like David Hartwell and Patrick Neilsen Hayden. Genres die. The gothic novel, the nurse novel and the western are genres whose death our guest has witnessed. What killed science fiction? Sci-fi, aka STAR TREK, STAR WARS, Lord of the Rings. Despite having an abundance of good, impressive writers, the battle was lost to sci-fi from its inception.
ASIMOV'S publishes the best science fiction every year. Gardner Dozois has learned that you can get away with anything as long as you stick in a robot or spaceship every four pages.
But science fiction is not like other genres. Fred Pohl stated science fiction is a way of thinking. There is a certain kind of mind unable to wrap itself around science fiction. These people are generally parents. But hand an issue of ASIMOV'S to a 12 year old and they will get it.
Still, science fiction has slit its own throat. Because it is self-referential, it is written in an internal code. Writers like Charles Stross, Paul McCauley and Stephen Baxter are incomprehensible to most people who are not already steeped in science fiction literature. Jack McDevitt is another example of an excellent writer who lacks mass appeal. Since his books do not enter the general marketplace of ideas, they do not effect anything.
Yet science fiction ideas do enter the mainstream and endure there in a way literary novels do not, but the science fiction novels which generated the ideas are unknown to the public and of little consequence.
Snippet observations of a number of aspects of science fiction follow:
Contrary to public opinion, feminism did not unlock the doors
of science fiction to women. There were always great women
writers like C L Moore in the field. Our guest has been arguing
this to no avail since the 80s with people like Shawna McCarthy.
Malzberg was never a fan of cyberpunk. Walter Miller, Jr and
Philip K Dick were doing it better 20 years earlier.
The relationship between fantasy and science fiction has
reversed. Fantasy used to be an appendage to science fiction.
Now it's the other way around.
Writers don't retire. They die or are cast out.
Being a Cassandra or Jeremiah is not fun.
Collaborations are like sex, you do it any way you want to.
Scott Meredith Literary Agency taught Barry Malzberg the way
publishing operates. If he had not worked at Scott Meredith,
he would not have had a career.
The transcription does not capture the excitement and fun of the evening, nor the sardonic wit of our guest. It was quite simply a wonderful, joyful experience. Undoubtedly much to the chagrin of our guest.