Read Online The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg - Free Book Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Education & Reference, History & Criticism, Criticism & Theory, Movements & Periods
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couple have reemerged as if from behind barricades, hurled a couple of stories into the editorial mills and run for their lives again (often cut down by flying rejections).
A very, very few, Pohl, Bester and Budrys being the best examples, have returned to do outstanding work but only after a sabbatical of many years, and then at a slow rate. Between Rogue Moon (1959) and Michaelmas (1978) Budrys published one minor novel and a couple of short stories. He might have been the best of them; he certainly had the most profound, subtle mind, the best insight, the darkest perspective.
Gone, then. All gone away. After the energy of the late sixties to early seventies there came another slack period, a return to traditional themes and approaches, editorial hostility toward or bewilderment at stylistic or thematic innovation.
Not to complain particularly: Varley has gotten through and Benford and Tiptree did or are doing major work. One can postulate that things will turn around eventually: new writers, new publishers, new editors . . . maybe a different politic and of course a new audience.
But virtually all the great innovators of the decade will carry on their work, careers, and lives as if the fifties generation had never written. They will not know the work. That work may live in the undertext of the field, influence piled atop work influenced by the canon, but these writers will not know to whom they owe what. That decade, already done for for more than twenty years, will for most intents and purposes appear to have been for naught.
Was it?
Each generation, Donald Wollheim once said, has its own tragedy, must learn again on its own what every generation had had to learn and can never teach. Betrayal, circumstance, defeat. The Loyalists, the Cold War. Vietnam. And end broken in silence. There is no answer to any of this.
But pace , Gertrude, we may take up the question. Yes. I think it was for naught.
1977/1980: New Jersey
The Fifties: Recapitulation and Coda
P HILIP KLASS’S SAVAGE “THE LIBERATION OF EARTH” appeared in Robert Lowndes’ Future Science Fiction . Any history of the decade in science fiction must draw attention to this; if nothing else it will work against undue sentiment or self-delusion. Future was one of the longer-lived of the thirty or forty magazines that were born to perish within the decade; it paid a penny a word (less to unknown writers) around or after publication and had a circulation of, at the most optimistic estimate, thirty thousand as opposed to the one hundred that Galaxy or Astounding achieved at least intermittently. (And to keep all of this in perspective, let us recall that The Saturday Evening Post had a circulation of seven million and Playboy , starting from Hefner’s garage in 1953, had exceeded two million by 1957. Science fiction then as now was a small field.)
“The Liberation of Earth,” perhaps the most sophisticated antiwar story ever to appear in science fiction (my own late-sixties “Final War” and Effinger’s “All the Last Wars at Once” from that period were little more than filigrees or variations; Haldeman’s 1970s The Forever War harked back further than that), and a story which has subsequently been reprinted often enough to be Klass’s best-known story after “Child’s Play,” this story appeared, in other words, in a bottom-line pulp magazine of negligible budget, circulation, or influence, presumably—this is the safest of blind guesses—because none of the higher-paying markets wanted any part of it whatsoever and because magazine editors outside of science fiction could not even take it seriously. All those aliens and tentacles and sucking air you know. Really weird stuff, Edmund. Kids say the darndest things.
There are many similar cases. Here are just a few: Blish’s “Work of Art” and “Common Time,” Kornbluth’s “The Last Man Left in the Bar” and “Notes Leading Down to the Disaster,” Knight’s “Anachron,”
A very, very few, Pohl, Bester and Budrys being the best examples, have returned to do outstanding work but only after a sabbatical of many years, and then at a slow rate. Between Rogue Moon (1959) and Michaelmas (1978) Budrys published one minor novel and a couple of short stories. He might have been the best of them; he certainly had the most profound, subtle mind, the best insight, the darkest perspective.
Gone, then. All gone away. After the energy of the late sixties to early seventies there came another slack period, a return to traditional themes and approaches, editorial hostility toward or bewilderment at stylistic or thematic innovation.
Not to complain particularly: Varley has gotten through and Benford and Tiptree did or are doing major work. One can postulate that things will turn around eventually: new writers, new publishers, new editors . . . maybe a different politic and of course a new audience.
But virtually all the great innovators of the decade will carry on their work, careers, and lives as if the fifties generation had never written. They will not know the work. That work may live in the undertext of the field, influence piled atop work influenced by the canon, but these writers will not know to whom they owe what. That decade, already done for for more than twenty years, will for most intents and purposes appear to have been for naught.
Was it?
Each generation, Donald Wollheim once said, has its own tragedy, must learn again on its own what every generation had had to learn and can never teach. Betrayal, circumstance, defeat. The Loyalists, the Cold War. Vietnam. And end broken in silence. There is no answer to any of this.
But pace , Gertrude, we may take up the question. Yes. I think it was for naught.
1977/1980: New Jersey
The Fifties: Recapitulation and Coda
P HILIP KLASS’S SAVAGE “THE LIBERATION OF EARTH” appeared in Robert Lowndes’ Future Science Fiction . Any history of the decade in science fiction must draw attention to this; if nothing else it will work against undue sentiment or self-delusion. Future was one of the longer-lived of the thirty or forty magazines that were born to perish within the decade; it paid a penny a word (less to unknown writers) around or after publication and had a circulation of, at the most optimistic estimate, thirty thousand as opposed to the one hundred that Galaxy or Astounding achieved at least intermittently. (And to keep all of this in perspective, let us recall that The Saturday Evening Post had a circulation of seven million and Playboy , starting from Hefner’s garage in 1953, had exceeded two million by 1957. Science fiction then as now was a small field.)
“The Liberation of Earth,” perhaps the most sophisticated antiwar story ever to appear in science fiction (my own late-sixties “Final War” and Effinger’s “All the Last Wars at Once” from that period were little more than filigrees or variations; Haldeman’s 1970s The Forever War harked back further than that), and a story which has subsequently been reprinted often enough to be Klass’s best-known story after “Child’s Play,” this story appeared, in other words, in a bottom-line pulp magazine of negligible budget, circulation, or influence, presumably—this is the safest of blind guesses—because none of the higher-paying markets wanted any part of it whatsoever and because magazine editors outside of science fiction could not even take it seriously. All those aliens and tentacles and sucking air you know. Really weird stuff, Edmund. Kids say the darndest things.
There are many similar cases. Here are just a few: Blish’s “Work of Art” and “Common Time,” Kornbluth’s “The Last Man Left in the Bar” and “Notes Leading Down to the Disaster,” Knight’s “Anachron,”
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