Read Online The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Education & Reference, History & Criticism, Criticism & Theory, Movements & Periods
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dismally for most science fiction writers. There is no other way to put this.
Still the work remains and is beginning to be looked over again. In the extreme long run 13 it will probably be ascertained that science fiction became both an art and contributed most of its best examples during the decade. The quality of even the top 20 percent was very high, higher than it had been before, higher than it is now.
What do not remain are the writers.
Very few of the major figures of the decade can be said to have had significant careers after 1960, and the few that have, significantly, stopped writing for quite a while. Pohl and Budrys became editors and only began to write science fiction in quantity again in the seventies, Alfred Bester became an editor at Holiday and was flat out from 1962 to 1975. Katherine MacLean and Theodore Sturgeon were little heard from in the sixties; Gordon Dickson and Poul Anderson carried on but Dickson had only begun to achieve prominence at the very end of the decade ( Dorsai! in 1959 was his first noncollaborative novel), and Anderson, a persistent, stubborn professional, must be commended as the sole exception to prove the rule.
The decade itself burned out these writers, one might speculate. On the other hand—to be judicious—decades burn writers out simply by being decades; the working span of a creative literary career seems for most of us to be around ten years. One does not want to make the sociologist’s error of retrospectively constructing a system that simply was not perceived at the time. There are, as has been pointed out, no literary movements, merely a bunch of writers sometimes hanging out together and trying to do their work.
And yet—ambivalence is the currency here—science fiction writers and editors are an incestuous bunch. Historically this is a close field. In this paradigm individual assent to circumstance was multiplied.
So let us not idealize. It offered much but was a bad time. Golden ages, all of them, look like brass from the inside; only the survivors call them golden and then because retrospective falsification is not only the sociologist’s but the human condition. It was a hard time. It was a hard time, folks: good work got rejected, careers got broken, writers lost their way, marriages lost their way, editors lost their way, the country lost its way. The fifties set us up for disaster; by the end almost any breath of energy would have felt good even if it was to lead us to the fire. For my children the fifties are the Fonz and Grease , a loveable time; to me they are Francis E. Walters and McCarthy, the Rosenbergs and Jenner, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Richard M. Nixon. Still, Presley blew them open and Bester wrote like the divine. It is a mystery.
1979/1980: New Jersey
Ah Tempora! Ah Portions! Ah Mores! Ah Outlines!
T YPICALLY—SINCE THE LATE NINETEEN-FIFTIES when book publishers began to dominate the science fiction market—the science fiction novel has been written on portion and outline. The writer produces the first two or three chapters and a fairly detailed outline of the remainder of a novel (established writers may get away with less than that) and either directly or through an agent offers the material around. If it is sold, the writer gets a contract giving him the first half of the advance on signature of the contract, the remainder on delivery of the completed manuscript. (Some publishers cut the amount into thirds, the last due on publication, and others delay delivery payment until publication, but these are the exceptions and most professionals do not have to stand for it.)
One can theorize that this system is the single important factor underlying the science fiction of the last decades and may explain why almost all science fiction novels fail on a literary, artistic, or structural level (if not all three).
Consider the writer. Consider his condition. He has produced, perhaps, ten thousand words on the
Still the work remains and is beginning to be looked over again. In the extreme long run 13 it will probably be ascertained that science fiction became both an art and contributed most of its best examples during the decade. The quality of even the top 20 percent was very high, higher than it had been before, higher than it is now.
What do not remain are the writers.
Very few of the major figures of the decade can be said to have had significant careers after 1960, and the few that have, significantly, stopped writing for quite a while. Pohl and Budrys became editors and only began to write science fiction in quantity again in the seventies, Alfred Bester became an editor at Holiday and was flat out from 1962 to 1975. Katherine MacLean and Theodore Sturgeon were little heard from in the sixties; Gordon Dickson and Poul Anderson carried on but Dickson had only begun to achieve prominence at the very end of the decade ( Dorsai! in 1959 was his first noncollaborative novel), and Anderson, a persistent, stubborn professional, must be commended as the sole exception to prove the rule.
The decade itself burned out these writers, one might speculate. On the other hand—to be judicious—decades burn writers out simply by being decades; the working span of a creative literary career seems for most of us to be around ten years. One does not want to make the sociologist’s error of retrospectively constructing a system that simply was not perceived at the time. There are, as has been pointed out, no literary movements, merely a bunch of writers sometimes hanging out together and trying to do their work.
And yet—ambivalence is the currency here—science fiction writers and editors are an incestuous bunch. Historically this is a close field. In this paradigm individual assent to circumstance was multiplied.
So let us not idealize. It offered much but was a bad time. Golden ages, all of them, look like brass from the inside; only the survivors call them golden and then because retrospective falsification is not only the sociologist’s but the human condition. It was a hard time. It was a hard time, folks: good work got rejected, careers got broken, writers lost their way, marriages lost their way, editors lost their way, the country lost its way. The fifties set us up for disaster; by the end almost any breath of energy would have felt good even if it was to lead us to the fire. For my children the fifties are the Fonz and Grease , a loveable time; to me they are Francis E. Walters and McCarthy, the Rosenbergs and Jenner, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Richard M. Nixon. Still, Presley blew them open and Bester wrote like the divine. It is a mystery.
1979/1980: New Jersey
Ah Tempora! Ah Portions! Ah Mores! Ah Outlines!
T YPICALLY—SINCE THE LATE NINETEEN-FIFTIES when book publishers began to dominate the science fiction market—the science fiction novel has been written on portion and outline. The writer produces the first two or three chapters and a fairly detailed outline of the remainder of a novel (established writers may get away with less than that) and either directly or through an agent offers the material around. If it is sold, the writer gets a contract giving him the first half of the advance on signature of the contract, the remainder on delivery of the completed manuscript. (Some publishers cut the amount into thirds, the last due on publication, and others delay delivery payment until publication, but these are the exceptions and most professionals do not have to stand for it.)
One can theorize that this system is the single important factor underlying the science fiction of the last decades and may explain why almost all science fiction novels fail on a literary, artistic, or structural level (if not all three).
Consider the writer. Consider his condition. He has produced, perhaps, ten thousand words on the
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