Re: RIP: Barry N. Malzberg

On 12/21/2024 2:00 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

In article <slrnvmdk86.2m42.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>,
Christian Weisgerber  <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

Wikipedia:
  Barry Nathaniel Malzberg (July 24, 1939 – December 19, 2024) was
  an American writer and editor, most often of science fiction and
  fantasy.
>
I recognize the name, but I don't recall ever reading anything by
him.
>

 Very New Wave.  What I read of his I really did not like.  In
particular his "novel" _Galaxies_ was packaged (perhaps not by him)
as a space adventure when in fact it was a meta-novel set of notes
about writing a space adventure.  14 year old me was very non-plussed.

[snip]
To quote what I wrote on Reddit the other day:
 > Malzberg's serious fiction (unlike the fiction that he produced to pay the bills) mostly explored the notion that "the literature of technology and its effects upon man must at the heart be pessimistic", as he wrote in his May 1976 article "Down Here in the Dream Quarter".
I also quoted his essay "Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction" (written in December 1975, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1976) which provides more context:
 > 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 [snip]
 > 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 [snip]
 > 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. [snip]
 >  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. [snip]
 > 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. [snip]
 > I want to make it clear on December 6, 1975: I love this field. My debt to it is incalculable. What has happened to writers like myself, Silverberg, Ballard, Disch, is not the fault of the category itself
(which allowed us to go as far as we wanted artistically for a while) or necessarily even the audience. The fault, as in most other aspects of America, is in what has happened to squeeze diversity from our culture in the last five years. [snip]