The legendary short story writer, novelist, and essayist, Barry Malzberg, passed away on December 19. To read his 12-20-24 LOCUS obituary, click HERE.
I was very pleased to share the same Table of Contents page with Malzberg on three separate occasions. The first time was in 2013 when Malzberg's story "The Rapture" (co-written with Jack Dann) and my story "Selections from The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook" both appeared in the same issue of the British magazine POSTSCRIPTS (issue #30/31). In the fall of 2020, my short story "62 Cents" appeared in THE MAILER REVIEW VOL. 13 alongside Malzberg's essay entitled "Sixty-seven Words a Minute." In the spring of 2021, THE MAILER REVIEW VOL. 14 published Malzberg's story "Barbarians? Sure" side-by-side with my story "Old Man on a Bus." On each of these occasions I was extremely proud to discover that I would be appearing between the same book covers as Malzberg. As a teenager, when I was reading his essay collection, THE ENGINES OF THE NIGHT, I never thought we'd share a Table of Contents page together even once, much less three times.
In his 12-23-24 NATION obituary for Malzberg, Jeet Heer touches on Malzberg's refreshingly bleak interpretation of the phrase "the Engines of the Night" and how it represented his perennial outsider status in the science fiction genre:
Malzberg’s efforts to marry modernist literary values to the pulp tradition made him a polarizing figure in the SF world. While he was extravagantly praised by fellow writers such as Philip K. Dick, Brian Aldiss, and Theodore Sturgeon, Malzberg also provoked a backlash from those who objected to the bleakness of his vision. A powerful strain of American science fiction, written under the aegis of the influential editor John W. Campbell of Analog magazine, was ideologically committed to technological optimism. The space program, in Campbellian science fiction, was proof that humanity could be triumphant and conquer the universe.
A life-long depressive, Malzberg had little use for can-do technological boosterism. In Malzberg’s gothic vision, technology was “the engines of the night”: the machines that can and probably will kill us. Ironically, in 1973 Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, created after the editor’s death. This provoked howls of outrage among science fiction traditionalists, who henceforth made Malzberg’s name a shorthand for the corrupting of the genre.
In 1983, Carter Scholz wrote in The Comics Journal the single best appreciation of Malzberg. Scholz argued that the gothic vision of “the engines of the night” was aligned with the deepest currents of American fiction. According to Scholz:
These are the engines of the night. These are the ageless horrific dreams of Washington Irving, the morbid fantasies of Poe, the dark fauns of Hawthorne, the crazed thunder of Melville, the wicked grin of Twain, the blood rituals of Lawrence, the mad fallen saints of Faulkner, the uprooted myths of O’Connor or Welty, the enervated hysteria of Oates, the lush obsessions of Hawks, the fragmentary scatology of Burroughs—this is the literary tradition of American SF [science fiction], and Malzberg has seen that, but he has seen also that it is not just a matter of art, no longer, it is a matter now of our blood; for the first time, the engines are not just in the mind’s night, for the first time in history they are being built. Technology is the expression of the Gothic dreams of the technicians. And the machines, by this reckoning, cannot fail to kill us.
Malzberg knew the machines were changing us because he himself had been part of the process. To make a living as a pulp writer, he turned himself into a human machine—a kind of ChatGPT avant la lettre. This process of becoming a human text generator drove Malzberg, as himself admitted, half mad. It informs all his best work, giving them an authenticity of lived experience...
To read Jeet Heer's entire NATION piece, click HERE.
Winner of the coveted Locus Award in 1983, THE ENGINES OF THE NIGHT should be included on every science fiction maven's bookshelf. Though this collection has been out of print for years, reasonably priced used copies can still be found online. I urge you to track down a copy as soon as you can.
And a few hours from now, as the clock strikes midnight, be sure to raise a glass to the memory of Barry N. Malzberg...
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