The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Education & Reference, History & Criticism, Criticism & Theory, Movements & Periods
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virtually unreprinted although alive, taught at least one writer what the conceptual limits of the science fiction novelette might be. No way to teach them that the short stories of Damon Knight and Alfred Bester, in their technical ease and ambition, struck not only readers but professionals of their own and the previous generation as miraculous—miraculous that such work could be both recognizably genre science fiction and of indisputable artistic quality. (Knight and Bester collections are available; between them, however, they have not published a dozen new stories in as many years.)
One of the hazards, not to say horrors, of age is the reconsideration of our youthful selves, the vision of subsequent heartbreak superimposed, the memory of what we became shading inexorably what we took ourselves to be. The conclusion must come that we were fools and it is this, perhaps, which has left the fifties almost bereft of significant critical reevaluation and comment. Those suited lived through the time and still feel the pain. They were naive. They wrote themselves a bill of goods and hawked it and bought it, every rotten, self-delusory item. Sure they know it now. They knew it by 1959 and it destroyed some of them. But the bill of goods seemed reasonable.
It really did. It appeared possible to remake the field. By the end of the forties, Campbell and his contributors had put the technical equipment of the modern short story, the rigors of scientific extrapolation into the hands of those ready to begin where the rest, through struggle, had finally peaked. Hiroshima and television, the cold war and the mass market had delivered unto the new writers and editors what appeared to be an enormous audience for a kind of fiction that would truly come to terms with the potential changes in lives caused by new and virtually controllable technology.
Horace Gold earnestly believed that Galaxy could eventually appeal to as many people as The Saturday Evening Post . Boucher and McComas, world-weary types, had less evangelistic obsession and more cynicism, but saw no reason why the audience for literate science fiction should be any smaller than that for fiction itself. 9 These major editors and John W. Campbell who was, at his worst, not impervious to good writing (a story would not, at least, be rejected for literary quality if it did not lack more immediate Campbellian virtues) gathered about them fifty to a hundred writers who, demoniacally inspired, were willing to try to take the field to the limit of their abilities, knowing that whatever they did they would not be rejected for trying too hard. These writers could not, of course, sell the major editors everything, but they could write passionately and often and the overflow, much of high quality, was being laid off to those thirty or forty magazines which appeared and disappeared like Flying Dutchmen.
(A few magazines such as Infinity or Venture or, at the beginning of the decade, Worlds Beyond , were created for the specific purpose of publishing a more literate and stylistically ambitious, thematically uncomfortable kind of science fiction, and these magazines were not publishing rejects so much as working on direct commission. They all failed, and except for Infinity failed quickly, but who in 1960 or 1981 would consider for the mass market a magazine devoted to the publication of non-mass-market fiction?)
It was a period which had never before occurred in mass-market fiction, perhaps in fiction of any kind. There was a wide market and one of exceeding range; work of quality was as readily acceptable within the confines of the genre as less ambitious science fiction. Black Mask and some of the other detective pulp magazines of the thirties had had no prejudice against art and had published Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich, but there were many more science fiction magazines and ( pace Pronzini) more genuinely gifted science fiction writers in the fifties
One of the hazards, not to say horrors, of age is the reconsideration of our youthful selves, the vision of subsequent heartbreak superimposed, the memory of what we became shading inexorably what we took ourselves to be. The conclusion must come that we were fools and it is this, perhaps, which has left the fifties almost bereft of significant critical reevaluation and comment. Those suited lived through the time and still feel the pain. They were naive. They wrote themselves a bill of goods and hawked it and bought it, every rotten, self-delusory item. Sure they know it now. They knew it by 1959 and it destroyed some of them. But the bill of goods seemed reasonable.
It really did. It appeared possible to remake the field. By the end of the forties, Campbell and his contributors had put the technical equipment of the modern short story, the rigors of scientific extrapolation into the hands of those ready to begin where the rest, through struggle, had finally peaked. Hiroshima and television, the cold war and the mass market had delivered unto the new writers and editors what appeared to be an enormous audience for a kind of fiction that would truly come to terms with the potential changes in lives caused by new and virtually controllable technology.
Horace Gold earnestly believed that Galaxy could eventually appeal to as many people as The Saturday Evening Post . Boucher and McComas, world-weary types, had less evangelistic obsession and more cynicism, but saw no reason why the audience for literate science fiction should be any smaller than that for fiction itself. 9 These major editors and John W. Campbell who was, at his worst, not impervious to good writing (a story would not, at least, be rejected for literary quality if it did not lack more immediate Campbellian virtues) gathered about them fifty to a hundred writers who, demoniacally inspired, were willing to try to take the field to the limit of their abilities, knowing that whatever they did they would not be rejected for trying too hard. These writers could not, of course, sell the major editors everything, but they could write passionately and often and the overflow, much of high quality, was being laid off to those thirty or forty magazines which appeared and disappeared like Flying Dutchmen.
(A few magazines such as Infinity or Venture or, at the beginning of the decade, Worlds Beyond , were created for the specific purpose of publishing a more literate and stylistically ambitious, thematically uncomfortable kind of science fiction, and these magazines were not publishing rejects so much as working on direct commission. They all failed, and except for Infinity failed quickly, but who in 1960 or 1981 would consider for the mass market a magazine devoted to the publication of non-mass-market fiction?)
It was a period which had never before occurred in mass-market fiction, perhaps in fiction of any kind. There was a wide market and one of exceeding range; work of quality was as readily acceptable within the confines of the genre as less ambitious science fiction. Black Mask and some of the other detective pulp magazines of the thirties had had no prejudice against art and had published Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich, but there were many more science fiction magazines and ( pace Pronzini) more genuinely gifted science fiction writers in the fifties
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