The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg Page A

than mystery writers in the thirties. But almost any writer who had a decent reading knowledge of the genre and could reproduce it to minimum standard could find a market. Thirty magazines times eight stories a month times twelve meant close to three thousand science fiction stories published a year, to say nothing of the original anthologies: Star Science Fiction , Star Short Novels , and New Tales of Space and Time . (Today magazines and original anthologies together accommodate perhaps three hundred new stories a year.) In 1955 there were in the United States and England perhaps two or three hundred writers who had managed some degree of professionalism. (Today there are over a thousand.) And the book market was not negligible. Wollheim was at Ace, Doubleday had begun a small program, Simon & Schuster were committed to a dozen titles a year, Signet, Avon and Pocket Books were toe in the water and Ballantine, beginning a flourishing program in 1953 with The Space Merchants , started by offering advances of five thousand dollars.
    Magazine rates were about what they are now. The top magazines paid three to five cents a word, the middle range one and a half to two, the bottom rarely less than a penny. In New York (or anywhere) at that time it was possible for a family to live with passable adequacy on five thousand dollars a year, comfortably on twelve. One without a family could get by on half that. It was not at all difficult to make five hundred dollars a month writing science fiction.
    Five hundred dollars a month was, perhaps figuring in the rejects and aborted stories, twenty-eight thousand words for a professional, and twenty-eight thousand words a month is a thousand a day with most Sundays off. A thousand words a day fall on three typewritten pages: some bleed more than others, of course, but three pages are nevertheless three pages (and no true professional will ever admit to an editor or even his peers how very quickly they can be done, particularly under pressure). There was more than enough time for bull sessions conspiring on plans for the field, drinking sessions ditto, club meetings, travel, conferences, parties and the exchanging of wives. (These were not wife swappers, the male writers, they were wife exchangers . They would divorce and remarry. Members of this generation were perhaps the last to bend to the so-called new morality; they would rather marry than burn.)
    The feeling in this rather insulated and socially peripheral circle of writers and their editors was that piece by piece they were remaking not so much the world (Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dresden, Hiroshima, Joseph McCarthy had proved exactly what effect the seers and poets would have on the political and social reality of their time) but the field, that science fiction was being at last reconstructed toward that idealized form it might have attained a long time ago if Hugo Gernsback had not, for cynical publishers’ reasons, slammed it into a format of bizarre adventures or marvelous inventions for kids and potential engineers.
    Certainly the best of the magazine work was equal technically to the best of American fiction. 10 Kornbluth’s “The Altar at Midnight,” Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” “Fondly Fahrenheit,” “Hobson’s Choice,” “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To,” Wallace’s “Delay in Transit,” Clifton’s “Clerical Error,” Pohl’s “The Knights of Arthur” or “The Tunnel Under the World” and Sheckley’s “Warm” (these titles are plucked virtually at random, sheer stream-of-consciousness; there are hundreds at this level, many by writers less well-known) were as accomplished and moving as “The Country Husband,” “For Esme with Love and Squalor,” “In the Zoo,” “Among the Dangs,” “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” or “The Man Who Studied Yoga.” 11
    There was, however, a tiny little problem.
    Neither these stories nor the novels were recognized outside of the