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

field at all. They made no impression. Outside of genre science fiction they did not, in fact, exist.
    This failure of science fiction to reach outside its immediate audience was not of itself among the factors which blew away the false spring, but it might have been the factor that underlay everything. Science fiction remained small. It remained a small field. The audience upon which it could draw was perhaps half a million souls who were being asked to support their forty magazines and three hundred books, and with all their dedication they were too limited in numbers and too strapped for funds to do it. Most of them, after all, were kids. On allowances.
    This core audience which perceives science fiction as important and to some degree necessary to their lives has never really increased from this half a million since the late forties. This is the central reason for the boom and bust phenomenon, as overextension inevitably hit the wall imposed by a readership which would not expand. The only difference between the fifties and the present, perhaps, is that the fringe audience—those who can be induced to buy two or three given titles a year through word of mouth, movie publicity or intense promotion—has expanded to several million. No science fiction novel in the fifties sold more than a hundred thousand paperback copies. Science fiction itself was regarded with disinterest or contempt outside the walls. Its very audience was an unorganized constituency; they were not in the main evangelical (in fact, like many of the academics, they were secretive), and those who were simply fed the popular perception of science fiction as a strange field: bizarre, endlessly incestuous and utterly defensive.
    The genre made no impression upon the academic-literary nexus which controls critical perception (and eventually for serious writers may even create a large audience) in this country. Only two stories from the decade were reprinted in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories annual: Sturgeon’s “The Man Who Lost the Sea” and Judith Merril’s “Dead Center.” (Both from Fantasy and Science Fiction .) None ever appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories . Not a story from Galaxy , Astounding , Worlds of If , Worlds Beyond , Venture , or Infinity achieved even the thin gruel of the Foley roll of honor. (Some writers at the fringes of the field who published work in the quarterlies did make the Foley or O. Henry volumes, increasing the sense of injustice for the committed science fiction writers.)
    No science fiction writer other than Ray Bradbury, that non-science fiction writer, appeared in textbooks. No science fiction novels other than Bradbury’s were reviewed outside the genre departments of the press, gray caverns of brief notation. Most were ignored. The Demolished Man was published in hardcover by Shasta, a semiprofessional house operated by thieves, presumably because no reputable publisher wanted it. 12 The Space Merchants stayed in print but Gladiator-at-Law and Wolfbane did not.
    By 1958, death and divestiture rolled around; the genre had been gutted. Many of its best writers were burnt-out cases. Aware of the anonymity of their work and lives outside of the small enclosure, aware of the necessity to go on and on just as they had simply to make an ever more difficult living, most either could or would write no longer. Probably if ANS had not been torn apart or Horace Gold had stayed together the field would have collapsed anyway. An entire generation of writers had been used up in the struggle to make science fiction a reputable literary medium. They had won—the evidence is there—and they had learned that for all the world cared they might not have bothered at all. They had made a living but an equivalent effort in insurance or the universities would have paid more and extracted less and the money was all gone anyway. Some of these writers have done no work for decades now. Others have done no good work. A