The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg Read Free Book Online Page A

fiction began to pick up once more in the mid-sixties, first with the British New Worlds and then with the fusion of new writers, new approaches in the barbarous colonies themselves, a new audience was unaware of what had been accomplished in the fifties and talked of the field’s “new literary merit,” “new relevance,” “new excitement,” “new standards of contemporaneity” as if nothing innovative had occurred before Ballard or Silverberg. Yet, as that second and less significant false spring of the late sixties and seventies also ebbs, the true dimensions of the fifties reappear, however distantly, across the murky waters. Time to reconsider.
    Some historical background: at the end of the nineteen-forties, science fiction accounted for perhaps fifty books, hardcover and paperback, published commercially in a year. The field supported perhaps seven magazines, only one of which, Astounding , paid decent word rates (two cents a word on acceptance) or was read by other than a juvenile audience. Five years later, there were forty magazines fighting for space on the newsstands, hardcover and paperback novels and collections were coming out at the rate of two to three hundred a year, and one book editor, Donald A. Wollheim at Ace, was publishing more science fiction in a month than had appeared in all of 1943. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , appearing first in late 1949 and Galaxy , the first issue dated October 1950, were well-financed, carefully edited projects intended to offer Astounding serious competition, and by the inclusion of a wider range of style and thematic approach they sought an expansion of the audience itself. They succeeded at once— Galaxy was to outsell Astounding almost from its inception through the next five years; Fantasy and Science Fiction , beginning as a quarterly Magazine of Fantasy , went bimonthly and added sf within a year and then, as its natural audience found it, became a monthly in early 1952—and behind them, entrepreneurs picking up the scent, came a clutch of magazines. Some, like Cosmos , Space , or Rocket Stories , lasted only a few issues, others like Worlds of If or Science Fiction Adventures held through various ownerships for longer, but through 1958 although magazines would collapse, new ones would spring. The growth of the field in a spectral minute was remarkable. In 1953 there were forty or fifty times the outlets for science fiction that had existed five years earlier.
    Writers who had struggled with varying degrees of success through the bleak, building years—Sturgeon, Blish, Simak—found to their astonishment that they could almost make a living. A new generation of writers who had grown up under the influence of the Campbell decade were able to leap from late adolescence into full-time freelance writing careers: Budrys, Sheckley, Dick, Gunn, Knight. The enormous expansion of the market was further signified by the fact that the three most prolific writers of the forties, Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, and van Vogt, backed away from science fiction to go into other careers 7 and that Heinlein, working on a long series of successful quasijuveniles for Scribner, abandoned short stories entirely as did L. Sprague de Camp, who concentrated on nonfiction.
    It was a pretty good time for Francis E. Walter, General Motors, Mitch Miller’s Columbia Records popular division and science fiction alike. Some of the field’s historians (notably Fred Pohl in a 1975 essay “Golden Ages Gone Away”) do not see these factors as unrelated; Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction were among the very few mass markets where, sufficiently masked, an antiauthoritarian statement could be published. There are rumors of professors and engineers trapped in the academies or industry who turned to the science fiction magazines and both read and wrote for them (pseudonymously) avidly as absolutely the only medium where the policies and procedures of the late Senator Joseph