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

McCarthy were explicated fully and mocked. Cyril M. Kornbluth in a 1957 symposium spoke of the hundreds of people in advertising who had thanked him and Fred Pohl in desperation for publishing the only novel, The Space Merchants , that told the truth about their industry and what it wanted the world to be. (Kornbluth added characteristically that of course, for all these thanks and testimonials, the novel had not changed its target medium to the slightest degree: advertising was exactly what it had been and so, to be sure, was Cyril Kornbluth.)
    One has to continue, however, by discussing what kind of work was being done to occupy the space that the publishers in their enthusiasm or simple greed had created. Say this at the outset: there has only been a trickle of novels through the fifty-five-year history of science fiction that have been consensually accepted as masterpieces, absolute examples of what the field can be at its best. With no exception that I can glimpse, all of them were published in the fifties. The jury on the seventies is, by definition, still out (it looks as if Dying Inside , The Dispossessed , perhaps 334 and Shadrach in the Furnace and The Ocean of Night may make it), but there is virtually no novel of the sixties, however acclaimed in its time, which does not have a substantial and influential claque in opposition, as it did then. 8 Forties novels of significance: Slan , Final Blackout , Sixth Column , World/Players of Null-A , Fury look archaic now: primitive and unfulfilled. They have fallen out of print; the most recently reissued of them, the Kuttner’s Fury , has not appeared since 1973. (That non-novel, The Martian Chronicles , does have a good in-print record, but Bradbury has had for decades access to the audience outside the genre and the television production has been a spur.)
    Consider, though, the fifties. A Canticle for Leibowitz , More Than Human , Double Star , Rogue Moon , The Space Merchants , Gladiator-at-Law , The Demolished Man , The Stars My Destination , A Case of Conscience , Bring the Jubilee . ( All are currently in print except for Gladiator-at-Law .) Rogue Moon won no awards; Canticle was published in its year. Kornbluth’s The Syndic copped no honors; More Than Human in that year. To consider that The Demolished Man , The Space Merchants , and Baby Is Three (the central section of More Than Human from which the fore and aft of the novel were flung) all appeared in Galaxy within a nine-month period in 1952 is to be awed.
    Novels, of course, collect the attention, the reissues and occasionally the money ( The Space Merchants , despite recent enormous advances to Silverberg, Heinlein, and Gregory Benford, may still be, over its twenty-nine-year life, the most remunerative of all genre science fiction novels) but science fiction, unlike any other category of literature, lives in the short forms. The short story or novelette seem perfectly available to the articulation and enactment of a single speculative conceit which, one could insist, is the task for which science fiction itself is most suited. The level of short-story writing during the decade in technical expertise and inventiveness has never been equaled nor have any short stories published within the last fifteen years had the impact upon the field and its audience of what was appearing routinely in the best-of-the-year anthologies or magazine anthologies. Until the advent of John Varley in 1975, no short story writer in two decades sprang upon science fiction as did Mark Clifton through Astounding .
    There is probably no way in which to teach a young audience (eighty percent of science fiction readers are under twenty) that Mark Clifton, dead a long time and virtually out of print, was for a period of four years the most controversial and influential writer in the magazines. No way to teach them that Floyd L. Wallace, Galaxy ’s Clifton who published novelettes of increasing inventiveness and technical clarity, also