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Malzberg, Barry N

Entry updated 30 June 2025. Tagged: Author.

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(1939-2024) US anthologist, editor and author, who also wrote as by K M O'Donnell, mainly for some of his early sf work, a name apparently derived from the initial letters of the surnames of Henry Kuttner and C L Moore plus the surname of one of their joint pseudonyms; he also wrote non-sf titles as by Mike Barry for the long non-sf Night Raider sequence, Claudine Dumas, Mel Johnson, Lee W Mason and Gerrold Watkins. He began to publish work of genre interest with "The Sense of the Fire" in Escapade for January 1967, soon followed by a bitter novelette in his full mature voice, "Final War" (April 1968 F&SF) as by O'Donnell, about an unwilling soldier trapped in a never-ending Wargame. For about seven years he was extremely prolific in the sf field, very quickly producing some twenty sf novels and over 100 short stories, and much other work. Books under the O'Donnell name included the short-story collections Final War and Other Fantasies (coll 1969 dos) and In the Pocket and Other Science Fiction Stories (coll 1971 dos), the novels The Empty People (1969) and Universe Day (fixup 1971), and two Recursive farcical Satires in which sf Fandom with attendant authors must confront Aliens at an sf Convention: Dwellers of the Deep (1970 dos) and Gather in the Hall of the Planets (1971 dos). His numerous non-sf works included several notable erotic novels, and four excellent thrillers in collaboration with Bill Pronzini, including Night Screams (1979), which makes use of ESP. His sf output slowed dramatically towards the end of the 1970s, when he became disenchanted with the genre for reasons argued in his two collections of essays, The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties (coll 1982; much exp vt Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium 2007) – the original winning a Locus Award for nonfiction in 1983 and the revision another in 2008 – and The Bend at the End of the Road (coll 2018).

The first explicitly sf novels to appear under Malzberg's own name were sceptical commentaries on the Apollo programme: The Falling Astronauts (1971), Revelations (1972) and Beyond Apollo (1972). The third caused some controversy when it won the John W Campbell Memorial Award despite its sarcastic and negative attitude to Space Flight. The three novels feature astronauts as archetypes of alienated contemporary humanity, struggling to make sense of an incomprehensible world and unable to account for their failure. All Malzberg's central characters are caught in such existential traps, and the measure of his versatility is the large number of such situations which he was able to construct in a half-decade of intense productivity using the vocabularies of ideas typical of sf and erotic fantasy. Two tales published as erotica are in fact sf: in Screen (1968) the protagonist can obtain sexual satisfaction only by projecting himself into fantasies evoked by the cinema, while in Confessions of Westchester County (1971) a prolific seducer obtains satisfaction not from the sexual act but from the confessions of loneliness and desperation which follow it. The situation of the racetrack punter, unable to win against the odds by any conceivable strategy (see Games and Sports), becomes the model of alienation in Overlay (1972), in which Aliens take an actual part in the process of frustration, and in the non-sf novel Underlay (1974).

Aliens threaten the Earth, and set absurd tasks to decide its fate, in The Day of the Burning (1974) and the Chess-permeated Tactics of Conquest (1974). The underlying truth exposed in On a Planet Alien (1974) may be that the grotesquely threatening wilderness that faces the colonist protagonist may be a fever dream of the nightmare of the American West, hence the Western topoi lurking beneath the surface of the tale. In Galaxies (July 1975 F&SF as "A Galaxy Called Rome"; exp 1975) the central character is in command of a corpse-laden ship which falls into a Black Hole of galactic size. The protagonist of Scop (1976) is a time-traveller (see Time Travel) trying desperately to change the history that has created his intolerable world. Even the situation of the sf writer, struggling to cope with real life and the pressures of the market, becomes in Herovit's World (1973) a metaphor for general alienation. In this novel, Galaxies and the introductions to some of his collections, Malzberg offers a scathing critique of the market forces shaping contemporary sf, an increasingly sophisticated analysis of the immurement of self in the falsifications and procrustean role-playing demanded by the world. His protagonists may seem rather less humorous than the stories in which they are trapped; but their angst is a fair call on the pending apocalypse of the world.

Perhaps influenced by the 1970s flood of tales of psychic entrapment, his work was sometimes found to seem bleakly monotonous and despairing, but Malzberg was in fact a master of black Humour, and was one of the few writers to have used sf's vocabulary of ideas extensively as apparatus in psychological landscapes (see Psychology), dramatizing relationships between the human mind and its social environment in an sf theatre of the absurd. The few novels which he published after 1976 include three fine fictional portraits of historical figures. The hero of the black comedy Chorale (1978) becomes a version of the unpartyable Ludwig van Beethoven (1771-1827), while the beleaguered protagonist of the remarkably intense The Cross of Fire (1982) becomes Jesus Christ; both are in search of a better psychological balance but find their quests frustrating. The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (fixup 1985) has the father of psychoanalysis failing miserably to master his own difficulties while trying to assist Emily Dickinson, and subsequently – following his technological Reincarnation – coming apart while failing to solve the problems involved in Communication with Aliens; the disparagement implied in this rendering of Sigmund Freud may more seem to address latter-day fragilities in the practice of psychoanalysis than it does the man himself (see Sigmund Freud for his late analysis of the dying of the West).

Malzberg's later short fiction – fully as intense and accomplished as his work of the 1970s – was widely published; some of these stories have been assembled as In the Stone House (coll 2000), and in Shiva and Other Stories (coll 2001; rev vt Ready When You Are and Other Stories 2023). They manifest dramatically what The Bend at the End of the Road (coll 2018), which assembles columns in Galaxy between 2006 and 2017, articulates with an intense, self-aware focus on the "great" days of the genre, its "outsider" prime in the 1950s: that although this Golden Age could not long survive exposure to a broader world, the repeated "graffiti of distress" at the heart of Bend eloquently demur from any easy sense that nothing valuable was lost. Malzberg's necessarily exilic sense of a golden past that could not be retrieved may have contributed – indeed almost certainly contributed profoundly – to the aftermath desolation of his best work, none of which could have been written earlier. But Malzberg's unsalvable loss, it must be said, has been the world's gain. [BS/JC]

see also: Amazing Stories; Arts; Critical and Historical Works About SF; Entropy; Fantastic Voyages; Fantasy; Future War; Great and Small; Icons; Media Landscape; Messiahs; Music; Paranoia; Perception; Religion; Sex; Time Paradoxes.

Barry Nathaniel Malzberg

born New York: 24 July 1939

died Saddle River, New Jersey: 19 December 2024

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