The Engines of the Night (23 page)
Read The Engines of the Night Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: #Education & Reference, #Literature & Fiction, #History & Criticism, #Movements & Periods, #Criticism & Theory
* * *
At eight-fifteen the next evening Ruthven delivers his guest-of-honor speech. There are about three thousand in the large auditorium; convention attendance is just over ten thousand but 30 percent is not bad. Most attendees of modern world conventions are not serious readers now; they are movie fans or television fans or looking for a good time. Ruthven has thought for months about this speech and has worked on it painfully.
Once he thought—this was, of course, years ago—that if he were ever guest of honor at a major convention, he would deliver a speech denunciatory of science fiction and what it did to its writers. Later, when he began to feel as implicated as anyone, the speech became less an attack than an elegy for the power and mystery that had been drained by bad writing and editing, debased by a juvenile audience. But after
The Lies of Science Fiction
had been put away and the edge of terror blunted, the very idea of the speech seemed childish. He was never going to be guest of honor and if he were, what right did he have to tell anyone anything? Science fiction was a private circumstance, individually perceived.
Nonetheless he had, when the time came to plan, considered the speech at length. What he decided to do, finally, was review his career in nostalgic terms, dropping in just enough humor to distract the audience from the thrust of his intention because after bringing his career up to date he wanted to share with them his conviction that it did not matter. Nothing mattered except that it had kept him around until the coincidence of
The Sorcerer
, and
The Sorcerer
meant nothing except that Ruthven would not worry about money until he was dead. “Can’t you see the overwhelming futility of it?” he would ask. “The Lies of Science Fiction” seemed a good title except that it would be printed in the convention book and be taken as a slap at the committee and indeed the very field which was doing him honor. Better to memorialize his book through the speech itself. Anyway, the title would have alerted the audience to the bitterness of his conclusion. He wanted to spring it on them.
So he had called it “Me and the Cosmos and Science Fiction,” harmless enough, and Ruthven delivers the first thirty-two minutes of his thirty-five-minute address from the text and pretty much as he had imagined. Laughter is frequent; his anecdotes of Campbell, Gold, and Roger Elwood are much appreciated. There is applause when he speaks of the small triumph of the science fiction writer the day Apollo landed. “
We
did that,” he remembers telling a friend, “at three cents a word.” The audience applauds. They probably understand. This much, anyway.
Then, to his astonishment and disgust, Ruthven comes off the text and loses control. He has never hated himself so. Just as he is about to lift his head and explain coldly that none of it matters his voice falters and breaks. It has happened in the terrible arguments with Sandra in the old days and in the dreams with Kornbluth, Hamilton, Kuttner, and Clifton, but never before in public, and Ruthven delivers the last paragraphs of his speech in a voice and from a mood he has never before known:
“We tried,” he says. “I want you to know that, that even the worst of us, the most debased hack, the one-shot writer, the fifty-book series, all the hundreds and thousands of us who ever wrote a line of this stuff for publication: we tried. We tried desperately to say something because we were the only ones who could, and however halting our language, tuneless the song, it was ours.
“We wanted to celebrate, don’t you see? We wanted to celebrate the insistent, circumstantial fact of the spirit itself, that wherever and in whatever form the spirit could yet sing amidst the engines of the night, that the engines could extinguish our lives but never our light, and that in the spaces between we could still thread our colors of substantiation. In childhood nights we felt it, later we lost it, but retrieval was always the goal, to get back there, to make it work, to justify ourselves to ourselves, to give the light against the light. We tried and failed; in a billion words we failed and failed again, but throughout was our prayer and somewhere in its center lived something else, the mystery and power of what might have been flickering.
“In these spaces, in all the partitions, hear our song. Let it be known that while given breath we sang until it drew the very breath from us and extinguished our light forever.”
And then, in hopeless and helpless fury, Ruthven pushes aside the microphone and cries.
1980: New Jersey
L’Envoi
MALZBERG, BARRY N.
Science fiction writer; references:
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia
, Contemporary Authors, Bibliography of Modern Science Fiction Writers, Who’s Who in the East, 1975–1977 edition. Second violin section, North Jersey Symphony Orchestra since 1976. Vice-Chairman, Program Committee.
Son of L’Envoi
T
HIS BOOK WON THE HIGHLY PREDICTIVE
Locus
poll in the spring of 1983 (for best nonfiction of the field published in the previous year) and was on the Hugo final ballot; I came to Baltimore with the feeling that I was the logical favorite for the prized gonfalon. The Engines of the Night, consistent to the last, however, lost.
It finished fourth to
Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction
, by James E. Gunn. Also ahead of it were
The World of the Dark Crystal
, a nice book of photographs, by Brian Froud, and
A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy
, edited by Baird Searles.
Engines
, however, did narrowly beat out
Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King
and No Award.
I also quit the North Jersey Symphony Orchestra. I may, at this writing, be found at the first stand second violins Glen Rock Pops but this condition, hopefully, will not last.
Footnotes
1
Asimov reports that as of December 1949 he had received a total of slightly less than $12,000 for his entire output. Considering what Asimov had done and what his stature in the field was already by that time, there may be no need to say anything else about the forties in science fiction.
2
And their due.
3
It takes a writer of real literary background and ambition to make a major contribution like this.
4
Neither writers nor stories are machinery, of course, and it can be presumed that
Amazing
preempted in certain cases some of the markets on the list, but certainly I was seeing nothing on first submission.
5
You know the perversity of editors—or at least I do.
6
The others, for the record, were Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt, and L. Sprague de Camp.
7
Asimov continued to appear in the magazines with diminishing frequency through the first half of the decade, but even the five or six serialized novels and fifty short stories represented a sharp cutback and the stunning expansion of the market diffused his proportionate impact. “Editors missed me a bit,” he wrote laconically about the period.
8
Bug Jack Barron
,
Stand on Zanzibar
,
Dune
,
The Left Hand of Darkness
,
Black Easter
,
Thorns
,
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
,
Camp Concentration
; case rests.
9
The payoff which Boucher, perhaps fortunately, did not live to see is that there is now in mass-market terms almost no audience for quality fiction at all, a fact not unnoted by science fiction editors—not, on balance, a dumb group.
10
And it is important to point out that science fiction in the fifties was a magazine field: almost everything originated there. The book publishers fed off what had been and was running in the periodicals, and only the bottom-line houses, like Monarch, published much nonmagazine material and that simply because these books were too weak to have achieved serial sale. The fifties novels mentioned earlier had
all
appeared originally in the magazines and most of them were commissioned and directed by the editors.
11
This is not quite fair. Although “Among the Dangs” appeared first in
Esquire
, it was a science fiction story which was reprinted in
Fantasy and Science Fiction
and several genre anthologies. But if it had appeared
first
in
F & SF
it surely would not have won second (or even 980th) prize in the 1959 O. Henry Awards.
12
Bester confirms this speculation in a 1980 essay for
Galaxy: 30 Years of Innovative Science Fiction
, published by Playboy Press.
13
Lord Keynes early had the late word on this.
14
This has changed in the last few years . . . a major sf editor can be a major editor at some places now. But he has to stay in the field, just like the writers, again.
15
Since I might be asked then I might as well put it here to refer to forevermore—the science fiction reading list limited to that dozen books:
Adventures in Time and Space
, edited by Healy and McComas;
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame
, Volumes I, II, and IIA, edited by Silverberg and Bova;
The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction
, edited by Greenberg and Silverberg;
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology
, edited by John W. Campbell;
The Best of Science Fiction
, edited by Groff Conklin;
Again, Dangerous Visions
, edited by Harlan Ellison;
The Demolished Man
, by Alfred Bester;
More Than Human
, by Theodore Sturgeon;
A Canticle for Leibowitz
, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; and
The Best of Damon Knight.
16
There were actually about forty such misguided souls in the audience, added to about 150 who had registered for a ten-session course called “The Writers Speak.” Or mumble. Or drink. But never simultaneously if you want to be invited back.
17
Say what, boss?
18
This giggler was about infanticide.
19
She was the only assistant Campbell ever had, joining him in 1938 and staying with the magazine until 1973—Catherine Tarrant died in Hoboken, New Jersey, in March 1980, unnoticed and unmourned at the time (the obituary appeared in the sf publications months later) by anyone in the science fiction community. Campbell let it be known many times that in his mind she edited the magazine, he only chose the stories.
20
I say this because Schwartz is so clearly a loser; the narrator of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” is in conventional societal terms at least holding his own.
21
Hexacon, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
22
The 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston.
23
This was a perfect summation of the situation just prior to the early seventies; now a good proportion of convention attendees are not readers at all but have been funneled in by
Star Trek
,
Star Wars
, and so on. Whether this is better or worse is for the writer to figure out; it’s every man for himself in this game.
24
Detroit and Chicago were competing bidders in 1980 for the 1982 world convention; no fools they—the fans went for Chicago. Or perhaps, fandom being self-renewing and ahistorical, the current bunch simply
liked
Chicago.
25
Boston in 1980. Come on, Malzberg, bite the bullet.
26
In
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
, Samuel R. Delany writes that the primary motivation of science fiction editors is to be assured that they are not doing anything wrong. “Since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them.”
27
Of course writers at the top are at the mercy of no one. They write what they wish. The point is that they got to the top by writing, deliberately or from cunning, that which intersected closely with what was perceived as safe and they are not now capable of writing otherwise, if they ever wanted to. Most, to their increase, never did.
28
Liberation would take down the walls. No more science fiction. No more
Analog
, world sf conventions, First Fandom, portions and outlines, or editorial lunches. Just a bunch of writers among a larger bunch of writers, none of them being read by anyone. For God’s sake, up the walls of the world!
29
We’ve all reneged—Silverberg published a long novel,
Lord Valentine’s Castle
in early 1980 and is at work on others; Ellison has published several stories in the genre and contracted out a few novels; I’ve done enough short stories to make up another book . . . but editors and publishers know what lying swine writers are, anyway, so no harm done.
30
Harper & Row is Ursula K. Le Guin’s publisher.
31
Thomas M. Disch at this writing (September 1980) seems to have a small chance of being the significant exception . . . Disch has published much work in the prestige quarterlies (
Paris Review
, etc.), however, and it is this that has granted cachet to the science fiction, not the other way around.
32
I have a best novel list footnoted elsewhere, and Harlan Ellison dared to name the ten best living writers in the field in a book review column for
Fantasy and Science Fiction
in May 1974. In fact, Ellison who could never be accused of backing off a big fight to find a little one,
ranked
the writers.
33
There is no way around this. One must face the truth at whatever age; to be born a fool is not to be mandated to stay a fool: a liberating discovery at forty-one. Anyway, of what use is unimplicated testimony?
34
Robert Lindner, the late psychiatrist, in
The Fifty-Minute Hour
wrote memorably of a young science fiction reader who did
not
appear to have the fail-safe mechanism and it is for this reason alone that the chapter has become famous in science fiction, often referred to, occasionally anthologized. This is what happens to someone who really
believes
this shit is the word to the wise.
35
Truth in packaging: Several science fiction writers
have
fallen apart and spent time in mental institutions . . . they all come out in pretty good shape, though, and the proportion of admissions in the field is probably less than amongst the general population.
36
Everyone at a convention is in the hotel bar, usually simultaneously.
37
Pace
Niven, Pournelle and all the rest, I am talking about the cutting edge; that which came into the field which was not there before. Replication and reinforcement have always been the staple of any genre.