The Engines of the Night (14 page)
Read The Engines of the Night Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: #Education & Reference, #Literature & Fiction, #History & Criticism, #Movements & Periods, #Criticism & Theory
A Few Hard Truths for the Troops
O
NE: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR PERSONAL
editorial contact in this business, particularly at the outset of a career. It is easy enough to sell short stories by mail, but in order to sell them in any quantity the editors should be met; it is ten times easier to sell a first novel to an editor who knows you. Shortly after the initial sales, therefore, it is imperative for a new writer to come to New York (wherein work almost all the editors), or, better yet, to attend the science fiction conventions. The editors go to them. There are at least five conventions a year—the world convention, the West Coast convention on the July 4 weekend, the New York convention in the spring, the Philadelphia and Cincinnati conventions—at which half the editors or more are present. Although a new writer should not become obsessed with convention attendance, at least six should be attended in the year after the first sale (assuming any professional ambitions and spare funds at all), and at least three a year thereafter.
It
is
possible to run a career from a post office box—James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) is the most notable recent example as Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) was of the past—but only a couple of such careers exist during any given writing generation (which according to van Vogt, and I agree, is just about ten years). The rest of you—the rest of
us
—are like it or not going to have to make the changes, work the scenery. Ten years ago or more a young writer would be best advised to come to New York to live for a while, but New York is now such an expensive and (for many) fundamentally untenable place that it is no longer necessary. With writers scattered throughout the countryside, editors have a good excuse to spend expense account money to go to conventions to see them and editors have no objection to this.
TWO: Reviews have almost no effect upon the sale of a science fiction book. Prepublication reviews in the trade journals are meaningless; reviews in the professional and amateur magazines appear so long after publication that the fate of a book has long been decided by the time they appear. The only factor affecting the sale of a science fiction novel from the point of view of the publisher is print order; a book that prints more will sell more, assuming a certain rough fixed percentage of copies printed as sales, and therefore the destiny of a book has been resolved before it is even out of manuscript. Print order is in itself determined by the amount of the advance—the more a publisher has paid the more he must print in order to retrieve the advance—and the advance depends upon the reputation of the writer, editorial caprice, the editorial-book interface, the general state of the market and so on. (Merit except for a rare case or two has no effect upon the advance.) There have been cases in which books for which large advances have been paid have had small print orders and failed dismally; this is either because the editor has, in the interim, lost his job or because others in the hierarchy are out to sink him. There are even fewer cases in which books with small advances have had large print orders, but here venery and caprice are the
only
applicable factors and it is impossible to do anything about them.
THREE: Although matters have changed somewhat in the last half decade, science fiction is still regarded by the nonspecialist publishers as a minor category and the science fiction editor is low in relative standing; this means for all intents and purposes that if a writer’s editor is fired or quits his job, the writer is finished with the publisher . . . the writer simply has no individual cachet for the publisher; he is an anonymous part of someone’s “science fiction list.” Accordingly one does not cultivate publishers but
editors
, and if one is fortunate, one’s editor will remain at a post for a long time acquiring autonomy and prestige,
or
will go onto other publishers at an increasing level of responsibility, finally achieving a position of full autonomy.
FOUR: There is no point in trying to construct a saleable novel by studying and then reproducing material which (even if recently published) is already on the stands or in the bookstores; the reality of publishing, because of the nature of the production and editorial processes, is at least two years ahead of books being published today (and the books two years behind). Attempts to reproduce the mood, subject, or style of freshly successful writers is only to remind the editors of what naïfs they were a couple of years ago, and besides, they already
have
published stuff like that. You are far better off trying to reproduce the sense, subject, and style of much older work, the forties and fifties novels; that is where the field reposes and probably always will. (You are almost certainly doomed if you attempt at the beginning of your career to do truly innovative, original work. You will not sell it. You may scatter a few such short stories here and there but the novel market is blocked to you. The time to do innovative work if you are fool enough to want to is after you have sold a few novels, have some kind of cachet in the field, and have enabled the publishers to presume that you have an audience which is looking for your work and which you can take along with you. The publishers are wrong in this judgment, but they are wrong in most of their judgments, and simple, vulnerable, hapless creatures are not necessarily to be condemned for that.)
FIVE: Never try to sell a novel to a publisher on the basis that although another publisher has rejected it, it has done so with a “good,” i.e., glowing, letter of rejection extolling the merits of the proposal and regretting only its inappropriateness for the particular list. Publishers tend to believe one another (otherwise why would they hire the same editors, publish the same writers, work from the same pool of freelance artists and copy editors), and a letter of rejection in any guise is nothing more than that. The only way to sell a novel in early (and usually in late) career is to represent it as new work, never offered to the marketplace before.
SIX: On balance, and taking everything into account, including the residual rights, the small notoriety, the sexual prerogatives occasionally available at conventions, the shelf of collected works, and the feeling of accomplishment, not disregarding all of this but putting it in the balance, you would be better off going to law school . . . or if that is not your thing, becoming a temporary typist.
1980: New Jersey
Onward and Upward with the Arts, Part III
W
HEN I STARTED OFF IN THIS FIELD IN 1967,
just a plucky lad with a sack over my shoulder, off to Ferman and Wollheim to seek my fortune, it all seemed very reasonable. The fact that no one had ever done it did not occur to me at the time or for several years thereafter: what I would do would be to write science fiction of such imposing quality and quantity that sooner or later it would seep into The New
York Review of Books
,
The New York Times Book Review
, and
The Hudson Review
, not the
fiction
you understand (later for the
Hudson
, but the recognition. “My,” I conceived of Phillip Rahv saying, breathing hard, brandishing Lancer Book X3418-B ISBN 0075, “this isn’t your ordinary science fiction full of monsters and stuff, this is quality
lit
. Let’s give this boy the
push
.” Soon thereafter there would be “At Home with Malzberg” sidebars accompanying the review of the new novel (surely from Farrar, Straus now), “Oh, I don’t know,” I would say with a fetching little laugh, tossing my head and inserting yet another cigarette into my elegant black holder, “I don’t know if I’m all that good; you have to understand that I’m just one of many. Many, many fine writers.
“Why this field is
filled
with people who are doing literature, you might never be able to guess it from the magazine and paperback covers in which they’re forced to appear because of the economics of the paperback original market . . . but they’re quite as good as anybody writing in America today. Why, just for openers there’s A and B and then there’s C, terrific kindly old fellow who has quietly been doing wonderful work for the penny-a-word market for decades, and let’s not forget D, who has been underrated for so long and whose new serial in
Worlds of If
is really terrific, and then as long as I’m making a list, you ought to investigate E and F and G—”
I had resolved to be generous, you understand. I knew of all the sullen, recriminative successes embittered by years of struggle and anonymity who held onto their recognition like spoiled children and would not share even a bite of it. I had been impressed by the stories of Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, determined to be unlike the former, who would not say a good word for any living poet, just like the latter, who told his Parisian publisher that if the choice was between doing
The Wasteland
or his own new volume, the Eliot work should be done. What must be understood about that twenty-eight-year-old version of myself is that although I was a fool, I was a fool of the kindliest nature. I really did not want to persevere or succeed at the cost of others, and if I did it was my intention to pass around at least a little bit of the success. (My first Ace paperback of short stories paid tribute in its introduction to several science fiction writers who I felt were superior to me.)
I was a fool of course. An idiot stick has been described as pointing toward nowhere on one end, attached to an idiot on the other, and the stick was science fiction. In 1967 no science fiction writer who stayed within the confines of the genre had ever received critical recognition or significant commercial success. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. had published with some frequency in the field in the fifties of course (and knew as much about it as, say, Robert Sheckley), but he had begun in the middle of the decade to disassociate himself from science fiction as vocally and persistently as he could; his denials that he was a science fiction writer and his refusal to publish his books under category imprint or his stories in the genre magazines had, along with good acquaintanceship, put him in the position finally in 1968 with the publication of
Slaughterhouse Five
to find recognition and enormous audience as a “serious” writer. Richard McKenna’s first publications were all science fiction short stories (and several of them were outstanding), but his first novel,
The Sand Pebbles
, was of course a near-date historical and was serialized in
The Saturday Evening Post
and picked up by the book clubs without even the knowledge that he had published in the field. Ray Bradbury had at least started off within the genre but soon enough his stories, all rejected (but one) by John W. Campbell, were appearing in the bottom-line pulp magazines and
Weird Tales
, and then in one postwar burst in the mass-circulation magazines;
The Martian Chronicles
was regarded as the work of a fantasist who had had only glancing acquaintance with science fiction, and Bradbury’s ascent came via the best-of-the-year short story collections, script work, and
Playboy
magazine. No other writer who had published in quantity in the genre had, as of 1967, had even a whiff of serious attention from the academic critics or the quarterlies.
The question arises soon enough—it always has when I have discussed this issue in public or even in small, clamorous trysts in restaurants or bars—as to exactly why I wanted critical recognition and what that critical recognition, then or now, would have been worth in terms of audience, income, or general karmic peace. The answer is one I would prefer to table within this context; the question is not contemptible and the answer may have to do more with my own personal conflicts and difficulties than it does with market realities. For the moment it is sufficient to say that no serious writer can be taken seriously in his time (and usually for all time) unless the academic critics pay him some attention, and I felt then (I am not nearly so sure now) that I was a serious writer. With the general trade imprints, the O. Henry Awards collection or the college anthologies closed to my science fiction, there was no chance of achieving reputation for the work that I had elected to do . . . I could have, in somewhat Vonnegut-fashion, ceased to write science fiction and come at the academies from a different direction, but I did not think that was quite fair . . . I would have had to partly repudiate and totally abandon the work that I cared to do and was doing well. So simple equity and justice were one motivation, and the other was that if I had achieved critical attention, I might have had at least the option of finding a university teaching position, a cachet absolutely unavailable to a science fiction writer at that time. (Matters have changed since then but not too greatly.)
Whether my ambitions were totally self-deluded or otherwise, it has been interesting (if that is the word) to survive this subsequent decade and a half as an identifiably science fiction writer and observe what has happened, to see if anyone (I obviously did not and probably never will) did break through. Over these years more than a few science fiction writers—Heinlein, Silverberg, Haldeman, Benford, Pournelle, Niven, to name less than half—have obtained huge (by late-sixties standards) advances and large or at least larger audiences, but although science fiction has clearly proven itself to be at least an intermittently commercially viable medium for a mass-market book, the question of critical recognition seems to be in the same place, relative to the field, that it was long before
Star Trek
,
Star Wars
,
Alien
, or
The Empire Strikes Back
. Only two science fiction writers in the last decade did attract widespread attention from critics and editors not already close to the form and neither of them obtained that from work done within the genre. Ursula K. Le Guin won the 1972 National Book Award in children’s literature for a fantasy series; Stanislaw Lem, a Pole, attracted the attention of Theodore Solataroff for a series of novels reissued by Avon, the most recent of which was (at the time the 1977 front page
New York Times Book Review
article appeared) almost a decade old. Le Guin, a winner of the National Book Award, and Lem, an Eastern European fantasist struggling to do a body of work between the interstices of official repression, were hardly examples of the crowd bellying around in
Analog
or Doubleday Science Fiction or even the small science fiction lists of Random House or Harper & Row at the time.
30
The truism seems to hold right through the eighties: no science fiction writer will ever be recognized as a writer of literary stature
for work done within the confines of the genre
.
31
There are reasons for this; Gregory Benford has summarized them quite neatly: the critics have nothing to gain and everything to lose by saying that they like science fiction. Taking a position in favor of the unfamiliar would involve risk. Also—and less abstractedly—the majority of advertising revenue for the book reviews, the book pages, and the quarterlies comes from publishers and titles which are not science fiction. There is none of the implied economic lever which the category’s editors or publishers could bring against the review media such as what a literarily oriented publisher such as Farrar, Straus, or Knopf could bring against the
Times
or
The New York Review of Books
.
For a good many reasons, it is probably always going to be this way. A lot of talent—not all of it; many science fiction writers do not have my mindset but some do—is going to get broken in the process, but why the hell should the critics or their media give a damn about talent? The publishers do not; the editors, most of them, can hardly under a clear light understand the difference . . . and writers who are not self-deluded fools learn in the medium long run not to care.
1980: New Jersey