Barry N. Malzberg (1939-2024)

The Fantasy Hive was saddened to hear of the passing of US author Barry N. Malzberg in December. Malzberg was one of the key figures of science fiction’s New Wave, and his writing helped to bring formal experimentation into the genre. His best work was as inventive and original as it was bleakly humorous. 

Malzberg’s peak period of productivity was in the 1970s, where over a period of seven years he produced 20 novels and over 100 short stories. Beyond Apollo (1972) caused controversy when it won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award – genre purists thought its bitterly sarcastic and pessimistic exploration of space travel flew in the face of what Campbellian science fiction was meant to be about. His best work epitomizes this ambivalent attitude towards science fiction. Malzberg clearly took great joy in deploying science fictional tropes and ideas, but frequently used them to push at the boundaries of what science fiction was, and to question science fiction as a literature. He would express this in a series of increasingly meta and subversive science fiction novels. Herovit’s World (1973) is a scathing satire of the science fiction writers, editors and fandom of the day, in which a struggling science fiction author whose life is falling apart meets first his SF writer pseudonym and then the swashbuckling hero of his science fiction tales, both of whom are convinced they can run his life much better than he can, only to lead to absolute disaster due to their inability to recognize or interact with real human beings. It’s brilliant, hilarious and crude, and finds Malzberg digging into the genre’s failings in the ways that only someone who is deeply invested in the genre can. Galaxies (1975) takes Malzberg’s meta-explorations even further, as its narrator describes the science fiction novel he is writing, about a heroine who is piloting a ship into a black hole, with increasing frustration as the gap between what he wants to express and what the genre allows him to articulate grow farther and farther apart. The original edition extended the meta narrative to the cover design, with the striking pulpy cover art and the blurb describing the non-existent novel within the novel that can never be completed. 

After this period of intense creativity, Malzberg slowed down. His dissatisfaction with the genre essentially ended his creative run as he felt himself withdrawing from science fiction and the SF community. However he continued to write striking short stories that were published in a range of venues, and wrote a long-running column for Galaxy magazine that reflected on science fiction and how it had evolved over the years. Malzberg’s writing changed the rules of what science fiction could do, and his constructive ambiguity towards the form produced some thoroughly striking work. His voice will be missed, and the Hive’s thoughts are with his friends and family at this difficult time.