The engines of the night: Science fiction in the eighties [Hardcover]

Barry N Malzberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1982

Aspiring science fiction writers, take heed! If you want to understand where the field has been and where it's going-if you want a career-you need this book. In The Engines of the Night, Malzberg reviews his own ambivalent relationship with science fiction up to 1980 and gauges its past and future potentials. Would science fiction have been better off without Hugo Gernsback and the pulp-literature stigma with which he cursed it? What are the seminal works of science fiction? Can science fiction kill you? His answers are brilliant, unequivocal, and surprising. Updated with a 2001 introduction, this award-winning collection remains an essential and enduring history and critique of a fascinating and problematic genre. (Locus Award Winner. Hugo Award Nominee.)

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 198 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385175418
• ISBN-13: 978-0385175418
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,515,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brutally, riotously funny, February 16, 2002

By 

silt (Portland Maine, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The engines of the night: Science fiction in the eighties (Paperback)

This book is essential for any scholar or passionate reader of SF or, indeed, genre fiction generally. Pair it with the author's novel Herovit's World for a bourbon & gasoline cocktail of black depression for those who genuinely care about the fiction no one takes seriously.

Malzberg's chapter on "instant" SF novels is both hillarious and sick making: take a plot from the list, buy and guzzle a fifth, make a novel in a weekend, pay the rent. He not only explains the genre writer's life, he does it in front the reader: you can hear the mordant tapping of his dance shoes.

A must for any would be writer, along with the essays of Flannery O'Connor.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Think U know SF?, August 31, 2002

By 

Tracy Deaton (Port Orchard, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The engines of the night: Science fiction in the eighties (Hardcover)

Brilliant, incisive, angry, despairing look at SF by 1 of its most prolific authors. Malzberg gets angry & sad over how many great talents burned themselves out in SF 4 such a small amount of payment. He looks at some of SF's "hot topics," not always in much detail; I prefer his historical work on the 50s in SF, & there R 2 unforgettable portraits of dead writers -- snapshots of Cornell Woolrich & Mark Clifton that R deeply moving. Malzberg keeps threatening 2 write something called "The True, Terrible History of Science Fiction," & I wish he would do it. I think the essay is the form he was meant 2 Xpress himself in. This is an intense, screaming book of criticism, suffused by Malzberg's deep love 4 SF. He tops the book off with a short story called "Corridors" that sums up many of the essays collected here. As good in its way as Algis Budrys' BENCHMARKS.