Customer Reviews

The engines of the night: Science fiction in the eighties

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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.

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.