I soon quit—as predicted—the Glen Rock Pops Orchestra and have—a great gift to music this—not played violin in public in almost exactly twenty years. In April 1981, a few years earlier, I had returned to fulltime employment at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (see "Tripping With The Alchemist" in Volume Two) which seemed the only rational course of action for me to take predicated upon the assumptions and conclusions from which Engines of the Night reels. I lasted at the Agency more than eight years past Scott Meredith's death in February, of 1993 but a course of disaffiliation, commencing in 1998 under the successor ownership, became complete in July 2005. If the arc of my career as science fiction writing mimicked in crucial ways the arc of a certain kind of science fiction over the decades, so did the arc of the Scott Meredith Agency refract powerfully the course of American publishing through the 47 years between the end of World War II and the death of its founder. Engines of the Night is clearly the work of a man who had had enough; I was grateful to Scott Meredith for permitting the prodigal's return, I was grateful to hide out there for a long time. I did not, of course, stop writing. Breakfast In The Ruins is in evidence and there are more than 150 short stories since 1981. In 1985 there was one more novel, The Remaking Of Sigmund Freud and then I had really had enough.
Engines still looks okay to me all these years later. A collection of sf criticism published by Scarecrow Press last year contains three short essays and I read them without much embarrassment. "On the whole," I thought, "pretty sensible stuff, reasoned and temperate." I am surprised how controlled and temperate most of the work is; I certainly did not feel that way in its composition.
I think Blish and Knight as critics and visionaries did it better and Budrys sure had his moments early on but my book is still around, kind of, and may have taken its place with those progenitors. Good for me but—more importantly—good for science fiction, the Onlie Begetter.
December 2005