The Engines of the Night was assembled in the Fall of 1980, published in February 1982. About half of the volume collected essays written before the conception and sale of the book, the remainder of the essays were written for the collection itself. (Many were placed serially.) "Corridors", the short story which concludes and summarizes the work was on the final Nebula ballot in 1983; the book in its entirety was a Hugo finalist (for "best related nonfiction") that year. In neither case or category did it win and it would have—I came to understand—violated premise and conception if it had. This is a work about losing and losers, conceived and executed in that mode. "The history of science fiction is a history of failure" I wrote somewhere a long time ago and Engines of the Night was an attempt to explain why this was so.
That book comprises the first half of the eponymously titled Breakfast in the Ruins. The second half collects most of my writing and certainly the better writing on science fiction in the near quarter of a century since.
Earlier Introductions to Engines follow and fairly well explain the situation.
I am indebted to James Baen and David Drake for this volume. Engines already bears a dedication but I would like to dedicate the second half of this and the consequent new work in its entirety to the memory of Henry Walter Weiss (2/10/40-11/3/91).