When I started off in this field in 1967, just a plucky lad with a sack over my shoulder, off to Ferman and Wollheim to seek my fortune, it all seemed very reasonable. The fact that no one had ever done it did not occur to me at the time or for several years thereafter: what I would do would be to write science fiction of such imposing quality and quantity that sooner or later it would seep into The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Hudson Review, not the fiction you understand (later for the Hudson), but the recognition. "My," I conceived of Phillip Rahv saying, breathing hard, brandishing Lancer Book X3418-B ISBN 0075, "this isn't your ordinary science fiction full of monsters and stuff, this is quality lit. Let's give this boy the push." Soon thereafter there would be "At Home with Malzberg" sidebars accompanying the review of the new novel (surely from Farrar, Straus now), "Oh, I don't know," I would say with a fetching little laugh, tossing my head and inserting yet another cigarette into my elegant black holder, "I don't know if I'm all that good; you have to understand that I'm just one of many. Many, many fine writers.
"Why this field is filled with people who are doing literature, you might never be able to guess it from the magazine and paperback covers in which they're forced to appear because of the economics of the paperback original market . . . but they're quite as good as anybody writing in America today. Why, just for openers there's A and B and then there's C, terrific kindly old fellow who has quietly been doing wonderful work for the penny-a-word market for decades, and let's not forget D, who has been underrated for so long and whose new serial in Worlds of If is really terrific, and then as long as I'm making a list, you ought to investigate E and F and G—"
I had resolved to be generous, you understand. I knew of all the sullen, recriminative successes embittered by years of struggle and anonymity who held onto their recognition like spoiled children and would not share even a bite of it. I had been impressed by the stories of Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, determined to be unlike the former, who would not say a good word for any living poet, just like the latter, who told his Parisian publisher that if the choice was between doing The Wasteland or his own new volume, the Eliot work should be done. What must be understood about that twenty-eight-year-old version of myself is that although I was a fool, I was a fool of the kindliest nature. I really did not want to persevere or succeed at the cost of others, and if I did it was my intention to pass around at least a little bit of the success. (My first Ace paperback of short stories paid tribute in its introduction to several science fiction writers who I felt were superior to me.)
I was a fool of course. An idiot stick has been described as pointing toward nowhere on one end, attached to an idiot on the other, and the stick was science fiction. In 1967 no science fiction writer who stayed within the confines of the genre had ever received critical recognition or significant commercial success. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. had published with some frequency in the field in the fifties of course (and knew as much about it as, say, Robert Sheckley), but he had begun in the middle of the decade to disassociate himself from science fiction as vocally and persistently as he could; his denials that he was a science fiction writer and his refusal to publish his books under category imprint or his stories in the genre magazines had, along with good acquaintanceship, put him in the position finally in 1968 with the publication of Slaughterhouse Five to find recognition and enormous audience as a "serious" writer. Richard McKenna's first publications were all science fiction short stories (and several of them were outstanding), but his first novel, The Sand Pebbles, was of course a near-date historical and was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and picked up by the book clubs without even the knowledge that he had published in the field. Ray Bradbury had at least started off within the genre but soon enough his stories, all rejected (but one) by John W. Campbell, were appearing in the bottom-line pulp magazines and Weird Tales, and then in one postwar burst in the mass-circulation magazines; The Martian Chronicles was regarded as the work of a fantasist who had had only glancing acquaintance with science fiction, and Bradbury's ascent came via the best-of-the-year short story collections, script work, and Playboy magazine. No other writer who had published in quantity in the genre had, as of 1967, had even a whiff of serious attention from the academic critics or the quarterlies.
The question arises soon enough—it always has when I have discussed this issue in public or even in small, clamorous trysts in restaurants or bars—as to exactly why I wanted critical recognition and what that critical recognition, then or now, would have been worth in terms of audience, income, or general karmic peace. The answer is one I would prefer to table within this context; the question is not contemptible and the answer may have to do more with my own personal conflicts and difficulties than it does with market realities. For the moment it is sufficient to say that no serious writer can be taken seriously in his time (and usually for all time) unless the academic critics pay him some attention, and I felt then (I am not nearly so sure now) that I was a serious writer. With the general trade imprints, the O. Henry Awards collection or the college anthologies closed to my science fiction, there was no chance of achieving reputation for the work that I had elected to do . . . I could have, in somewhat Vonnegut-fashion, ceased to write science fiction and come at the academies from a different direction, but I did not think that was quite fair . . . I would have had to partly repudiate and totally abandon the work that I cared to do and was doing well. So simple equity and justice were one motivation, and the other was that if I had achieved critical attention, I might have had at least the option of finding a university teaching position, a cachet absolutely unavailable to a science fiction writer at that time. (Matters have changed since then but not too greatly.)
Whether my ambitions were totally self-deluded or otherwise, it has been interesting (if that is the word) to survive this subsequent decade and a half as an identifiably science fiction writer and observe what has happened, to see if anyone (I obviously did not and probably never will) did break through. Over these years more than a few science fiction writers—Heinlein, Silverberg, Haldeman, Benford, Pournelle, Niven, to name less than half—have obtained huge (by late-sixties standards) advances and large or at least larger audiences, but although science fiction has clearly proven itself to be at least an intermittently commercially viable medium for a mass-market book, the question of critical recognition seems to be in the same place, relative to the field, that it was long before Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, or The Empire Strikes Back. Only two science fiction writers in the last decade did attract widespread attention from critics and editors not already close to the form and neither of them obtained that from work done within the genre. Ursula K. Le Guin won the 1972 National Book Award in children's literature for a fantasy series; Stanislaw Lem, a Pole, attracted the attention of Theodore Solataroff for a series of novels reissued by Avon, the most recent of which was (at the time the 1977 front page New York Times Book Review article appeared) almost a decade old. Le Guin, a winner of the National Book Award, and Lem, an Eastern European fantasist struggling to do a body of work between the interstices of official repression, were hardly examples of the crowd bellying around in Analog or Doubleday Science Fiction or even the small science fiction lists of Random House or Harper & Row at the time.30
The truism seems to hold right through the eighties: no science fiction writer will ever be recognized as a writer of literary stature for work done within the confines of the genre.31 There are reasons for this; Gregory Benford has summarized them quite neatly: the critics have nothing to gain and everything to lose by saying that they like science fiction. Taking a position in favor of the unfamiliar would involve risk. Also—and less abstractedly—the majority of advertising revenue for the book reviews, the book pages, and the quarterlies comes from publishers and titles which are not science fiction. There is none of the implied economic lever which the category's editors or publishers could bring against the review media such as what a literarily oriented publisher such as Farrar, Straus, or Knopf could bring against the Times or The New York Review of Books.
For a good many reasons, it is probably always going to be this way. A lot of talent—not all of it; many science fiction writers do not have my mindset but some do—is going to get broken in the process, but why the hell should the critics or their media give a damn about talent? The publishers do not; the editors, most of them, can hardly under a clear light understand the difference . . . and writers who are not self-deluded fools learn in the medium long run not to care.
—1980: New Jersey