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Afterword

December 6, 1975: On this date, the first copies of my 38-story, 160,000 word Pocket Books collection, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg are available and in my hands and having them forces, in all fairness, a postscript to this bitter essay.

It is true that I must leave science fiction. As the vise of the seventies comes down upon all of us in every field of the so-called arts, there is almost no room left for the kind of work which I try to do. But it is also true that this collection—which is a major effort of at least intermittent literary intention and execution—would not even exist, nor would the career it capsules, have come to be had it not been for science fiction, which gave me a market, an audience, and a receptivity to my work that I would never have found elsewhere. In this sense I owe my career and large pieces of my personal life as well to science fiction. (Such a career as it has been.)

Where else could an unknown writer whose only virtues (other than a modicum of talent) were energy, prolificity and a gathering professionalism be able to write and sell twenty-three novels and five collections of some literary intention in a period of less than eight years? Even if I had satisfied my original ambitions I would have been dealing with a market which held me back, not only quantitatively but in terms of "artistic" growth. The only limits which sf imposed upon me (until 8/74 when the bottom fell out) were those framed by my willingness or unwillingness to turn out work of such pretension for what was, inevitably, an audience not intersecting with the academic/literary nexus. That is not a very large sin on the scale of things. Not at all.

I want to make it clear on December 6, 1975: I love this field. My debt to it is incalculable. What has happened to writers like myself, Silverberg, Ballard, Disch, is not the fault of the category itself (which allowed us to go as far as we wanted artistically for a while) or necessarily even the audience. The fault, as in most other aspects of America, is in what has happened to squeeze diversity from our culture in the last five years. I was either twenty years too late or twenty years too early for this kind of work: even so—didn't I?—I got the work done.

And some of it, dammit, will live.

 

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Framed