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Interregnum: Preface to an Essay

Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction was one of my early declarations of departure from science fiction writing; it was also the most florid. My departure became a sabbatical and a short one; within two months of its publication I was attempting again to sell short stories and since publication of this essay there have been perhaps 150. And there were two more novels, Cross of Fire (1982) and The Remaking of Sigmund Freud.

In short, the essay was specious, the anger and disillusion were genuine but the unmasked cry for attention and reader regret which marked the truer purpose of the work do me little credit in retrospect. A bad idea altogether and although the essay was collected as an afterword in the 1976 Doubleday Down Here in the Dream Quarter I really wanted after that second appearance for it to go away. Certainly, this rather callow and self-serving plea had no place in The Engines of the Night as it was being assembled in the light of greater understanding at the beginning of the 1980s.

But Jim Baen, the publisher of this book and David Drake who is effectively its editor requested inclusion nonetheless. So here it is and since it falls well outside any literary or criminal statute of limitations (it was written more than 30 years ago) I feel that neither blushes nor recriminative outpouring are necessary. The publishing situation which gave justification to this essay hasn't, after all, changed much: a few serious science fiction writers who originated in the genre have achieved a kind of condescending authentication from that academic-critical nexus (cf: Phil Dick, Ballard, Le Guin) but usually for the wrong reasons. If I had 1975 to relive I certainly would not have perpetrated this essay but there's a lot in 1975 which I wouldn't want to perpetrate now.

The outrage which follows is, at least, genuine, it is not posturing. I hope. Then again, one critic noted that this essay constituted "Malzberg hanging around the coffin, waiting for mourners" which wasn't a nice thing to say. Truth, that bitch, is only nice on alternate Thursdays in the Winters of even-numbered years.

 

November 2005

 

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