The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties

by Barry N. Malzberg

Book Overview

Aspiring science fiction writers, take heed! If you want to understand where the field has been and where it's going—if you want a career—you need this book. In The Engines of the Night, Malzberg... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385175418
• ISBN13: 9780385175418
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 198 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Think U know SF?

Brilliant, incisive, angry, despairing look at SF by 1 of its most prolific authors. Malzberg gets angry & sad over how many great talents burned themselves out in SF 4 such a small amount of payment. He looks at some of SF's "hot topics," not always in much detail; I prefer his historical work on the 50s in SF, & there R 2 unforgettable portraits of dead writers -- snapshots of Cornell Woolrich & Mark Clifton that R deeply moving. Malzberg keeps threatening 2 write something called "The True, Terrible History of Science Fiction," & I wish he would do it. I think the essay is the form he was meant 2 Xpress himself in. This is an intense, screaming book of criticism, suffused by Malzberg's deep love 4 SF. He tops the book off with a short story called "Corridors" that sums up many of the essays collected here. As good in its way as Algis Budrys' BENCHMARKS.

Brutally, riotously funny

This book is essential for any scholar or passionate reader of SF or, indeed, genre fiction generally. Pair it with the author's novel Herovit's World for a bourbon & gasoline cocktail of black depression for those who genuinely care about the fiction no one takes seriously.Malzberg's chapter on "instant" SF novels is both hillarious and sick making: take a plot from the list, buy and guzzle a fifth, make a novel in a weekend, pay the rent. He not only explains the genre writer's life, he does it in front the reader: you can hear the mordant tapping of his dance shoes.A must for any would be writer, along with the essays of Flannery O'Connor.