Quotes from Barry N. Malzberg

Nothing matters at all. Survival is the coin of the realm. Time is a river with banks.

Certainly, forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties, H L Gold, Fred Phol, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and doom, and in the sixties, Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it.

More than two decades later we know that American Science Fiction was not murdered. It had a whopper of a heart attack; it lay in the intensive care ward for quite a while. (and had like most indigents to somehow find its way to the hospital itself), but time and a little fresh air did wonders for the patient, who toddled out of the hospital in 1965 and has not yet returned…Over a thousand titles labeled "science fiction" have been published every year since 1978.

The material would indeed have to be handled carefully and with an awareness of how easily it might descend into riotous. Pain would have to be wrenched out of it; the reader would have to feel with the characters. Not only intellectual content but levels of the ambiguous would have to woven through less Galaxies become merely an attack upon the technological, a curse against the absurdity. Nothing, surely, could be further from the intent of the novel.

But it can be said that the black galaxy not only repeats and intensifies time, but also compresses so that although seventy-thousand years are in one sense quite extended, in another, they are short enough for Lena all the various sensations of her various lives.

Thirty-Nine zero two. There has yet been no contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, although humanity has colonized many planets and investigated several thousand more. This seemingly exclusivity of human intelligence baffles cosmologists and mathematicians while pleasing theologians.

Consider Science Fiction, since its formal inception as a romantic subgenre in this country in 1926 with the publication of the first issues of Hugo Gernsbeck's Amazing Stories has been known for its simple and melodramatic plots which demonstrates man's mastery (or later on loss of control of technology

For how can this be? How can it be? That from all the Ridgefield Parks of our time we will assemble to build the great engines which will take us to the stars... and some of the stars will bring death and others will bring life and then there are those which will bring us nothing at all, but the engines will continue, they will go on forever. And so, in a fashion, after our fashion, will we.

We know what we do; the engines that eat us up-this is what science fiction has been saying (among other things) for a long time now. It may be preaching only to the converted, but the objective truth, the inner beast, will not go away and so neither-despite the hostility of culture, the ineptitude of many of its practitioners, the loathing of most of its editors, the corruption of its readers-neither will science fiction.

Science Fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effect of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a reconceived history.

Whatever happens to science fiction, it would not exist at all if it had not been given a name and a medium for this, if we are not led to praise Gernsbeck, we must entomb him with honor. He was a crook, old Hugo, but he made all of us crooks possible.