Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium by Barry N. Malzberg
Paperback, 389 pages
Published 2007
by Baen Books
(first published April 1st 2007)
One of the coolest things that has happened to me since starting the Dickheads podcast was speaking to and interviewing the author of this book Barry Malzberg. My biggest regret now is that I didn’t read this book before doing this interview. Breakfast in the Ruins is a big book and it is made up of two parts that are similar just written at different periods in the life of this writer who had a unique window to the 20th-century output of science fiction.
The first half of the book is made up of essays written mostly in 1979 and 80 about the first forty years of science fiction. The second half is made up of essays from the late 90s and early in the 21st century. The essays are very similar, in fact, you might not notice the difference if Malzberg had not mentioned that John W. Campbell would of loved the internet and Murray Leinster had been the first to predict it in a short story in 1946. That story was A Logic Called Joe. I know I am going to track down that story now.
This book was clearly and openly influenced by Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder which collected his essays and thoughts on the early days of Science Fiction. I read that book last year and I think both are very important. If you are not making lists of books in the canon that you thought you should read along the way then you are doing it wrong. I added probably 40 books to my GoodReads “Want to Read” and found a few already there being reinforced.
In the opening essay, Malzberg talks about the definition of Science fiction. In 1980 he stated it this way…
“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.”
This is an entertaining essay that bobs and weaves around other famous Science fictioneers giving their definitions. Then BNM (that is Barry N. Malzberg’s MC name) provides to show how major classics would be left out of those narrow interpretations. I am not going to go through them all but he is right to say that in Theodore Sturgeon’s view of science fiction Anne McCaffrey's dragons would need to find another part of the bookstore to call home. JG Ballard doesn’t fit either, and certainly, almost everything that came after John W. Cambell died in 1971 would not have fit his rigid and pretty much-canceled ideas of sci-fi.
This is a great opening essay but once the definitions are out of the way there are a variety of topics. It is interesting to get the snapshot of the genre seen through the lens of 1979 Barry and in many ways I found those essays to be stronger and more clear than the ones in the second half. Several of the second half essays were reprints of introductions to collections and novels.
I know in my interview 80 years old Barry was less grumpy than Spinrad, but these essays have a bitter and annoyed edge to them. Malzberg was not an Asimov clone and a one-of-a-kind in the genre. Even though he worked in and around the slush piles don’t think for a minute he wasn’t a team player.
“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.”
He believed in the genre enough that much of his anger is a mix between the failings of Gernsbeck and Campbell to the names lost progress in the genre. He wants you to remember the genius of Judith Merrill, Damon Knight, Henry Kuttner, and CL Moore, to rediscover Burdy’s, Rogue Moon. To recover and promote the work authors I admit I didn’t know before like Mark Clifton and Murray Leinster. Sure he writes about Silverberg, Ballard, and Tiptree and that is important, but the lost novels, short stories, and authors are the key mission of this book.
These are titles and writers I will discover because of this book. While I didn’t always agree with Malzberg and cringed at some inherently out-of-date thinking like referring to the Henry Kuttner and CL Moore as the Kuttners when CL Moore’s role in the genre is as valuable as her husbands. Before you youngbloods come for Malzberg try to remember that he was confronting the right-winger and stagnation in Sci-fi before we were born, give him some credit.
In Malzberg’s case that is done with a push and pull. I am with him that we need to confront these titans of the field while balancing the good and bad they did.
“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.”
Malzberg was unaware of how and why the genre was held back so often. He understood the roots of it in a way that many young members of the community could stand to learn. Each region now has a convention, each subgenre has its own gatherings, the diversity of the modern movement is bolstered by online forums and community unthinkable in the early genre.
“Modern” science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. It was no Bloombury but there could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90% of the writing and editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each other’s material, and so on. For a field which was conceptually based on expansion, the smashing of barriers, the far-reaching and so on, science fiction was amazingly insular.”
Right or wrong the early days of science fiction which really well documented in Damon Knight Futurians was a tiny community. Any progress that movement saw often started in the imagined worlds, but Malzberg is right to remind us. That is the importance of books like these that point out how small and humble these beginnings were.
When you see classic novels by Asimov, Knight, Merrill, or the others of these early days it might be tempting to think these writers were following the same paths through NY publishers that today’s Hugo and Nebula winners took. The early genre was more like punk rock zinesters, I mean Asimov got his start by taking the bus across the city and just introducing himself to Campbell.
“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.”
The Eureka Years does a good job explaining Boucher and Mccoma's (The first editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) impact and is worth a read to anyone interested in this era where the scene was reacting to and rebelling against Campbell. Malzberg gives a ton of time in this book to Campbell and I understand why. But in the years since we got the biography in Astounding that Barry thought would never happen. So in a sense, I wanted to no more about the fee room at SMLA, and the impact of Judith Merrill and Gold who edited Galaxy.
Instead, we get three essays about Campbell. That said there is one piece I think is very important. In 2017 when Jeanette Ng was given the award named after him, she rightfully became a hero because she started with “John W. Campbell is fucking fascist.” Not to take away from her defiant act, as I respect the hell out of it, but it was funny that at the time people were saying “Finally someone said it!”
Because I read this book, I learned that Barry Malzberg while using less colorful metaphors as Captain Spock would have said did the same thing at the very first John W. Campbell award. In fact, lots of people in the scene in 1973 were upset that Malzberg won the award over Asimov’s The God Themselves. The award-winning book Beyond Apollo (that we covered in a special episode of Dickheads linked below) was everything Campbell hated. He liked perfect heroes and Malzberg’s book was a psychosexual book about astronauts going mental on their first trip to Venus.
Not only that but when Malzberg won he got up and told the story of confronting Campbell in his office in 1969 while accepting the first award:
“I stayed with him in his office for three hours, fighting from the bell. Catherine Tarrant sat at her desk in the far corner typing and making notes trying hard not to smile. A young man’s intensity can be a terrible thing to bear (for no one so much as the young man himself) and I came off the chair right away, throwing jabs, pumping and puffing, slipping the phantom punches, going in desperately under real ones.
Not interested in market conditions, no sir. I wanted to know why Analog was the restrictive right-wing, anti-literary publication that it had become. Didn’t Campbell care what all the new writers, the purveyors of street fiction and venturesome prose, thought of him?”
It is kind of amazing from the first time the Campbell award was given to the last Malzberg and Jeanette Ng both called out his right wingery. Despite all the failures and lack of progress in the early days, science fiction survived rough patches.
“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.”
Science fiction survives and for that, we can be thankful for the good, the bad, and the ugly who were on the frontlines in the early days. It is valuable to learn from these times. We don’t have to glorify them but it helps that we have these books that contain candid and personal histories from various points of view.
Do you know what else survives? Barry freaking Malzberg. In the link below you can hear him in his own words from 2018. Thanks to the work of Professor D.Harlan Wilson his important works of fiction are staying in print. Beyond Apollo, Revelations, Galaxies, and more coming I am sure. I am glad this book exists, as important as his fiction is his critical voice is so valuable. Yeah, if the history of the genre is important put this one on your shelf.
My podcast interview with Barry Malzberg from 2019
