Book Review: Galaxies by Barry N. Malzberg

 

Galaxies by Barry N. Malzberg

208 pages, Paperback

Published March 17, 2014 by Anti-Oedipus Press  

First published August 1, 1975 Pyramid books

When Barry Malzberg graduated from Syracuse University he joked about not wanting to become an unpublished English professor. That is one reason he "fell into Science Fiction" as he put it. As he started publishing he bounced back and forth at jobs between reading slush piles at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency and ACE books under a brief mentorship of DAW books founder Don Wollheim. Enough so he told us during a (during Dickheads podcast interview) a story about being in the room when Wollheim blew a gasket over Man in the High Castle (a novel he passed on) getting a Hugo nomination.  SMLA represented both PKD and Arthur C. Clarke among others. The dude read tons of manuscripts.  In that era, he probably read more wretched SF than good.

I think that is one of the most important factors to consider when thinking about this uh novel, I mean I will call it a novel for lack of a better word. Let's talk more about Malzberg because it is meaningful. While he comes off as a grump and he certainly takes shots at the genre in this book he really loves the history of the genre. If it should please the court I offer two key points of evidence. Malzberg wrote fiction faster than PKD on pills. The dude had so many pen names in part because he was writing dirty erotica books (I am told a few classics in the genre) but also because he was publishing more SF than one name could handle.  Two of his most beloved stories Final War and  Gathering at the Hall of Planets were released under the name"K. M. O'Donnell",  a tip of the hat to the surnames of Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and their joint pseudonym "Lawrence O'Donnell." If you Barry he will tell Henry Kuttner was the best, or at least his favorite. The second piece of evidence would be his collection of  essays on the genre, anyone interested in the history of the genre must read “Breakfast in the Ruins.”

 When I interviewed him he pointed out that he got really good at reading the slush pile. That is important because he was reading the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the genre during the period when the Golden Age faded to New Wave. That makes Barry Malzberg a one in million critical eye on the genre that makes this book stand out. NO ONE. Not any other human being was in a position to comment on Science fiction in this era that way.

Barry N. Malazberg and his multiple Science Fiction personalities were on the frontlines as eras shifted from Asimovian ideas to a counter-culture middle finger held high novels filled with sex, drugs, and political points of view. There were a few authors who bridged the eras Leigh Brackett, John Brunner, and Philip K. Dick. Malzberg who is still rocking as the grumpy old man of Science Fiction in the 2020s can feel like he was born a grumpy old man, but he was a radical young voice. In the era when Astronauts were golden boys he wrote several novels critical of the space program including his masterpiece Beyond Apollo. At the time that was a punk rock move for a young SF writer.

Here is the point where if you trust me and want to go unspoiled is where I suggest you order the re-print from AOP and come back to read the rest of the review…

Malzberg was always a writer going for deeper, more serious meaning. I expected something deeper and cooler than your average SF novel but knew nothing going in.  Galaxies is a novel I had been saving, knowing that my friend whose taste I respect D.Harlan Wilson went to the length of putting this novel back into print. I knew it was important. I am glad that the meta-commentary was not spoiled for me.

I want to quote David Pringle’s Ultimate guide to SF entry about Galaxies. “Mock hard-SF tale in which heroine flies her spacecraft into a ‘black galaxy.’ The author interweaves many sour comments on the nature of SF as a genre. Witty, self-reflexive, occasionally irritating.”  Despite that three-star review later Pringle would list it in his Science Fiction: 100 best novels. “Galaxies is a love/hate letter to all readers and writers of Science Fiction, a witty criticism of the genre and its aspirations.”

 It kinda makes sense that this novel would pull two very different takes from the same person. Galaxies is a tough novel to judge. It has flashes of genius and moments that could easily be nitpicked. to me the genius outweighs the moments that had me stratching my head. The story follows Lena Thomas a starship captain in the 40th century on the verge of her ship falling into a black hole and creating time-warping effects that cause her to trip through infinite lifetimes, talk to the dead, and live in the subconscious of the author writing this very science fiction novel. Personally, I pictured Barry typing away in an office piled up with slush piles at SMLA in 1974. I gotta write a novel before lunch!

I think in most authors' hands this novel would start entirely in the 40th century and Lena would discover The author and the existence of the novel as a twist. I am not sure that version wouldn’t be better but that is not the point here. Malzberg is not messing around with that stuff, he tells you the score in the first sentence. “To define the terms at the outset, this will not be novel so much as a series of notes towards one.” On the first page, he makes fun of pulpy SF by saying “…it will be as much a novel as the Rammers of Arcturus or Slinking Slowly on the Slime Planet’s Sludge, titles which flank this to the left and right.”

The first fifteen pages are a commentary on the genre, and in that sense, Malzberg warned the reader that these were notes, at some point the novel starts. The thing is it is more of a novel at that point but no one would fool themselves that this is a traditional narrative.

The author talks to us, to his characters, and along the way comments on the genre, he has a love/hate relationship with. I personally think this novel is a 128-page reaction to the years of his life spent reading the slush pile. David Gerrold recently told me on my podcast that Malzberg fought for his now classic time travel novel “The Man Who Folded Himself,” after the editor he was working for declared it nonsense.

Eventually, Malzberg would publish essays on the topic,  but in 1974 if he wanted to express an opinion it was unlikely to find a home. So blending it in with a novel was not only subversive but smart. My dude was taking a chance to teach history  “ 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 demonstrate man’s mastery (or later on loss of control of technology.”

That is not the introduction that is in the novel. The direct commentary and notes start to fade away as the novel continues. We get commentary on the lack of sex in novels and BM makes clear they do it in the future. One of my favorite asides happens on page 27. “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.” I love those bovine animals of Sirius who turned out to be intelligent. This doesn’t forward the narrative, but it is an example of how asides in this novel take little funny shots at SF in general.  

The story once it gets humming takes advantage of high-concept ideas of black holes and time dilation. Lena starts to feel time and space stretched and manipulated. “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.”

Part of the novel’s mission statement is expressed after Lena knowing she is trapped to falling into the black galaxy calls on cyborgs to discuss her problem. She suggests the dead have overcome death.

“They have not. It is all in your imagination. There are places man was not meant to go, objects he was not meant to touch, and emotions beyond his ability to interpret. And this is all of them. You must yield. You must face the futility of the situation. I would recommend that you look for a religious solution. That would probably serve you better than anything at this time.”

Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo is about the madness of going out into the universe, in this moment he is saying to his main character in the face of the black galaxy there is nothing to do but surrender. Unlike other novels, Malzberg has the excuse and right to just talk about the meaning of the novel directly.

“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.”

Galaxies is a work of genius. It won't work for everyone. It is a bit of satire, tongue-in-cheek commentary on the genre. It is not the kind of novel that would ever get attention for awards like Hugos or nebulas. A good number of SF readers probably are never going to vibe with it. Had PKD or LeGuin written something like it, it would be taught and studied widely.

It wasn't written by those titans, I mean Malzberg is that important to a few of us, and I suppose it is our mission to get more eyeballs to this book and the author in general.