The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties
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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:0312941412
ISBN13:9780312941413
Release Date:September 1984
Publisher:Bluejay Books
Length:198 Pages
Weight:0.55 lbs.
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
Think U know SF?
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 22 years ago
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
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 22 years ago
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.
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