The Fate of Science Fiction According to Barry N. Malzberg

Below is an editorial called “The Malzberg Predictions” from E-Genre Weekly, July 20, 2001.

by  G. W. Thomas

I just finished Barry N. Malzberg’s book, The Engines of the Night. It’s a collection of essays about Science Fiction in the 1980s. I’ll warn you. It’s a downer of a book. That isn’t to say it doesn’t have merit. In one piece (“Give Me That Old-Time Religion”), Malzberg says that SF writers are lousy predictors. They can extrapolate some factors but always miss the true innovations. His example is that SF writers predicted that Man would land on the moon. What he failed to see was that Big Media would be along for the ride.

In another piece (“SF Forever”) he predicts what SF writers have to look forward to in the 1990’s. (I think it applies to more than SF.) He is all too accurate. He says:

1. 75% of SF will become more like Fantasy
2. Some of these SF/Fantasy books will do well; others will not, depending on the size of the print run and how much tie-in with TV and films
3. Series books set in other author’s previous creations
4. Series originated by publishers will farm out work for a flat fee
5. Hard SF will occupy the same space that “literary” mainstream work does (not much)
6. Literary SF will become the province of small publishers
7. The audience for written SF will remain inflexible and will disappear
8. There will be quality work (as always) but it won’t come to the mass-market
9. Magazines and short stories will have little or no role
10. The two or three magazines left will be owned by the same conglomerates, edited by the same people and still pay 1950’s rates

Let’s look at Barry’s predictions:

1. Lord Valentine. The Snow Queen. These were two Malzberg attacked in another piece. I don’t know if SF has become closer to Fantasy, but I don’t think there have been any real SF-types to replace the Asimovs and such either.
2. Star Wars and Star Trek books abound and have been bestsellers.
3. This was a big fad for a while. In the world of Silverberg’s Majipoor. Andre Norton’s Witch World. There were others. Not to mention Brian Herbert’s new Dune books…
4. Phil Farmer’s Dungeon. David Drake’s Cat Space Opera. [I think I was thinking of Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars?] George Martin’s Wild Cards. Heroes in Hell, Thieves World…
5. Name 3 new hard SF writers? Name one.
6. Many of the old guard are now being re-issued by smaller companies. Philip K. Dick had a series of trade paperbacks a few years ago. Piers Anthony is re-issuing through X-Libris.
7. None of us is getting younger. My kids’ tastes are certainly in the speculative branch but they like different authors.
8. Don’t know. Has anybody heard of any really good Hard SF novels lying in dusty desk drawers?
9. Magazines were once the launching stage of all the big writers. Asimov, Heinlein et al. They published it in a magazine then collected the stories or expanded them. Now, who reads them anymore? They are all so insular and unoriginal. You don’t have to crack the magazines to sell a book. Doesn’t hurt but doesn’t really help either.
10. Who’s left? Analog. Asimov. F&SF. What magazine of the last 10-15 years has become a seminal journal? None.

Which brings me back to the prediction part. Malzberg says that SF writers are lousy predictors. I think he had a pretty good handle on what the 90’s and now the new millennium has in store. He saw the coming of the corporations and the dwindling of the magazines. But what he didn’t see – none of us did—was the Internet. Much of the small press publishing mentioned in #7 has been in e-format. How will e-publishing change or enhance Malzberg’s predictions? I don’t know. I’ll leave that to the SF writers to get wrong.

Well, it’s almost twenty years later (really?). How have the Malzberg Predictions held up almost to that most Science Fiction of years, 2020? Now to be fair, Barry was only looking ahead 10 years so we won’t criticize him for not predicting Amazon. (Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Called Joe” is about as close as we can get.)

1. SF today seems less fuzzy. Military SF, Space Opera, Feminist SF, these aren’t tainted by Tolkien. That being said N. K. Jemisin has won a pile of Hugos lately.
2. Media tie-ins still do very well. With Disney owning a large chunk of the imaginative universe, this isn’t likely to go anywhere.
3. The series set in other writer’s worlds has died down a bit since 2001. Not evaporated but not as prominent. In recent years there have been more “in the theme of” type anthologies: George R. R. Martin, Jack Vance, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc. Certain authors being in the public domain also lead to the Pride and Prejudice With Zombies spat of rewrites. I think there are a hundred Sherlock Holmes pastiches written for everyone one that SF produces.
4. Writers who work for a flat fee. It wasn’t really new to publishing in 1980 (think of The Executioner type series) but it has become a staple of SF. Usually the product is a tie-in: Conan, Star Wars, movie novelizations. Many of the writers who pay their rent on writing do some of this work.
5. Hard SF has had a bit of a resurgence of late. It has never been the bulk of commercial Science Fiction, at least not since Hugo Gernsback. Kim Stanley Robinson, Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter are not relegated to a tiny shelf.
6. Literary SF has broken out of its small shelf with writers like Margaret Atwood’s sequel to A Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments sold 100,000 copies in the first week. A divide has arisen in which fans gravitate to the literary stuff or the old-fashioned stuff. This gave us some pretty ugly behavior around the Hugo Awards.
7. I wrestle with the idea that the audience for “well written SF” will disappear. As I mentioned back in 2001 my children read different authors than I do. Still true, but they like video games more than books. They get their SF and Fantasy from Star Craft and WoW and other places I can’t even imagine. And if you have ever had to sit through a “walk through” on YouTube you’ll understand the coyote that chews off its own foot…
8. Quality work not coming to the mass market… we finally hit the Amazon question. There is a river of fiction coming to the mass market but is it quality? And how do you navigate it? Buyer beware.
9. Magazines have even a smaller role in 2019. Even the online ones.
10. Barry was right. The same corporation that owns Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine owns Analog and Asimov’s. But their Sudoku books outsell them all (combined).

Well, I’ll see you in another twenty years, 2039, and we can see how Barry’s predictions change. I’d like to thank Mr. Malzberg for his insights over the years.