Editorial
A Perfect Breakfast

Addiction to science fiction can be a progressive disease. While most of those who get hooked are content to devour novels, short stories, movies, TV shows, games and other forms of the fantastic without desiring to peer behind the curtain, some of us move on to the next level, becoming addicted not just to science fiction but to books about science fiction as well.

I've been that way since the beginning. Before I discovered the field's book-length nonfiction, I'd always enjoyed going behind the scenes through the editorials, letter columns and book reviews in its magazines. Then, when I attended my first World Science Fiction Convention, I bought a copy of All Our Yesterdays by Harry Warner Jr. Even though the subject of that book was fandom in the '40s, I was still entranced. I hadn't entered fandom until decades later, and yet reading about the birth of clubs and conventions made me feel part of a larger family, a participant in the continuum that made up the history of science fiction.

Over the years, more nonfiction followed, each title indispensible—

Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder, in which he gave us all a critical vocabulary, demolishing A.E. van Vogt's career in the process. James Blish's The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand, in which he shared truths so dangerous that he felt the need to publish his commentary under the pseudonym William Atheling Jr. Joanna Russ' How to Supress Women's Writing and To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, which laid out the many ways gender kept some voices silenced. Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and The Motion of Light in Water, which revealed, with greater intimacy than most other writers would even dare to attempt, the intellectual journey of one of our greatest writers.

And most recently, Julie's Phillips' James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which last year took me places I'm not sure I was entirely ready to go.

My bookshelves reveal many other treasured friends, far more than I should list here now, and I value them all. But for me there is one that stands above all others. The nonfiction book I return to most often is Barry Malzberg's Hugo-nominated and Locus Award-winning Engines of the Night. (An additional honor received by the volume was that "Corridors," a short story about ambivalent science fiction writer Henry Martin Ruthven published as the book's final chapter, was a finalist for the Nebula Award.) Today, however, I find that I can no longer put forward Malzberg's Engines of the Night as my favorite work of SF nonfiction ...

Night must fall

... for now, a quarter of a century after its original publication, it has been replaced as the jewel in the crown by Malzberg's newest book, Breakfast in the Ruins.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should reveal that Breakfast, just out from Baen Books, includes among its other riches the sequel to the Nebula-nominated short story I mentioned above, which I commissioned from Malzberg (seen at right in a photo by Ellen Datlow) in the early '90s, back when I was the editor of Science Fiction Age. But that isn't why I'm recommending the newer volume. Instead, the reason the new book overtakes its predecessor is because it actually contains the full text of that earlier book, which had been subtitled "Science Fiction in the Eighties," as part of an updated collection subtitled "Science Fiction in the Last Millennium," featuring almost 200 pages of additional material.

Malzberg's credentials as a commentator on our field are many. His hundreds of published short stories and novels educated him in SF's school of hard knocks. His knowledge of the history of the genre is flawless, and his ability to quote chapter and verse to buttress his beliefs is impeccable. But the most important ingredients here are his unique voice and his passionate and often controversial point of view.

Science fiction has many cheerleaders. But where are those who love it enough that they are willing to say that the emperor sometimes has no clothes? Malzberg took up that calling. Fired from his volunteer position as editor of the SFWA Bulletin back in 1969 for not being an unquestioning supporter of the space program, he soon came to realize that:

Science fiction, for all its trappings, its talk of "new horizons" and "new approaches" and "thinking things through from the beginning" and "new literary excitement," is a very conservative form of literature.

He also came to realize (though I'm guessing he'd known it all along, but only then decided to begin to acknowledge it publicly) that it wasn't right to define the field entirely by its success stories. And so he chronicles here the story of science fiction not just as seen by the winners, but as experienced by the losers and outcasts and broken souls. As a former editor of Amazing and Fantastic, he looked at the slush pile and considered not just those who got published but those who got rejected:

"How many stories in oblivion, how many careers unable to begin? ... What is the cost to the people of all that failure and bitterness?"

He insists that in addition to those lucky enough to have been rewarded by the muse, we should never forget that there have also been spirits crushed, lives wasted and careers ruined. And attention must be paid.

And so he wrote of Mark Clifton, Hugo Award-winning author of the novel They Might Be Right ...

"who is unknown not only to the contemporary science fiction audience, but to its writers and editors; most editors under thirty have never heard of him, most writers under forty have never read him."

And he tells us of Cornell Woolrich, who wrote novels of which you've likely heard the titles, even if you've never read them, such as Rear Window and The Bride Wore Black, and how ...

"the booze had wrecked him, the markets had wrecked him, he had wrecked him ... "

And he mourns the ends of many others of whom it could be said—

"Cause of death: science fiction."

Breakfast in the Ruins is an alternate history of SF, the story of those who fell between the cracks. It's a moving and powerful book, and if I could, I'd reprint it here in its entirety, for my words are but a poor stand-in for Malzberg's own. But I can't, so instead, I'll just end by saying—go. Buy it now. Read it. Treasure it. Amazingly, the most important book of 2007 turns out also to have been the most important book of 1982.

Maybe this editor is crazy. But then, in Breakfast, Malzberg already has that base covered, too. He quotes John W. Campbell Jr., science fiction's greatest editor, as saying that:

"People who read science fiction are crazy. We all know about that. And science fiction writers are even crazier. But when you talk about science fiction editors, well—"

A long Campbellian sigh.

And if Campbell and Malzberg combined believe it—who am I to argue?