onathan Herovit, a hack science fiction writer who has produced 92 novels and is now hopelessly bogged down in his 93rd, has never respected his own work and has never been respected for it. Insulted by fans, underpaid by publishers, abused and exploited by old colleagues, he ekes out a subsistence living producing prose he despises for readers he despises even more.
Herovit, who at the beginning of his career was forced by an anti-Semitic editor to adopt the less ethnic pseudonym Kirk Poland, once intended to get out of science-fiction writing by age 30. Now he’s 37, working on his latest novel about series character Mack Miller, and his life is falling apart. Living in a two-room apartment with a wife who despises both him and their squalling baby daughter, descending into hopeless alcoholism, he finds himself unable to stomach the line-by-line awfulness of the novel that sits on the typewriter before him.
Already way past deadline, desperately in need of the miniscule payment he'll receive upon completion, aware that his life’s work has been garbage and terrified of a mental state deteriorating even faster than his modest writing abilities, Herovit finally breaks down completely: his heroic pseudonym, Kirk Poland, takes over his body, arrogantly determined to straighten out Herovit’s life once and for all.
Alas, Kirk Poland is even less equipped to handle the real world than Herovit was. And when Herovit makes a botch of things, Mack Miller steps in to ratchet up the insanity.
A love/hate relationship with SF
As the kind of writer whose work unfortunately garners more respect from his fellow writers than from his readers, Barry Malzberg was always a underground figure even during the days of his most prolific output. Now that he appears only infrequently in anthologies and retrospectives, he deserves rediscovery by a new generation. Those moved to check him out should be warned that nobody ever read his books for their bright and bubbly outlook--they could be dark, despairing and downright bitter. They were also compelling and moving and sometimes, in their sustained accumulation of increasingly awful detail, perversely funny.
Herovit's World, currently available as part of his collection The Passage of the Light, is one of his best, is one of his best. Not science fiction, but a portrait of how badly the field of science fiction treats some of those who produce it, it presents the unforgettable spectacle of Jonathan Herovit, a man first seen enduring a scornful fan who flings a scotch and soda in his face. Herovit, who once harbored dreams of writing a "serious" novel, simultaneously loathes every word he puts on paper and clings to ancient reviews that called him one of the field’s bright new voices. One of those reviews, Malzberg tells us, was written for a magazine that folded before the rave could see print. Somehow this has compensated for poverty-row payment and the casual cruelties of fans and critics who persist in telling him, again and again, that he’s lost whatever talent he ever had.
His disintegration in the novel is precipitous in the extreme, and only accelerates when Herovit’s collapse makes him try to act like the action hero he has been writing about for so long. It’s a cautionary tale destined to resonate in the hearts of all writers everywhere, whether successful or not ... as well as those who care about them.
