Barry N Malzberg

Most likely the first I knew of Barry (middle N optional but usually present) Malzberg, who died on 19 December, was his novelisation of Saul Bass's outstanding mutant-insect film Phase IV. In those dear dinosaurid days before media streaming and before the reissue of formerly real books as Kindle content, the only alternative to waiting for a film to show up again on one of the four available TV channels was to get hold of the cash-in paperback, which if the film was science fiction would have an odds-on chance of having been written by Alan Dean Foster. Censorship meant that certain films had no chance of turning up on TV at all, so it is to paperback cash-ins that I owe my first acquaintance with Cronenberg's The Brood and Videodrome. Being prose transliterations of the screenplays, novelisations often included details that didn't appear in the film as released; Dennis Etchison's versions of Videodrome and of Carpenter's The Fog are both interesting in this regard.

The prose in such works was generally workmanlike, professional and anonymous; among the exceptions are Videodrome, Ramsey Campbell's versions of Universal's 1930s monster movies, and Malzberg's Phase IV, all of which can be read on their own merits. Malzberg's novel de-mystifies the enigmatic happenings in space at the beginning of the film; in a verbal as opposed to a visual medium this is perhaps unavoidable to some extent, but the ending is characteristically Malzbergian. The theatrical cut of Phase IV ends with an ambiguously transcendental merging of the human characters into the newly-evolved insect hive mind; Malzberg finishes with a disembodied voice saying "please clear all channels" and the start of an unspecified Phase Five.

Later I happened upon Guernica Night, which I found considerably less accessible; but it came with a useful afterword by Jeff Clark (no, neither have I) that pointed out some of his distinguishing traits: notably an intense, present-tense focus upon the consciousness of a single protagonist and a style combining meticulous syntactic precision with liberal use of the vernacular and long sentences with under-use of punctuation to convey the impression of a mind both rigidly controlled and ready at any moment to run haywire. The afterword also named two of Malzberg's best books, The Falling Astronauts and Beyond Apollo, both concerned with the internal affairs of pathologically alienated astronauts; and quoted the narrator of the latter to the effect that "the universe was invented by man in 1976 as a cheap and easy explanation for all his difficulties in conquering it."

Deservedly his most acclaimed novel, Beyond Apollo touches on many of the author's themes. Richly endowed with the Malzbergian astronautical character traits of outer passivity, inner resentment and confusion, and sexual uncertainty, Harry Evans is stuck in an institution where the authorities demand a full account of the recent disastrous Venus expedition, of which he is the sole survivor. He explores a number of scenarios in both the voyage and his private life, including hostile Venusians, the Captain's insanity, and the trauma of being cooped up with another human being in a marriage or a metal box with nothing but space outside. He plans a heroic novel about the expedition, which has the same length and the same number of chapters as the decidedly unheroic document we are reading. He plays with anagrams, whether to achieve new perspectives on the jumble in his mind, or simply to pass the time, or perhaps to remake his life and the universe in more user-friendly models: "Evans and I are the same person ... Each of us has a dissociation reaction, but mine is stronger than his."

Padded-cell humour also enlivens Herovit's World, one of Malzberg's numerous satires on the shortcomings of science fiction, the lunacy of fandom and the generally horrific business of writing for money. Jonathan Herovit churns out sub-literate space opera under the pseudonym Kirk Poland (surname courtesy of "the goddamned Gomulka government" which attained newsworthiness at an opportune moment); when Herovit finally collapses under pressure, the pseudonymous personality steps up only to suffer problems of his own, leading to a terminal fiasco too good to reveal here. Galaxies, a novel in the form of notes towards a science fiction novel, subjects the genre to a more overtly metafictional assault.

When not deconstructing science fiction tropes, Malzberg happily bent them to his own obsessions. The Men Inside is a deranged variation on the Fantastic Voyage premise, wherein young Blount is miniaturised and injected into a rich old man for healthcare purposes; like most Malzberg protagonists, Blount suffers from bureaucratic bullying, existential anxiety and unfair women. In Overlay the mind of Simmons the horseplayer (Malzberg was an enthusiast of the racetrack) is ridden and reined by a minion of an alien Bureau, with unfortunate consequences the only safe bet. Revelations and The Destruction of the Temple both prefigure the horrors of reality TV: the former depicting a talk show and another discontented astronaut, the latter an attempt by a future video creator to reconstruct the assassination of the sainted John F Kennedy.

In the 1990s, when Kathe Koja was producing superb stream-of-consciousness horror novels like The Cipher and Skin, Malzberg collaborated with her on several short stories. Notable among the hundreds of short works that he wrote on his own are the fatalistic love story "Gehenna" and the essays collected in Breakfast in the Ruins. Malzberg had a genius for titles; one fears to attempt anything called The Sodom and Gomorrah Business in case the content fails to measure up.

Malzberg was insanely prolific during the sixties and seventies, producing dozens of short novels (such that they can be collected by threes in volumes the size of a moderately concise Stephen King opus) in various genres, and under various pseudonyms which one must hope proved less fatally assertive than Kirk Poland. Even within the fraction of his output that has come my way, there is inevitably a certain amount of re-tread and repetition; but none of Malzberg's work could be mistaken for anyone else's, and the best of it is among the best there is.