Remembering Barry N. Malzberg
I. The Passage of the LightBarry N. Malzberg died on December 19, 2024. I got an email from my friend Michael A. Burstein on December 20th alerting me to his passing. Of the many writers I got to know over the years, Barry was the closest thing to a mentor that I had. Each time I’d get an email from him or see him in the halls at Readercon, I had this surrealistic feeling: here was this great and talented artist who had taken an interest in me and my work. As I said to him once, it was as if I had befriended Derek Jeter and we were out in the yard having a catch. He knew what I meant.
After receiving the news of his passing, I sat glumly in my office for more than an hour, not moving, not writing, just thinking. I wanted to write something about him and what his writing and mentoring meant to me. Usually, this kind of thing came easily to me, but this time it did not. I was genuinely sad. It has taken some time, but here at last are some thoughts and memories I have that I think are worth sharing.
II. Malzberg’s WorldThough he may not know it, I have Scott Edelman to thank for first introducing me to Barry Malzberg. One afternoon between my junior and senior years at the University of California, Riverside, I was browsing the magazine rack at a bookstore in Moreno Valley, California, when I saw a copy of the July 1993 issue of SCIENCE FICTION AGE, the glossy science fiction magazine that Scott edited from 1992–2000. I wasn’t a very broad reader of science fiction at the time, and indeed, most of what I’d read since junior high school were Piers Anthony novels. It just so happened that the cover of the July 1993 issue of SF AGE had Piers Anthony’s name on it and included a story by Anthony called “A Picture of Jesus.” I never had much spare money in college, but the magazine hooked me, and somehow, I scraped up the dough for a subscription. Two issues later, in the November 1993 issue, I encountered Barry Malzberg for the first time.
The little s.f. I’d read outside of Anthony, up to that point, was not what I would call remarkable writing, although the stories themselves were often remarkable. For me, that’s what s.f. was about—the stories and the sense of wonder. That changed when I read Barry Malzberg’s story “The Passage of the Light” in the November ’93 SF AGE. The story was a work of art. Never before had I read prose as relentless and brilliant as Malzberg’s. I didn’t know that kind of writing was possible in a work of fiction. The words assaulted my emotions and senses. Even visually, looking at a two-page spread of the story, the massive blocks of unbroken paragraphs of text were astonishing. What was even more remarkable was that the story was about a writer of science fiction. It was what Scott Edelman referred to in his editorial as “recursive” science fiction:
Perhaps the most frequent practitioner of recursive SF is Barry N. Malzberg, who has written numerous novels and short stories about SF writers, such as Herovit’s World and Gather in the Hall of Planets, the latter of which was set at a science fiction convention. His short story in this issue, “The Passage of the Light,” is a sequel to perhaps the most famous of recursive short stories, “Corridors.”
I read “The Passage of the Light” in my apartment, even taking it with me to the restroom because I couldn’t put it down. I’d never read anything like it anywhere. It wasn’t just the idea of recursion. This guy could write like no one I’d ever experienced before in my life. I had been submitting stories to magazines at this point for about a year, but I could see that even with a hundred years of practice, my writing would never match the force and language that Barry Malzberg’s had.
I was fortunate to be in school where I was. UC Riverside was and is home to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Shortly after reading “The Passage of the Light,” I found a copy of Herovit’s World and was again astounded by the writing. This was writing that was so good, one almost had to take it in small doses. It was clear that Barry had a unique style, and he brought that style to bear powerfully in his writing.
Through the second half of the ’90s, I decided that small doses weren’t enough for me anymore, and I began to tear through Barry Malzberg’s books, peaking with seven of them in 1999. I read Chorale and re-read Herovit’s World, and then read Beyond Apollo and Galaxies. I read The Engines of the Night and discovered that Barry’s essays were as good, if not better, than his stories. I read Guernica Night and The Falling Astronauts and The Sodom and Gomorrah Business and The Destruction of the Temple. I read Overlay and Underlay, which he once told me was his personal favorite. I began to collect his pseudonymous writing that was not science fiction, like Screen. I even read some of his adventure books written under the pseudonym Mike Barry.
1999 was also the year that I sent him a letter, care of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, telling him just how much I enjoyed his writing. In college, I’d worked up the courage to send Piers Anthony a letter, knowing that he often responded to fan mail. I didn’t expect a response from Barry, but I got one—a gracious letter that, in many ways, was nothing like the characters in his stories. It is to my deepest shame that the letter was lost in a move from L.A. to the East Coast in 2002.
III. Some Notes Toward the True and WonderfulI was always a huge fan of Isaac Asimov, but I really discovered him just after he’d passed away, so that I never had the opportunity to write to him or meet him in person. As I began to sell stories and meet more people, I had the opportunity to write to Barry again. I think we were perhaps introduced first in email by Michael A. Burstein, but I’m not 100% certain of this. Barry and I began to exchange email, and I learned that his emails were as brilliant as his stories and essays—fierce, colorful, magnificent. He had the funny habit of changing the subject line of an email on each reply so that it related to whatever he was writing about. Recalling the lost letter, I made sure to preserve the email from Barry. Over the years, he sent me almost 500 of them.
He encouraged my writing. When I sold a story to ANALOG in 2010 (my third professional sale, but first to that magazine), he was the second person I told after Michael Burstein. He wrote:
I am thrilled for you. I’m happier by far than if it had been me. Give me all details, please. At your leisure.
Re-reading that email just now brought tears to my eyes. I sent Barry the story and the details of the acceptance. He wrote:
Young fella, this is as good as it gets… I want you to enjoy this to its fullest extent as long as you can. Blessings. Is a really fine piece of work. I don’t want you to touch it, let the fix go… but remember for the next time. And keep in mind Lincoln’s aphorism about the length of a man’s legs, “They should be long enough to touch the ground.” A story should be long enough to tell the story. No longer. But no shorter.
This was typical of him when reading my stories and providing feedback. He was always encouraging, always incredibly perceptive, always with insights into my own writing that I never saw myself.
My gosh, how our correspondence wandered and blossomed over the years. I told him stories of my creative writing professors in college, one of whom (Stephen Minot) he was familiar with and about whose writing he had interesting things to say (good things, to my surprise, since I always thought Professor Minot was something of a literary snob).
He was generous with his time and his connections. I’d written an odd mystery involving horse racing, about which I knew little, but about which he was quite versed. He read and commented on the story and then offered to send it to the editor at EQMM, whom he knew and recommended it to. Alas, no sale ever came of it, but I was incredibly grateful for his generosity.
When I was writing my Vacation in the Golden Age series, I regularly consulted Barry on my posts, and we had long, wonderful exchanges on the history of science fiction and the Golden Age, particularly Galaxy magazine in the 1950s.
One amusing story: By 2012, ANALOG had shifted completely to an online submission system. Barry could not navigate the system, and he asked me if I could submit a story by him and Bill Pronzini on his behalf. This I did through the online submission system. I followed it up with a note to Stan Schmidt to let him know the backstory and that the story was not mine but Barry and Bill’s. That story ultimately appeared in the March 2013 issue of ANALOG, and I was glad I could return some of the favor Barry had shown me1.
IV. Gather in the Hall of ReaderconAfter much correspondence, Barry and I finally met in person at Readercon in 2011. It was wonderful to finally meet in person. Not only that, but I was on panels for the first time ever at a conference, and I came up with the idea for and was moderator of a panel on “The Hidden History of Science Fiction.” I’d asked if Barry would be on the panel with me, and he agreed. I was incredibly nervous. Here I was moderating a panel at Readercon with Barry Malzberg, David G. Hartwell, Eileen Gunn, Darrell Schweitzer, and Fred Lerner. (David ultimately couldn’t make the panel, but Barry encouraged audience member Michael Dirda to help out.)
In person, I thought of Barry very much as a grandfatherly figure. I spent quite a bit of time with him, walking the parking lot—sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with others like Liz Hand and Paul Di Filippo. It was during one of these walks that I told him that walking the parking lot with him was like having a catch with Derek Jeter.
The following year I attended Readercon again and got to spend more time with Barry. I went to dinner at a nearby diner with Barry and his wife Joyce. It was just the three of us, and it was wonderful. We had tuna melts, which I gathered was a favorite of Barry’s. During those times with him, I was stunned by his memory. I’d heard of an eidetic memory before, but I’d never met anyone who seemed to actually have one. Barry did. It was incredible.
V. Beyond ReaderconWe continued to correspond after the 2012 Readercon, but I don’t think we ever saw one another in person again. Scrolling through his emails, however, I see we had long correspondences. I would tell him about my kids growing up, and he would tell me about new books coming out. In some of our last emails (ca. 2022), he was excited about reissues of some of his books by Stark House, for which he had written new introductions. He thought he’d finally mastered the art of the personal essay in those intros.
But life gets busy, and after 2022, I was remiss in emailing Barry. I thought of him frequently and would occasionally scribble a note to myself to check in with him and see how he was doing. It never happened, and I regret that.
That said, I told Barry many times over the years how much I valued his writing and friendship and how much of an impact it had on me. He was always humble, gracious, and a little self-deprecating. It was a pleasure to know him, and a pleasure to scroll through the hundreds of emails and be reminded of his remarkable writing and his remarkable mind.
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