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Guernica Night
Who can resist the Final Trip?
Earth in the twenty-third century is adorned with corpses as suicides ravage a dehumanised population, compelled to live, or merely exist, in segregated complexes.
Despite the technical wizardry of the Church of the Epiphany and the dictates of the unseen rulers, more and more people seek the ultimate exit. One man probes the social disease, but he too fights that dreadful and permanent seduction.
If he succumbs, the victory of the Oppressors would be complete...
Earth in the twenty-third century is adorned with corpses as suicides ravage a dehumanised population, compelled to live, or merely exist, in segregated complexes.
Despite the technical wizardry of the Church of the Epiphany and the dictates of the unseen rulers, more and more people seek the ultimate exit. One man probes the social disease, but he too fights that dreadful and permanent seduction.
If he succumbs, the victory of the Oppressors would be complete...
- GenresScience FictionDystopia
127 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
Barry N. Malzberg
537 books141 followersBarry Nathaniel Malzberg was an American writer and editor, most often of science fiction and fantasy.
He had also published as:
Mike Barry (thriller/suspense)
K.M. O'Donnell (science fiction/fantasy)
Mel Johnson (adult)
Howard Lee (martial arts/TV tie-ins)
Lee W. Mason (adult)
Claudine Dumas (adult)
Francine di Natale (adult)
Gerrold Watkins (adult)
Eliot B. Reston
He had also published as:
Mike Barry (thriller/suspense)
K.M. O'Donnell (science fiction/fantasy)
Mel Johnson (adult)
Howard Lee (martial arts/TV tie-ins)
Lee W. Mason (adult)
Claudine Dumas (adult)
Francine di Natale (adult)
Gerrold Watkins (adult)
Eliot B. Reston
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
June 30, 2020
Somewhere in the late-middle of his decade-or-so-sprint of writing about a novel each month for his genre publishers (though often experimenting wildly and grasping after literary significance despite his constraints, or through them), Barry Malzberg wrote this anomaly among anomalies. Not that it's as metafictional or fragmented as Galaxies or his astronaut novels, but it's as cryptic and oblique a presumed science fiction as any of them. In a worn-out future, our protagonist attempts to live out fantasies of the past via martyred presidential automatons and an obsolete car on boarded-over highway, while a government agent attempts to discern the reasons for the incredibly high number of under-25s opting out on Final Trips ie suicide. The culprit, in part, seems to be the dream-leveling effect of widely-available instantaneous transportation: instead of giving people the world, it made the world all equivalent, as travelers duck in and out distant cities in boredom, now seemingly stripped of the ability to envision life progression by the unavailability of anywhere interesting to go. Unless it's to Trinidad, where certain superannuated religious rites may still enacted...
But it's all, as I said, very cryptic and oblique. Why exactly are our protagonists such assholes, for instance, a familiar device in Malzberg's unstable narrators, people usually unable to cope with their circumstances? At least when one of them seems especially horrible, a hallucinated Kennedy (the martyred president speaks) and Beethoven arrive together to call him out. These celebrity dead are followed by others, the last of which turns out to be none other than Buried Book Club discovery Gil Orlovitz, appearing to, it seems, Malzberg himself, who conveys the scene in direct authorial address. Orlovitz advises:
They were friends, apparently, and at the time of this writing, Malberg seems to have been distraught over not having seen him in the last two years of his life. Is this book, with its suicides and despair, an epitaph for a dead friend who never found literary success despite two massive experimental novels and nine volumes of poetry?
Malzberg seems to have internalized the phantom advice however, as this is fully a book of masks, though masking what is harder to say. Their strange and tantalizing deceits linger, instead, before us.
Though Malzberg's insane avanting of his genre tropes mostly got lost amid his genre audiences, it seems, he caught at least one eye outside with this one. Joyce Carol Oates wrote a review of Guernica Night -- of all his experiments of that moment -- for the New York Times in 1975 (though it requires a subscription, so I can't quite read it), just before her own arguably finest experiments in 1976, The Triumph of the Spider Monkey and Childwold. A few years ago, she anthologized the also-still-active Malzberg in Akashic Press' New Jersey Noir.
But it's all, as I said, very cryptic and oblique. Why exactly are our protagonists such assholes, for instance, a familiar device in Malzberg's unstable narrators, people usually unable to cope with their circumstances? At least when one of them seems especially horrible, a hallucinated Kennedy (the martyred president speaks) and Beethoven arrive together to call him out. These celebrity dead are followed by others, the last of which turns out to be none other than Buried Book Club discovery Gil Orlovitz, appearing to, it seems, Malzberg himself, who conveys the scene in direct authorial address. Orlovitz advises:
use artifice, use art, use masks, the manipulation of masks behind which the truth may be given, because only the masks are universal, and only the deceits count.
They were friends, apparently, and at the time of this writing, Malberg seems to have been distraught over not having seen him in the last two years of his life. Is this book, with its suicides and despair, an epitaph for a dead friend who never found literary success despite two massive experimental novels and nine volumes of poetry?
Malzberg seems to have internalized the phantom advice however, as this is fully a book of masks, though masking what is harder to say. Their strange and tantalizing deceits linger, instead, before us.
Though Malzberg's insane avanting of his genre tropes mostly got lost amid his genre audiences, it seems, he caught at least one eye outside with this one. Joyce Carol Oates wrote a review of Guernica Night -- of all his experiments of that moment -- for the New York Times in 1975 (though it requires a subscription, so I can't quite read it), just before her own arguably finest experiments in 1976, The Triumph of the Spider Monkey and Childwold. A few years ago, she anthologized the also-still-active Malzberg in Akashic Press' New Jersey Noir.
April 20, 2025
“Life is a totality. Like a great hunk of meat, it hangs loose and flapping against the wall of consciousness. Try to take one part, examine it, and the blood spurts.”
There’s a spectral interiority in Guernica Night: a text not of actions, but of perceptions misfiring against meaning. This is where Malzberg deters from most science fiction—displacement and disassociation aren’t symptoms of the environment, but symptoms of the underlying human condition. The social context merely exacerbates the crisis. Malzberg shows us our world of masks, and how difficult it is to extract metaphor from an illusion that seems to spring up from nowhere:
“We stand there in the strangeness, and for a moment I feel that I have understood something, but I know as always that this will go away, and all, in the morning, will be as it has been before.”
In Guernica Night, Malzberg takes this to an extreme by introducing us to a world where an alarming number of its inhabitants are taking the “Final Trip”—suicide before the doom-striated stasis of adulthood sets in.
If a writer is at their most poignant when they’re at their most honest, Barry leaves very little to the imagination in terms of his beliefs about the condition of society—and, further, his own place in it. As a writer who faced continuous pushback in the paradoxically conservative genre of science fiction, Malzberg was trying to perform a kind of revelation in a landscape that wasn’t interested in revelation. They wanted rockets, not rot. There’s been transgressive fiction (hell, even in religious texts) long before Beyond Apollo, but the almost Victorian level of anachronistic morality found in the SF community shot one of its greatest writers in the face.
Barry would’ve appreciated that tone.
Guernica Night moves in semi-linear fashion through a relatively small ensemble of characters. The most compelling aspect of Malzberg’s character design is that, while none of them can truly see one another—on a purely humanistic level that resists collapse into nihilism—they are all ironically tethered by the same prevailing condition. It’s as if the brute machinations of their dysfunctional technological society have created an abstract lacuna between connection and isolation, between moral and immoral. When a society has no collective moral impulse, no shared essence of knowledge, whatever ghostly gossamer threads are holding it together must frantically reapply themselves just to keep the experiment from ripping apart.
Malzberg’s protagonists aren’t unreliable narrators because of poor craft—they’re unreliable because they’re human beings in a post-ideological world with no stable referents. Of course they break. And he withholds narrative clarity not out of pretension, but because his characters themselves are groping through a world where meaning never quite arrives.
Malzberg is a pessimist, sure. But it’s more complex than that. He was a man who clearly wanted something out of life—and in fact, offered up what he had to get it. The truth is: no matter your goal, life will modulate your circumstances until you find yourself somewhere you never foresaw. We all learn that life is largely about showing up to its abstract conditions with a kind of flare. To paraphrase Emerson, all must take themselves—for better, for worse—as their portion. We each have a plot of ground we’re given to till. For Malzberg, one of life’s great heartaches lies in the attempt to control it. To place ourselves in it. To understand not only one another, but some eternal power-presence that seems to speak in a language we don’t have ears for.
This is a key philosophical thread across Barry’s work: his protagonists, while desperate for a center, never quite touch it. Their most earnest attempts at insight curdle into disillusioned solipsism—mere flashes of a not-yet-decoded language:
“There is no reason to stay, but there is none to go either; life at whatever level is perversely interesting; it disgorges, piece by piece, miscellaneous hunks of information which if properly understood and balanced may be a metaphor for reality.”
This is also why the sexual element in Malzberg’s work is so common. His characters are always trying to find themselves inside it. Over and over, they chase the flash of orgasm as the most accessible link to connectivity—but they always drop it. This is why nearly all of Malzberg’s masculine characters exist in an immoral dance between love and misogyny. With nowhere to assign blame, the weak man blames the woman.
And yes—I’ve said very little about the plot of Guernica Night. That’s because the story is merely a vehicle for Malzberg’s metaphysical insights. But surrounding this metaphysics is a visceral world. Some of his dreariest, most imaginative landscapes appear in this book—scenes that seem to pay homage to C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories. I keep coming back, not just for the tone and existential play, but for the shapes of faces, the beads of sweat. There’s an almost Lynchian darkness that seeps through the prose.
If you like to putter around in various ways of seeing the world, Malzberg is an isolated incident in fiction. He shares more with Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet than with any of his genre peers—offering harrowingly emotional honesty and a kaleidoscope of internal voices. Here, you’ll find less science fiction than what might be called the speculative phenomenology of despair—a chronicle of those at the edge of their own unmaking, still trying to extract metaphor from a world that only gives blood when you touch it.
There’s a spectral interiority in Guernica Night: a text not of actions, but of perceptions misfiring against meaning. This is where Malzberg deters from most science fiction—displacement and disassociation aren’t symptoms of the environment, but symptoms of the underlying human condition. The social context merely exacerbates the crisis. Malzberg shows us our world of masks, and how difficult it is to extract metaphor from an illusion that seems to spring up from nowhere:
“We stand there in the strangeness, and for a moment I feel that I have understood something, but I know as always that this will go away, and all, in the morning, will be as it has been before.”
In Guernica Night, Malzberg takes this to an extreme by introducing us to a world where an alarming number of its inhabitants are taking the “Final Trip”—suicide before the doom-striated stasis of adulthood sets in.
If a writer is at their most poignant when they’re at their most honest, Barry leaves very little to the imagination in terms of his beliefs about the condition of society—and, further, his own place in it. As a writer who faced continuous pushback in the paradoxically conservative genre of science fiction, Malzberg was trying to perform a kind of revelation in a landscape that wasn’t interested in revelation. They wanted rockets, not rot. There’s been transgressive fiction (hell, even in religious texts) long before Beyond Apollo, but the almost Victorian level of anachronistic morality found in the SF community shot one of its greatest writers in the face.
Barry would’ve appreciated that tone.
Guernica Night moves in semi-linear fashion through a relatively small ensemble of characters. The most compelling aspect of Malzberg’s character design is that, while none of them can truly see one another—on a purely humanistic level that resists collapse into nihilism—they are all ironically tethered by the same prevailing condition. It’s as if the brute machinations of their dysfunctional technological society have created an abstract lacuna between connection and isolation, between moral and immoral. When a society has no collective moral impulse, no shared essence of knowledge, whatever ghostly gossamer threads are holding it together must frantically reapply themselves just to keep the experiment from ripping apart.
Malzberg’s protagonists aren’t unreliable narrators because of poor craft—they’re unreliable because they’re human beings in a post-ideological world with no stable referents. Of course they break. And he withholds narrative clarity not out of pretension, but because his characters themselves are groping through a world where meaning never quite arrives.
Malzberg is a pessimist, sure. But it’s more complex than that. He was a man who clearly wanted something out of life—and in fact, offered up what he had to get it. The truth is: no matter your goal, life will modulate your circumstances until you find yourself somewhere you never foresaw. We all learn that life is largely about showing up to its abstract conditions with a kind of flare. To paraphrase Emerson, all must take themselves—for better, for worse—as their portion. We each have a plot of ground we’re given to till. For Malzberg, one of life’s great heartaches lies in the attempt to control it. To place ourselves in it. To understand not only one another, but some eternal power-presence that seems to speak in a language we don’t have ears for.
This is a key philosophical thread across Barry’s work: his protagonists, while desperate for a center, never quite touch it. Their most earnest attempts at insight curdle into disillusioned solipsism—mere flashes of a not-yet-decoded language:
“There is no reason to stay, but there is none to go either; life at whatever level is perversely interesting; it disgorges, piece by piece, miscellaneous hunks of information which if properly understood and balanced may be a metaphor for reality.”
This is also why the sexual element in Malzberg’s work is so common. His characters are always trying to find themselves inside it. Over and over, they chase the flash of orgasm as the most accessible link to connectivity—but they always drop it. This is why nearly all of Malzberg’s masculine characters exist in an immoral dance between love and misogyny. With nowhere to assign blame, the weak man blames the woman.
And yes—I’ve said very little about the plot of Guernica Night. That’s because the story is merely a vehicle for Malzberg’s metaphysical insights. But surrounding this metaphysics is a visceral world. Some of his dreariest, most imaginative landscapes appear in this book—scenes that seem to pay homage to C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories. I keep coming back, not just for the tone and existential play, but for the shapes of faces, the beads of sweat. There’s an almost Lynchian darkness that seeps through the prose.
If you like to putter around in various ways of seeing the world, Malzberg is an isolated incident in fiction. He shares more with Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet than with any of his genre peers—offering harrowingly emotional honesty and a kaleidoscope of internal voices. Here, you’ll find less science fiction than what might be called the speculative phenomenology of despair—a chronicle of those at the edge of their own unmaking, still trying to extract metaphor from a world that only gives blood when you touch it.
January 5, 2011
Now, if you were to ask me what this book was about, I would not be able to tell you.
If you asked me who, what, where, what happened to whatever, or wherever or to whomever. I would not be able to tell you.
And I am not kidding. I do not actually know what happened or what the book was about.
There were epiphanies and tripping and some real whacky tobacky inspired out of body wiffle waffle going on and I didn't really understand a word of it.
My brain was pushed to it's limits, but it was only 128 pages, so there was no serious harm done to my precious brain cells.
I think you would have to be living in the 70's to comprehend this book, and short of a blast back there in a time machine, I am never going to understand what the heck the author was talking about.
And he won the John W Campbell Award for this piece of scrambled sci fi fiction.
I suspect the judges were all taking hits from the bong the day they put Guernica Night up.
If you asked me who, what, where, what happened to whatever, or wherever or to whomever. I would not be able to tell you.
And I am not kidding. I do not actually know what happened or what the book was about.
There were epiphanies and tripping and some real whacky tobacky inspired out of body wiffle waffle going on and I didn't really understand a word of it.
My brain was pushed to it's limits, but it was only 128 pages, so there was no serious harm done to my precious brain cells.
I think you would have to be living in the 70's to comprehend this book, and short of a blast back there in a time machine, I am never going to understand what the heck the author was talking about.
And he won the John W Campbell Award for this piece of scrambled sci fi fiction.
I suspect the judges were all taking hits from the bong the day they put Guernica Night up.
June 4, 2025
What happens when a society loses all purpose? The invention of the transporter has enabled instantaneous travel around the planet, but as a consequence, the world has become homogeneous. Suicide, known as the Final Trip, is endemic among bored young people ruled over by an authoritarian government.
This is a dense, dark, and unsettling book. Malzberg's existentialism is on full display as his characters wrestle to extract meaning from their dystopian society. Like Delany's sensory-heavy prose, he writes very physically, focusing on temperature, texture, moisture and internal state, mixing in dream sequences and depressingly grim sexual encounters, creating an oppressive atmosphere that his characters inhabit.
The novel is packed tightly into just over 100 pages of surreal ambiguity. Historical figures counsel unhinged protagonists, off-kilter prose builds a sense of confusion, and details are glossed over so you never feel able to visualise a scene clearly. Eschewing descriptiveness and commentary, Malzberg focuses inwards, assembling his bleak society piecemeal from its dysfunctional inhabitants and its inept Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
His unlikable and unreliable first-person narrators continually disconcert with their turn of phrase: People 'feed themselves' into transporters in a way impossible to visualise, they live in cubicles, they put things away inside themselves. His dialogue is similarly dissonant and rhythmic:
> She looks at it, counts it laboriously as I spread it in my hand, then hesitantly takes it. 'It looks proper.'
> 'Good.'
> 'It is sufficient. You may go.'
> 'All right,' I say, feeling myself being dragged into a gluey kind of stasis. 'I will go now.'
> She gestures through the curtains. 'Yes', she says, 'you may do so'
Fans of the new wave existentialism of Disch, Delany, Ballard, and Spinrad, should feel at home with Malzberg's relentless nihilism. For everyone else, you'll probably find it a confusing and slightly grubby experience. It's one of those books that feels like it would reward re-reads and analysis, but I'm not sure I'll ever return.
This is a dense, dark, and unsettling book. Malzberg's existentialism is on full display as his characters wrestle to extract meaning from their dystopian society. Like Delany's sensory-heavy prose, he writes very physically, focusing on temperature, texture, moisture and internal state, mixing in dream sequences and depressingly grim sexual encounters, creating an oppressive atmosphere that his characters inhabit.
The novel is packed tightly into just over 100 pages of surreal ambiguity. Historical figures counsel unhinged protagonists, off-kilter prose builds a sense of confusion, and details are glossed over so you never feel able to visualise a scene clearly. Eschewing descriptiveness and commentary, Malzberg focuses inwards, assembling his bleak society piecemeal from its dysfunctional inhabitants and its inept Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
His unlikable and unreliable first-person narrators continually disconcert with their turn of phrase: People 'feed themselves' into transporters in a way impossible to visualise, they live in cubicles, they put things away inside themselves. His dialogue is similarly dissonant and rhythmic:
> She looks at it, counts it laboriously as I spread it in my hand, then hesitantly takes it. 'It looks proper.'
> 'Good.'
> 'It is sufficient. You may go.'
> 'All right,' I say, feeling myself being dragged into a gluey kind of stasis. 'I will go now.'
> She gestures through the curtains. 'Yes', she says, 'you may do so'
Fans of the new wave existentialism of Disch, Delany, Ballard, and Spinrad, should feel at home with Malzberg's relentless nihilism. For everyone else, you'll probably find it a confusing and slightly grubby experience. It's one of those books that feels like it would reward re-reads and analysis, but I'm not sure I'll ever return.
July 1, 2020
Really bizarre and uneven even compared to his other books but I mostly liked it, and there's a Gil Orlovitz cameo!
August 13, 2023
Weak Malzberg.
December 7, 2022
The subject of suicide really caught my attention here. The explicit rejection of cheap sentimentalism and the serious approach of the subject within an absurd setting, almost giving reason for the pessimistic suicidals, being them as convicing as their violent refutation made by the optimistic resigned to life imprisonment is one of the greatest things I have ever read.
The author is a first rate writer undercover in the sci fi niche. If he wasn't found out until now it's because he just didn't wanted to. The self-evident impostor syndrome shared by Malzberg with Nabokov amongst similar writers is his least praiseworthy quality. I'm not any snitch to rat him out but nevertheless if you enjoy any first rate New Wave science fiction writers ranging from the likes of Philip K Dick and Norman Spinrad to J. G. Ballard and John Brunner, and even more if you read the most disillusioned 21st century writers such as David Foster Wallace with his neglected, bleak, depressed science fiction or Roberto Bolaño with his literature about literature and about writers (living, dead or made up) you probably could like Malzberg as well.
The author is a first rate writer undercover in the sci fi niche. If he wasn't found out until now it's because he just didn't wanted to. The self-evident impostor syndrome shared by Malzberg with Nabokov amongst similar writers is his least praiseworthy quality. I'm not any snitch to rat him out but nevertheless if you enjoy any first rate New Wave science fiction writers ranging from the likes of Philip K Dick and Norman Spinrad to J. G. Ballard and John Brunner, and even more if you read the most disillusioned 21st century writers such as David Foster Wallace with his neglected, bleak, depressed science fiction or Roberto Bolaño with his literature about literature and about writers (living, dead or made up) you probably could like Malzberg as well.
August 19, 2015
I don't know why this ended up on my to read list (probably from io9.com) but I just didn't get it. Maybe 1 star is to little it had some good things but overall I was just too confusing. I'm not really sure who was the protagonist and who was the antagonist. It was all just so muddled. It needed more explanation and clarity to work but alas it just wasn't there. So I would definitely skip this one.
May 30, 2025
Took me a while to get into this one as it's tone is more sombre than the other Malzberg's I've read, and there is an early rape scene that wasn't necessarily handled in the best way imo. However, upon finishing it, I ultimately think that Guernica Night is a brilliant piece of existentialist literature.
November 26, 2017
I couldn't get anywhere with this. I read the whole thing but it made zero sense to me.
April 1, 2026
My rating means nothing.
I absolutely loved Beyond Apollo. If I had to come up with a top 10 books I've ever read, it would probably end up on that list. I'd been wanting to read another Malzberg ever since I finished it, but they all seem so intimidating. I'm always worried that I'm not ready for them, that they'll be too difficult and go over my head.
And yeah that's pretty much the case with Guernica Night.
Like Beyond Apollo, the writing is some of the best I've ever read. Almost every chapter ends with the most gut-wrenchingly beautiful sentence or sentences you can imagine. Divine inspiration seems the only explanation. I can't imagine a real human being writing prose this unbelievably good. My favorite prose ever, full stop.
But unlike Beyond Apollo, at around the halfway mark the book slipped right on by me and I had no idea at all what Malzberg up to. There are little hints of things I glean here and there (and of course the experience is always enjoyable because of the writing and so on), but I admit fully that I lost track of what the novel was trying to get at.
I imagine that if this book was more widely read it would be a bountiful source for meaningful litcrit. Idk. For all I've said, this one did in fact make me want to read more Malzberg. I just need to be selective. lmao does anyone know a good easy Malzberg?
I absolutely loved Beyond Apollo. If I had to come up with a top 10 books I've ever read, it would probably end up on that list. I'd been wanting to read another Malzberg ever since I finished it, but they all seem so intimidating. I'm always worried that I'm not ready for them, that they'll be too difficult and go over my head.
And yeah that's pretty much the case with Guernica Night.
Like Beyond Apollo, the writing is some of the best I've ever read. Almost every chapter ends with the most gut-wrenchingly beautiful sentence or sentences you can imagine. Divine inspiration seems the only explanation. I can't imagine a real human being writing prose this unbelievably good. My favorite prose ever, full stop.
But unlike Beyond Apollo, at around the halfway mark the book slipped right on by me and I had no idea at all what Malzberg up to. There are little hints of things I glean here and there (and of course the experience is always enjoyable because of the writing and so on), but I admit fully that I lost track of what the novel was trying to get at.
I imagine that if this book was more widely read it would be a bountiful source for meaningful litcrit. Idk. For all I've said, this one did in fact make me want to read more Malzberg. I just need to be selective. lmao does anyone know a good easy Malzberg?
November 18, 2020
Set in a mid-apocalyptic future where nothing happens, humanity is divided into societal enclaves, working in admin or machine operation, for a faceless and remote government; teleportation has opened up the world to everyone, and everything has become a homogenous whole as a result. Suicide–before the age of 20–is legal, if discouraged. When the suicide rates among a bored, disaffected and directionless young populace reach 90%, a government agent appears.
Malzberg excels in ambient depression, the monolithic unravelling of a psyche in a world of emotional ambivalence and ennui, where technology can only ever make things worse. His trick here is to present both pro- and antagonist as largely similar, even two halves of a whole, and set them against the same objective, in a tale with so dissolute a resolution, the author can only resort to finishing up with a personal regretful anecdote, as apt a warning for the young as it is the old.
Malzberg excels in ambient depression, the monolithic unravelling of a psyche in a world of emotional ambivalence and ennui, where technology can only ever make things worse. His trick here is to present both pro- and antagonist as largely similar, even two halves of a whole, and set them against the same objective, in a tale with so dissolute a resolution, the author can only resort to finishing up with a personal regretful anecdote, as apt a warning for the young as it is the old.
April 12, 2020
Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
Nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novel
“Here we are in Disney Land/Disney World; clutching the strange hands of those with whom we came, we move slowly through the ropes under the chanting of the attendants, swatting insects of habitation, toward the exhibit of the martyred President. The martyred President has become a manikin activated by machinery, tubes and wiring; he delivers selected portions of his famous addresses, stumbling back and forth […] (1)”
Guernica Night (1975) is the third of Barry N. Malzberg’s books I’ve read after Conversations (1975) and In the Enclosure (1973). Although lacking the harrowing extremes of the brilliant In the Enclosure, Guernica Night is not without merit. It is a dense work inundated by an incredible spectre [...]"
Nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novel
“Here we are in Disney Land/Disney World; clutching the strange hands of those with whom we came, we move slowly through the ropes under the chanting of the attendants, swatting insects of habitation, toward the exhibit of the martyred President. The martyred President has become a manikin activated by machinery, tubes and wiring; he delivers selected portions of his famous addresses, stumbling back and forth […] (1)”
Guernica Night (1975) is the third of Barry N. Malzberg’s books I’ve read after Conversations (1975) and In the Enclosure (1973). Although lacking the harrowing extremes of the brilliant In the Enclosure, Guernica Night is not without merit. It is a dense work inundated by an incredible spectre [...]"
April 8, 2021
This was a real dull slog of a book which is a pity as there is some promise here. There are some truly haunting images of a broken, desolate and emotionally empty society. Why exactly society had gone down the path it has is never really explained or expanded upon, nor is it really explained exactly why so many feel so hopeless and seek suicide as a way out. Most of the problems in the society in the book seem to arise from the fact that people are just simply depressed. It's never explained in any depth and the issue remains a mystery at the end of the book. For this reason I could not empathize with any of the characters. Their problems, whilst excellently conveyed through the author's prose remained distance because I could not grasp a solid motive other than "I'm just fed up". It is a shame because I really like Malzberg's more literary approach to science fiction.
June 9, 2021
I really find it hard to give a writer a low score since the endeavour of writing a book should never be underestimated and always respected. Sadly this is one of those stories that does not survive the test of time. I reached page 30 and then gave up because I found the prevalent misogyny and the treatment of a very sensitive subject of suicide not to my taste. I am sure this was a great book in the context of its time, but not today.
In any case by this point I had met a really nasty character who rapes and assaults a woman in the first chapter and then starts to consider whether he takes the final trip which I guess is to end his life.
It was easy for me at this point hope it would be a case of good riddance and stop the read there.
In any case by this point I had met a really nasty character who rapes and assaults a woman in the first chapter and then starts to consider whether he takes the final trip which I guess is to end his life.
It was easy for me at this point hope it would be a case of good riddance and stop the read there.
April 15, 2022
One from the archives. 1974. U.K. 75p. beautiful cover art by Tim White.
I've looked out for Malzberg's stories since the seventies, always amazed and left wondering by the writing. This one is like a Logan's Run turned on it's head, excavated, unearthed, laid bare. There is the usual bureaucracy, introspection, insanity, plus Celebrated Dead and an eviscerating technology.
It kicks open the fourth wall.
Amazing. I wonder if this was the novel he had to finish fifty pages of, and estimated it would take three hours? No, it couldn't have been.
I've looked out for Malzberg's stories since the seventies, always amazed and left wondering by the writing. This one is like a Logan's Run turned on it's head, excavated, unearthed, laid bare. There is the usual bureaucracy, introspection, insanity, plus Celebrated Dead and an eviscerating technology.
It kicks open the fourth wall.
Amazing. I wonder if this was the novel he had to finish fifty pages of, and estimated it would take three hours? No, it couldn't have been.
March 2, 2025
Almost DNF. Glad I finished though. Weird little book. If you are triggered by suicide, avoid. The story takes place post nuclear apocalypse in a society that has high rates of youth suicide. The global society is interestingly revealed bit by bit. The author explores personal freedom and suicide... Recommended for the adventuresome sci-fi reader.
May 30, 2026
It reminded me of one of PKD's more incoherent novels, but darker, more hard edged,and with a protagonist I can't connect with. I struggled to finish, despite it's short length.
July 26, 2025
I know it can sometimes take a few pages to become accustomed to a new authors style, but when I started reading Guernica Night I thought I was reading the mock purple prose of some angsty teenage protagonist, utterly convinced of his own literary genius. Turns out the entire book carries on like this and sort of meanders about for a bit looking for a plot. There is a hint of one slightly more than halfway through when we get a shift in perspective. But is a false hope and the book stumbles to the end without achieving anything other than wasting the readers time.
Padded to an actually publishable length with the authors musings about the duality of Disney Land/World, the tale about that one time he shared a private remark with another author, and is finally topped off with endless gushing praise from Jeff Clark. Where we learn that seemingly endless comma filled sentences, strangely mechanical descriptions of sex, and narratives discarded for the incoherent rambling internal monologues of half crazed protagonists are the norm for Malzberg, and thus should be lauded.
Padded to an actually publishable length with the authors musings about the duality of Disney Land/World, the tale about that one time he shared a private remark with another author, and is finally topped off with endless gushing praise from Jeff Clark. Where we learn that seemingly endless comma filled sentences, strangely mechanical descriptions of sex, and narratives discarded for the incoherent rambling internal monologues of half crazed protagonists are the norm for Malzberg, and thus should be lauded.
January 14, 2012
Clearly Malzberg is able to handle the words nicely and construct the proper atmosphere for his ideas. Other than that, none. I guess it was supposed to be modern and groundbreaking in the seventies sci-fi scene, but it lacks any interest in terms of plot and characters, while we are reminded that the hero (or non-hero, whatever) is depressed in every other page. Great, but you are not going to get any interest about this guy or his society, I am afraid.
PS. I have exactly this edition, and the fonts are the smallest I have ever encountered in any book, the smallest in my entire library. You simply can't read them if you are older than... 40. Please, be warned.
PS. I have exactly this edition, and the fonts are the smallest I have ever encountered in any book, the smallest in my entire library. You simply can't read them if you are older than... 40. Please, be warned.
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