Breakfast in the Ruins Quotes

“Certainly, forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties, H L Gold, Fred Phol, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and doom, and in the sixties, Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“More than two decades later we know that American Science Fiction was not murdered. It had a whopper of a heart attack; it lay in the intensive care ward for quite a while. (and had like most indigents to somehow find its way to the hospital itself), but time and a little fresh air did wonders for the patient, who toddled out of the hospital in 1965 and has not yet returned…Over a thousand titles labeled “science fiction” have been published every year since 1978.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“I stayed with him in his office for three hours, fighting from the bell. Catherine Tarrant sat at her desk in the far corner typing and making notes trying hard not to smile. A young man’s intensity can be a terrible thing to bear (for no one so much as the young man himself) and I came off the chair right away, throwing jabs, pumping and puffing, slipping the phantom punches, going in desperately under real ones.

Not interested in market conditions, no sir. I wanted to know why Analog was the restrictive right-wing, anti-literary publication that it had become. Didn’t Campbell care what all the new writers, the purveyors of street fiction and venturesome prose, thought of him?”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“Modern” science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people. It was no Bloombury but there could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90% of the writing and editing. All of them knew one another, most knew one well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each other’s material, and so on. For a field which was conceptually based on expansion, the smashing of barriers, the far-reaching and so on, science fiction was amazingly insular.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“Whatever happens to science fiction, it would not exist at all if it had not been given a name and a medium for this, if we are not led to praise Gernsbeck, we must entomb him with honor. He was a crook, old Hugo, but he made all of us crooks possible.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“Science Fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effect of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a reconceived history.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins

“We know what we do; the engines that eat us up-this is what science fiction has been saying (among other things) for a long time now. It may be preaching only to the converted, but the objective truth, the inner beast, will not go away and so neither-despite the hostility of culture, the ineptitude of many of its practitioners, the loathing of most of its editors, the corruption of its readers-neither will science fiction.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins