The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg Page B

Campbell said. Much later too I realized that he might have wanted me to go out with him, but in light of the argument knew no way to ask. “Nice talking to you.”
    “Nice talking to you ,” I said. “An honor.” I stood shakily, took his hand, shook it, nodded at Catherine Tarrant and stumbled down the corridor. Later I stood by the elevator bank at 420 Lexington Avenue and waited.
    For quite a long time. While I stood there, briefcase clutched, trying to straighten my tie with one hand (I was a self-important young fella) the fuller sense of the morning came over me. The schism between us, the irreparable distance, the sheer unreason of this man from whom I had learned so much, expected so much more. There were, if you considered it in one way, aspects of tragedy here.
    It should not have come to this; it was terribly sad. I began to shake with recrimination. It was wrong. This was not the way Campbell should have ended, the way it should have been the only time I met him—
    Still no elevator.
    Around a corner loomed suddenly the figure of John Campbell on his way either to or from—I surmised—the lavatory. He regarded me for a while. I looked back at him, shook my head, sighed, felt myself shaking as a sound of despair oinked out.
    A twinkle came into the Campbell eye as he surveyed it all.
    “Don’t worry about it, son,” he said judiciously. And kindly after a little pause. “I just like to shake ’em up.”
    So he did.
    And so do I try. Still.
    1980: New Jersey

The Science Fiction of Science Fiction
    R OBERT SILVERBERG’S TWO 1970S STORIES, “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” (1972) and “Schwartz Between the Galaxies” (1973), are central to any analysis of the form; they are extremely important as works of literary criticism and may in that regard transcend their value as fiction (which is not to say that as fiction they are contemptible). Neither has received a great deal of attention; short stories in this category rarely do. Neither in my opinion has been properly understood, because to properly grasp these stories is, perhaps, to cease reading and writing science fiction. It is astonishing, a tribute to professionalism and the contradictory nature of the writers’ persona that Silverberg continued to write past these stories, and after a three-year pause seems to stand on the verge of yet another major career, his third in this field.
    (But this is not to single out Silverberg. My own 1973 Herovit’s World reads like the last will and testament of a bitterly exhausted writer about to quit science fiction; that posture did become mine for a time but only three years later. Between Herovit’s World and my public scream of pain I wrote more than fifteen additional science fiction novels and a hundred short stories. Persistence or the beckonings of the market, culture lag or most likely of all proof of Robert Sheckley’s aphorism: It is very hard to learn from something that we already know.)
    To jump the argument herein right to the end and to anticipate my conclusion (a habit quite common among writers who fear the point may otherwise wriggle off like a fish and evade them forever), what Silverberg is clearly saying in both “Schwartz” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” is that science fiction is doomed by its own nature and devices to be a second-rate form of literature. It can never aspire to the effects of the first rate, which are to break the reader (and writer) through to new levels of perception, to a reorganization of the materials of his life. It cannot do this because the purposes of science fiction, at the base, must work against this kind of heightening of insight, confrontation of self.
    Yet at the same time that both of these stories drive through to the point conclusively, they are themselves very close to first-rate work. “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” is not science fiction (it is a literary story which incorporates the genre as a metaphor for the