I just read an interview with Barry Malzberg, in the October 2010 issue of Locus. My conclusion is that Malzberg desperately wanted science fiction to be prophecy, and has lived his entire adult life in a state of perpetual frustration and disappointment that it’s mere entertainment. By prophecy, I don’t mean he wanted a flying car and a jetpack and vacations on Mars, I mean he wanted people to accept science fiction as visions, as a holy guide to, I dunno, something. It’s rather as if the Apostles hadn’t been able to convince anyone else, and were taken for mere storytellers.

I found his anecdote about Owen Lock soliciting work from him, but then laughing at the idea of a short story collection, to be telling. To Lock, publishing is a business and short story collections don’t sell, so you don’t publish them, while to Malzberg short stories are a part of the sacred body of science fiction, and failing to publish them is betraying the cause.

It seems a very strange worldview to me.

It’s not unique to Malzberg, though; he’s merely the most extreme example. I remember having a couple of conversations with Damon Knight that struck me as weird, and which probably have a similar basis, except that Knight had become something of an apostate — he felt that the Revelation of Science Fiction had failed him because some of the taken-for-granted story premises turned out to be faulty. Specifically, as the example I remember most clearly, he considered himself to have been wronged by all those stories in which extraterrestrial colonies serve to relieve population pressure on Earth, because he had run the numbers and concluded it was simply not possible, even given cheap FTL, to ship people off Earth fast enough to make a difference. This bothered him.

It never bothered me; I always just thought they were stories. I never particularly cared whether they connected to the real world.

My father, too, was to some extent a believer in the faith of science fiction. He wanted his fiction to have a solid grounding in science, to be possible. He didn’t care for fantasy, and he actively disliked horror. To some extent he tried to inculcate this attitude in his kids, but I don’t think it really took in any of us.

But that’s because to us, they were stories, and didn’t need to be more. Speaking only for myself, since I never really talked to my sisters about it, I liked science, and I liked science fiction, but I never thought it necessary that they be connected. I took after my mother, who did like fantasy and horror, and didn’t much care if the science in her fiction was accurate.

The two of my sisters who most took after our father didn’t become science fiction writers; they became scientists.

In fact, I think that’s probably the more common result of growing up believing in science fiction — you don’t write the stuff, you live it.

Except for some people, Barry Malzberg among them, it was the visionary aspect that mattered — he apparently wanted to be a part of an expanding cult showing humanity the possibilities of the future, not part of making those possibilities real.

I don’t get it. Me, I just want to tell stories.