Free The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg

basis of which he has been paid half the total amount due. Maybe he is modestly famous or knows the editor well; call it four thousand words on paper. These words were typed months or even years before the contract. He is now faced with the necessity to write in effect an entire book for half an advance (one tends to consider spent the signature advance upon its receipt—never existed). He has not thought of his book in months or years; it is already detached; he has only the vaguest recollection of characters, incident, and plot and yet—ah, here it is—the book is due in not more than six months and nothing to be done but to write it for exactly half the money that the publisher knows it to be worth. The alternative is to return the advance (unthinkable) or simply not deliver and wait out the publisher, but although respectable careers in this field have been built upon nondelivery, there are only a few available at any given time and even these have a cutoff point. Publishers have a stuffy tendency to go to court. Sooner or later even the weariest of us, the most venal or duplicitous must either write or get a job. (Well, one could farm out the manuscript to a struggling or unknown writer to ghost it under one’s name for the delivery money and it’s been done. But usually you need the money yourself and there is always the problem of exposure, that is if the delivery is at all publishable. There have been horrifying examples of the opposite.)
    Here is the writer. He is thirty-two or twenty-seven or perhaps forty-six years old; his being groans with resentment, his skull is drained of last year’s ideas. He hates the bastards for exploiting him and well he should because they are and do. Here too is the portion and outline. Particularly the outline.
    It is, as such things usually are, chock-a-block with incident, color, character, motivation, conflict, metaphor, pizzazz, and fire. Give them anything may be the trade secret, but promise them a partridge in a pear tree. By the twelfth day of Christmas. In fact, promise it by the tenth. What will the stupid bastards remember by the time the chips are down and the advance is paid?
    Here as well are the opening chapters. Carefully, patiently worked out they glint with promise, tumble with plot, glow with the dark and richly hued colors of invention. The time machine has jeweled dials, it has never before run so smoothly: automatic levers, brakes, and protectors to guide against temporal paradox. The protagonist’s lady friend is blonde and promising, but in her quieter moods the stranger aspects of her history emerge. The first scene between them reeks with implication and then there is that underground working to create the forces of paradox and brooding over this a somber, rigorous God . . .
    God, the writer says. Sometimes he drinks. Often he proceeds to write. Sometimes he continues to write. Every now and then he simply writes and writes to get the thing over with; like Mark Twain’s laziest preacher in the world who gave such long sermons because he got started and was too lazy to stop, it is often easier simply to get through the whole thing. Drop the blonde by the side, jettison her for good in Chapter 8, make the temporal paradox underground a figment of the protagonist’s paranoia by Chapter 12. Move those levers, spin those dials, get the damned thing back to 2214 and write the final confrontation. But get it out of the house. It is forty-five thousand words, not the contracted sixty thousand, but with all the dialogue and wide margins who the hell will know the difference? Anyway, the word from the agent is that the commissioning editor, the gullible fool, was thrown out three months ago and his contract novels are now going directly to the copy editor, who will place The Time Wizards of Lucidar between a gothic and historical. She knows nothing about science fiction; why the hell should she? No one in the house except for the commissioning editor knew