Free The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg Page A

anything about science fiction and he’s been fired, and replacements are being screened ever so carefully. Meanwhile, Noble Paperbacks is overinventoried with novels owed out on contract all over so why worry about it? Next year they’ll get an editor.
    It is possible by employing this fantasy to explain every defect in every science fiction novel published since, say, 1958 (when the magazine market collapsed and the magazines, through their somewhat more knowledgeable and rigorous editors, were the cutting edge of science fiction)—every truncated plot, rushed conclusion, unpredictable denouement, scientific error, sterile love scene, failed resolution. It is possible to understand all of it and to suggest that the few good novels of this era were not written on portion and outline, but this is a fantasy and may be disregarded. And by most of the readers (leave us not mention the writers) it certainly is.
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    Footnote to a fantasy: most of the important novels of the fifties originally appeared in the magazines whose editors commissioned them (like Space Merchants or Demolished Man ) or worked them over pretty carefully (like Dorsai! ). Most of science fiction’s few acknowledged masterpieces in the novel appeared in the early to middle years of that decade. But then the distributors collapsed and so did plenty of magazine editors.
    1980: New Jersey

Science Fiction and the Academy: Some Notes
    A CCORDING TO LATE STATISTICS COMPILED BY the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), over a thousand colleges, junior colleges, and universities throughout the land have courses devoted solely to science fiction. This is twice the number extant in the mid-seventies, almost ten times that of a decade ago and, when one considers that in 1960 there were perhaps two such courses in the United States (one of them taught at City College in New York on an adjunct basis by Sam Moskowitz), imposing. Part of this growth has to do with simple consumer economics: science fiction is something that they’re reading, let’s register them and grant credit to keep up the enrollment. (Most college catalogues are testimony to this philosophy of desperation.) Part has to do with the agonizingly slow but continuing legitimization of the field: some science fiction writers have broken through to critical recognition in other fields, and Leslie Fiedler did none of us any harm by declaring in the early seventies that he had always loved Phil Farmer (and now admired Norman Spinrad), but could not admit this until he became, at last, a tenured Distinguished Professor.
    All of this is supposed to be good for science fiction, if not for science fiction writers , who are, with occasional exceptions, unable to teach courses for credit in their own field, made self-conscious by textual analyses and often photocopied and distributed without their knowledge or permission. The statement of the late sixties has already passed into the liturgy of the field (and has been claimed by a few): “It’s time to get science fiction out of the academy and back in the gutter where it belongs.” Analyzed out of existence, drained of mystery, codified to the final decree, science fiction, some of its writers fear, is on the way to becoming the Henry James or George Eliot of the twenty-first century.
    Still, the academicization of the field, if only marginally helpful to the writers (and the students), can hardly be portrayed as an evil: it does not seem to have done much damage. The questions are a little more basic than those above but by their definition cannot be raised at the yearly conferences of the SFRA, the association of science-fiction—teaching college academics (two of which I have attended with great glee). They can, however, be raised here, at least a couple of them.
    The pervasive question is whether the field is worth teaching, whether there is sufficient text and insight to support a full-term college-level course. Oddly, I heard this point