Malzberg excels at departing from and satirizing standard tropes or expectations such as the “competent hero” or the “hard SF puzzle story,” and for the unsuspecting reader that can be an upsetting experience.
They’re full of depressed, unstable characters, often trapped in hopelessly decadent or insoluble situations that subvert the genre’s conventions or ignore them altogether. Malzberg’s relationship with the SF field has always been contentious. And yet these thirty-two stories from the last four decades are crafted with such intensity, artistry, and originality that we somehow still manage to chuckle when we get to the punch line (or, in some cases, the knockout blow). Malzberg makes painfully clear, is on us. The joke, as this long overdue retrospective collection by Barry N.
Immediately thereafter he’s killed in a mordantly described head-on collision, and during his final moments of consciousness the narrative fractures into a few elliptical yet cutting ruminations on the existential meaninglessness of modern life. In the universe of Barry Malzberg’s fiction, the joke might go something like this: after several moments of tense dialogue in which the man and woman reflect on their estrangement and lack of sexual compatibility, the driver puts down the phone while his wife is still talking, realizes that reality has somehow parallax-shifted into a world where people are indeed driving the wrong way - everyone except him - and then wonders whether, after years of untenable pressure, he hasn’t simply gone insane. REMEMBER THAT OLD joke about the senior citizen driving down the freeway who gets a call from his wife warning him that some maniac is on the news driving the wrong way? In our world, the man responds that there isn’t just one such maniac going the wrong way, but hundreds, and we chuckle.
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