Breakfast in the Ruins
by Barry N. Malzberg
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Book Summary Information
Author: Barry N. MalzbergEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-04-03
ISBN: 1416521178
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Baen
Book Reviews of Breakfast in the Ruins
Book Review: An Essential Book on How the Sci-Fi Publishing Industry Really Works
Summary: 5 Stars
This is basically two books in one: ENGINES OF THE NIGHT and BREAKFAST IN THE RUINS, which are a collection of short essays Malzberg published over the years about both publishing and the science fiction field. If you're just a consumer of sf or fantasy and all you know is what appears on the stand (or in magazines), what you're missing are the stories of egos, desperation, the vagaries of the marketplace, the rise and fall of the pulps and other magazines that used to be so vital in getting science fiction to the public. Malzberg details the horrible truth about being a writer in the sf field; how _hard_ it is; how easy it is to slip into a crack and disappear; how books get published but don't get distributed (or how distributers come and go). In LOCUS Magazine you find all this happy news about who is publishing with whom. What you don't see that Malzberg provides is what goes on behind the scenes. You see how when magazines die, only the safest science fiction gets published; only the "known" authors get published. He lays on the line the absolutely conservative nature of publishing. How books that advocate literary asperations (and perhaps unhappy endings) never get published in the sf field and he lists names and books long since gone from us that will never be reprinted. You think a book like ON THE BEACH could be published today? Think again. (Even when ON THE BEACH was published in the mid-Fifties, it had to be published in Australia where the author lived.) You think Thomas Disch's THE GENOCIDES could be published today if it were submitted by an unknown writer? Nope. This book is an eye-opener. It shows the human side to a genre that might be coming to an end. He says it himself. Nothing new is being published or if it is, it's mostly dazzle and flash. The publishing field as it exists now is very, very conservative and is only interested in authors who can deliver books that are easy to market and sell well. For writers who want to do something different, Malzberg says this might not be the field you want to work in. This is a book that is at once cranky, witty, angry and sad. It echoes my own experience in the field and it's reassuring to see that someone is out there (and has been out there for over forty years) who has already articulated what's come and gone and what's yet to unfold. After reading this book, I'm convinced that the science fiction being published now is a creature totally different from the science fiction that John W. Campbell Jr. advocated and I don't think men like Heinlein, Sturgeon, Kuttner and Van Vogt would recognize it today. I give the field another ten years. Then it'll become just so much mechanical fantasy and the main novelistic conceit will be the alternate history novel. Malzberg is only slightly more optimistic. Get this book if you're interested in what's _really_ been happening in the science fiction field since the 1950s. It'll surprise you. Thanks, Barry
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