Novelist on a Deadline: Barry Malzberg, 1939–2024

If your life absolutely depended on it, could you write a readable and publishable novel in 27 hours? In early February of 1969, that was the task an editor at Midwood books foisted on Barry Malzberg, then a 29-year-old rising star in the seedy world of the paperback quickie. Midwood specialized in soft-core erotic fiction, often with a sapphic bent. Over the previous year, Malzberg had proven his chops by knocking off seven novels for Midwood, writing under the pen names M.L. Johnson and Mel Johnson titles like I, Lesbian and Nympho Nurse. The editor was in a jam: He had promised the publisher too many titles, one of which he was planning on writing himself, called Diary of a Parisian Chambermaid, but the deadline loomed terrifyingly close as he had to prepare for a vacation in Argentina.

The editor asked Malzberg if he could deliver the book in a few days. Malzberg, full of the impudence of youth, replied, “Try me.”

On February 13, Malzberg sat down at the typewriter at 8 am and started banging away at his top rate of 60 words a minute, which gave him between 3,000 to 4,000 words an hour. Malzberg paced himself, taking time off to eat, go for a few walks, and sleep. He finished the book the next day, appropriately enough Valentine’s Day, at 11 am. From start to finish, the novel took him 27 hours, with 16 of those feverishly pecking at the typewriter. The book was duly published under the pen name Claudine Dumas and Malzberg collected his fee of $1,500, giving him 2.5 cents a word for a 60,000-word opus. Malzberg worked, he said, “at an hourly wage rate that would astonish even a teamster.”

Malzberg, who died in a hospice in New Jersey on Thursday at the age of 85, flourished in the world of pulp fiction where quick writing was common: Malzberg’s friends Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg would both compile bibliographies of more than 500 titles. But even in that hurly-burly realm, Malzberg was a marvel. Reflecting on Diary of a Parisian Chambermaid in 2017, Malzberg told a podcast that, “in my opinion, with all deference to some writers we can name, it is the best novel written in 16 hours ever.” Malzberg did allow that Silverberg, if given a few days, could have written something superior. Although he never made great claims for such scutwork, Malzberg described Diary of a Parisian Chambermaid as “better than it has any right to be. It was readable.”

The key fact about Malzberg was not just that he was fast—but that he was good. Perfectly readable was his baseline minimum, and when he was at his peak, he overshot that to achieve genuine brilliance. It’s easy enough to tote up evidence of Malzberg’s prolificity: In his peak decade, from 1967 to 1976, Malzberg wrote at least 68 novels and seven story collections along with scores of still uncollected stories published in many magazines and anthologies. He worked in a variety of genres, including mystery, thrillers, erotica, and adventure fiction, but his core work was in science fiction.

Malzberg’s best science fiction novels—titles such as Beyond Apollo (1972), Herovit’s World (1973), Guernica Night (1975), and Galaxies (1975)—were astonishingly incisive critiques of modern technology and mass society. Intimately familiar with the genre, Malzberg used all the familiar SF tropes (space exploration, time travel, alternative histories) but amped them up with a bracing dose of pessimism and the stylistic bravura of literary modernism. Beyond Apollo tells the story of a doomed mission to Venus with an involuted, self-contradicting, sardonic, and half-mad narrator worthy of Samuel Beckett. Reviewing a Malzberg collection in 1980, the critic John Clute described “the sense of perplexity, of alarmed alienated implication, one feels on entering [Malzberg’s] calcined solipsistic universe.” This created, wrote Clute, “a world whose colors have been ashed down into a desolate, grey weirdly tonal inscape dominated” by a voice that was “grey, flat, intense, obsessive, unstoppable, almost always couched in the claustrophobic narrative-present tense, and seemingly humorless.” But that seeming lack of humor was, Clute went on to note, a misimpression. Once you caught the rhythm of his sly deadpan wit, Malzberg was also a hilarious writer.

Along with his peers J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delany and Philip K. Dick, Malzberg was a central figure in the movement of science fiction away from the external world of adventure fiction and outer space into the psychological torments and struggles of inner space. Technology, these writers all understood, is not something external to humans but changes how we think and how we feel: The registering of technological change in the realm of emotional life was their literary project.

Malzberg was a particularly kindred spirit to Dick, another speed demon—one who batted off books in a matter of weeks during amphetamine-fueled binge sessions at the typewriter. In an interview in the late 1970s, Dick said, “In all the history of science fiction, nobody has ever bum-tripped science fiction as much as Barry Malzberg.… he’s a great writer.”

Dick and Malzberg were ambidextrous in the same way: With one hand they wrote as pulp writers, and with the other as literary modernists. Pulps and modernism are usually treated as mutually hostile traditions: In contrast to the slapdash outpouring of words from the pulp writers, great modernists such as Flaubert and Virginia Woolf are notorious for agonizing over their words—the endless and painful quest to locate le mot juste.

Malzberg’s conflicting heritage of pulp fecundity and modernist ambition was rooted in his biography. Born in 1939—the son of a plywood salesman and a public school teacher—Malzberg aimed to be a writer from age 7. “I wanted to write because it was the only way I could deal with, control, and shape my experience,” he said in a 1979 interview. A classmate introduced Malzberg to science fiction magazines in 1951 and he soon became an avid reader. But it was a career as a literary writer in the mode of Norman Mailer or Philip Roth that he aimed for when he studied at Syracuse University in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where he won a Schubert Foundation fellowship for playwriting.