Galaxies Read online

  GALAXIES

  Barry N. Malzberg

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Chapter XLIX

  Website

  Also by Barry N. Malzberg

  About the Author

  Copyright

  First the corpus, then the mind, the consciousness, then self-awareness and its extensions: the environment, the abstract environment, immortality, matters of the spirit. We can assume a continuity of these qualities and we can even assume that that which would insist upon imposing order would continue to do so even after the point of physical death.

  But in order to be completely secure with these assumptions we would have to define some terms. What is “consciousness” or the “spirit”? What is “order”? For that matter, what is “physical death”?

  H. H. Brenner

  The Last Possessor

  I

  To define terms at the outset, this will not be a novel so much as a series of notes toward one. Nevertheless pay attention, for it will cease to become a novel exactly at the point where it seems to be at last gathering force. Up until that time (which I will never tell), it will be as much of a novel as The Rammers of Arcturus or Slinking Slowly on the Slime Planet’s Sludge, titles which flank this to left and right with covers offering inducements—let me be honest about this—they will never fulfill.

  The novel itself cannot be written, at least by this writer, nor can it be encompassed by any techniques currently available, because it partakes of its time and that time is of the fortieth century, a time unimaginably distant … and it could be perceived only through the idiom and devices of that era which, to be sure, will not exist for more than eighteen hundred years.

  Nor—continuing to be straightforward—will that idiom or those devices ever exist because science fiction is not a series of working models for the future but merely a subgenre of romantic fiction which employs the future as historicals would use the past, as Westerns would use the West, as pornography would use fornication—in short as a convention, which is the focus of their appeal. By virtue of these reasons then, not to say others which are more personal—but which will be revealed—these fifty-five thousand words are little more than a set of constructions toward a construction even less substantial. It, as the writer himself, will not be finished in this world.

  II

  Let us talk about the writer a little if I may. Writers are not machines, you know, or disembodied personae, part of the printers’ workshops: we have our qualities, we are people, we suffer, we hurt, although not as much, perhaps, as we would like you to believe. Still the writer is entitled to some explication. As he writes this novel he has slid past his thirty-fifth birthday and now confronts the not-distant monument of his thirty-sixth with bewilderment Thirty-five is practically more than he can handle. He knows that forty is bad and fifty is worse, he has heard grim reports from even further on, but the writer has always thought of himself as being such a young man and ever-youthful; he has lurched through twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty years and similar landmarks in his shambling way, but nothing, either inherited or anticipated, has quite prepared him for the understanding that by Biblical calculation—by calculation, too, of much heredity—his life is fully at the halfway point. How can this be? The writer for many years was always the youngest person in the class. He finds his state hard to reckon with and he does not know with whom he can commiserate. Those older think he is young; those younger think he is old; his contemporaries have similar difficulties. Psychoanalysis is expensive and the writer has never had much faith in it.

  The writer has struggled to order his life just as he is struggling now to order his sequence of notes for a novel entitled Galaxies, and yet no less than the wild and wonderful concepts which are surely to follow, he wonders whether he is really under control or whether it matters at all how he contemplates his death. His passage would be of little more consequence than his birth, which did not by much antedate the rape of Poland. Were the two somehow causally linked? Did the writer by being born cause Warsaw to be sealed off, reports moving toward the front lines on fine and invisible connection? Did he, by being born, cause the world to exist and by dying will he end it? This is the kind of megalomania with which he must deal—and yet it is this megalomania which is the key—God help him—to fiction which itself creates or manipulates worlds.

  III

  The reader may sit tight, however. The author is not a character in Galaxies. You need not worry that he will intrude into the body of the work which will be fast-moving (when it gets into the action sequences) and exceedingly detached. I introduce myself, in truth, only to remind you that these engines of creation are indeed powered by an individual no less idiosyncratic, difficult or painful
to himself than you, although I have learned through tormenting years of apprenticeship ruthlessly to suppress all that is truly mine in the service of detached and transmuted work. (Even this use of “author” as character is a device, then; it is an invented persona which is in certain ways a metaphor for the real writer and in other ways not; it is a thing of spring and cheap bailing wire which, if it is handled correctly, will give you the impression that you know me when all you know is what I wish to present. So there.)

  The author has been writing, with some success, for seven years now, but he was writing without success for a long time before that, and, therefore, his failure ratio, even taking into account his recent modest rise in reputation, is still convincing. Not only has the author always felt himself to be a young person, he has thought himself to be a young failure; but there is more strength in that because our youth and possibility may be stripped from us, but our failure can remain shining and constant forever. Sustained by his failure—to say nothing of a modest advance from his publisher—the author moves forward.

  IV

  Galaxies will be based heavily on two articles published in Analog: Science Fiction—Science Fact by the late John W. Campbell. Campbell for the last thirty-three years of his life (he died on 7/11/71) was the editor of that magazine under its present title and earlier identity, Astounding Science Fiction. He was a difficult man but not a dishonest one.

  Campbell’s articles put forth the existence of a “black” or lightless galaxy which would result from the implosion of a neutron star, the implosion unleashing terrible forces, causing a gravitational influence so strong as the star collapsed upon itself that the galaxy in which this occurred would trap not only light but space, and possibly time. A spaceship trapped within this black galaxy would be unable to get out. Escape velocity would, to counter gravity, have to exceed the implausible speed of light All interstellar paths of flight would lead toward the gravitational field of this galaxy; none would lead away. Such a galaxy, Campbell pointed out, would be called Rome.

  V

  Neutron stars are white dwarves, inconceivably hot and dense, which burn furiously through their resources only to exhaust their fuel at a much earlier stage of their cycle of existence than so-called “normal” stars like our own humble Sol which, when its light is exhausted in several billion years, will probably decoalesce and disperse gently, therefore signaling the day of judgment, to say nothing of the rising of the dead and the sacred priests. Neutron stars cannot look forward to a long senility and a whimpering old age; they will depart to no nursing home of the heavens but instead are at a consistently accelerating combustion in order to maintain their existence, and when this acceleration reaches a point of no supply, matters do become rather cataclysmic. A day of judgment controlled by the life of a neutron star would be brief and would result, doubtless, in the recremation of the dead who, presumably, have already suffered enough.

  VI

  The novel to be based on this material would concern itself with a faster-than-light spaceship in the year 3902 which would tumble into the black galaxy and be unable to leave by tachyonic drive. (“Tachyonic” meaning faster than light, a device long beloved by science-fiction writers, since we can keep our characters shuttling through the galaxies much as writers for the Quarterly Review can use subways and taxicabs for understandably slighter terrain, but a device useful here only if the ship can accelerate up to before moving beyond light speed.) Falling into the galaxy would be easy or at least inevitable, since one of the characteristics of the black galaxy is its invisibility, the implosive forces having contained light. Leaving, however, would be much more difficult. Leaving will be the concern of this novel.

  Consider. Science fiction, since its formal inception as a romantic subgenre in this country in 1926 with the publication of the first issues of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories has best been known for its simple and melodramatic plots which demonstrate man’s mastery (or later on, loss of control) of technology. The conventions of the genre then demand that the novel pivot upon the attempts of the crew to leave this entrapment and return to their planet of origin.

  The ship is known—to us at least—as the Skipstone. It was completed in 3895 after a century-long effort of construction that involved the resources of many worlds and billions of the Systematized Forces. It is one of only fifteen faster-than-light ships now operating. Obviously something like this cannot be cheaply abandoned. The crew must return it to the fleet.

  This problem-solving pivot is not one which I might at? tempt given my own devices. I am not a problem-solver by profession, let alone in my personal life. Left to myself I would be more interested in showing how the ship’s inhabitants and cargo adjust to their new dwelling, how they set up light housekeeping in this unknown and difficult sector of the universe, but this would not do for the purposes of the science-fiction novel. We must compete with, sell on the racks against The Rammers of Arcturus. It is important to understand, and I am sure that all of you do, that classically this field of science fiction was meant by its American originators to provide a road map from technological impasse, a map which would show us the way from a confusing and overpowering technology, to the wondrous society it could give us. Science fiction, then, is technological fiction; it is an attempt to relieve anxieties about the encroaching machinery by showing people how that machinery may be usefully applied. Science as benign instrumentation. Amazing’s earliest competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science. Super-Science brings us super-solutions. Thrilling Wonder. Astonishing Stories.

  Details of the submission of Skipstone’s crew to the unknown should be dystopian. While the dystopian has an honorable tradition in science fiction, reaching earlier than Amazing to the works of Olaf Stapledon and H. G. Wells, it has really had a difficult time making its way, and even now, at a time of technological impasse and collapsed institutions, science-fiction writers who go against the pro-technological format have a more difficult time in finding audiences and publishers than the traditionally oriented.

  My own decision has been made, however: I would rather command an audience than not, to say nothing of publisher’s advances, and therefore this construct, despite its bleaker aspects and a certain aura of cynicism which may occasionally drift off the pages, will be essentially cheerful, essentially hopeful, quite problem-solving and possessed of qualities of adventurousness. No writer of integrity with a wife and two helpless children could do less for the sake of his controlling artistic vision. This is to be kept in mind at all times.

  VII

  The Campbell articles were found by others and given to me; I did not locate them myself. There was a time in the late 1960s, early seventies, when I gave up altogether on Analog. Through no fault of my own (I felt), I was unable to read or relate to the contents of the magazine. Now I am back to reading it but not quite up to back issues. The articles were sent by people who thought I might be interested in basing a technologically oriented S F story on their contents. “Hard” science fiction they call it.

  I have always had a certain awe for this kind of science fiction, and, although I cannot really do it well myself, wish that the genre had more of it Unhappily “hard” science fiction is largely a myth; there is almost no science in science fiction and never has been. The recollected masterpieces of the 1940s were fantasies whose scientific basis was almost completely invented or could have been found in a general research work in five or ten minutes. At low word-rates, research is neither desirable nor profitable, since all markets pay the same for all stories that they publish, rewarding merit as they do the incompetent with a standard rate. Consequently, James Blish’s science-fiction writer is quoted as saying, “All the science I ever needed to know I got out of a bottle of scotch.”

  But how we could use it! Science, that is to say. We could indeed profit by technologically accurate science fiction. The awful expansion of our machinery, the technological manual as the poetics of the age, the rhythms of the machine as an
alogous to those of the newly discovered spirit … we need writers who can show us what the machines are doing to us in terms more systematized than those of random paranoia. A writer who could combine the techniques of modern fiction with a genuine command of science could be at the top of this field in no more than a few years. He would also stand alone.

  There are a few among us who know science and a few more who understand fiction, but there is not a single science-fiction writer who can do both. The one who has come closest, at least in his later work, is A—but A, although his undoubted gifts are the equal of any writer in America, is exhausted by a career of hackwork in his youth and embittered by the fact that his newer, important work has not distanced him from the hackwork but to most readers simply extends and reaffirms it In any event A, like all science-fiction writers, is invisible to the academic/literary nexus which controls judgments of literary reputation in America. He made wrong choices at the beginning. It is all his fault, of course, but one may nevertheless have sympathy for A.

  B, a writer of equal technical range and even greater delicacy than A, also comes close to this ideal, but his science is weak and his output diminishing; he has, in any event, no interest in continuing to write science fiction and is making desperate attempts to leave the genre. Then there is C who has won a major literary award and is considered by many to be at the level of A or B, but C is clumsy and impenetrable and has little sense of compression. X, Y and Z have all in their way done interesting work but are burned out at the ages of, respectively, 2-, 2- and 2- and little can be expected of them. R had promise, of course, but has been dead for many years, and in terms of their literary contribution, O, P and T might just as well be—although one may wish them long life and health of days. Commercial writing is a difficult field for even its few successes. Ask A about this sometime.