peaking directly to the reader, author Barry Malzberg explains that Galaxies is not so much a novel as a series of notes toward one. He says it has to be this way. The plot he has in mind, a tragic spacefaring adventure about a doomed lady pilot whose starship, the Skipstone, is captured by the gravity of a neutron galaxy, cannot be written in terms available to the science-fiction writers of his time and place, who are bound by the conventions of their time and by the limitations of the science-fiction marketplace.
The story, he says, is doomed by the flaws inherent in science fiction before he writes page one, and the very tools he needs to shape the story into a publishable manuscript doom it as much as his protagonist Lena is doomed.
He goes on to explain that Lena's life is no glamorous adventure, but a bleak and dull working-class existence, punctuated only by the terror and despair she experiences when everything goes wrong—which in many ways echoes his sad existence as a writer, who can only compile notes toward a story that he cannot write and which would be shackled to mediocrity even if he wrote it.
Not by telling the story, but by explaining how he would tell it if he could, Malzberg examines Lena's background, contemplates ways of livening the story with sex and bemoans the forces that doom to failure even the attempt at such a novel. The book becomes a critical essay on the market forces that shape science fiction, as well as the frustrations that hobble its writers ... ending as the phenomenon transports Lena and her passengers to the town where Malzberg sits typing about his inability to tell their story.
An indictment of and a valentine
for SF
Barry N. Malzberg, who was most prolific in the early 1970s, had and still has a love-hate relationship with the field. He sees its failures and its limitations and believes it leaves many of its authors brutalized. Several of his novels, including the brilliant Herovit's World, are less science fiction than works about science fiction; Galaxies, the expanded version of his novelette "A Galaxy Called Rome," is another look at these issues, and in many ways one of the damnedest pieces of science-fiction prose ever written.
Malzberg's dense, almost obsessive style, which is so often put to the purpose of his rank pessimism, can be hard to take in part for that reason, but even his darkest and most mordant observations can be bleakly funny, which is one major reason why Galaxies, with all its refusals to acknowledge itself as a story, still exerts such a strange fascination.
It's easy to argue with some of his conclusions. Is it fair to say that science-fiction readers crave boring stories? Or that science fiction, almost by definition, offers promises it can't fulfill? Are we even willing to believe the most self-deprecating elements of Malzberg's thesis—as he directs so much of his most ruthless criticism at his own considerable skills?
Each and every one of his assumptions offers room for argument ... which is not to say that the journey itself, as truncated as it is, isn't fascinating for its passion and its audacious style. It's an aggravating book, but an important one: one of the best ever produced by one of the field's most neglected talents.
