The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg

make a contribution. Nonetheless, my early stories went to him first and the rejection slips became a personal repudiation, stoking my rage. In the seventies I won the first award given in his name and the cries of pain resonated in his magazine for months thereafter. Still resonate. The point seemed to be that Beyond Apollo , a despairing novel about the collapse into madness of the first Venus Expedition, was not exactly the kind of material Campbell would have published. Full of sex and dirty words too. An insult to his memory.
    Everything that supersedes the dead must be an insult to their memory. The only real tribute—I know what I am talking about—would be for the world to end with them, and in a certain sense, with the large figures, it might. Beyond Apollo was, to me, a logical extension of John Campbell’s editorial vision of the forties: if his magazine had continued to move past 1950 as it had in the previous decade, my novel would have fit almost indistinguishably into the pages of the 1972 Analog . Nonetheless, if there is no real tribute to the dead, there is no arguing with them either; one can rave at them in the spaces of the night, prove one’s father a fool, demonstrate to an uncle that it never could have worked his way after 1963 . . . but the dead have no comment, the arguments rebound to the damaged self, there is no answer, Lear, never, never, never, never, never. To accept the idea of one’s death is at last to accept all the others and then after a long time the recrimination may end . . . but we never accept the idea of our own death, do we now, doctor? What do you think?
    I have only one Campbell story but I think it is a fairly good one and worth entering in the ephemeral permanence of these pages; I told it for the first time in Chicago in April 1973 when accepting the Campbell award, but I don’t think that anyone there got the point, least of all myself because it was many years later and in a different land before I understood, and now the wench is dead. (At least for me, alas. Generalizations are dangerous.) I met Campbell on June 18, 1969, a month and two days before the Apollo landing. As the newly installed volunteer editor of the SFWA Bulletin I had an excuse at last; I wanted to discuss “market trends,” I said to him over the phone. “All right,” he said, “same as ever though.” What I intended to do, of course, was to finally, after two decades, meet the man who had changed my life. I knew the stories, the sacred texts and the apocrypha; I certainly knew what had happened to him since the fifties but intellection is not to feeling formed . . . regardless of my shaky professionalism I came to that desk with awe. Trying not to show it, of course. I was there to go the full fifteen or die. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. I am the greatest / Just you wait / Big John Campbell/ Will fall in eight I might have gibbered if I had had a Bundini.
    I stayed with him in his office for three hours, fighting from the bell. Catherine Tarrant 19 sat at her desk in the far corner typing and making notes and trying hard not to smile. A young man’s intensity can be a terrible thing to bear (for no one so much as the young man himself) and I came off the chair right away, throwing jabs, pumping and puffing, slipping the phantom punches, going in desperately under the real ones.
    Not interested in market conditions, no sir. I wanted to know why Analog was the restrictive, right-wing, anti-literary publication that it had become. Didn’t Campbell care what all of the new writers, the purveyors of street fiction and venturesome prose, thought of him? “You’ve got to understand the human element here,” the young man said, “it’s not machinery, it’s people, people being consumed at the heart of these machines, onrushing technology, the loss of individuality, the loss of control, these are the issues that are going to matter in science fiction for the next fifty