The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg Page A

years. It’s got to explore the question of victimization.”
    “I’m not interested in victims,” Campbell said, “I’m interested in heroes. I have to be; science fiction is a problem-solving medium, man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out.”
    “But not everyone is a hero. Not everyone can solve problems—”
    “Those people aren’t the stuff of science fiction,” Campbell said. “If science fiction doesn’t deal with success or the road to success, then it isn’t science fiction at all.”
    Much later—after his death—it occurred to me that he must have been lonely in those last years. Many things had changed in and out of science fiction in the late sixties, the writers were spread all over the country and didn’t come up to the office much anymore, the old guard had very little to do with him, the new writers were with Carr and Knight, Ellison and Ernsberger. Fred Pohl was responsible for buying the first stories of most of the writers who in the sixties were to go on to careers; Campbell’s discoveries—he was still hospitable to unknowns—tended to stay in the magazine. If, like Norman Spinrad, they began to write a different kind of fiction and publish elsewhere, they were not welcomed back. At the time this seemed to be arrogance and editorial autocracy, but seen from Campbell’s side it could only have been reaction to ingratitude and perversity. Why weren’t his writers selling in the book markets and why did those who he broke in, so many of them, stop listening? It was very hard to handle and his sinusitis had turned to emphysema. Gout made him limp. Some fanzines were venomous.
    “Mainstream literature is about failure,” Campbell said, “a literature of defeat. Science fiction is challenge and discovery. We’re going to land on the moon in a month and it was science fiction which made all of that possible.” His face was alight. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he said. “Thank God I’m going to live to see it.” (He must have been thinking of Willy Ley, who had died just a few weeks before. Ley, the science columnist of Galaxy , had been with the German Rocketry Society in the thirties, had dedicated his working life to the vision of space travel. The timing of his death was cruel; even though they had been at odds for almost twenty years Campbell had gone to the funeral and been shattered.)
    “The moon landing isn’t science fiction. It comes from technological advance—”
    “There’s going to be a moon landing because of science fiction,” Campbell said. “There’s no argument.”
    Probably there wasn’t. (Most of the engineers and scientists on Apollo had credited their early interest in science to the reading of science fiction, which meant, for almost all of them, Astounding .) Still, the young man’s intensity had turned at last to wrath. Here was the living archetype of science fiction, right here, and he wasn’t reasonable.
    No, he was just a stubborn, close-minded, bigoted sixty-year-old who had endorsed Wallace in 1968, had said that the Chicago police hadn’t hit long or hard enough and was now pursuing dowsing as a legitimate research method. I lunged at him verbally. Engaged he lunged back. We argued civilization. The electoral process (Campbell thought most were too dumb to deserve the vote). The fall of cities, the collapse of postindustrial democracy because of the pervading effect of ideologies like Campbell’s. (“Good,” Campbell said, “we’ll find something better.”) The editor would not budge. Neither would the soon-to-be-editor emeritus of the SFWA Bulletin . It became, at great length, one o’clock. The young man twitched like an elongated White Rabbit. “Better go,” he said, “better go, it’s late. I’m late.” For nothing. But I would not presume on Campbell’s time further. Besides, it was time for his lunch. Besides, arguing with him had made me sick.
    “All right,”