Barry Nathaniel Malzberg (July 24, 1939 – December 19, 2024) was an American writer and editor, most often of science fiction and fantasy.
[1] Resolving not to be an "unpublished assistant professor of English,"[2] he left the program in 1965 to pursue a career as a freelance writer and agent for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.
He first found commercial and critical success with publication of his surreal novelette "Final War" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under the name "K. M. O'Donnell" in 1968.
[6] He was the editor of the Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin in 1969 until he was asked to resign because of a critical editorial he wrote about the NASA space program.
Most of his science fiction books are short, present-tense narratives concerned exclusively with the consciousness of a single obsessive character.
In novels like Galaxies (1975) and Herovit's World (1973), Malzberg uses metafiction techniques to subject the heroic conventions and literary limitations of space opera to biting satire.
Malzberg's work has been widely praised by critics, while being attacked by proponents of hard science fiction for its pessimistic, anti-Campbellian tenor.
Daniels said of Malzberg: "Malzberg’s books, in their tortured self-awareness, are primarily about writing: its technical difficulties and moral pitfalls, its potential to cheapen or calcify, its temptation to fraudulence or ventriloquism, the insisted-on inadequacy of language as an excuse for not being a less recursive or less involuted writer, and so on.
Malzberg was a regular contributor to the SFWA Bulletin published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.