Barry N. Malzberg

Barry N. Malzberg (1939–2024) was an American writer whose prolific, often bleak and self-reflexive science fiction made him one of the genre's most distinctive stylists of the 1970s. Born in New York City and a Syracuse University graduate, he worked as a welfare investigator and a literary agent at the Scott Meredith Agency before turning to full-time writing; he published his first stories under pseudonyms including K. M. O'Donnell. His novels The Falling Astronauts (1971) and Beyond Apollo (1972) used unreliable, breaking-down narrators to turn the space program into metaphors for bureaucratic dehumanization, a satirical, metafictional approach that put him at odds with more optimistic hard-SF traditions even as it won him admirers such as Theodore Sturgeon. He edited Amazing Stories and Fantastic in the late 1960s and, with Mike Resnick, wrote decades of columns on the business of writing. His nonfiction study The Engines of the Night and his story collection Breakfast in the Ruins both won the Locus Award.