The Engines of the Night — Barry N. Malzberg

Aspiring science fiction writers, take heed! If you want to understand where the field has been and where it's going -- if you want a career -- you need this book. In The Engines of the Night, Malzberg reviews his own ambivalent relationship with science fiction up to 1980 and gauges its past and future potentials. Would science fiction have been better off without Hugo Gernsback and the pulp-literature stigma with which he cursed it? What are the seminal works of science fiction? Can science fiction kill you? His answers are brilliant, unequivocal, and surprising. Updated with a 2001 introduction, this award-winning essay collection remains an essential and enduring history and critique of a fascinating and problematic genre. (Locus Award Winner. Hugo Award Nominee.)