Herovit's World by Barry N. Malzberg

"God, how I hate science fiction.  I hate everything about it.  I hate the people who write it and the people who edit it, and don't forget the idiots who read it.  And the word rates and the conventions and what people say to you if you are married to someone who writes this crap."

"It's an honorable field.  It foretold the splitting of the atom and the moon landing."

"Like hell it did."

In his 1976 introduction to The Best of A. E. van Vogt, Barry Malzberg compares himself to van Vogt, arguing that both of them are sui generis, writers who, while members of the science fiction community, must be judged by different standards than their contemporaries in the same field.  When I read this back in 2017 I was thrilled, because I had long enjoyed Malzberg and van Vogt, who are of course very different people in so many ways, in the same way, as wacky characters with wacky ideas who present their ideas in odd and distinctive ways, whose work is challenging because it can be difficult to grasp, difficult to grasp because it ignores some of the traditional structures and forms of fiction, especially genre fiction.  I was also interested to read Malzberg's apparently sincere and obviously well-thought-out* appreciation of van Vogt because I had got the idea that Malzberg's 1973 novel Herovit's World was some kind of attack on van Vogt.

*Malzberg's intro to The Best of A. E. van Vogt is a stark contrast to his intro to The Best of Mack Reynolds, which is an opaque metaphor which talks about Reynolds' actual work hardly at all.  Not every van Vogt fan shares my view, however: van Vogt expert Isaac Walwyn, who runs the very fun, very informative, Ischi.net website, considers Malzberg's intro to The Best of A. E. van Vogt to be "full of back-handed compliments."  

Well, today we read Herovit's World.  I own the 1974 Pocket Books paperback with the brilliantly strange Charles Moll cover.  I love the typewriter with an eye and the male nude in the crucifixion pose (writers, like most creative people, are totally full of themselves!)  The barren landscape of the background, and the strange font and odd colors serve to heighten the sense that this book, and the people and environment it describes, are otherworldly, bizarre, queer.  (As you can see below, quite a few editions of Herovit's World have good covers.)  On the back we have extravagant praise for Malzberg and this work in particular from Harlan Ellison and from the award-winning fanzine The Alien Critic, which would later change its name to Science Fiction Review and which I first learned about early this year.  Ellison's back cover blurb praises Herovit's World for "destroying SF cliches," while the quote from his review in F&SF on the front cover (and Robert Silverberg's blurb on the book's first page) tell us this book is "important."

To get myself in the mood for attacks on van Vogt and SF cliches, before starting Herovit's World I read the original 1948 version of "The Rull," available at the internet archive--in The Best of A. E. van Vogt Malzberg tells us that "The Rull" is "a largely ignored story in its own time and a forgotten one now, [that] has tremendous power, and may be the best single piece that van Vogt has ever written."  I'd read "The Rull" before, but in revised versions, like the version that appears in the fix-up novel The War Against the Rull, and as I have found in the case of other van Vogt stories, the original of version of "The Rull" is better than the revisions.  Suffice to say that "The Rull" is a terrific story, full of tension, violence, and high stakes, with a weird setting, an alien villain and many new pieces of technology, and it is a story that romanticizes (fetishizes?) science, engineering, quick thinking and intelligence, a sort of Platonic exemplar of Golden Age SF--it also reflects van Vogt's particular concerns in its preoccupation with psychology and "the unconscious mind."

(I also reread Malzberg's "Vidi Vici Veni," a good reminder of how hilarious and outrageous Malzberg can be.  No matter what Herovit's World is like, Barry will always be close to my heart!)

From the first page of Herovit's World we are firmly in familiar Malzberg territory, with present tense narration of the humiliating trials of a Manhattanite protagonist who has a disastrous social life and sundry sexual problems.  Jonathan Herovit is a successful SF writer, with almost one hundred novels and hundreds of stories to his credit, including the dozens of books in the Mack Miller of the Survey Team Series.  Long ago, before his first sale, Herovit's mentor, editor of Tremendous Stories John Steele, told Herovit that his name had "too much of a New-Yorkish type of ring" and so his many books and stories appear under the pen name "Kirk Poland."  This hint that the SF community is anti-Semitic is only one of the many charges Malzberg levels at the creators and readers of SF in this novel; Malzberg is openly hostile and drearily dismissive of SF, root and branch, in Herovit's World, suggesting SF readers are sexually impotent "disturbed adolescents" who don't know a good sentence from a bad one, portraying SF writers as faithless, lecherous alcoholics, and calling the whole SF field "infantile."  Herovit's pseudonym is perhaps also a reference to anti-Semitism, a sort of Polish joke (under the name of "Poland" Herovit writes books full of nonsense and grammatical errors) and a reflection of Jewish resentment of Poles--metaphorically, "Poland" is stealing credit for Herovit's hard work!  Malzberg does creative things with names in this novel; for example, Herovit's agent is Morton Mackenzie, known as "Mack," so that Herovit's most famous character has the same name as his agent, and editor John Steele (presumably based on John W. Campbell, Jr.) has a first name that is practically the same as Herovit's.

Even though Herovit has a dim view of the fictional people Mack Miller and Kirk Poland ("he wishes that he could meet old Mack so that he, Jonathan Herovit, could kill him") they also serve as alter egos, wish fulfillment role models, of Herovit's; when Herovit faces obstacles, like when his wife Janice refuses to have sex with him or, in a laugh-out-loud passage, fellow SF writer Mitchell Wilk comes into Herovit's home office and looks at the draft on his typewriter and says "Why, this is the worst thing I have ever seen," Herovit inwardly fumes:

Mack Miller would not have put up with this shit.  Mack Miller would not have to stand in his own office, his own control room, and listen to some balding, bearded fool of a washed-up hack bait him and then start teasing.  Mack would have seized a weapon a long time ago and cleared out the invader. 

Herovit even has a sharp image of Kirk Poland ("a picture of ease and confidence") in his head, and has conversations with Kirk Poland in visions and dreams.  Some of these conversations have a homoerotic character, with Poland, for example, smoothly trying to talk his way into Herovit's bedroom while Herovit tries to sleep (Janice is in the kitchen staring at the TV):

"Come on, let me in; let's discuss this.  Let's talk things over reasonably.  You've been waiting a long, long time for this; now we can have it out man to man.  You'll like it, you really will...."

Herovit is thirty-seven, and his wife Janice, a person who hates SF but whom Herovit met at a SF convention over ten years ago, is thirty-five, and they have a six-month-old daughter, Natalie.  Janice is no prize.  One of the more chilling aspects of the novel is Janice's treatment of their daughter, whom she calls "the bitch" and "the thing."  ("Outside, Natalie begins to cry, Janice to swear at her.  Midmorning, the usual.")  Feminists will perhaps find more chilling still the scene in which Herovit has sex with Janice against her will.

"You're hurting me, Jonathan," she says--at least using his proper name, which is a start.  "You've got to stop hurting me now, please, now, please," but it is impossible to stop and how well she must know it.

Herovit is no prize himself!  Besides the marital rape, we know Herovit cheats on Janice, having unsatisfactory one night stands with female SF fans he meets at conventions.  Malzberg's characters are unambiguously unheroic; in the same way that Herovit's shady business dealings and poor writing at least in part justify the criticisms lebeled at him by people like Mackenzie the agent and Wilk the two-faced friend, Herovit's treatment of women doesn't do anything to refute Janice's ferocious feminist harangues about how men treat women as housekeepers and only pay attention to them when they want sex.

Malzberg's work is not particularly plot driven, but let's look at Herovit's World's plot.  As the novel begins, Herovit is having trouble meeting his obligations on his first contract with a major publisher, finding himself unable to write the latest Mack Miller adventure.  He already has been paid, and the book is quite overdue, and failure to deliver in mere days could jeopardize his relationship with Mackenzie and his access to this important new market.  Then Herovit is visited by his old friend  Mitchell Wilk, who hasn't written fiction in years because he somehow got a job as a professor at a college even though he himself never finished high school, much less college.  Wilk's college is offering a course in science fiction and he invites Herovit to attend a seminar, even promising him a $100 honorarium!  But it is not the hundred bucks that really attracts Herovit, but the news that college girls are easy!

"...the truly important thing is that the ass on campus, the ass is fantastic.  Nowadays they call it cunt, Jonathan....Do you know that they like to fuck?  I mean, they really like it!"

 ...the thought of the ass that likes to fuck, like the remote strains of departed music, touches Herovit...."That's what I read," he says hoarsely, "in the newsmagazines and like that."  

"And it's true.  For once the media haven't lied to us!"  

On the brink of these new professional and social opportunities, Herovit's inability to finish the required novel and deal with his wife become just too much for him, and he accepts the insistent offer that the vision of Kirk Poland has been making him--Herovit surrenders control of his life to his alter ego, his "less New-Yorkish," "all-American" pseudonym.  As so many Malzberg protagonists do, Herovit has gone insane.

This cover is beautiful, but the man is too
handsome for the material--Herovit should be
haggard, unkempt, ugly...this dude is like
some kind of gorgeous male model, fresh from
the salon!

To get the hang of Herovit's body, Kirk takes a walk around the Upper West Side.  Early in the book while walking the streets Herovit was robbed by a beggar, but Kirk proves he is a master of the streets when he confronts and intimidates a reckless taxi driver.  Kirk then patronizes a prostitute--to test out the equipment he will soon be using on Janice, whom he believes will be more tractable after "a couple of fucks like she used to have."  (That morning Herovit had proven unable to perform satisfactorily with Janice when she initiated sexual activity.)  Back home Kirk calls up Mackenzie and humiliates the agent, insisting that he doesn't need "Mack" and is withdrawing from that contract with that big new client--Kirk even tears up the 50-odd pages of that latest Mack Miller adventure that Wilk so severely condemned--Kirk knows Wilk was right.

From his filthy home office (Malzberg's long description of this office and its contents is a great scene) Kirk goes to the bedroom to begin his program of using sex to resolve Herovit's marital issues--he is too late!  Herovit's failure in bed that morning was the last straw, and Janice is packing up all her things, determined to leave her husband.  Janice is actually a more interesting character than most of the flat characters we get in Malzberg's work.  She halfheartedly tries to convince Kirk to take Natalie off her hands, but Natalie's father isn't very interested in the infant, either.  Janice, in the course of denouncing the SF field and every person connected with it, reveals that she was hanging out with SF people back in her twenties because there were so few women involved with SF that even an ugly girl like her could get a lot of dates, which she liked, "even if I was mostly going out with losers."

Janice leaves and the next day, after a dream sequence, Wilk and a young female SF fan, a woman Herovit had sex with at a convention recently, come by, ostensibly to condole with Herovit.  This visit collapses into acrimony, and in the final pages of the novel Mack Miller appears and takes over Herovit's body.  Miller's solution to every problem over the course of his career in the Survey has been violence, and he punches Wilk, then runs out on to the streets of Manhattan, where he attacks innocent strangers and then is killed when he blunders into automobile traffic.  (This ending reminded me of Nabokov's The Enchanter, but the similarity must be a coincidence, as The Enchanter did not appear in English until the 1980s.)

Barry's name may not be on the
cover of this 382-page volume,
but isfdb assures me that Herovit's World
appears within entire.

Herovit's World is only barely a SF story.  A lot of science fiction, of course, speculates about the future or alternate conditions: what will government or war or sex be like in the future, and/or in an alien environment with different technology or cultural values?  Herovit's World isn't like that at all--it has more in common with books like those of Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski or Somerset Maugham, those semi-autobiographical novels and stories that describe the difficult life of a writer or artist and his difficult relationships with women.  I'm not complaining; I love all those books, and I love reading the biographies of men like Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis.  Judged as a novel of that type, Herovit's World is a big success--it is funny, well-written, and includes a genuinely affecting character in Janice (Herovit himself is too insane and too similar to other Malzberg protagonists to be surprising or truly moving.)  The plot sort of peters out a little at the end rather than building to a big climax, but it still works.

Herovit's World is a success as a novel of literary life, but it says "Science Fiction" on the back cover and all four of the blurbs are from SF sources, so let's assess Herovit's World as a novel about SF and figure out if it has something to say about SF that is valuable.

First, let's consider the idea that the novel is "important."  I think we can forgive people like Silverberg and Ellison for thinking that Herovit's World is important because it is more or less about them, professional writers in the SF field with what people years ago might have called "girl troubles," a sort of Uncle Tom's Cabin or A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich of the SF world, an expose of a world of corruption and injustice!  (Though, of course, Ellison and Silverberg made serious money and won wide acclaim in that world, and Herovit admits that his problems are his own doing, more the author of his own fate than a victim, unlike a black slave in 19th-century America or a prisoner in the Soviet Union.)

Second, let's look at Herovit's World as a roman a clef; what does Malzberg claim or imply about specific real life SF figures?  Joachim Boaz in his review of Herovit's World foregrounds Malzberg's satire of A. E. van Vogt, and, excepting Herovit--an exaggeration of Malzberg himself--our favorite Canadian is the most recognizable figure in the book, even though his appearance only takes up a few pages in a flashback to a meeting of a short-lived SF writer's professional society (a "guild.")  Under the name V. V. Vivaldi, van Vogt appears as a drunk who has not written lately because of his involvement in a goofy religion, but who speaks extravagantly of the superiority of SF to other forms of literature.  "Science fiction...is a way of life, a way of thinking, a new and important means of dealing with the universe."  I don't think van Vogt was actually a drunk, but Malzberg portrays every SF writer as a drunk in this book, so why should van Vogt be portrayed any differently?  And of course van Vogt did get deeply involved in Dianetics, though he rejected the later evolution of L. Ron Hubbard's project, Scientology, a distinction van Vogt, who has no interest in religion or mysticism, makes very strongly in interviews (see Charles Platt's interview with van Vogt in Dreammakers), but a distinction which Van's legions of detractors (Joachim among them!) ignore.  Interestingly, instead of portraying van Vogt as a controversial figure (van Vogt's work was famously attacked by Damon Knight in 1945 and has had many detractors since), Malzberg has all the guild members siding with Vivaldi against Herovit when a dispute between them erupts.  I think the fairest stroke of Malzberg's impressionistic sketch of van Vogt is in portraying Van's confidence in SF--in this novel he talks quite like an uncharitable paraphrase of how he writes in nonfiction parts of The Best of A. E. van Vogt, in which he says stuff like: "the individual who repeatedly exposes himself to the reading of science fiction will eventually change his brain.  For the better."  Perhaps Malzberg means this to be ironic (Malzberg portrays SF as trash, so to have a guy extolling its virtues like this is ridiculous) but I actually find van Vogt's conviction and dedication charming.

After van Vogt, the most obvious representative (non-Malzberg) figure is John Steele as John W. Campbell Jr., who like Vivaldi is revered by the masses of SF fans and pros that make up the background characters of Herovit's World.  (Janice was chair of the Bronx Honor John Steele Society when Herovit met her.)  Steele's helping Herovit come up with a less Jewish-sounding pseudonym rings true, as Campbell did help people like van Vogt and Heinlein come up with pseudonyms, and he did take possible prejudices of his readers into account when making editorial decisions, for example, not printing Samuel L. Delany's Nova, which Campbell himself liked, because he thought his readers would not want to read about a black protagonist.

Herovit recalls a Mack Miller Survey Team story written in 1961 or so:

In 1961 the best way to sell to Tremendous was to cobble up a good justification of slavery and send it off the Steele with a sincere covering letter saying that you were trying to think the unthinkable through. 

Were there really lots of stories in Analog about slavery in the early 1960s, or is this just a sort of take on Campbell's dismissive views of blacks and defense of segregation and his oft-attested willingness to buy any story about psychic powers?   The 1961 story Herovit wrote for Steele was about the "cunning little Survey Team" brainwashing some aliens so they would rebel against their overlords and become the Survey Team's slaves--could this be a reference to the elitism of so many major SF works (Asimov, Heinlein and Sturgeon all advocate smart people manipulating the masses in the Foundation stories, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and "Slow Sculpture," all three of which won Hugos.)

Could Mitchell Wilk, the guy without a high school diploma who becomes a college professor, perhaps be based upon high school drop out (and SF Grand Master) Frederik Pohl?   

The description of that specific Mack Miller story and my speculation it is a spoof of the elitism of SF raises the topic of Malzberg's presentation of actual SF texts in Herovit's World.  What "SF cliches," as Ellison puts it, does Malzberg "destroy?" Are there specific authors' bodies of work or individual works he is satirizing?  One of the odd things about Malzberg--and I think Ellison is somewhat guilty of this as well--is that he will often moan that SF is horrible, but he always praises individual writers, even famously controversial writers who often serve as critics' punching bags, like L Ron Hubbard and van Vogt and Heinlein and Mark Clifton.  (The exception is Lovecraft, whom Malzberg slagged in the 1989 story "O Thou Last and Greatest!" though Malzberg wasn't even bold enough to use Lovecraft's name in that story, instead describing him with a contemptuous reference to the Rhode Islander's face--easy for a handsome devil like Malzberg to do, I suppose.)

Malzberg provides something like seven or eight pages from Mack Miller novels for us to examine.  The Mack Miller stories bear very little resemblance to either van Vogt's or Malzberg's own SF work, even though Herovit's life seems loosely based on Malzberg's own.  Herovit says that he doesn't know much about psychology or write about sex, that his "focus [is] on the hard sciences," and of course we know that both Malzberg and van Vogt have among their main themes psychology and the mind, and that Malzberg writes about sex all the time.  Neither man has a long series of SF novels about the same heroic character.  (Though Malzberg did write the 14-volume Executioner-style paperback series "The Lone Wolf" between 1973 and '75.)  What Herovit is writing seems to resemble the work of E. E. "Doc" Smith and Edmond Hamilton, both of whom contributed numerous volumes to long-running series about teams of super soldier/scientists who, like Mack Miller, battle hostile aliens, the former the Lensman series and the latter the Captain Future novels.  Ellison in his review of Herovit's World links Herovit to Smith, but without using Smith's name.

I guess Malzberg's general criticism is that SF of the Lensman-style makes people appear simple and life a series of triumphs when in fact people are complicated and life is a tragedy.  Lensman-type heroes are too successful, they handle problems too easily, and they don't have any emotional or psychological issues.  In his review Ellison tells us SF has to mature and join mainstream literature, ascribes to Malzberg the belief that SF has to try to follow William Faulkner's prescription that fiction should be about "the human heart in conflict with itself," and that is the sort of stuff Herovit hoped to write (he has a "long novel of Army life... all blocked out in his head") and I guess Malzberg hoped to write as well.

I don't take this kind of criticism very seriously, as it is like complaining that an apple isn't an orange, when oranges are freely available.  If you want all that human heart stuff, it isn't hard to pick up a volume of Proust and let alone that paperback of Spacehounds of IPC.  It also ignores the fact that different writers have different objectives, and people's life experiences are diverse.  John W. Campbell, Jr. told Malzberg (see Malzberg's 1980 essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971") that science fiction was about success, about heroes, about the human ability to solve problems and figure stuff out, and of course sometimes people in real life really do solve problems and achieve success.  I don't think that a literature that celebrates humanity's achievements and ability to overcome obstacles is illegitimate, and I don't think that straightforward entertainment is illegitimate either. I also think that you see plenty of human heart stuff in the SF field, not only in post-New Wave era work by people like Thomas Disch and Gene Wolfe* who are obviously strongly influenced by "serious" literature, but even during the Golden Age from, say, Kuttner and Moore--"Vintage Season" is a good example.   

*In the same column in which he praises Herovit's World and our pal Barry to the skies, Ellison also reviews a pile of new anthologies and in the course of discussing them lists who he thinks the eight top writers in SF in 1974 are--Disch is #4 and Wolfe is #7.

On a more specific level, Malzberg portrays Mack Miller as a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy who blasts a lot of aliens (though as we have seen he does turn some into servants or slaves.)  Is this caricature a fair portrayal of the Smith/Hamilton type of space adventure story?  Obviously there is a lot of war and violence in those space operas, just like in literature and entertainment in general, and obviously people enjoy it.  But is the implicit charge of xenophobia fair?  If you actually read Smith and Hamilton, as well as Heinlein and Burroughs and van Vogt (as Malzberg and Ellison certainly have), you'll see that the human polities form alliances with many alien races and that individual humans make friends with individual aliens all the time.  "The Rull" actually ends with the human race about to enter a peace treaty with the Rull.  SF is full of war, but it is also full of trade and diplomacy and camaraderie, just like real life.  This is a weak criticism!

(Malzberg and Ellison in the texts I am discussing today do not make the sort of standard allegations you hear from Christians, pinkos and other busybodies that violent entertainment creates a violent society or that pop culture makes people too individualistic or too consumerist or too conformist or whatever, even though in other contexts, like a film column in the January 1991 F&SF, Ellison argues that violent films cause street crime.)

Even though Ellison implies that Herovit's World "immolates" a long list of SF cliches, I am hard pressed to find many more SF cliches in the novel than that SF heroes are "too" competent and shoot lots of bad guys and manipulate people.  In the novel Malzberg notes that heroes like Mack Miller don't have sex, something Ellison makes a big deal about in his review, using the phrase "sexless heroes," and Ellison adds that they don't use the toilet.  Does every story have to have a relationship angle?  And how many stories would be improved by periodic updates on the characters' bowel movements?  I'm afraid Malzberg's attack on SF is not as comprehensive or as devastating as Ellison (in his back cover blurb) makes it out to be.

Silverberg and Ellison oversell Herovit's World, but I still loved it; it is hilarious and fascinating, on every page you find some gem of a joke or phrase.  And Malzberg doesn't oversell "The Rull."  Two masterpieces of their respective subgenres, and top examples of what their respective authors are trying to accomplish--I highly recommend both to people interested in the history of SF or just enjoyable reads.