Barry N. Malzberg: "1984," "Reason Seven" and "Piu Mosso"

I was digging through the old paperbacks and magazines at Antiques Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, when I came upon an issue of a digest-sized magazine I'd never heard of before, Espionage.  The cover illustration was sort of crude and I would have just ignored the thing and forgotten about it ten seconds later had I not spotted on the cover the name of our hero, Barry N. Malzberg!  Attached to a cryptic title that I didn't recognize, a title doesn't appear at isfdb!  I had to own this magazine!  And luck was with me--the price sticker on the plastic bag read "$1!"

Let's read this story and two other Malzberg stories from magazines printed in 1985, stories we might call rare.  

"1984" 

"1984" is a trifle, taking up a mere half page of Ed Ferman's F&SF.  This issue of F&SF also includes a book column by Algis Budrys, in which Budrys talks about A. E. van Vogt and van Vogt's influence on or relationships with Damon Knight, Philip K. Dick and Charles L. Harness, and a film column by Harlan Ellison, in which Ellison savages Gremlins and questions the effect on society of the way talented filmmakers George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg are using their power.  Both of these columns are clever and compelling, Budrys and Ellison demonstrating a deep knowledge and commitment to genre literature (and in Ellison's case, cinema) and getting pretty emotional, Budrys' column ultimately being heartwarming and sweet and Ellison's of course self-important and over-the-top bitter and angry.  I definitely see where Ellison is coming from with Gremlins and Lucas and Spielberg's work, however--as a kid I loved Gremlins, and of course the film is very competent technically, but when I saw it for the first time as an adult back in 2015 I was put off by how much it feels like a vicious attack by the contemptuous cognitive elite on ordinary average-and-below-average-IQ Americans and their perhaps childish attitude about Christmas.

Anyway, Malzberg's "1984," which Ferman suggests is about the election in which Ronald Reagan thrashed Walter Mondale, relates a scene in a school for scientists or gods or whatever; the narrator is the teacher and he is reviewing students' work.  A student has created a simulation of a society, or an actual miniature society (like in Ted Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God," I suppose), apparently a regular part of the curriculum.  The miniature society's politicians are stupid, its cities are full of riots, its countryside plagued by pollution.  The student is protective of his work and thinks he can jigger with it and get this fallen society back on course, but teach insists he put the people of this society "out of their misery."  The student will fail if he doesn't follow orders, so he pulls "the electoral lever" and destroys the little civilization.  

Presumably the implication is that by voting for Ronald Reagan the American people had destroyed the world, but maybe we should take solace in the fact that the world is in a terrible irreparable mess.  A view into the mind of the center-left intellectual in the Reagan era, which I guess was a tough time for them psychologically, as so many times are.  

Not a good story by any means, but an interesting time capsule that is brief and to the point.  Acceptable.  "1984" can be found in the recent Malzberg collection Collecting Myself.  

"Reason Seven" 

"Reason Seven" debuted in Omni and was reprinted in 1994 in the anthology Omni Visions Two and in 2023 in the anthology Ready When You Are and Other Stories.  Maybe it is not fair to call this one "rare."  Anyway, the issue of Omni in which "Reason Seven" appeared, where I am reading it, has a column by Charles Platt about the use of speculative futuristic languages in SF with references to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker, and a story by Kate Wilhelm, a person whom we are always hearing is so very important.  Photos of Malzberg and Wilhelm are included on page 10 for those who want to admire these two lookers.

Like "1984," "Reason Seven" has on its surface a difficult and destructive human relationship and is some kind of attack on Ronald Reagan that doesn't actually mention the 40th president's name.  It is the near future, I guess the mid or late '90s, and the United States has been engaging in invasions and raids all over the Third World in the prosecution of its conflict with the Soviet Union.  The assumption of the American intellectual class, of course, is that opposing the Soviet Union is a mistake or actually immoral, so the US government strives to deceive the public into supporting these kinetic actions and one means of doing so is producing what are purported to be enemy documents captured during the attacks, documents that make the enemy look bad.  Our narrator's job is composing this black propaganda. 

Like so many Malzberg stories, "Reason Seven" is a sort of report or testimonial the narrator has been ordered to produce.  In it he describes how he, stupidly, told a woman he was dating, a nurse with a masters degree, about his job.  Government agencies and employees in Malzberg stories are always incompetent, and not only is the narrator shown to be foolish enough to explain his espionage job to a civilian predisposed to oppose American foreign policy; Malzberg also makes clear that the fake documents the narrator concocts are shoddily composed but that the narrator, nevertheless, is very proud of them, and confident that by creating them he is "making a difference."

The nurse is outraged when the narrator explains his job and shows her his elaborately and lovingly organized library of his own half-baked meretricious writings, and she not only denounces him and his work but starts destroying the binders full of them and declaring she will expose him to the press.  So, the narrator murders her.  When he tells his superiors about what he has done, they quickly move to solve the problem presented by the woman's death, and assign the narrator the job of writing a suicide note.  I believe the final twist is that the narrator is going to be extrajudicially executed by the agency for which he works, that the suicide note he is writing is his own--in the same way he has been writing fake documents in the voice of commies the government has murdered as a way of justifying the killing of those reds, he is writing a fake document in his own voice to justify his own murder in pursuit of anti-communist policy.

More interesting than the story's banal and silly idea that the US is no better and perhaps worse than the USSR is Malzberg's depiction of the inner life of the writer and his relationship with his employers and with the public.  The narrator of "Reason Seven," for money, churns out at a high rate of speed a vast quantity of writing at the direction of callous employers, texts that few people end up reading and which most ordinary people would find unconvincing or uninteresting or even incomprehensible, but the narrator is nevertheless proud of his work, the artistic touches he has tried to include within it, and he cherishes the idea that by doing this (in-fact useless or even evil) literary work he is somehow "making a difference."  This is of course a somewhat caricatured depiction of Malzberg's own career.  This sad self-reflection is clever and compelling, and of course I appreciate Malzberg's depiction of a disastrous sexual relationship, one of my favorite themes and one that Malzberg skillfully addresses again and again in his work, in particular how here Malzberg focuses not on physical sexual dysfunction but on the risk we all run when we expose our true selves to others, when we make ourselves vulnerable in pursuit of an intimate physical or emotional connection to others; here in "Reason Seven" the result of a man opening himself up to a woman is catastrophic for all involved.

I like it.

"Piu Mosso" 

Malzberg knows all about music and a quick search on the google machine tells us that "piu mosso" is an instruction you might find on sheet music that directs the musician to play faster and with more energy.  What this has to do with this story is a little vague; maybe we are expected to think this story strives to achieve "the condition of music," i. e., it seeks to affect us directly, without having to describe reality or construct a plot or engage in other such intermediary techniques and devices.  (Music inspires emotion in the listener without having to tell a story or conjure an image the way painting, sculpture and literature generally do.)  Of today's stories, "Piu Mosso" is the least tethered to reality, a dream-like absurdist narrative featuring jokes about how government employees are lazy and corrupt and government operations are incomprehensible.  But just because a story tells a truth doesn't mean it is good; "Piu Mosso" is the weakest of today's stories.

A civil servant working in a building full of shirkers, malingerers, liars, and double and triple agents has decided to murder the President, he is not sure why; perhaps to become famous.  (Political murder is one of Malzberg's hobby horses, one I find far less entertaining than the sexual dysfunction theme.)  By threatening him with a revolver, the narrator acquires from his office mate the itinerary for the President's movements today, a document of loose sheets variously called "plans" and "charts."  This turns out to be unnecessary, as out in the corridor the narrator encounters the President--the chief executive is on his own, in a disguise and exposes himself as a quadruple agent somehow already aware of the narrator's scheme of assassinating him.  The narrator drops his revolver (one of the story's little jokes is how the narrator insists on calling the gun his "point thirty-eight") and the President picks it up and, after consulting the itinerary to make sure he is actually supposed to be here, the President shoots the narrator--in the flash of the shot the narrator sees his office mate and has a ridiculous conversation with the man. 

There is very little plot, emotion or substance of any kind here; "Piu Mosso" is like an unfunny dream sequence taken from a novel that was included in the novel only to pad out the page count.  Thumbs down, I'm afraid.

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I can only really recommend one of today's 1985 Malzberg productions, but that one, "Reason Seven," is pretty solid.  But I have no regrets about exploring some of the less-travelled paths in the sprawling bibliography of our pal Barry.