Galaxies

By: Barry N. Malzberg

Narrated by: Lucinda Gainey

Galaxies is a brilliantly original science fiction novel arranged in fragments that satirize the science fiction writer imagining new worlds and characters. Its central persona is a female astronaut of the 40th century investigating a mysterious "black galaxy".

©1975 Barry N. Malzberg (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Cerebral meta-science-fiction

This is both a science fiction novel and a novel about the process of writing a science fiction novel, a meta-fiction in the tradition that goes back to Tristram Shandy and forward to Borges to Borges and to the movie Adaptation (2002). It works, amazingly well on both levels -- the novel-within-novel is a fine hard science-fiction tale, using the cutting edge thinking about Black Holes in 1975 to imagine a scenario of a FTL ship trapped in an inescapable gravity well (and how escape might happen and what the consequences might be). Interspersed with that is Malzberg (or a near-likeness) offering his notes on how this happened. There are a few problems -- the characterization of of the starship captain Lena Thomas, her lover and her various interlocutors is thin. The story is deliberately schematic. As always Malzerg's authorial voice is eloquent but also narrow, tending towards the bitter, the mordant, the self-rebuking with only a glimmer of joy & ecstasy. And yet, for all that, a short novel with a punch, expertly read by Lucinda Gainey (who I think gives Lena perhaps more character than the words themselves allow). But as Malzberg notes in the novel (he is his own best critic) the writer of a book is only a collaborator in a process that includes readers (and in the case of the audiobook, the vocalist is also a collaborator). This is a thought provoking book about the sterility of space travel (a beloved Malzberg novel), the reality of death, the theology of the scientific age, and much else. If you enjoy the bracing New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s -- the works of Le Guin, Ballard, Dick, Silverberg, Ellison, and writers of that muster -- you will enjoy this book. It's science fiction of a unusually high pitch of literacy and awareness.

The first several minutes will tell

For some people, this novel is a ground-breaking exploration in what the writer can truly do, a daring departure from conventional forms, and an engaging experiment.

I'm one of the other people. I tried to give this novel a shot, and it took too long to get past the philosophizing and autobiographing and meditations on the genre to get an actual story started. If the author starts wearing on your patience ten minutes in, don't count on it getting any better.