Barry N. Malzberg, like several other important science-fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s, began his career not intending to write science fiction. His ambition was to write literary or mainstream short stories. But by 1965, when he was awarded the Cornelia Ward Creative Writing Fellowship at Syracuse University, he had discovered the practical impossibility of a new writer's supporting himself through the limited and shrinking market for the literary short story. He declined the fellowship, returned to New York City, and found, after a few years, that the science-fiction market can be made to support a hardworking, productive writer. He found, too, that science fiction is the field of contemporary writing most open to newcomers. He also found the prices a writer pays for that support and openness. Early in 1975 he decided to write no more science fiction, for reasons adumbrated in several later essays and reviews but...