Revelations

“Here we see the face of the enemy and what we have found is that it is No Face.”

Malzberg’s writing is of that rare caliber in that it contains texture, it breathes, it’s winking at the reader with a sardonic grin, crooked teeth are stained cigarette yellow behind cracked lips.

What made Malzberg an outsider was that he had more in common with transgressive literature than with the mainstream of science fiction. Barry is closer in relation to the likes of Hubert Selby Jr. and Harry Crews. All three write with an emotional fixation that is enraged, absurd, and body-obsessed. Malzberg, like Selby and Crews, is concerned with people chewed up and spit out, people who are pushed past the point of meaning, left only with a dead center. These writers are demythologizers. The American dream floats at the periphery of awareness in a grimy, existential orbit.

The novel is concerned with the commodification of pain, the spiritual hollowness left in the wake of manifest destiny, all through the lens of a vapid exhibitionist television program called Revelations. Marvin Martin, the host who refers to interviewees as “meat,” is that typical entertainment industry predator we have all grown increasingly sick of over the past decade. His only interest lies in exploitation as a means of increasing viewership. A predator who gently pets his prey before laying out their unsavory insides to the American people.

Revelations focuses mainly on Hurwitz, the procurement executive for Martin. With this protagonist, Malzberg inserts himself into the novel, with that postmodern stylization so deft in his writing. On theme with all of Barry’s works, often the only escape his dread-ridden protagonists have access to is their delusions, which are the dark impulses of an entirely misdirected cultural zeitgeist.

Dismissing Malzberg as an exploitative and violent writer ignores the perspicacious insights he had about a rapidly changing world in the mid-20th century. Like other socially conscious science fiction writers of the time, Malzberg saw a world accelerating through changes that could not be categorized. As machines emerged from the industrial revolution, our world became more entropic. Everything was chaos, nothing was known. Unlimited discovery meant perpetually limited knowledge. The universe was behaving in ways that could not be understood.

Alongside his focus on the technological implications for the future, Malzberg was intimately aware of shifting power structures. In all of Malzberg’s novels, the powerful are phantom-like, Kafkaesque, but withering away. When a powerful entity is encountered, they are bedridden, handicapped, grasping for oxygen from a collapsed chest. Malzberg understood that somewhere in the souls of the powerful lies a dying light that is frightened and alone. Not even they could grasp our complex and chaotic world. As power aims to control, entropy provides the ultimate fear, and the only thing that keeps the terror at bay is a societal belief in some abstract myth of empire. Video technology, as demonstrated in Revelations, exacerbated this unveiling of the collective fear parade underneath.

Malzberg examined a corner of our existence left only for the brave explorers, where there is a dark reality behind our modern myths.