The Gamesman

“We’re just a couple of motes intersecting in a void; our lives and relationships are defined by the roles we play.”

Once you’ve read a handful of Malzberg’s work, you begin to recognize his recurring themes, his particular type of protagonist, and his consistent approach to dialogue — balancing the unreliable internal voice with the external world. Like Kafka, Malzberg often depicts an ambiguous totalitarian structure presiding over a hopeless, jaded population. His protagonists, however, tend to be exceptions to the rule. With all their borderline-insane idiosyncrasies, they summon the courage to face the impossible, to seek truth, and to defy a corrupted power structure. And, presuming the theme holds, they always fail.

The Gamesman aligns with Malzberg’s other novels like The Cross of Fire and In the Enclosure, in which the protagonist endlessly searches for understanding, convinced that conditions can be changed, that an identifiable force can be opposed and conquered. Yet, like Kafka, the abstracted angst prevailing their world only intensifies in tandem with their efforts. What begins as a determined struggle for change becomes a mere drop of water on a forest fire.

The story is likely an exhibition for a condition of life, and given the presence of tyrannical malevolence, The Game itself may serve as nothing more than a public distraction — a bureaucratic trap designed to further cement rulership. It is a mechanism of complete self-entrapment, where the ego dive is so central to achieving victory that it reveals a psychological truth: obsessing over one’s problems, drowning in the conditions of self, only serves to exacerbate them. Malzberg’s characters are frequently imprisoned by their own rumination. Every aspect of their introspection is contaminated by a seething aspiration — to improve, to win, to be sexually competent, desirable, successful, to lead and be followed — only for that drive to collapse inward, folding back on itself like a dying star.

I remember reading Beyond Apollo immediately after Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. and noticing similarities — the bleak portrayal of humanity and the relentless, almost persecutory dialogue. Selby’s characters, like Malzberg’s, are deeply flawed, often immoral, but unmistakably human. Malzberg’s protagonists are always likely to be atomized by a form of technological estrangement, unable to place themselves into the world. Which, in turn, is an existential comment on humanity’s vexation with placing itself into the universal condition.

No matter where one ultimately lands on Malzberg’s work, it’s evident that he is, and will remain, one of the most singular voices in science fiction. He takes the genre’s tropes and shatters them with a hammer of existential stasis. There are no galaxies awaiting exploration, no preternatural terrains in Malzberg’s fiction. His worlds are black grids of interlaced dread. Yet, despite their defining lassitude and pessimism, they are often satirical, humorous, and — at times — capable of delivering faint but strikingly human moments of optimism.

Malzberg’s oeuvre isn’t without its flaws, but I can’t help but feel shortchanged by how consistently overlooked his work has been. In some alternate world, Barry might have given us a 400- to 600-page award-winning science fiction epic. His subtle world-building is, at times, so brilliantly original that I’m left tantalized by what could have been.

Still, I’m grateful for what he did deliver, given the conditions.