I missed it when it was originally up, but I thought this provocative Barry Malzberg essay on Judith Merril originally in Galaxy’s Edge (and now available through the wayback machine) was worth quoting:
A decent writer and a highly intelligent person, she did the field more damage than Raymond Palmer or Roger Corman, Ed Earl Repp or Ed Wood. The field certainly survived, it had demonstrated the pre-Lucas capacity to survive anything, but it was irreversibly damaged.
It was irreversibly damaged because Merril’s influence in those years was great, and she was on a methodical, hardly understated campaign to tear down the walls and destroy the category. As a failed mainstream writer who had essentially been rescued by her friends Theodore Sturgeon and Philip J. Klass, and pointed toward commercial writing, Merril was determined to find another way into the mainstream. And if that involved rupturing or destroying science fiction, well, that would be collateral damage.
I don’t know enough about Merril to comment. But love him or hate him, Malzberg has always been a provocative and informed critic of the field. And his opinions are a regular feature of Galaxy’s Edge.
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Tags: Barry Malzberg, Galazy's Edge, Judith Merril, Science Fiction