Thursday, April 12, 2007

All Malzberg! All the Time!

The opening of the essay, "On Engines Again," now available in Breakfast in the Ruins, originally written in 1992:
This exchange outside the student/faculty cafeteria at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, 7/22/89:

Bruce Sterling: Fifty years old and still writing! That would be horrible! When I'm fifty I hope I won't be still writing and involved in all this shit. I'd rather be dead than that pathetic.

Barry N. Malzberg: Oh, come on, Bruce. I'm fifty years old, well, I'll be fifty on Monday and I'm still writing or at least trying to write and I'm not pathetic.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, Barry, you're pathetic all right. You just haven't accepted it yet.
Footnote 1: Bruce Sterling was born April 14, 1954, which means Saturday is his 53rd birthday.

Footnote 2: "A Plain Tale from Our Hills," a new Bruce Sterling story available free online at Subterranean.

Pathetic or not pathetic? Discuss.

1 comment:

Jess Nevins said...

...?

I hope he was joking. That, or doing some sort of warped homage to the first time Harlan Ellison encountered Isaac Asimov.

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