Seeklight

Introduction

In the mail the other morning, from an unpublished writer a little to the west of here, came a letter which took me back ten years to the living room of 143 Avondale Place, Syracuse, New York, where I, the then Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow, was trying to push my failing Dodge and beginning marriage on an income of $250.00 a month while simultaneously applying myself to collected works which then might have numbered all of one hundred and fifty pages.

The Writer (from the west of here that is; I no longer live at Avondale Place) wanted to know what the truth of getting started in publishing was. How did you sell a story? Was it really true as it appeared to him that you had to have connections to place your work? How did writers get going anyway? Was it possible to do your work and mail it out and get in print or did you need contacts? What contacts, anyway? He was pretty discouraged, the young writer went on, but not ready to give up yet. Perhaps I had some suggestions. Markets? Contacts?

Back to the living room in Syracuse where the same questions rattled through my mind and corpus for almost a full year. It is possible that the subculture of professionally published novelists, poets and short-story writers is not a cabal to be achieved only through dark rites of initiation-and-persecution but if this is so, you could not have proven it by me in the academic year of 1964−5, a feeling which to a certain degree persists emotionally even to this day. How indeed does one break into this business?

How can one emerge from the mass of unpublished writers to professional publication? What is the secret?

It is not easy to break into this business and my correspondent from Philadelphia was right, it does appear from the outside as if it were a mysterious cabal with equally mysterious but rigorous social customs; one becomes a writer only by becoming personally acceptable to a formal or less formal board of review. It does little good to advise that this is not the case; that while the medium of the literary novel and short-story is closed nearly tight nowadays, insular and self-limiting, the category market—gothics, westerns, mysteries and particularly science-fiction—remain open to those who can meet the rather stringent requirements of the categories and that science-fiction in particular, if it has been characterized by nothing else for its near-fifty years as a discrete sub-category of fiction, must be praised for its openness, its willingness not only to publish work by newcomers of no prior social acceptability but to welcome that work and to quickly elevate its best talent to the top of the field within a shorter period of time than almost any other category would so do. It is true that Philip Roth won the National Book Award at 26, that Joyce Carol Oates was winning O’Henry Prizes in her early twenties and won the NBA (after two appearances final list) at 31. But Roth and Oates are exceptions, not only exceptional writers—of course they are—but exceptional examples of luck.

Not to digress however, people in early middle age have the habit of running on, sometimes in a disjointed fashion, on issues peripheral to what should really concern them. Let us drag ourselves away from the NBA or middle-aged American literary novelists to the far more vital and salutory matter of this particular book.

I proposed the idea of trying to make the course of new ’s-f writers easier rather than more difficult and Roger Elwood, the energetic and capable editor-in-chief of this new Laser Book program, came right back at me within days asking me to put my time where my mouth was. Let me discover the newer writers, let me develop projects with them, introduce them to the markets. If I felt that the markets should be more receptive to the new than they are at present (although as I have said above, s-f really isn’t that bad compared to most other fields) then take up the cause myself.

So that was the way in which this book was proposed and that was how it began.

K. W. Jeter, whose SEEKLIGHT follows as the first of these novels in whose publication I have assisted, is a twenty-four-year-old Californian, a state university graduate who prefers to keep his persona out of his work, a position which I share in relation to my own and with which I am in hearty agreement. Other than knowing that he is married, widely-read in ’s-f (this would be obvious without testimony simply from the novel) and utterly committed to his work, I know only that he is greatly and diversely talented and that given a reasonable contribution of luck, that luck without which none of us would ever have achieved any success (this is not paranoia; life is luck, breath is luck, love is luck) he may achieve a major career within this field. SEEKLIGHT is one of the three or four best ’s-f novels I have ever read and on any level is a distinguished contribution to the field; it promises to be an auspicious start to an auspicious career but even if it did not it is, on its own terms, a wholly successful and gripping novel which should provide its readers with hours of entertainment and, after the fact and by implication, a rather deeper level of inference which emerges from the book only as the consequence of its full statement. The “statement” however may be taken or more properly left; this is, in my opinion, a work of art but it is first and last and more important a work of craft and delight.

With more pride than it is perhaps seemly to admit, I gladly turn over to you SEEKLIGHT and K. W. Jeter.

—Barry Malzberg

New Jersey