Barry N. Malzberg (24 July 1939–19 December 2024), also writing as Mel Johnson, K.M. O’Donnell, Nathan Herbert, Mike Barry, Claudine Dumas, Lee W. Mason, and Gerrold Watkins, was a prolific and varied writer, anthologist, columnist, critic, satirist, and editor. Malzberg served as SFWA’s Eastern Regional Director from 1980 to 1984.

After originally working toward careers in screenwriting and as a literary agent, Malzberg began writing and publishing short fiction in the mid-1960s. His early publications, such as “The Sense of the Fire,” were in men’s magazines such as Escapade, where he was also an editor. Over the next three decades, he wrote many well-known and award-nominated short stories, later gathered into volumes of collected works, as well as dozens of novels across science-fiction, mystery, thriller, and erotica. His works were often notably pessimistic in tone, including his John W. Campbell Memorial Award winning book Beyond Apollo (1972), the third in a series of negative commentaries on the Apollo astronauts and program, and he was known for melding a bleak perspective on humanity with traps of existence as psychological elements through stories of science-fiction, erotica, and the two combined.

A prolific essayist, Malzberg’s collected non-fiction won the Locus Award twice and covered a broad range of current and historical topics. Malzberg was a notable contributor to the SFWA Bulletin: first, as the magazine’s editor in the late 1960s, until asked to resign after an essay negative to the NASA space program. Then, together with writer Mike Resnik, Malzberg contributed to The Resnick & Malzberg Dialogues, a regular advice column that ran in over fifty issues, ending famously with a discussion on women in editing, which sparked conversation that changed the course of the SFWA organization and influenced the broader genre community.

Author and editor Scott Edelman notes, “My first thoughts go not to his millions of written words—which I have loved and do not intend these memories to diminish—but to the moment when we first met, and I had the opportunity to face to face tell him how sorry I was for how I’d once wronged him. He waved it off and said something like—the world would be a terrible place if we were all judged by the worst thing we ever did. ‘Let it go,’ he said. And we went on to have a true friendship. I will always treasure his graciousness in that moment.”

Author Nancy Kress remembers, “Barry Malzberg, my friend for over thirty years, was a mass of contradictions. A self-proclaimed pessimist (he thought of it as realism), he was a funny and entertaining raconteur. Holding a low opinion of humanity in the aggregate, he was kind, loyal, and generous to individuals. Believing he had fallen short of his own literary hopes for his writing, he nonetheless was justly proud of his best work and enormously pleased when his impressive oeuvre was brought back into print. I relished his company, and I will miss him.”

Barry N. Malzberg lived 85 years.