The novel “Herovit’s World” by Barry N. Malzberg was published for the first time in 1973.
Jonathan Herovit is a science fiction writer who’s going through a period of crisis. At 38 years he has written more than 90 novels and hundreds of short stories with the pen name Kirk Poland. He signed a contract with a major publisher to publish another novel in his Survey Team series but is having big trouble to write it. He recently had a daughter but the relationship with his wife is in crisis too.
Herovit got reduced to a whiny loser who too often tries to drown his problems in a bottle of scotch. His wife, who’s getting crankier and crankier, doesn’t help and the occasional sex between them is squallid. Sometimes, Herovit sleeps with some girl at the conventions where he goes as a guest without his wife but even those moments are of little help.
One day, Kirk Poland starts materializing in front of Herovit proposing to leave his body to him. It could be a solution but in the end Kirk Poland is Jonathan Herovit’s alter-ego, can he really solve his problems?
“Herovit’s World” is a novel about science fiction rather than a science fiction novel. Barry N. Malzberg had already written two novels of this type, “Dwellers of the Deep” in 1970 and “Gather in the Hall of the Planets” in 1971 using the pseudonym K.M. O’Donnell.
The style used by Barry N. Malzberg for “Herovit’s World” is peculiar. In the course of the novel there are often snippets of the last novel that Herovit is desperately trying to write. It’s a suitable choice for a novel that mixes various levels of narration.
“Herovit’s World” uses the protagonist Jonathan Herovit to write a satire on the world of science fiction, its writers in particular. Herovit is one of them: as a kid he was a fan and he managed to become a professional author. His initial idea was to make some money while accumulating experience and learning how the publishing world works then start to write something “serious”.
Jonathan Herovit uses the pen name Kirk Poland for his science fiction stories. He kept his real name for the “serious” stories he wanted to write but his plans changed. Herovit wrote novels at a very fast pace earning pretty good money but never had the courage to change genre.
After several years of that life, when he’s approaching his fourties, Jonathan Herovit enters a crisis. It’s not just about keeping on writing stories that are becoming more and more repetitive with worse and worse quality because the problems also affect his family life. He met his wife Janice at a science fiction convention but now she hates that genre and shows contempt for the husband who can only write science fiction stories without even earning very well.
“Herovit’s World” focuses on the Jonathan Herovit’s story but it’s shown how the main character is a typical science fiction writer. In some cases it’s possible to recognize some real people in the some characters of the novel. For example, there’s John Steele, inspired by John W. Campbell Jr., and there’s an author who invented a religion.
The conventions are useful to earn some extra money and is an opportunity for writers to find some girl to sleep with. In fact, the few female fans seem to get them interested just for that.
Science fiction fandom doesn’t come out well either: in “Herovit’s World” fans are mostly kids or young adults but generally they abandon science fiction when they grow up.
We can see that the novel was written during a time when even in the U.S.A. science fiction was still trying to establish itself as a genre that could credibly deliver contents more important than a low-level entertainment. It’s a type of problem that involved more or less the whole world: in some countries the situation improved, in others not so much.
“Herovit’s World” is tragicomic in the way it shows the protagonist in a series of conflicts with the whole world but also with himself when his alter-ego Kirk Poland starts materializing, a moment that brings his crisis up to a new level. The result is funny and bitter at the same time and can be irritating for science fiction fans as it goes beyond a normal parody.
Overall, “Herovit’s World” is a good novel but must be read with an appropriate dose of irony. For this reason I recommend it to anyone who appreciates really irreverent stories.
