Afterword to “Herman Melville: Space Opera Virtuoso” (1980)
“Herman Melville” is one of the oldest stories in this book, written under the influence of my growing Melville obsession in the late 1970s, even before “Another Orphan.” I remember it as being inspired by reading Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and in reaction to some dunderheaded review column by Lester Del Rey, who never met a piece of literary sf he didn’t despise. I wondered what might have happened had Melville been born eighty years later than he was; it seemed to me that he might have written pulp fiction instead of sea stories.
This is the first of my stories to play with the issues the gulf between genre and literary fiction, and within a week of its publication, I received a postcard from Barry Malzberg commending it. As I was a big fan of Malzberg’s work (see “Of New Arrivals…” elsewhere), and at that time a complete unknown, that act of kindness was hugely important to me.
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