I’ve been busy, on the road, and generally distracted lately, so I missed hearing about a couple of deaths in the science fiction and fantasy community.

Barry N. Mazlberg (1939-2024) passed away on December 19 in Saddle River, New Jersey. He was an author, editior, and critic. His essays, collected Breakfast in the Ruins and The Bend in the Road are worth seeking out. Stark House Press has published a couple of collections of his science fiction as well as a series of his mystery novels.

I met Malzberg once back in the 00’s at a ConDFW. I don’t recall which year. He was a pleasant speaker and an approachable guest.

For years Malzberg cowrote a column with Mike Resnick for the SFWA Bulletin until they committed the unforgiveable crime of referring to Bea Mehaffey (an editor from the fifites) as a lady editor and said she was attractive. (She was.) Or something along those lines.

I’ve never really gotten into his science fiction, and I’m not sure why. I think I may not ahve been ready for it when I was younger.

I’ve got the book on the left, and I’ll dip into it later tonight.

The other loss was George Zebrowski (1945-2024), who died on December 20th. It’s December 27 as I’m writing this. His birthday is December 28. Zebrowski wrote space oriented fiction that, from what I understand, tended towards hard science fiction.

I’ve got some of his books but haven’t gotten to them yet. I have read  soem of his short fiction, althoug it’s been so long that I don’t recall much other than I enjoyed it enough to want to read more of his work.

He was married to science fiction author Pamela Sargent.

We at Adventures Fantastic would like to express our condolences to Barry Malzberg’s and George Zebrowski’s faimly and friends.