Jonathan Herovit used to be a rising star in science fiction. Now he’s paralyzed by domestic anxieties, creative exhaustion, and an industry that happily consumes its own. Haunted by his wife’s post-partum depression, hobbled by his own worsening alcoholism, and mocked by the impossible deadline of a novel he cannot bring himself to face, Herovit retreats further and further into the margins of his life. Then things get truly strange: Kirk Poland—Herovit’s hard-boiled, hyper-competent pseudonym—begins to speak to him, critique him, threaten him, and offer a seductive alternative to everything the author hates about himself, fracturing the divide between person and persona. What follows is Barry N. Malzberg at his most incisive and self-lacerating: a comedic nightmare of writerly neurosis, genre politics, and the psychoses baked into American professional life.

First published in 1973, Herovit’s World remains uncannily contemporary. The teeth of Malzberg’s satire have only grown sharper with time in his most self-reflexive novel, which exposes the anxieties of late-capitalist creativity, fan culture, toxic ambition, and the paranoid machinery of pulp publishing. This anti-oedipal edition includes a foreword by D. Harlan Wilson, an introduction by Paul Di Filippo, and an afterword by Malzberg himself—one of the last pieces he wrote before logging out of reality’s submission portal in 2024.

BARRY N. MALZBERG was an American writer, editor, and agent. His prolific career spanned numerous genres, most notably crime and science fiction. He was particularly active in the SF scene of the early seventies, although he became disillusioned with the market forces defining the field and rarely published SF works since. Malzberg won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Beyond Apollo in 1973, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, among others.