Note: appeared as by K. M. O'Donnell. This
work is contained, in its entirety, in The
Passage of the Light.
From the cover blurb:
Review:
Review by Guy Salvidge:
Dwellers of the Deep is an expansion of a story of the same name, and I have to say it shows. Here is a good idea (as satire, anyway): aliens have taken over a young SF magazine collector’s mind (after a fashion) and demand that he gives them an issue of K. M. Conrad’s Tremendous (obviously this is satirizing Astounding and John Campbell). Not just any issue, mind, they want the one in which Cupboard (L. Ron Hubbard) first espouses his crackpot theories which led to Dianetics and the Church of Scientology.
On one level, this is fairly entertaining (or it would have been for someone who knew more about the goings on in and around science fiction in 1951); the pleasure comes in guessing exactly who is being satirized. My inadequate knowledge of the period no doubt diffuses much of this, but I did gather that V. V. Vivaldi is A. E. van Vogt (who reappears in Herovit’s World) and Harlow Hollowaite, then a pimply fan, is Harlan Ellison. The ‘Solarians’ are obviously the ‘Futurians’ (I think?) and thus Frederik Pohl ought to be hanging around here somewhere, and others.
Unfortunately, a promising premise unfolds into a less than entertaining
novel. Dwellers of the Deep really isn’t all that funny. I feel
warranted in saying this because of another review of this novel I saw
on the Internet, in which the reviewer had similar difficulties with the
book. In reply, Malzberg said that that was a ‘grim winter’ (or something
to that effect); real humor could not be manufactured. Dwellers of the
Deep suffers for these reasons. I think the story may function much
better at shorter length (I have not read the original story) but at 100+
pages it drags.
Another
review (with a response to it by Malzberg himself!)