From the (e)Bookshelf: Prose Bowl

Back in high school, I found a box of old issues of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" from the late 1970s and early 1980s one day in the corner of a portable classroom. Out of the stories I read back then that have stuck in my mind ever since, I do seem to keep thinking back to one as standing out among that distinguished group. It was called "Prose Bowl," by Barry N. Malzberg (who before looking it up I supposed to be a "New Wave" science fiction author with a tendency of sardonic pessimism towards older SF themes such as space travel, but who I now know also did quite a bit of work with "metafiction") and Bill Pronzini (a prolific writer of mysteries and an editor of anthologies in multiple genres), and involved a showdown between two authors down on the field of a stadium filled with thousands of fans, each trying to finish typing a ten-thousand word story first. Just a little while ago, I started wondering if I could find any information about the story online, but a quick search turned up that it had been expanded into a full novel, which didn't seem to be in print any more but was readily available in electronic book stores. Curious, perhaps, as to how this would turn out, and equipped in just the last little while with some new ways of reading electronic books, I bought a copy.
( A New-Sport experience )