Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (43 page)

That spirit of collaboration for the noble purpose of expanding our intellectual horizons is exactly what we're trying to achieve here in Tempe, Arizona. I think I might have the best job in the world, and the most fun part of it is bringing new readers, thinkers, tinkerers, fans, philosophers, writers, and makers into the fold. It's a conversation that we really can't have without you. Won't you join us?

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering and the Department of English. Ed's research and teaching explore digital narratives, contemporary culture, and the intersection of the humanities, arts, and sciences. He completed his doctoral degree in English and American literature at Stanford University in 2011. To learn more about the Center for Science and the Imagination, visit
http://csi.asu.edu.

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238 words

DECEMBER ISSUE

A truly memorable character viciously skates her way into December's cover story. "Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters" is a first sale for author
Henry Lien,
but we know it won't be his last. The gorgeous cover art accompanying the tale is by Alexandra Manukyan. The protagonist "Entangled" in
Ian R. MacLeod's
new story is the only person in a world on the way to healing itself who is not gloriously happy to be alive.

ALSO IN DECEMBER

Planetary exploration takes a terrifying turn in
Gregory Norman Bossert's
"Bloom"; but aliens are much milder, if hardly any less enigmatic, in
Timons Esaias's
tale of "The Fitter"; still, for new author
Jay O'Connell,
it's humanity that shows a lack of "Dignity"; while a certain inability to communicate is on display in
R. Neube's
"Grainers";
William Preston
attempts to humanize the "Vox ex Machina"; and
Nancy Kress
reveals that regardless of whether you're human, alien, or amphibian, you should expect things to get pretty strange during "Frog Watch"!

OUR EXCITING FEATURES

Robert Silverberg's
Reflections column wistfully peers into vast distances to find "The Plurality of Worlds":
Peter Heck's
On Books includes a review
Shadows of the New Sun
—an anthology that honors the Science Fiction Writers of America's latest Grand Master, Gene Wolfe; plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our December issue on sale at newsstands on October 1, 2013. Or subscribe to
Asimov's
—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at
www.asimovs.com .
We're also available individually or by subscription on
Amazon.com's
Kindle and Kindle Fire,
BarnesandNoble.com's
Nook,
ebookstore.sony.com's
eReader,
Zinio.com,
and from
magzter.com/magazines!

ON BOOKS

GENRE VERSUS LITERATURE

Norman Spinrad
| 5079 words

THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS
By Karen Lord
Del Rey $25.00
9780345534057

TEARS IN RAIN
By Rosa Montero
AmazonCrossing $14.95
9781612184388

THE MAGIC CIRCLE
By Jenny Davidson
New Harvest $15.95
9780544028098

TURING & BURROUGHS
By Rudy Rucker
Transreal Books $6.00
9780985827236

As the commercial corporate structure of the American, the Anglophone, indeed, even the world publishing industry contracts as conglomerates engulf and devour each other, their product lines exfoliate into more and more narrowly specific subgenres that, seemingly paradoxically, combine into more and more so-called "crossovers" which themselves then become more subgenres.

Hachette, the French publishing conglomerate, gobbles up Orion in Britain, and Little Brown and Harper in the U.S. and Australia. MacMillan owns Henry Holt, Farrar Straus, and Picador, among other imprints, as well as St. Martin's Press, of which Tor and Forge are subsidiaries. Pearson owns Penguin which owns Viking which owns Putnam which owns Berkley and Ace recently formed a joint something or other with Random House which owns Knopf, Ballantine, Del Rey, Doubleday, Pantheon, Bantam, Delacorte, and Dell, among dozens of other imprints, and which itself is owned by the German horizontal and vertical monster conglomerate Bertelsmann...

And so on and so forth, with probably more concentration between the time I'm writing this and the time you're reading it. To the current point where American publishing's former flower garden of well-known major independent publishing houses has already become plucked bouquets of mere brand names of a literal handful of the major publishing corporations which already own an overwhelming majority of the American publishing industry and much of the British one besides, not to mention their holdings in France, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere. Technically not yet an actual monoculture, maybe, but getting there fast.

The same thing has been going on in a different devolutionary manner in the retail end of the book business. First the bookstore chains, such as Dalton, Borders, and Barnes & Noble, squeeze the independent bookstores toward extinction. Then they shove each other into the tarpits until really only Barnes & Noble is left, and now Amazon is doing likewise in spades to the sole major "bricks and mortar" bookstore chain left standing.

Meanwhile, within the plethora of brand names whose books are marketed and sold by these semi-monopolistic publishing behemoths, more and more and more subgenres have arisen as branded names within branded genre lines.

Some—like fantasy and science fiction within the "SF" lines; "high fantasy" and "heroic fantasy" within fantasy lines; "police procedural," "noir," and "hard-boiled" within mystery lines; "space opera," "post-modern space opera," "hard science fiction," "cyberpunk," and "steam-punk" within science fiction lines—are carved out of subgenres and subgenres of subgenres by the creation of ever more narrowing genre formulas, restrictions, and requirements, targeting ever more specific and therefore narrower readership demographics, as publishers try to survive by gaining dominant market share in these tranches, bigger slices of smaller pies.

Their other marketing strategy is the combining of two or more genres to create so-called crossover subgenres: "paranormal romance," "literary fantasy," "alternate history," "historical fantasy," "SF mystery," and so forth. In a certain sense, this seems to be widening genre parameters, and sometimes it even does. But more often than not, by combining two sets of genre requirements and requiring the fulfillment of both in the same fiction, it actually narrows literary freedom.

What, you may well ask, does any of this have to do with literature?

Nothing and everything.

How can it not?

It has always been obviously true that what gets written can hardly be divorced from what gets published, since publishers can only publish what writers write and what gets written cannot help being influenced by what writers and agents perceive as what has a chance to get published and what does not.

Back in the day when there were many truly independent publishers actually competing with each other for readership of their commercial wares and therefore for the works of writers their editors perceived as likely to appeal to readers, when there existed editors with different perceptions of what writers and what sorts of fiction that might be, there was a certain rough balance of power, at least up to a point, between what serious and even not so serious writers wanted to write for artistic reasons, and what publishers perceived as commercially viable.

Out of this dynamic could emerge fiction that was "literary" and "popular" at the same time. Literary lions like Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Mailer wrote novels with literary passion and even culture-changing ambition, as at least to some extent did some so-called "science fiction writers" like Verne, Wells, Brunner, Heinlein, Moorcock, Le Guin, Aldiss, Herbert, and, uh, even me.

And I think I'm speaking for all of us when I say that none of us set out to write fiction that would be
unpopular,
meaning not reaching as large a readership as we could without pandering, without selling out our literary and cultural intents. As I have written before, even if you live in an ivory tower, you've got to pay the rent, and no writer that I know of has ever set out to deliberately go broke.

But these days, with all these formerly independent publishing houses having become brands of something like a half dozen conglomerates, and the industry probably not yet finished contracting, and Amazon more and more dominating the retail end, the balance of power has radically shifted one-sidedly away from writers and agents toward the remaining publishing corporations, and because of the overweening power of Amazon as both distributor and retailer, away from even them.

Ebooks are now something like 30 percent of the American book market. And they're still increasing their market share, but seeming to level off, as tablets eat into the market for dedicated ebook readers and eat into electronic book reading itself—and therefore sales—by offering movies, music, and games on the same platform.

Thus everyone except Amazon, Apple, and maybe Google, who among them form something close to an illegal monopoly on ebooks, is running scared. On the retail end, Barnes & Noble is closing bricks and mortar stores and being squeezed into possible insolvency by Amazon's near-monopolistic domination of both the ebook and ink-and-paper book markets. On the publishers' end, conglomerates are gobbling each other up to cut staff and production costs and trying to live long and prosper, at least until the next fiscal year, by trying to at least maintain stable customer demographics for their products by targeting and tailoring what they offer to what is perceived as the more and more fragmented and diminishing market for all fiction, period.

Writers who have not already established themselves as "best-selling authors," a subgenre in itself, find themselves on the wrong end of this long shitty stick. The bad news is that writers who still want to be literarily sincere and committed, to write fiction that aspires to literature and "popularity" at the same time, and so more or less pay the rent, have little choice but to cope with this schlockmeister subgenrefication.

The good news, such as it is, is that where there's a will, there sometimes is a way.

Here we have four novels,
The Best Of All Possible Worlds
by Karen Lord,
The Magic Circle
by Jenny Davidson,
Tears in Rain
by Rosa Montera and
Turing & Burroughs
by Rudy Rucker, all of which have openly literary ambitions which are fulfilled to varying degrees. All of these save the Rucker have found their various ways through the genrefication maze and into commercial print, though how "popular" any of them will be remains to be seen, and is likely to be problematical.

As if Amazon weren't powerful enough already, even as I predicted a while ago, it's now become a publisher itself, competing on the production end with the publishers whose books it is retailing. It's aiming to become a vertical quasi-monopoly as well as a horizontal one, capturing if not an outright majority of the book business, then already an increasingly dominant plurality.

And Amazon Publishing is doing this by launching a broad spectrum of narrow genre and subgenre lines, some via partnerships with existing publishing houses. AmazonEncore for general back-list and general fiction. AmazonCrossing for fiction in translation. Montlake Romance for romance novels. Thomas & Mercer for mysteries. New Harvest for "literary" fiction. And no doubt more to come, probably before this column even sees publication.

And yes, SF, with 47 North, which Amazon Publishing's own website declares "offers a wide array of new novels and cult favorites, from urban fantasies to space operas, alternate histories to gothic and supernatural horror."

47 North was launched with book one of a series called the
Mongoliad
Trilogy that, such things being as they are, could end up being an open-ended series if the ratings hold up past the first three episodes, a possibility for which Amazon seems well-prepared, seeing as the
Mongoliad
series is being staff-written by Neal Stephenson, Erik Bear, Greg Bear, and Joseph Brassey, at least for now, though more writers can always be hired if needed because the ratings hold and the series gets picked up for a regularly scheduled season.

This in turn is described as a subgenre of "The Foreword Saga, spanning continents and millennia," a "sweeping work of alternate history," which may or may not be written by a different tag team or teams, itself a subgenre of Amazon's 47 North SF genre line.

Literary television, anyone?

N-n-n-n-not me, folks!

Not even Amazon could pay me enough money to co-write such stuff, and this magazine certainly doesn't pay me enough money to actually read it, which I would have to do in order to review it with any sense of honor or justice.

So I will confine myself to the consideration of two Amazon Publishing novels that I have read,
The Magic Circle
by Jenny Davidson, published in the New Harvest literary line, and
Tears in Rain
by Rosa Montero, published in the AmazonCrossing translation line.

The Magic Circle
is an interesting semi-failure from one point of view and perhaps a flawed success from another, and very interesting from both—which is to say from the point of view of the central topic of this essay.