Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (26 page)

One big difference between today’s book-centered SF world and the magazine-centered world of fifty years ago is that book publishing is almost entirely sales-driven, magazine publishing much less so. Oh, of course, magazines had to maintain a certain sales level or they would go under, as did
Space Science Fiction
and
Marvel Science Fiction
and
Dynamic Science Fiction
and many another ephemeral title of the early fifties. But once a magazine succeeded in establishing a modestly profitable basic level of circulation, the main task of its editor was just to keep the core readership happy by providing, month after month, the sort of fiction it seemed to prefer. The habit of regular purchase was easily instilled—everybody knew the right time of month to find the new
Astounding
or
Galaxy
on the newsstands—and that devoted cadre of faithful month-by-month buyers, along with a considerable nucleus of annual subscribers for, at least, the top three, allowed the most shrewdly edited magazines to survive for years.

But each book that is published today is an individual entity that must stand or fall on its own pulling power. Perhaps the name of the author provides that power—a
lot
of people will buy any new book by X or Y—or, if the author isn’t a brand name, perhaps a provocative blurb will do the job, or a powerful cover painting, such as the celebrated one Michael Whelan did for Heinlein’s
Friday.
(Not that Heinlein needed anybody’s painting to pull in the readers, but the sexy Whelan painting certainly was a plus.) Nobody, though, except a fanatic collector decides to buy a book simply because its publisher is Tor or Del Rey or Roc. There is almost no way for a publisher to create the sort of brand continuity that the old magazines could, when readers looked for a familiar magazine name, even a familiar logotype or cover format, without caring particularly about what stories were likely to be in any one issue. They knew they could be confident of getting
something
they’d want to read. The only way a paperback publisher can achieve something similar is to make each new book resemble all the previous titles of its line in format and content—the Harlequin Books approach—and while this tactic has been marginally successful on occasion, it is no recipe for producing great science fiction. And it is essentially impossible for a hardcover house to do anything of that sort.

So each new book usually stands alone, unsheltered by the other titles its publisher may have issued, and if it sells badly, its author will very quickly find himself in commercial trouble, because everybody knows everybody else’s sales figures. One conspicuous failure from a big house can doom a writer in the eyes of the book-chain buyers for years to come. And if a publishing house puts out a long string of books that sell badly, not just the writers will be in trouble. Editors and higher-level executives will lose their jobs.

Caution, therefore, is the watchword in the book field. Publish wisely; publish warily; take no chances, because your job may be at stake. Editors rightly abjure risk. Artistic risk means commercial risk; commercial risk means trouble.

Once in a while an innovative novelist like William Gibson will come along, yes, and turn everything upside down with a single book. But books of that sort are rare, and it takes a courageous editor to take a chance on publishing them. Gibson emerged because one brave editor managed to create a whole line of innovative SF novels—Terry Carr’s Ace Science Fiction Specials—that also gave us outstanding pathbreaking work by Joanna Russ, R. A. Lafferty, Ursula K. Le Guin, D. G. Compton, and others of that ilk. But the specials were a kind of loss leader for Ace, which made its real money doing action SF of the old pulp kind. The fact is that such books as
Neuromancer
and
Left Hand of Darkness
also happened to turn out to be tremendous commercial properties, but would any of today’s paperback editors have taken a chance on publishing them if they turned up in manuscript form now? They will, of course, all loudly insist that they would, but that’s with the advantage of twenty-twenty hindsight, which provides an awareness of the immense fame and influence that the books of Le Guin and Gibson have gathered over the years, and their huge sales figures. I’m not so sure, remembering as I do that Le Guin was a little-known writer of paperback originals and one still-obscure Earthsea novel in 1969 when
Left Hand
came along, and that
Neuromancer,
in 1984, was the almost unknown Gibson’s first novel. Both are challenging books. I can think of a couple of modern-day editors who might be willing to gamble on books like that as unheralded new properties—but only a couple.

The science fiction magazines of the 1950s were not greatly sympathetic to trailblazing material either, but it’s important to remember that in the 1950s most of the SF magazines still were pitched to the primarily young and unsophisticated pulp-magazine readership, and that the Eisenhower era was not, in general, a time of brave literary experimentation. Still, the editors of some well-established magazines could afford to take risks from time to time, knowing that a single unusual story wasn’t likely to drive their entire readership away. Thus
Fantasy and Science Fiction
was willing to devote a couple of pages to Richard Matheson’s strange, haunting first story, “Born of Man and Woman,” in 1950, though no one would have touched a book written in that tone of voice. Campbell and Gold both rejected Philip José Farmer’s taboo-breaking “The Lovers,” but Sam Mines of
Starting Stories
used it as the lead novella in a 1952 issue and turned Farmer into a famous SF writer then and there. Robert W. Lowndes made room for such unusual James Blish stories as “Testament of Andros” and “Common Time” in his low-paying pulp.

I could provide many other examples. The stories that Ray Bradbury was doing throughout the 1940s and 1950s were very different from standard pulp-magazine fare, but pulp editors recognized their power and slipped them into their magazines anyway. So too with the work of Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, C. M. Kornbluth, and, a decade later, Harlan Ellison and Barry Malzberg: they all ignored the pulp formulas and got published anyway. The reader who didn’t care for their radical work would find something else more to his taste elsewhere in the same issue. (I don’t mean to imply, of course, that
any
unconventional or experimental story would find a market easily back then. As I’ve already noted, Farmer’s “Lovers” had a hard time getting into print. Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain” was rejected everywhere until a semi-pro magazine called
Fantasy Book
finally picked it up. My own bleak, pessimistic “Road to Nightfall” bounced around for four years before one of the minor magazines agreed to print it. But at least all three stories did get printed eventually.)

By fits and starts, then, the evolution of science fiction away from its pulp antecedents continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s, first in the shorter forms, then in the explosion of brilliant novels of what we now call the New Wave period, 1967 or so through the early 1970s. Most of those New Wave novels didn’t sell very well, alas. Before long some editors were getting their pink slips: those who had not been able to see that although one or two experimental stories tucked into an issue of a monthly magazine could do no real harm, a whole line of books, each sent out to make its way on its own and failing, could be a major financial disaster for their company. A few paperback houses and most hardcover ones withdrew from SF entirely. Which led, quite rationally and appropriately, to the play-it-safe attitude that typifies science fiction publishing today.

What we have now in SF is a largely derivative enterprise. Serving up familiar stuff, not breaking new paths, is the primary goal. The trilogy is the standard publishing unit. What is now termed a “stand-alone” book is considered risky. The hope of the publishers is to get a series going—the Dune books, the Foundation books, the Pern books, the Ender books—and make a “franchise” out of it, extending it indefinitely, often even beyond the lifetime of the original writer. A big media-related series—
Star Trek
novels,
Star Wars
novels—is, of course, the ultimate jackpot. The books themselves observe rigid conventions of format—the huge lettering, the space-battle illustrations—that hearken back to the old pulp days. And, perhaps most troublesome of all, even those books that are not part of some established series are given spurious links to previous best-selling titles by other writers with that appalling and preposterous cover line, “In the tradition of . . .”

Some of the traditions thus proclaimed are strangely desperate ones. The one closest to my heart was emblazoned on a fantasy novel of a decade or so ago: “In the tradition of Stephen Donaldson, David Eddings, and Robert Silverberg.” Perhaps more unlikely yokings could be conceived—“In the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien, Clifford D. Simak, and Philip K. Dick,” say, or “In the tradition of Lois McMaster Bujold, Neil Gaiman, and Avram Davidson,” a nice party game for late at night, but still—Donaldson, Eddings, Silverberg?

In any case this whole business of “traditions,” proudly advertising the derivative nature of the product being marketed, is pernicious. Imagine a magazine of the 1950s splashing this on its cover: “A new novella by James Blish . . . closely imitating Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.” Not likely. We each wanted to be writing in our own traditions, not someone else’s. Since we all read the magazines, and discussed their contents among ourselves, there was, of course, that ongoing dialog among writers, that colloquium of ideas—Heinlein would toss in waldos, Sturgeon would give us synergy, Blish genetic modification, or Campbell would send
Astounding
off on some new thematic tangent and ask us to dream up our own variations on it—but when we picked up those themes and worked with them ourselves, as we inevitably had to do for the sake of employing up-to-date furniture in our stories, we tried to deal with them in our own ways, not produce imitation Heinlein or Sturgeon or Blish. Anything too blatantly written in someone else’s tradition would get a quick rejection from editors who knew that their readers weren’t interested in secondhand merchandise. But today, when marketing is all, derivative is good.

What we had back then, and don’t have now, was a small—
very
small—publishing universe in which science fiction was dominated by a handful of magazine editors, powerful creative figures who gathered a nucleus of regular contributors around them, nurtured and encouraged them, guided them, and sponsored a continuous conceptual dialog that led to the steady growth of the ideational foundations of the field. Most of us lived in or around New York City, then—something else that has changed—and not only did the writers know one another, they dropped in frequently at the editorial offices (all but the office of the Boucher-McComas team, which was in Berkeley, California) and maintained close personal relationships with the men who actually bought their stories. So we all talked about that lead novelette in last month’s
Astounding,
or the flabbergasting novel by Alfred Bester that Horace Gold had just serialized in
Galaxy,
or the utterly original stuff that Phil Farmer was selling to
Startling
and
Thrilling Wonder
. And I was able to learn at first hand of John Campbell’s latest intellectual hobbyhorses, I got vitriolic but valuable tongue-lashings from the voluble and impassioned Horace Gold, and I helped out such editors as Bob Lowndes and Larry T. Shaw when they came up a story or two short as deadlines approached, all this before I was twenty-five. Whenever I began getting too cocky for my own good, as early success will cause one to do, there was some older colleague like Fred Pohl or Lester del Rey on hand to set me straight in a kindly dutch-uncle way.

It’s not like that any more. The field has no coherent center. There are too many publishers, too many writers, too many books hitting the stores every month. There are no editorial titans like Campbell and Gold and Boucher. Modern-day editors, by and large, are young and harried, frantically trying to find enough publishable material to fill their huge lists and making their editorial decisions, mostly, on the basis of potential sales figures and “traditions.” The closest thing we have to a coherent center is the
Locus
best-seller list. That tells us what to imitate; it doesn’t tell us how to forge our own way. Meanwhile the books pour out by the hundreds. No one could possibly keep track of them all: the
Locus
list of upcoming books is pages and pages and pages of small type every three months. I miss the old organic coherence of the field I grew up in, when the appearance of a new magazine (
If, Fantastic, Infinity
) brought excitement and promise, and when the emergence of a dazzling new writer (Philip K. Dick, Wyman Guin, Philip José Farmer) was the subject of immediate ubiquitous discussion.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

I’m not really advocating a return to the time when that handful of dominant and very forceful editors, a couple of whom verged on being tyrants, ran the SF world, and the only way a science fiction writer could earn a living was to turn out dozens of short stories a year, for fees of fifty to four hundred dollars apiece, while keeping a watchful eye on each editor’s special “slant.” That was a tough, practically impossible thing to do, and only a dozen or so were able to manage it. Most writers were part-timers with outside jobs, like Blish or Asimov or Clement. Even the few full-time pros in the field usually lived the most marginal of lives: you would be amazed to learn what the annual incomes of such great writers as Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Fritz Leiber were back then. (Heinlein and Clarke did well, on sales to the slick magazines and royalties from big book publishers; but those were fields closed to all but a few. Ellison, Anderson, and I had decent incomes also, but that was only by dint of inordinate prolificity, a jillion words a year at two cents a word. Dick was very prolific too, of course, but his output could never keep up with the high price of divorce.)