by IGMS
SCHWEITZER: You mean as an agent?
McCARTHY: Yes. E-books have made an incredible difference. I have a client who writes women's fiction, sort of like Maeve Binchy or Rosamund Pilcher, with some fantasy elements, and she is a big bestseller in Europe. I represent her in the United States for an English agency. I could barely give her away here. I did four books and they just went nowhere. I finally found her a New York publisher who made a deal with Amazon to put her latest title up on their Pick of the Week page for 99 cents. She instantly made the New York Times Bestseller List. The power of e-books is not to be sneezed at. As long as we can figure out a way to keep our rights where they belong and keep getting paid, I think publishing has a very bright future. I think that maybe what we need is to stop thinking about science fiction in the way that we do, because we can't continue to go on living in the '70s and '80s or even '90s. It's a new millennium and things have changed. I think we have to figure out a way to work within what we've got rather than say, "No I don't want it to change. I want it to stay exactly the way it was."
SCHWEITZER: Let's take questions from the audience.
Question from audience: Back in the 1960s, the people involved in the New Wave said they wanted to bring science fiction into literature. Do you think that, fifty years later, they have succeeded, or that they should have forgotten about the whole thing?
McCARTHY: I think they succeeded admirably. I think that everything they did in the New Wave spoke to and has influenced everything that has been done since. You wouldn't have a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson without the New Wave writers. They transformed the field in a lot of ways. It was a major influence in the industry. It affected a lot of people's reading and writing habits. So, yeah, I think they succeeded admirably.
Question from audience: If someone were to send you a book, what would be the best thing to be in the first chapter to make it stand out from the rest?
McCARTHY: First of all, people don't send me books. They send me queries. The first thing you have to do is craft a good query letter. That means don't start out telling me how you've been writing since you were three and your kids love your stories. It means get to the heart of it, "I have a manuscript of 97,000 words about ______" and then make it as interesting as you possibly can. Make sure it is not something I see every day. I see a zillion vampires and werewolves and angels and demons and homosexual angels and homosexual vampires. They're circling themselves. It's like the Worm Ouroboros eating its own tail. You've got to come up with something different. I am so tired of this.
SCHWEITZER: The other cliché I got very tired of as a PKD judge might be summed up as Steampunk Zombie Noir.
McCARTHY: [Laughs] I remember the first time someone proposed to me a zombie book. I had never seen it. I've read zombie books, of course. They used zombies instead of vampires as the romantic heroes. I thought, "Eeew! No! It's never going to work!" [Laughter from audience.] They are shambling along dropping limbs or eyes. No I can't feel sympathetic or romantic or anything.
SCHWEITZER: Zombie erotica?
McCARTHY: I got one that actually interested me, and I asked to see the first three chapters. It was about there's been a zombie epidemic and the army or scientists or someone managed to find a cure, and the zombies were all dead except for one last zombie girl who was being kept captive like the last smallpox germ at the CDC. Everyone is debating what should be done with her. Should she be preserved? Is she alive? Maybe we need to research her? This went on for a while and was an interesting idea, and then the author just forgot what he was talking about and had the zombie plague come back. It was an interesting idea, but other than that you have to find a new way to deal with these same old tropes. That's what I've been saying since the day I started working in this industry. In 1981 when I got up on a panel at a Worldcon, people would ask, "What are you looking for?" I am looking for something new and different and unusual.
SCHWEITZER: Isn't the problem now that the commercial SF genre - with all these military space operas, or whatever - is almost entirely made up of old tropes? Maybe these literary novels are where the people with fresh ideas are going.
McCARTHY: I think that is probably true. They mostly are old tropes. It depends, because as you and I both know, Darrell, anything can be made new in the hands of a good writer. It can be an idea as old as time. It can be Adam and Eve on a planet. If you've got a good writer, they can make it work. But he has to be a damn good writer to make Adam and Eve on a planet work.
SCHWEITZER: George [Scithers] got one that he was afraid to buy, because he thought it would open the floodgates. It was one of those short-shorts that Asimov's used to run, only this one didn't end in a pun. There were these two time travelers who were moving ahead in time, beyond the nuclear holocaust, talking about how they would repopulate the Earth, because they had plant seeds and animal embryos and everything with them. "Won't that be great, Adam?" the woman says at the end. He replies, "Yes, Mother."
McCARTHY: [Laughs] That's so much a George story.
SCHWEITZER: He didn't give into the temptation because he thought it would cause a flood of Adam and Eve stories.
Question from audience: You say that science fiction is on the descent. Maybe you are making a strict distinction between science fiction and fantasy, but it seems to me that science fiction has become the norm.
McCARTHY: I am making a very sharp distinction between science fiction and fantasy. Fantasy is selling like hotcakes. Fantasy is everywhere. Science fiction is what is dying.
Questioner from audience: Well The Hunger Games is one of the bestselling books of recent years and that's science fiction. Something like 99% of all Young Adult books are science fiction or fantasy.
McCARTHY: Yeah . . .
Questioner from audience: It seems like 99% of all Hollywood blockbusters are science fiction.
McCARTHY: From comic books, mostly.
Questioner continues: There's so much of it to be had on television. You can get a hundred thousand people at a comic-book convention. [Such numbers actually are realized at the San Diego Comics Con. -DS]
McCARTHY: I was a big fan of Terra Nova, that show which was on for a little while. I don't know if it's ever coming back. [No. -DS] I really enjoyed it. I shouldn't have because it was as obvious as it could be, but it was the kind of thing I would have loved when I was twelve. It was a cute boy and adventures and dinosaurs, and I still enjoyed it at my age. But I don't think you could sell a book like that. I really don't. I couldn't read The Hunger Games. I had it on audio-book. I enjoyed listening to it, but reading it, it was too YA for me, too much words of one syllable. Having it read to me was fine. But it didn't feel like science fiction. There were no atomic weapons. There were no spaceships.
The same questioner from audience: It was sociological science fiction.
McCARTHY: Sociological science fiction you could probably still make work. Connie Willis does it. I am talking about more hard SF, which is difficult to sell. But Connie may be one of the exceptions that proves the rule too. There are a few of them out there, but I would have a very hard time selling a straight science fiction novel today, at least outside the YA genre.
SCHWEITZER: I keep thinking of some of the eccentric writers of the past. How would a latter-day Howard Waldrop get started today? Could he?
McCARTHY: Anybody who survived on mainly short stories obviously couldn't survive today. Ed Bryant, for instance. Howard did more short fiction than novels. I think that with the death of most magazines ongoing, and with those that are surviving paying 1940s word-rates, it would be very, very difficult to make a living as a short story writer these days.
But that's not to say you can't make it work for you. Look at the success some people have had with e-books, self-publishing e-books. There's an industry newsletter that goes out every day called Publishers Marketplace and they did a survey of all the self-published books vs. how many had made it big, i.e. sold over a million copies, and there were something like th
ree hundred thousand self-published books, and eleven had made it big. But a million copies is a lot of books and you don't have to aim that high. If you see them at 99 cents apiece and you market yourself the right way, okay. It's all social media, networking and stuff like that.
SCHWEITZER: Isn't the problem that ultimately you have to have the goods?
McCARTHY: No.
SCHWEITZER: Apparently not?
McCARTHY: That one woman just made a four million dollar deal with - I want to say Harper Collins, but I can't be sure - and she had self-published. Amanda Hocking.
SCHWEITZER: I am thinking of someone who can't write, has met no standards, and just published themselves.
McCARTHY: That's pretty much it. It's not that. It's just kind of bad. The stories move along, but there is just absolutely nothing to recommend them other than that they were 99 cents. There's no craft in them. There's no writing in them. It's typing.
SCHWEITZER: And no editing.
McCARTHY: And no editing. Absolutely not. But she marketed the hell out of them.
SCHWEITZER: That sounds even more pessimistic. It reminds me of something John Clute said, drawing an analogy to a movie called Kill Bill. There's this martial arts move in it, which, when it is done on someone, they take precisely five steps and then drop dead. [McCarthy laughs.] John was saying that this has been done to science fiction, but we don't know what step we're in.
Question from audience: Just remember that once upon a time, science was actually doing something. Remember that? I'm an elementary school teacher. My kids actually believed the mock documentary that we didn't land on the Moon.
McCARTHY: [Laughs] God . . .
SCHWEITZER: That brings up Ballard again and his Memories of the Space Age.
McCARTHY: Mythbusters did a wonderful thing on debunking that.
SCHWEITZER: Recently a photo was taken from orbit around the Moon and you can see one of the lunar rovers on the surface. Many people were heralding this as "Proof that we've actually been to the Moon!" as if this were needed.
SCHWEITZER: As an agent to you take first novels to major houses or to the smaller ones?
McCARTHY: Actually first novels are a breeze to sell if they're good. They have no track record. If it's an appealing idea and well-written, I can sell a first novel like that. It's the second novel that is the hard one. If the first novel doesn't do that well, they will generally give you a chance for a second, but after that it's on to the small presses.
SCHWEITZER: Or change your byline. When I did agenting I realized there were a lot of writers whose careers couldn't be jump-started, so my advice to them would be to change their byline and lie about their age. Don't overdo it. Don't claim to be a whole generation younger, but a writer who is seventy might do well to claim to be fifty-five and say he's taken early retirement, so he has many years of writing in front of him.
McCARTHY: How does anybody know how old they are? I don't know half my clients. I haven't met them. I don't know what they look like. They could be purple.
SCHWEITZER: They could be purple, but publishers want a writer with a future in front of them.
McCARTHY: I guess. I haven't really found that to be the case. They like to know there is another book in the pipeline if the first one does well. But if the first one doesn't do well, they couldn't care less if there is another book in the pipeline. I've gotten as far as seven books in a series, and then the publishers say "Sales are slowly going down with each one, so you are going to have to stop this." Then the writer will come up with a different name and a new series and sell it back to the same publisher.
SCHWEITZER: What about writers who just write individual novels, not series? Do they still exist?
McCARTHY: Oh, yeah. Charles Wilson.
From audience: Charles Stross.
SCHWEITZER: A few. Someone else?
[No questions.]
SCHWEITZER: We've just depressed them completely.
McCARTHY: Am I that depressing, really? I hope so. [Laughs.]
SCHWEITZER: Maybe the best advice for most would-be writers is don't quit your day job.
McCARTHY: That has always been my advice.
SCHWEITZER: Separate the need to make a living from the need to write well.
McCARTHY: Absolutely.
SCHWEITZER: If you run out the numbers, you can see how someone could have a distinguished science fiction career, win all the awards, publish a book or two a year, publish stories in all the best magazines, and make eight or nine thousand dollars a year.
McCARTHY: Absolutely. But you never really know. When I first started agenting, I took on an author whose book I just loved. I sold it to St. Martin's, and it did all right. It wasn't gangbusters or anything. But he fired me because it wasn't a bestseller. I said, "Bestseller? That doesn't happen all that often. You did very well. It earned out." He said, "I published a book. I thought I was getting a bestseller." He hadn't thought that out before.
Question from audience: I haven't paid much attention to science fiction in a while, but I am still amazed at all the vampires and werewolves . . .
McCARTHY: Me too. Whenever I ask editors what they are looking for, they say "Urban contemporary fantasy." That hasn't slowed down at all. Not a whit. They keep waiting for it to. They keep waiting for it to crash like it did in the '80s, but so far it is like an ever-expanding sponge, the public appetite for vampires and werewolves. Go figure.
SCHWEITZER: You're never going to get sexy zombies, though.
McCARTHY: No, you're never going to get sexy zombies. Maybe if you, like, polyurethaned them . . .
SCHWEITZER: Zombie sex is going to be like all those old leper jokes . . .
[At this point things mercifully come to a close.]
SCHWEITZER: Thank you, Shawna.
Letter From The Editor
Issue 28 - May 2012
by Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show
* * *
Welcome to Issue 28 of IGMS. No need for blathering from the editor, let's dive right into the stories, shall we?
Our cover story, by Brad Torgersen, is "The Curse of Sally Tincakes," a near-future story about jet-bike racing on the moon and one woman's willingness to take on all challengers to win, including death. Because before she can claim the cup, she's going to have to go through a woman whose curse looms as large as the statue of her that her cheating husband erected overlooking the race track.
"Blank Faces," by M.K. Hutchins, is an alternate history-tale set in a magical gold-rush of the old west, and explores the costs of wealth, both overt and hidden. Some people pay a much higher price than they'll ever realize.
Next in our lineup, "Paper Airplanes Into The Void," by Terra LeMay, is a tale of one young man's journey to the literal end of the Earth in search of his family. He launches letters to his missing parents into the nothingness, but the answers he discovers are grounded much closer to home.
"Master Madrigal's Mechanical Man," by Scott Mikula is the story of a young girl apprenticed to a master robot-builder whose creations fight in the gladiatorial arenas. The problem is, she's more astute than her master, requiring battles to be fought both within the arena and without.
Rahul Kanakia's story, "The Snake King Sells Out," is a fantastical tale that ponders the issues of what it means to be normal, what the cost of normalcy is, and how often the price-sheet gets rewritten. But you can always sell your scales and horns to pick up a quick buck, right?
And last but not least comes our audio feature for this issue, "Calling The Train," by Jeff Stehman, read by Stuart Jaffe. Lying in a swamp, half torn up by an alligator, with a supernatural train coming to pick up its next dying wayfarer: how well could you play a harmonica under those circumstances, if it were your last chance to cheat death?
Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show
P.S. As usual, we've collected essays from the authors in thi
s issue and will post them on our blog (www.SideShowFreaks.blogspot.com) Feel free to drop by and catch The Story Behind The Stories, where the authors talk about the creation of their tales.
For more from Orson Scott Card's
InterGalactic Medicine Show visit:
http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
Copyright © 2012 Hatrack River Enterprises
