Nebula Awards Showcase 2006

by Gardner Dozois

  Literary forms are shaped by technologies of communication, and change as they change. Homer’s epics were composed in verse to be memorized for oral transmission. The invention of writing gave permanence to prose. The novel was invented for the printing press. The short story was born in mass magazines and orphaned when TV claimed the audience for sitcoms. Yet no genre is gone forever, and literature is left richer for the growing variety.

  The effects of the information revolution are not yet clear. Worldwide communication is cheaper and faster. Literacy should become universal. The e-book may be perfected. Electronic “paper” could save forests and alter every aspect of our culture. Copyright law may change. The economics of distribution certainly will. The roles of editor and publisher as well, though they can hardly be replaced.

  Science fiction itself was a child of changing technology. New technologies have always reshaped culture and society, but beginning at a glacial rate, hardly noticed until the time of Jonathan Swift, a stout defender of the past. Gulliver’s flying island of Laputa was his horrified response to the dawn of modern science and the creation of the Royal Society. Mary Shelley’s idea for the animation of Frankenstein’s monster must have come from Volta’s experiments with frog legs. New technologies seem now about to bury the globe beneath an avalanche of change. We are left to wait and wonder at what is to come. Speculative fiction will surely live on.

  THE WAY IT WAS

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  It was all very different once upon a time, of course. In the old days, fifty-some years ago, the magazines were the center of the whole thing—the soul of science fiction, as Barry Malzberg has said. The magazines were where nearly all science fiction was published, and the magazine editors were the suns around which we orbited. The Hugos hadn’t been invented yet, in that far-off antique era, nor the Nebulas, nor, for that matter, the Science Fiction Writers of America itself; and what I dreamed of then was not anything like getting a book on the New York Times best-seller list, or winning an award, or being named a Grand Master—that last one would have been a fantasy too absurd to waste a moment’s mental energy on, even if such an honor had existed then—but simply selling a short story, just one story, to any of the magazines. That was the big career-launching breakthrough that any would-be writer of the era yearned for—selling a story to one of the magazines.

  By which I meant, back there around 1952, magazines named Startling Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories or Planet Stories; or, more probably, the lowest-paying market in the field, Future Science Fiction. As the gaudy names of most of them indicate, they were pulp magazines, crudely printed on cheap, shaggy paper that left bits of itself all over your lap as you read them, and their bright, flashy, posterlike covers, showing wide-eyed brass-brassiered maidens being menaced by monsters or robots, were no more than half a notch up from comic-book covers in artistic quality. Those few disreputable-looking pulp magazines were the bastions that novices like me dreamed of storming: what we would think of today the entry-level markets.

  There were, it’s true, a couple of magazines even pulpier than those—the Ziff-Davis pair, Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, two bulky monthlies devoted to the publication of simple adventure fiction. But I had already discovered, by dint of sending stories to them over a period of two or three years and getting them all back with the speed of light, that they were entirely staff-written, and paid no attention whatever to submissions from the outside. Also there was what we called the Big Three—a trio of elite non-pulp magazines, neat little jobs, dignified in look and manner, published in what was called the “digest” format because it was the size that The Reader’s Digest, the dominant general-circulation magazine of the day, employed. I had slightly more hope of selling to one of them than I did to Amazing or Fantastic, because the editors of all three did, at least, read unsolicited submissions with some degree of sympathy. But I knew I wasn’t likely, at the age of sixteen or thereabouts, to be pushing Theodore Sturgeon or Hal Clement or A. E. van Vogt aside on the contents page of John Campbell’s austerely intellectual Astounding Science Fiction, nor did I have the polished narrative technique that Horace Gold demanded for his shiny new Galaxy Science Fiction, or the sophistication and literary breadth required by Anthony Boucher and J. F. McComas for Fantasy and Science Fiction. If I was ever going to make that first sale, I was going to have to make it to one of the pulps.

  You’ll note that I say nothing about book publishers. It was entirely a short-story market then. A little hardback science fiction was being published by the children’s-book houses, where I would, in fact, make my first big sale in 1954. But when it came to adult science fiction there were, essentially, just two book publishers, each doing, at most, a book or two a month. Doubleday was the established leader, but its list was strictly top-echelon: Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov. Not for another few years would writers of merely middling fame like Edgar Pangborn, Poul Anderson, and Jack Vance be getting published there, and they certainly had no interest in beginners like me. The other major house, just getting started in 1952, was Ballantine Books, but at the outset it, too, was publishing the likes of Bradbury and Wyndham, along with such other big-name writers as Arthur C. Clarke, Frederik Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, and one gifted newcomer who was making a spectacular splash that year, Robert Sheckley. We also had a handful of semi-pro houses—Fantasy Press, Shasta Press, etc.—but those concentrated mostly on reprinting classic magazine material of earlier years. For most science fiction writers of those early postwar days, selling a novel to a major publisher was a little like winning the lottery. It did happen to people now and then, yes, but counting on it wasn’t a smart career plan. Nearly everyone who hoped to earn some substantial fraction of his livelihood from writing science fiction, or was already doing so, looked to the magazines for his income, and (to minimize the risks inherent in putting in many months writing a novel and finding no taker for it) concentrated on short stories and novelets.

  It’s all so different today. Astounding Science Fiction is still with us, transmogrified into Analog, and so is Fantasy and Science Fiction, and alongside them is a newcomer of 1970s vintage, Asimov’s Science Fiction. Those are today’s Big Three. Then there’s a fantasy magazine—Realms of Fantasy—and some titles like Absolute Magnitude that have been fighting their way up from semi-pro status, and a host of electronic “magazines,” of which the best-known is Ellen Datlow’s SCI FICTION. A list like that makes it appear that magazine science fiction is still a thriving operation, but what it actually is is a ghostly relic of its former self. The surviving magazines are all minor players in the vast, hectic marketplace that is modern SF. Even the top ones have only modest circulations, and the others are largely the work of publishers and writers who must be considered devoted hobbyists, amateurs in the best sense of that word. The real action is in the book field. And from the point of view of the reader seriously concerned with science fiction as an art form, or even the writer with the same concerns, it’s mostly the wrong kind of action.

  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.