Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 73
There’ll be some differences, of course, which simply reflect changes in popular taste over the years. ASF in mid-century, for instance, very rarely if ever carried any fantasy stories, while we will be carrying a lot. In that sense, Baen’s UNIVERSE is a very big tent, and we’re not fussy at all about the content of the stories we buy. All we ask is that they be stories, of whatever of FSF’s many sub-genres, that at least most readers find fun to read.
Let me put it this way. The guiding editorial philosophy of Baen's UNIVERSE is the well-known remark-usually attributed to Robert Heinlein but actually said by Poul Anderson-to several other SF authors. I can't remember the exact words, but the gist was:
"Face it, guys. We're competing for our customer's beer money."
Indeed so. UNIVERSE is what you might call a beer drinkers’ magazine.
Well… No, that's not quite right. Most people are neither low-brows nor high-brows, they go back and forth depending on the situation. And they do not drink beer exclusively. On occasion, they'll put on a tux and drink expensive champagne and cognac, and eat caviar. But, most of the time, they just want to have a couple of beers after work on a Friday night, to relax.
That is our audience. People relaxing on a Friday night over a couple of literary beers. The deadly words, for me as an editor, is for someone to finish a story and say: "Well, that was a real bummer. I wish I'd bought a beer instead."
That said, people have different tastes in beer. So I'm quite willing to provide a range of them in the magazine, ranging from lagers and pilsners to dark stouts.
The dichotomy between "popular stories" and "literary stories" is usually posed incorrectly, in my opinion, as if they were aimed at two completely different markets in the sense of two completely different sets of people.
But that's not really the case. At best, it only captures the fringe of the phenomenon.
Yes, it's true that there are some people who can be called Joe Six-Packs. But, typically, they read very little to begin with. They spend their time watching television, and if they read at all it's usually a newspaper or a non-fiction "self-help" type of book.
On the flip side, yes, it's true that there are also some people who read nothing but the great classics of western literature. But not many. In my experience, even very intellectually-inclined people are far more likely, on any given Tuesday, to read some kind of popular genre fiction than something like Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.
The reason is not hard to figure out. For most people, most of the time, reading is first and foremost a form of relaxation and entertainment. It's the literary equivalent of having a beer after work.
Our magazine is not so much aimed at Person A as opposed to Person B, it's aimed at both people when they're in Mindset X. "Relaxation mode," so to speak, where they mainly just want to have fun.
That's the reason I bend the stick very heavily in the direction of stories that, however dark the content might be at times, are basically positive, in emotional terms. They aren't necessarily what you'd call "happy stories"-some of them can be pretty grim-but they don't leave the reader feeling down in the dumps at the end.
And it's one of the main reasons that I reject most of the stories that get past the editorial board and get sent up to me for a final decision. The editorial board doesn't send me any turkeys. I've gotten quite a few stories that are perfectly fine stories otherwise. But I reject them because the emotional impact is just wrong. For this magazine, at least.
I should add that there is no presupposition here, on my part, that this kind of story is "better" than that kind of story. I think that's just silly. People read different kinds of stories at different times, for different reasons.
I have no quarrel with literary stories, as such. Not at all. I've read most of Faulkner's writings, and his best novels more than once. I've read Joyce's Ulysses three times, the same for Melville's Moby Dick, and I’ve been a fan of Dostoyevsky’s writings since I was a teenager. But the fact remains that, on any given Tuesday, I'm far more likely to be reading something by Robert Heinlein, or a mystery novel by Robert Parker, or a western by Luke Short or Louis L'Amour, than I am to be re-reading Anna Karenina so I can watch the heroine throw herself under the train again.
That's not a criticism of Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is a great novel. I just don't want to read something with that emotional impact all that often. Just don't. Most people don't, all that often.
The problem with the science fiction magazines as a whole, in my opinion-there are some exceptions-is that I think they've drifted too far away from that center of gravity. The presupposition for any kind of challenging literature is the existence of a huge market for popular fiction, which is big enough to allow more specialized forms of literature to carve out a big enough niche that they can prosper financially.
But if you lose too much of the popular market, the room for the niches starts vanishing. It just does. That's the literally equivalent of the well-known phenomenon of major climatic changes producing a wave of extinctions. The species that suffer the worst are usually the ones with a specialized ecological niche.
None of my remarks above should be construed as a swipe at any of the existing magazines. I’m glad those magazine are there. In fact, I’d like to see them improve their circulation and I’d like to see new magazines come into existence. And if Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE can help reinvigorate the short fiction market in fantasy and science fiction, they will. The bigger and more prosperous the market gets for short form fiction, the better it will be for all FSF magazines, and all FSF authors-and our readers.
Salvos Against Big Brother
A Matter of Principle
Eric Flint
I’m going to be writing a regular column on the subject of electronic publishing, and the challenges it poses to modern society-as well as the opportunity it provides. This column will take up a number of related issues, including such matters as the proper length of copyright terms, the nature of Digital Rights Management and why we are opposed to it, and the largely mythical nature of so-called “online piracy.”
We decided to keep this column separate from my general editor’s preface for each issue-see “The Editor’s Page”-because we think the issue is important enough for a separate column of its own. Furthermore, there will usually be a number of specific matters relevant to each issue of the magazine that I will need to address in “The Editor’s Page” that would simply get in the way of this discussion.
We’re calling the column “Salvos Against Big Brother” because that captures the key aspect of the problem, so far as Jim Baen and I are con�
�cerned. Both the publisher of this magazine and its editor believe that so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM)-by which we mean the whole panoply of ever more restrictive laws concerning digital media, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)-are the following:
First, they represent a growing encroachment on the personal liberties of the American public, as well as those of citizens in other countries in the world;
Second, they add further momentum to what is already a dangerous tendency of governments and the large, powerful corporations which exert undue influence on them to arrogate to themselves the right to make decisions which properly belong to the public;
Third, they tend inevitably to constrict social, economic, technical and scientific progress;
And, fourth, they represent an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur.
As this column progresses, in issue after issue, I will wind up spending most of my time dealing with the fourth of these statements. It is my opinion, and Jim Baen’s, that on top of everything else DRM is just plain stupid-even from the narrow economic standpoint of most of the people who advocate it. And, since the issue has a direct impact on the work and lives of authors, I will spend a great deal of time discussing the practical realities of DRM, as well as the various alternative economic strategies that some people and companies-Baen Books being foremost among them, in science fiction and fantasy-have been adopting in its stead.
But I don’t want to start there, because that might give people the wrong impression. Neither for me nor for Jim Baen is the issue of DRM primarily an economic or practical issue. Although Jim and I have often pointed out, over the past number of years, the sound business logic to our approach to electronic publishing, that's entirely a secondary issue for us. There's a basic matter of political principle involved here, which goes right to the heart of what "copyright" is in the first place.
In a nutshell: Copyright terms that become excessively long-and modern terms are absolutely grotesque in that respect-especially when combined with policies that place too many restrictions on fair use, start undermining the whole purpose of copyright. Which is not to provide a living for authors, but to set up a system that maximizes the benefits of intellectual work for the entire society.
Beyond that, DRM is a particularly dangerous political trend, because it's based on a fundamental fraud. The fact is that very rarely does "piracy" occur by some genius hacker cracking some fiendishly clever electronic code. 99.99% of all books that are pirated have it done simply by someone obtaining a paper edition of the book and scanning it.
So what's the point of DRM in the first place? It's incredibly burdensome to legitimate customers and does absolutely nothing to stop "piracy" anyway. The insidious danger, of course, is that as time goes by the pro-DRM forces will keep demanding more and more restrictions on the public's access to books of any kind. Along with regulations concerning the use of computers, scanners, keyboards, you name it. Because that's really the only effective way to stop "piracy" and enforce so-called “digital rights management.”
Jim Baen and I do not want books with little chips in them that the authorities can track. We do not want computers or computer equipment to have to be registered. We do not want legal spyware placed in all computers and scanners so that the authorities can make sure they are being used "legitimately"-with penalties attached if anyone attempts to remove the spyware.
If this really difficult to comprehend?
DRM is madness, politically speaking, and that's why Jim and I are flat against it. Period. You start with principles, and then figure out a way to make money. Not the other way around.
In this particular case, it's a piece of cake anyway-as I will demonstrate in column after column-so there's NO excuse. It is perfectly possible to figure out ways that authors and publishers can make money producing electronic texts that are not saddled with DRM-as we are doing with this very magazine, in fact.
The only reason DRM exists at all is because too many powerful corporations with too much influence in government didn’t want to have to get off their lazy butts and figure out how to provide their customers with what their customers wanted. Instead, they used their influence to get their political stooges to pass laws which attempt to force their customers to accept whatever crumbs the new corporate nobility chooses to drop from their tables onto the serfs below.
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Okay. That said, let me begin with a brief discussion of what copyright is in the first place. That’s as much as I can cover in this first column.
I want to begin there, with that most basic question, because I’ve found that many people-including an astonishingly high percentage of authors-have the most preposterous misconceptions about it.
The first and most important misconception is the notion that copyright is a “right” to begin with. It is not. It never has been-and you can check the entire history of copyright legislation in the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, going back several centuries, and you will not find a shred of support for that silly notion.
Copyright is a privilege, not a right. It is, in fact, an evil and iniquitous privilege-as has been recognized as such from the beginning. “Evil and iniquitous” in the same sense that any government-enforced commercial monopoly inevitably has negative consequences. The only reason it exists is because society decided, several centuries ago, that as evil as it was, it was a necessary evil-because the alternatives all seemed to be worse.
Here is how Macaulay put it, in his great speeches on the subject of copyright before the British Parliament in 1841:
Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly… I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad. And I may with equal safety challenge my honourable friend to find out any distinction between copyright and other privileges of the same kind; any reason why a monopoly of books should produce an effect directly the reverse of that which was produced by the East India Company's monopoly of tea, or by Lord Essex's monopoly of sweet wines. Thus, then, stands the case. It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpo
se of securing the good.
Macaulay’s position in the pivotal debates on copyright in the British Parliament carried the day, at the time. A similar position was adopted by the founders of our own American republic. Unfortunately, in the two centuries that followed, we have slid back to the position advocated by his opponents. I say “slid back,” because at no point along the way was this retrogression done honestly, in full and open debate before the public. It has been a slow and steady erosion, which has now reached the absurdity of copyright terms that last anywhere up to ten times longer than copyright established at the beginning of the American republic-and, now, accompanied by the most draconian and often absurd attempts to enforce those monopolistic privileges.
All of this, of course, was done in the name of “protecting the intellectual creator.”
Hogwash. What is involved here has nothing to do with protecting the legitimate interests of authors like me and other creative artists and intellectual workers. For that, the old and reasonable copyright laws were more than sufficient.
I am an author myself, and quite a successful one. Even my income as an editor-which is no more than 20% of my total income, the rest coming from my work as an author-is directly tied to sales and royalties. I do not receive a salary for my work on this magazine. I work on commission. I do not receive a salary for my work as the editor of some twenty volumes of reissues of the writings of other authors. I get paid out of a small percentage of royalties.