by Bill Fawcett
In other words, in the few years between the end of the war and the earliest 1950s, these various people with their varied resources brought out the books which are still the liver and lights of any permanent collection of good science fiction. Random House had issued its legendary Healy-McComas anthology, Adventures in Time and Space, and Crown had brought out Groff Conklin’s A Treasury of Science Fiction, but Gnome had countered with Martin Greenberg’s Men Against the Stars, an entry fully qualified to run in that field.
If it hadn’t been for the houses listed in Paragraph One of this necessarily breathless history, grown-up science fiction might have taken years to find a permanent place in literature via the library catalogues. With the few exceptions mentioned immediately above, the established major houses hadn’t touched anything but Verne and Wells in years, the only significant wartime exceptions being Pocket’s original paperback, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, and Viking’s Portable Novels of Science. Both of these had been edited and one assumes fought into life by Donald Wollheim, who has gone on to do his impressive job of making bricks without straw for Ace paperbacks. He, Healy and McComas, Groff Conklin and a few others might eventually have succeeded by applying unremitting pressure over a long period of time. The little specialist houses, operating out of lofts, bookstores and their owners’ basements, cut that time dramatically short. They made the 1950s into boom years . . . from which they themselves would draw little but disaster.
By 1951, these people had accomplished two major things, both suicidal. They had exhausted the supply of easily found, high-quality reprints from the magazines, and they had established the financial value of the SF book market. They had gotten to that point because you can succeed with almost any sensible small venture in publishing as long as you’re not doing something the potential major competitors want to do as well. At that point, the first Science Fiction Book Club ad had appeared on the back cover of a prozine. Except for differences of detail, it looked and read exactly like its sister ads for the Detective Book Club, which had been riding the back covers of the crime magazines for years. Merchandising had come to the business of publishing SF books for profit, and the incidence of major company names on new titles had begun to rise sharply.
A major publishing house has, by definition, the equipment needed to be a major publisher—a staff of editorial specialists, a production staff which does nothing all day but buy supplies and services having to do with publishing, and a sales staff which can consist of hundreds of specialists, some of them out on the road calling on bookstore owners they have known for years and others sitting home and writing punchy brochure copy. This is what these people do for a living. They have been trained for it under the impetus of believing that this is all they can do for a living. They are paid to do their one thing at least as well as their opposite numbers at the next major house. With this sort of organization, it is possible to produce a million copies of something that may look and be fractionally better than the work of one busy man working for himself. If you have a hundred such specialists, they can produce, say, ten times as many things to make a million copies of.
Once such a major organization has been put in train, it is committed by the inertia of schedules and capital investment. The sight of a major publishing company winding up to give birth to a new program is so impressive that few of its rivals can restrain themselves from following suit. Once the herd has been set in motion it must, by the nature of the beast, proceed along the line of least resistance for an indefinite period of time, leaving nothing in its wake but a stubble of grasses cropped too short to sustain life.
In the area of wholesale bookselling, the brief contention was thus between the specialists in science fiction and the specialists in publishing. In the area of simple packaging—of producing at a profit a book which appears to be worth the retail customer’s money—the contest was only a little longer in the drawing out. It was in fact extended past its natural run by something like a happenstance. The merchandising machinery having gotten turned on, the various sales organizations sponsored by the major publishers immediately needed more product than the publishers themselves were yet able to furnish. So for a little while the small houses were able to supply copies to the book club operations owned more or less by their direct competitors. Thus they acquired a little more money to operate on, at the same time that their choice of production standards was sharply narrowed to the more expensive bands of the book-making spectrum.
What this meant for the retail customers was that more conventional-looking science fiction books in far greater quantities had become available. Shopping for books became considerably more convenient. Book prices were reduced, in several senses; over the short term, there was the benefit of having the specialist houses throw their stocks on the cut-rate market in an effort to get hold of additional working capital or simply to bail out. Over the long term, book prices were reduced (not absolutely, but relative to the still rising cost of production) by the combination of high-volume sales and production economies of which only major publishers are capable.
In fact, the only place the SF book-reading public lost anything tangible at all was one from which the small publishers could not have rescued them, but from which the big publishers could. That was in the paucity of remaining publishable book-length material. The result was that the middle 1950s were bad years for quality, and looked worse by comparison to the immediate past.
The middle 1950s were the years in which we got the “novels” pasted together from series short stories, the “science fiction” by outside writers who had obviously seen a monster movie once, and the unfortunate experiments in hapless antiquarianism reminiscent of that pioneering California company which had staked its all on Ralph Milne Farley.
These were the years in which knowledgeable critics lambasted the major companies day and night. If Gnome Press had been able to bring out Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, why in Heaven’s name couldn’t a giant outfit like Doubleday do better than Nelson Bond’s Lancelot Biggs series disguised as a novel? Answer, Doubleday wasn’t about to do I, Robot—yet. Gnome’s excellently manufactured edition, with its flossy Cartier jacket making it look exactly like a big-time book, was still very much on sale. Doubleday would of course get to it in the course of time, but meanwhile there was Max Ehrlich’s The Big Eye, and that was science fiction too. You could tell by the rocket on the title page.
It wasn’t all bad. Gnome’s City, by Clifford Simak, was the outstanding example of a pasteup that had been begging to be done. Doubleday’s The Martian Chronicles dates from that time—a beautiful Bradbury collection which owes part of its charm to the loose connecting passages between stories, which may be the fragile vestiges of earlier plans to make a novel. Simon & Schuster did take the bit in its teeth and publish an edition of Slan. Grossett & Dunlap came out with a mass-priced edition of Henry Kuttner’s Fury. Frederick Fell, hitherto known as the promulgator of Oscar J. Friend’s The Kid from Mars—which is not quite as bad as its title—began publishing the Bleiler-Dikty annual “best” collections of magazine stories, which served the function of providing the cinderblock base for Judith Merril to later build bigger and better for Simon & Schuster and Dell. And Twayne, another small but nevertheless full-scale publisher who hoped to ride up among the majors on the strength of this new boom, did something very interesting with its “Triplet” series, fostered by Fletcher Pratt and Dr. John D. Clark.
These were anthologies of three novellas each by three major SF writers, who were given a loose outline of a basic story problem and a detailed description of the solar system in which it was to occur, each writer then going his own way as he saw fit. This was one attempt to create books. With all the will and budget in the world, the science fiction magazines of that time could only supply the best of the new gout of wordage the book publishers now needed as they jockeyed for control of the market. They couldn’t supply all of it, by a long shot.
Perforce, the book publishers had
to be willing to pay enough for original material so that good writers could be induced to occasionally forgo the magazines as a primary market.
No publisher in the world ever pays more than he has to, but the major publishers have people trained to pay that minimum with checks drawn on impressive banks, and with cheerily mesmerrhetic references to the freemasonry of the arts. In this case the book publishers were not only broadening the primary market for original SF, they were now applying the coup de grace to the little specialists, as well as shaking off the coattail riders in their own ranks.
Twayne was one of the companies which dropped out of the picture, But its program left some significant orphans. Among the ultimate results of Fletcher Pratt’s brainchild was James Blish’s Hugo-winning A Case of Conscience, which ran as a long one-parter in If before expanding up to its prize book length. Two other Twayne stories, an Asimov and a Poul Anderson, appeared as serials in Astounding. In its own lefthanded way, this was the first major case of important work being fed from a book publisher into the magazines—a complete reversal of the established precedence.
At about this same time, two other interesting things happened.
A publisher of paperback originals got on the stands with his edition of a middling-important novel before it had finished running as a serial in Astounding. And Doubleday published Cyril Kornbluth’s Takeoff, a major novel by a major magazine writer, which had seen no magazine publication at all.
After the inevitable stumbling start, the big book houses were getting their programs into full flight. In every other important field of magazine fiction, most of the long serials had in fact been already under contract as books. That had now become the situation in science fiction, as well, and with various ups and downs, that is the situation today. In all, it took the major houses about five years, from 1950 to 1955, to make it so.
After ten years, this pendulum may now be getting ready to swing back the other way. Too many new “novels” are not former magazine serials—however arrived at—but puffed-up novelettes. Some of them were books all along, cut down for magazine use. But by far the greater percentage are not—they are padded, patched together or published in a design form that makes a lousy forty thousand words stretch across too many pages which are mostly margin and elephantiasical type. They are sometimes written by third-rate writers who are being overpaid in compensation for missing the apprenticeship that magazine work forces on its steady practitioners. These flat souffles are in turn subjected to the attentions of blurb writers and sales promotion directors who describe and package them to be more attractive and rewarding than they really are.
DECEMBER 1965
What sane man would be a writer? Consider that he has to please himself; he may claim he does not care what he writes or how, but he must write to sell, and that elementary need alone operates to shape his choice of word-arrangements. He may claim that he does not care if he sells . . . but you can see where that leads. The writer who doesn’t care is the least free of all writers, and often a suffering slave to his own notions of excellence.
Then he has to get past an editor, who is in turn conscious of his publisher. To an at least appropriate degree, and often to a point of paranoia, the three of them are conscious of what they believe the reader wants. In many cases, there is the background influence of the distributor, who is dogmatically sure of what will sell and is often in a position to influence everything from cover design to content. The distributor is in turn marginally conscious of the retailer—the storekeeper in whose power it lies to bury a magazine behind a stack of competitors, or to return a bundle unopened, unsold.
But let us assume that the writer’s words, however shaped by conscious and unconscious modifications at all these levels, have been published, sold, and are now held before a reader’s eyes.
Can the reader read? What influences in his life have made certain words compellingly significant to him? Never mind the twelve-year-old who has stumbled across his first unabridged dictionary, and the certifiable maniac who underscores the words he likes in the publications he likes; these are the extreme cases. But they are significant; you cannot tell me that an individual sufficiently word-conscious to read for pleasure has not developed a complex tangle of reflexes triggered by words. This tangle is not the same as anyone else’s, and therefore no reader reads what the writer has written.
Not only are words an arbitrary code with less than perfect accuracy, so are letters only arbitrary marks on paper. I can read German, for instance—but not in the quasimedieval characters of the 1930s. Some groups of letters are difficult for people to read accurately—if your name is Bulger, Swensen, Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Fredric Brown or Frederic Wakeman, or if you are quite accustomed to receiving mail addressed to Algis Burdys, you know exactly what I mean. If you have a name that ends in “s,” or if you will observe home-made signs selling tomatoes or chili-and-beans, you will quickly note what can be done with a possessive apostrophe in reckless hands. People have certain predispositions when deciphering the code we call language—in fact, we mis-call it, for in this case we are discussing literation—one of the more infuriating of which is an apparently universal tendency to call one very clangorous SF novel “Rouge Moon.” (A man who wanted me to hire him once devoted three single-spaced pages to telling me what a great book that was, and not once in some twenty detailed references to its title and specific scenes therein did he even accidentally tumble to the fact the the publisher had called it Rogue Moon. Yet he wanted the job very badly.)
And then, poor chap, the writer has gotten his work out into print, and at least some of his readers—as frail, as tangled inside—are critics. Critics think they know everything that went on in the writer’s mind, and where he did not say what he intended to say. They correct his arrangements for him before he even makes them, and then they write essays about them.
I, fortunately, am a book reviewer. I only know all about editing, publishing, book production, distribution and the difference between making and missing the distributor’s tie (not an item of accessory apparel, in this case). I would not dream of telling you what goes on in the mind of any specific writer. I have some understanding of what goes on in my own mind, of course, when I am being a writer, and would be remiss if I did not ascribe my habits and prejudices to the people whose books I review. All this I write down, and send off to my editor, who marks it up and sends it to his printer, who hands it to his composing room foreman, etc., etc., and after a while you get it, complete with occasional typographical errors and idiosyncratic editing, and you understand it, don’t you?
JUNE 1966
As you know, the problem with life is that nobody understands the situation. Nonetheless, we have to get through it as best we can. If there is a scheme to it all, it is sufficiently complex and covers sufficient spacetime so that only God could account for it. It is one of the primary purposes of commercial entertainment—and of art—to compensate us for the fact that none of us are God. It is the function of a statue to capture some small slice of something that we say is real, and hold it frozen for us to walk around and look until we are satisfied that we understand it. It is the function of a commercial novel, of the sort to which most science fiction novels belong, to provide what Murray Leinster long ago called a “pocket universe.” In this universe, the rules rapidly become comprehensible, or an assurance is quickly given that the rules will become comprehensible. There is a protagonist—a hero, or a fascinating villain, who becomes the reader’s particular property, and whose movements, troubles and triumphs become the reader’s own. In this way and for some little space of time, the reader inhabits a comprehensible world, and escapes from the real one.
This escape into an organized delusion—if you will, a systematic lie—is distinguishable from psychosis only by the fact that you can walk into a store and buy a package of it, the package having been provided by someone who deals in this service. As you know, psychosis is frowned upon, whereas reading is no
rmally acceptable. Thus commerce does confer a certain absolution on us all.
Some kinds of books are automatically more popular than others, just as some individual books are more popular than others of their same kind. This means, apparently, that there are fashions in psychosis, just as there are degrees to which individual books please their readers—that is to say, provide a delusional system yummier than someone else’s delusional system. It might even be possible to psychoanalyze a particular period of human history by running one’s finger down a list of the bestsellers. Thus, simple statistics and grubby pennies and dimes lay us all upon the psychiatrist’s couch. Never doubt that some day some earnest Ph.D. candidate will do all this for us; hopefully, not in my time or yours.
MAY 1969
As you know, this field functioned without criticism for many years. There was no systematic effort to apply standards to science fiction as a literature. In the earliest days of magazine SF, a story was good or bad in exact relationship to the durability of its scientific rationale, which served as the silent valet on which all the shirtings of prose, characterization and plot were flung.
A little later in our history, the story did begin to be measured against certain purely literary criteria; exactly the same criteria as those applied to the stories in the westerns, crime yarns, confession, sports and air war stories published in the companion magazines belonging to the same pulp chains that included one or two SF titles. The same people who edited Planet, for example, also worked on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And John W. Campbell, Jr., sat in on the plotting conferences for Doc Savage. (The last time the subject was raised JWC still had two absolutely perfect murder methods stored up in the back of his mind, should Street & Smith ever revive the Man of Bronze, and JWC ever revive Street & Smith.)
