An incredibly rare British edition of the October 1912 issue of The All-Story pulp magazine, which featured Edgar Rice Burroughs’ complete novel Tarzan of the Apes, was sold by a UK auction house for £9,000 (before fees). The money went to charity.
To mark the 40th anniversary of the first Star Wars movie, Japanese jewellery store Ginza Tanaka created a 24-karat gold life-size mask of Darth Vader, which went on sale in Tokyo for $1.38 million (154 million Japanese yen). They also offered a solid gold commemorative coin, which was available in just seventy-seven sets of three for $11,000 apiece.
Britain’s Royal Mail issued a set of eight first-class Star Wars stamps to tie in with the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
From June to September, the prestigious Tate Britain gallery in London featured “The Art of Ray Harryhausen”, an exhibition showcasing the late special effects expert’s models, bronzes and drawings from such movies as Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans alongside artwork by John Martin, Gustave Doré and Joseph Gandy.
Over the same period, London’s Barbican Art Gallery centre hosted an exhibition entitled “Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction”. Curated by historian and writer Patrick Gyger, the display of art, design, film and literature consisted of more than 800 items (including works by H.R. Giger and Ray Harryhausen), many of which had never been seen in the UK before.
The British Library’s record-breaking “Harry Potter: A History of Magic” exhibition featured items from J.K. Rowling’s personal archive—including handwritten drafts and annotated sketches—along with items that inspired the series. 30,000 tickets were sold prior to the opening on October 20. According to the Great British Pride Index survey in June, the fictional boy wizard instilled more pride in the UK’s 16-24 year olds than either the Queen or William Shakespeare.
Guillermo del Toro’s “At Home with Monsters” exhibition, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2016 and featured the movie director’s own exhibits and art from the horror genre, toured the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2017, before finishing up in Mexico City. The similarly themed “El Mundo de Tim Burton” also opened in Mexico in December.
The rural Oxfordshire farmhouse where J.R.R. Tolkien lived until his death in 1973 went on the market in January for £2 million.
The historic Queen Mary ocean liner, permanently docked at Long Beach, California, was the inspired location for the The Horror Writers Association’s second annual StokerCon, held over April 27-30. The bewildering line-up of guests included Guests of Honour George R.R. Martin, Elizabeth Hand, Chuck Wendig, Peter Crowther, Tananarive Due, Gretchen McNeil and Stephen Graham Jones. Bill Bridges was Gaming Guest of Honour, Becky Spratford was Librarian Guest of Honour, and Nancy Holder was Toastmaster [sic].
Almost as bewildering were the number of Bram Stoker Awards for “Superior Achievement” (there are no “winners” in the HWA) handed out on the Saturday night Banquet by regular Awards MC Jeff Strand. The Poetry Collection award went to Stephanie M. Wytovich’s Brothel, Non-Fiction went to Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, and Thomas F. Monteleone and Olivia F. Monteleone’s Borderlands 6 received the Anthology award.
Joyce Carol Oates’ The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror received the award for Fiction Collection, Robert Eggers The Witch was given the Screenplay award, and convention co-chair Kate Jones’s Omnium Gatherum picked up the Specialty Press Award.
Oates also received the Short Fiction award for ‘The Crawl Space’ (in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), Tim Waggoner’s The Winter Box got the award for Long Fiction, and Dennis Etchison and Thomas F. Monteleone were the Lifetime Achievement Award recipients.
The Graphic Novel award went to Kolchak: The Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe, Maria Alexander’s Snowed received the award for Young Adult Novel, Tom Deady’s Haven picked up the award for First Novel, and John Langan’s The Fisherman collected the award for Superior Achievement in a Novel.
Various other HWA awards went to James Chambers, Caren Hanten and Linda Addison for their services to the organisation.
The British Fantasy Society’s FantasyCon 2017 was held over September 29-October 1 in Peterborough. The Guests of Honour were writers Nancy Kilpatrick, Ben Aaronovitch and Pat Cadigan. The British Fantasy Awards were presented at a banquet on the Sunday afternoon.
The Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer went to Erika L. Satifka for Stay Crazy, Best Film/Television Programme was Arrival, Best Independent Press was Grimbold Press, and Daniele Serra was voted Best Artist. The Best Non-Fiction Award went to Kameron Hurley’s The Geek Feminist Revolution, Jan Edwards was the recipient of The Karl Edward Wagner Special Award, and Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress Vol.1: Awakening was voted Best Comic Graphic Novel.
The British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical went to Tor.com, Best Short Fiction was ‘White Rabbit’ by Georgina Bruce, Best Anthology was People of Colour Destroy Science Fiction edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim, Best Collection was Some Will Not Sleep by Adam L.G. Nevill, and Victor LaValle’s ‘The Ballad of Black Tom’ won Best Novella.
The Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel went to The Tiger and the Wolf by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel went to Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay. David Sutton and Sandra Sutton were named as Legends of FantasyCon.
The 43rd World Fantasy Convention was held over November 2-5 in San Antonio, Texas. The theme was “Secret Histories”, and the guests of Honour were Tananarive Due, Karen Joy Fowler, Gregory Manchess, David Mitchell and Gordon Van Gelder, with Toastmistress Martha Wells.
The World Fantasy Awards were presented at a Banquet on the Sunday afternoon, and, unfortunately, this was the year that the convention’s administration boards finally decided to bow to minority pressure and replaced Gahan Wilson’s iconic Lovecraft bust with an anodyne award designed by artist Vincent Villafranca.
Special Award, Non-Professional went to Neile Graham, for fostering excellence in the genre through her role as Workshop Director, Clarion West, and Special Award, Professional was won by Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn’s Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction.
Jeffrey Alan Love was voted Best Artist, Jeffrey Ford’s A Natural History of Hell won Best Collection, and editor Jack Dann’s Dreaming in the Dark received the award for Best Anthology.
Best Short Fiction was ‘Das Steingeschöpf’ by G.V. Anderson (from Strange Horizons), Best Long Fiction went to The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, and Claire North’s The Sudden Appearance of Hope won the Best Novel award.
Lifetime Achievement Awards were presented to Terry Brooks and Marina Warner.
There is a dichotomy in publishing at the moment. As noted at the beginning of this column, book sales are on the increase. This is particularly true of ghost and horror fiction which, according to Nielsen Bookscan, in 2017 saw its highest sales in four years, up almost a third in value to £4.2 million.
The reasons given for this increase are given variously as the popularity of horror in the media—from a new generation discovering Netflix’s Stranger Things and the remake of Stephen King’s It—to the increase in reprint anthologies (really?), the exploration of gender and sexuality by new female writers exploring the #MeToo movement, or as a reaction to the “scary” state of world events and politics—with concerns over everything from Brexit to Donald Trump’s unpredictable presidency of the US driving readers to the relatively “safe” scares of horror fiction.
As a result, Stephen King’s sales in the UK went up an impressive 59%, while sales of Shirley Jackson’s work soared an incredible 654%.
However, at the same time, according to ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society) research, the median annual income of professional writers in the UK dropped to below £10,500 ($13,300), down by 15% since 2013 (putting an author’s
hourly rate well below minimum wage level).
The research stated that the median earnings of a “professional” writer—that is defined as someone who dedicates over half their working hours to writing—had fallen by 42% in real terms since 2005, and by 15% since 2013. At the same time, it was estimated that the profit margins of the five big publishers in the UK increased by around 13%, with shareholders receiving up to three times the amount paid to authors.
This will come as no surprise to those writers (and editors) who are not in the top tier of “best-sellers”—the annihilation of the publishers’ “midlist” over the past decade has led to lower advances and royalties at a time when more and more people are attempting to build a career as an author.
It is therefore inevitable that, as earnings have fallen, so have the number of full-time writers. In 2005, 40% of professional writers earned their income solely from writing. By 2017, that figure had fallen to just 13.7%. As writing earnings decline, authors have been forced to work much harder to supplement their income by taking secondary careers, such as teaching or freelance editing. Despite that, at a time when book sales are increasing, figures show that the earnings of many authors continue to decline on both sides of the Atlantic.
The question has to be where all of this will end? Except for a lucky few, is the future of the full-time fiction writer doomed to extinction, or is it time that the way in which authors are paid needs to be re-evaluated? If not, then there is a real danger that writing will once again become the profession of the wealthy elite—just as it was with the “gentlemanly” writers of the 19th century.
And none of us want that…do we?
The Editor
January 2019
HELEN MARSHALL
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES
HELEN MARSHALL is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publish-ing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. She is also the general director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy there. Her debut novel, The Migration, is released by Random House Canada and Titan Books in the UK in 2019.
“I wrote this story after I took a research trip to the United States in 2016 to look into the publishing history of Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie,” explains the author. “My own first novel, The Migration, had just been bought by Random House Canada, and it made me interested in the writing life of one of my favourite authors—those pivotal years that propelled his career forward.
“Much of the research I had done for my PhD in medieval literature has focused on long-dead authors, and so I was excited by the prospect of access to those who had been alive during those days, particularly Bill Thompson, King’s original editor.
“But as the trip progressed, I found myself increasingly uncomfortable by the fact that I was prying into someone’s life, a life filled with texture and detail and relationships that I didn’t really have any right to.
“The story took on the proportions of a ghost story when I was told by more than one person that Thompson had passed away (he hadn’t!). Rather than publishing an article, I wrote a short story that captured the uncanny mood of the trip and the destabilising politics of the period in which it was written.”
BARRON ST. JOHN must have been nearing his seventies by that point. The pictures I’d copied from magazine covers and newspapers charted his rise from a rake-thin tower of a man, nearly six-three, clad in a badly fitting white wool jacket with a thick crop of black hair cut like a bowl around his ears to his older self: hair grey but still as thick as it had ever been, fine laugh lines etching the curve of that grinning, maniac mouth. In his heyday people had taken him to calling him the King of Horror, a real scaremeister—that term always made me laugh—but the man I saw in those later pictures had the look of a grandfather, which I suppose he was, one who could spin a yarn, sure, but not the kid who’d posed with a shotgun for his university paper under the headline “Vote dammit!”
My university had given me a small grant for my research project into St. John’s career. I had planned to stay in Hotel 31, the cheapest place Luca and I had agreed we could afford. He had wanted me in midtown so I could walk most places. He was a worrier, had never been to New York and the idea of me riding the subway right then made him uneasy.
“It’ll be fine,” I told him, “nothing will happen. It isn’t like that anymore. It hasn’t been since the ’90s.” We both knew that wasn’t exactly true. The situation was different now, but scarier in other ways. There were journalists being stopped at the borders, asked invasive questions. Not everyone was allowed in. And Luca, for all his woolly sweetness and soft English manners, had a serious stubborn streak. He was protective, I knew, and didn’t like the idea of me travelling on my own, not after I’d reacted so badly to the procedure, and certainly not “abroad” as he called it in that charmingly old-fashioned way of his.
But “abroad” was what I had wanted. Even if it wasn’t home for me, which lay four-hundred miles north across the border in Toronto where my sister lived, New York still felt more familiar than the still-drizzly streets of London in the summer. Besides, I suppose there was a part of me that wanted to see how bad things had got.
And St. John was a new obsession of mine, one I’d taken up in my recovery. Luca had been reading his pulpy looking paperbacks for years but I’d never touched them. They were too scary, I’d thought, too low brow. I remembered the garish paperbacks though, the ones that showed off his last name in huge embossed letters. They’d been ubiquitous when I was a kid. Each had a plain black cover with a silhouette cutaway so you had to turn the page to get the full effect. Rosie was the first I ever saw, his debut, the starting point for his surprising upward trajectory. It featured a small New Hampshire town—eerily similar to the one where I’d grown up, what had once been a small farming community until the petroleum processing plants transformed it. The town was engulfed in a crackling lightning storm. Gory and horrifying, read the cover, you can’t put it down!!!
St. John didn’t live in New York, but his former editor did: Lily Argo.
I’d found her e-mail address online. Like St. John she must have been in her seventies, but was still working freelance. There were no pictures. The best I could find was a black and white shot of her and St. John at the signing of his fourth book, What Is Mine, the last they worked on together. Lily Argo was an inch or two taller than St. John, glorious, an Allison Janney look-alike, which meant the two of them towered over the line of moist-lipped teenage girls who were clustered around the table. That was back in ’79.
When I first approached one of my friends—an anthology editor named Dylan Bone (real name or not, I never knew)—about the possibility of an article on the publication of Rosie, he told me Argo had died. Dylan had even written up her obituary for Locus—but in retrospect he couldn’t remember how he’d first found out. She’d been one of the few female editors at Doubleday back then, mostly due to her lucky discovery of St. John. When I mentioned I’d been in contact with her, that she’d agreed to meet me, Dylan had stared at me thoughtfully.
“Just be careful,” he said.
“About what?”
He’d just waved his hand. “You know,” he said before lurching off to the bar to fetch another round.
I didn’t have any problems with the border guards. The customs line was tense, but I’d always had that feeling whenever I entered the States. Once I’d swallowed two painkillers before a flight back to London and the random swipe they’d done on my hands had registered a false positive for explosives or drugs. I’d been taken to a small backroom where a dark-haired woman in a uniform demanded to know why I had been in the country. I kept apologising, I don’t know why. She had to search me by hand and the process was brusque and businesslike. She asked me to remove my bra. Then someone else came in, a heavy-set man with a broad forehead. He didn’t look at me. Neither of them did. Afterwards they let me go but ever since I’d been stopped for “random” checks whenever I boarded a plane. This time though the guard to
ok one look at me and waved me through. I must have looked harmless to him.
Hotel 31 was as old as the Overlook, mostly derelict with a walk-in elevator whose grille door you had to close yourself. The room was sparse, but by that point exhaustion had sunk into my skin. I called Luca to tell him I’d arrived and then collapsed under the thin covers.
All night I could hear animal sounds in the walls. The bodies of whatever moved beyond the peeling wallpaper hummed like batteries. Still, I slept. And in the morning I felt better than I had in weeks. Not mended, but stronger.
I was still in that dusky phase of grieving so that sometimes when I slept it felt as if I had fallen through a hole in the world. Each morning I woke up as a different person, discovered new wrinkles at the corners of my eyes, wires of thick, unrecognisable, grey hair. The doctor warned me of changes in my body, cramping, small clots of blood between my legs. I had expected my breasts to shrink but they’d only gotten larger. I read online the best thing to do was to bind them tightly with a snug towel and apply ice for ten minutes on, twenty minutes off. He hadn’t told me how old I would feel after.
I had given myself three days to acclimatise to jetlag before I met up with Lily Argo.
In the mean time I’d arranged a visit to Doubleday, St. John’s first publisher. In the last thirty years Doubleday had joined with Dell and Bantam which in turn joined up with Random House. Size, they had thought, was the best way to survive an uncertain economic climate.
Two weeks ago I’d contacted an editor at Random House in the hopes he might know if the company had kept some of the records from St. John’s days. But after the bag search and the metal detectors, when I was buzzed into the offices, a blonde receptionist told me my meeting had been postponed. She was young, slickly made up in that New York way with manicured fingers and perfect plucked eyebrows. I was wearing a dark blue cardigan which, seeing her, suddenly felt so English, so matronly I almost laughed.
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