Asimov's SF, October-November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  So while SF may not have been accepted into the center of literary culture or become a major publishing profit center, in the 1960s it expanded its singular fringe readership into a multiplicity of fringe readerships. In retrospect, this was a large part of what the New Wave was really about, and which, in the 1980s, it would become a large part of what Cyberpunk was really about, too.

  The New Wave, speculative fiction written that appealed to fringe readerships outside the hermetically sealed demographics of SF fandom, like the counterculture, the literary avant garde, the politically progressive, the New Age movement, and so forth, never really became the commercial center of the genre, washed over as it was by the later tsunami of tie-ins and schlock generated by Star Trek, Star Wars, and their would-be imitators in book form.

  But in the end what it did establish commercially was that taken as a whole the new clade of more sophisticated fringe readerships was sufficient to make novels like Brian Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, my own Bug Jack Barron, and Robert Silverberg's Son of Man at least commercially viable as major SF titles.

  What these various novels and the rest of the New Wave canon had in common was that they all had very little in common save a liberation from the taboos and restrictions—sexual, stylistic, thematic, political—on what could previously have been published by the central SF publishers or the SF imprints of major publishing houses.

  Similar freedom still exists today, and such stuff is still publishable, and still finds some kind of fringe readership. But most of the major SF lines are targeting the perceived “fan base,” what they conceive of as the demographic center in these tough times—meaning, inevitably, the retro and nostalgic, the “pulp tradition,” the good old stuff, punting, bunting, playing it what they believe is commercially safe, whether it is really working or not.

  Of course there are exceptions, but when what were previously independent publishers get gobbled up and become imprints of conglomerates, it's inevitable that the number crunchers come to dominate editorial policies—and when they do, that those policies follow the Book-Scan numbers defining the bottom line, which has to lead to playing down the middle.

  Son of Man, for example, was first published in 1971 by Ballantine Books, then entirely under the command of Ian and Betty Ballantine, but now an imprint of Random House, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. Its SF line in turn is a sub-sub imprint, Del Rey Books, and it's highly unlikely that Del Rey would be able to publish this novel even if Silverberg had submitted it as a brand new book today, rather than a “golden oldie” reprint.

  Instead, it has been republished by Pyr, a house somewhere between a large small press and a small independent major, which has been making a name for itself in this ecological niche for quite some time now, publishing worthy fiction unable to find a home with a major SF line.

  Pyr has chosen a bit of an old New York Times review of the original edition for the cover blurb:

  "Son of Man is profligate, spendthrift, wildly generous with image and sensation and with sexuality."

  Well, yes, that about says it all, though not quite. Imagery, sensation, sexuality, altered states of form, consciousness, and being are just about all this novel is about. The viewpoint character is a man from more or less the present, transported by literary fiat to a baroquely transhuman far future when humanity has exfoliated and evolved into all sorts of post-human “Sons of Man.” The novel is a conventionally plotless psychedelic trip through this manifold wonderland, though Silverberg takes care to avoid what Herbert did in Dune—putting what was going on at the time, chemical alteration of consciousness leading to higher states of being, front and center, or even there at all.

  It's hard to imagine the SF imprint of a publishing conglomerate taking a flyer on such a novel today. Not because of any taboos against explicit or even “perverse” sexuality, which really have not existed since the 1960s, but because the digital thinking of the number crunchers, BookScan watchers, and marketing staff wouldn't know what to do with it. Because from that point of view, there's nothing to do with it, no identifiable track record of similar stuff with a viable and quantifiable demographic.

  From the analog point of view of a perspicacious idealistic editor, given sufficient literary quality, given sufficient speculative imagination, this would be an exciting virtue, a chance to publish something sui generis, something new under the literary sun. But from the digital point of view of BookScans, P&Ls, bottomline number crunching, this is commercial poison.

  If this were not the present state of the Industry, surely Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird would have been found a home in a major SF imprint, rather than published by a small press like Night Shade Books.

  Kadrey has been publishing speculative fiction—some excellent interesting stuff, most of it in small press of one sort or another—for something like two decades. He's literate, pop culturally au courant, writes in an entertaining and accessible style, knows how to plot, and has an eye for thematic material, all of which is abundantly on display in Butcher Bird.

  Much of Kadrey's work has been SF, or fantasy on its interface with science fiction, but Butcher Bird is as unequivocally fantasy as fiction can get.

  Spyder Lee, the hero, is an ex-car thief and present tattoo artist who finds himself enmeshed in the magical and theological hugger-mugger of intersecting universes and reality spheres thanks to getting involved with Shrike, a dispossessed transreality princess and present mercenary assassin. Shrike is the Butcher Bird of the title, out to rescue her father and reclaim her heritage, among a few other arcane things. It's an odyssey through the bad-ass music of the fantastic spheres, including a long climactic sequence in a most original version of Hell, accompanied by a cast of human and non-human characters including one who turns out to be an ambiguously sympathetic Lucifer. It's colorful, fast-paced, action-packed, scary, highly imaginative, theologically thoughtful, funny without ever approaching farce, and skillfully written.

  Butcher Bird touches all the bases that commercially successful fantasy should touch, far more entertainingly than most bestselling fantasy, and then some. So why the relatively obscure small press publication?

  Perhaps Kadrey prefers his position out there on the fringes, where the unlikelihood of commercial fame and fortune can liberate a writer from the futile pursuit of same to follow the purity of his own literary star. Or perhaps, once typed as such, whatever you write, what the track record of the numbers says is what you are. But maybe, perversely enough, the aforementioned “and then some” is part of the problem.

  Butcher Bird is full of pop cultural references, musical and otherwise, but they're more than a little bit retro, and culturally Bay Area. This may be no problem for me, or for any reader over, say thirty, but the prized 18-25 year old demographic may not get a lot of it—may even be put off by it, finding it excessively what the French contemptuously call “baba cool."

  Or at least this may be the calculation of the number crunchers: namely that this novel is targeted at a fringe readership older and a bit more sophisticated than the prime time central fantasy readership demographic and not large enough to satisfy bottom-line requirements.

  So it would seem. For additional evidence, consider the Pyr publication of Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy (if trilogy it will remain, which seems unlikely) The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings.

  I do not like trilogies. I detest “trilogies” that end in mid-air at the end of the third volume as this one does, in a cliff-hanger that certainly signals that there is more to come, and possibly that Abercrombie doesn't even know how much.

  This is unequivocally sword and sorcery, a complex and extended fantasy war story that takes place in a made up universe unapologetically entirely disconnected from our own, where the level of the technology is medieval, various sorts of magic more or less work, and the main characters are barbarian warriors (including the female version), generals and officers, wi
zards, monarchs, and a crippled torturer.

  I do not like sword and sorcery either.

  But I liked Before They Are Hanged very much indeed, even though it was the second book in the damned trilogy, and I knew it when I read it first because it was the first volume I had. I liked it so much that I sought out the first novel, The Blade Itself, read it second, and then Last Argument of Kings.

  Why?

  Because of the way this series is written.

  Not primarily because I like Abercrombie's prose style as such, which I do, but primarily because of the mordant cynicism of his third person narrative voice, the touchingly guilt-ridden sardonic attitude of his sometime berserker barbarian hero, the phlegmatic consciousness of this ambiguous warrior's some-time sidekick, the utter crazed viciousness of Abercrombie's female barbarian warrior, the bitterly cruel psyche of his crippled torturer, the way that this is no moral tale of the Conflict of Good and Evil, but one in which the reader is left to ponder which is which and what the difference may or may not be without an auctorial scorecard.

  As Ralph Waldo Emerson had it, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and I've found myself entranced in practice by an open-ended series my literary principles tells me I should hate, because Abercrombie's sword and sorcery is neither written by one nor intended for the sort of reader to whom the works of Robert E. Howard or Robert Jordan are sophisticated stuff.

  On a literary level, on the levels of political sophistication, military credibility, down and dirty martial realism, fantasy world-building, characterization, The First Law series is head and shoulders above just about any such stuff I can think of—yes, even Tolkien and Michael Moorcock's Elric tales included.

  Yet in an era where heroic fantasy can ride to the top of national bestseller lists, Abercrombie's novels, far superior to anything that has gotten that far, end up being published out there on the fringe.

  Why?

  Well, sword and sorcery is sometimes called heroic fantasy, but heroic fantasy The First Law certainly is not. No unalloyed heroes or villains here. What Joe Abercrombie has done is taken the traditional characters and tropes of sword and sorcery seriously, transmogrified the time-worn material into psychologically credible, morally ambiguous, realistic fiction. If such a world actually existed, this is what the inhabitants thereof and their interactions would really be like.

  Yes, what seems unavoidable, is that in this moment of literary history Abercrombie's literary virtue is commercial vice. What the numbers and number-crunchers say is that this sort of sword and sorcery written for sophisticated adults is not viable in big-time mainstream fantasy publishing precisely because it is written for sophisticated adults, because sophisticated adults are the wrong demographic for sword and sorcery, the potential readership is just too small for such fiction to be published as anything but fringe stuff.

  And from a certain viewpoint they may be right. The relative commercial success of SF media tie-ins, and the sort of fictional series aping them, over the past two decades or so may have greatly expanded the readership for SF in general. But not only has it not expanded the readership for more sophisticated SF, it has contracted that readership by tarring the entire genre with the schlocko brush of marketing targeting the larger but relatively unsophisticated demographic.

  How else can you explain something like Helen Collins's Neurogenesis being published by an all but unknown small press called Speculative Fiction Review?

  Collins's previous science fiction novel Mutagenesis was published by Tor in 1993 (and reviewed favorably by me here). So why not Neurogenesis a decade and a half later?

  Well, I don't know what Collins has been doing since 1993 and I don't know whether she ever even submitted Neurogenesis to Tor or any other mainline SF publisher. But having read the novel what I do know is that it is an excellent piece of hard-core science fiction; imaginative, extrapolative, credible on an exobiological, anthropological, cultural, and at least arguably hard science level, and characterologically interesting, too.

  What we have here is an interstellar human civilization more or less held together by light-speed-limited starships so that it's the time-dilation effect that makes it possible for people to make journeys between planetary systems, but at the price of either being never able to go home again or returning to your planet of departure decades or even centuries later with all you knew or loved gone or mutated.

  There's complicated interstellar politics and economic skullduggery, which results in a mission by a spaceship crewed by a specialist in group dynamics, the heir to a ruling family, an experimental Artificial Intelligence, and others to a certain planet for such politico-economic reasons, but for the same reasons, another interest reprograms the destination to send the ship to the ass-end of nowhere.

  But while the crew is in suspended animation, the AI evolves, and takes the ship instead to the planet of the Corvi, a hitherto more or less hidden civilization of sentient avians, and...

  Well, there's no point in giving away more story, and as usual good reason to stop before one has given away too much, the salient point here being that this is the real deal, a science fiction novel that satisfies the parameters of hard science fiction, biological science fiction, anthropological science fiction, political science fiction, characterological science fiction, cyber science fiction, and tells a well-plotted and coherent story, too.

  It touches all the time-honored bases.

  It's a major science fiction novel that easily deserves to have been published as such by a major SF imprint.

  So why wasn't it?

  Well, one thing that Neurogenesis isn't is a quick facile read. Not because it isn't well written, which it is, but because it is intellectually demanding. Those who don't enjoy intellectually demanding science fiction may not get through Neurogenesis, or if they do will miss much of the central pleasures of reading it.

  The physics of the interstellar travel is as well worked out as such stuff generally gets. The manner in which the avian visual sensorium of the Corvi drastically affects their strange consciousness and therefore their civilization is beautifully and masterfully worked out. Ditto for the evolution of the Artificial Intelligence in the NeuroGenesis of the title. The human interstellar civilization makes economic and political sense. The deep sociology and psychology is equally cogent, well-detailed and logically puissant, and affects the personalities and consciousnesses of the characters as it should.

  Once again, and here it is more glaringly obvious that the situation with Joe Abercrombie's sword and sorcery trilogy, in these latter days, literary virtue would seem to be commercial vice from the point of view of major SF line marketing —and alas, in the case of Neurogenesis, perhaps with unfortunately reasonable justification.

  There's no getting around that to fully understand all that Helen Collins is about in Neurogenesis, readers must be at least minimally scientifically literate in physics, biology, sociology, cybernetics, anthropology, and so forth, and from the evidence in the culture at large this is not exactly a large demographic. Worse still from a commercial publishing viewpoint, to really fully enjoy this novel, readers must be the sort of people who actually take pleasure in wrestling with such intellectually challenging material, and that narrows the potential readership even further.

  Am I saying that in the twenty-first century well-rounded and fully realized science fiction like Neurogenesis has become an elite fringe literature?

  Yes I am.

  To a point, this was always so, commercially speaking. This kind of science fiction was never bestseller material. Enjoying it always required a higher level of scientific literacy than that of even the well-educated average, and to a large extent writing it without long boring didactic diversions required writing for such a relatively small in-group demographic as your perceived ideal readership. A fringe literature written for not only an elite readership but a readership whose intellectual eliteness was rather specialized.

  Up until the New Wave period
of the 1960s and early 1970s, this kind of stuff was the core of seriously intended science fiction, and the limited readership for it was what is now generally called the “fan base” of the literature, making it a fringe literature by its inherent nature.

  From the retrospect of the present situation, it can be clearly seen that what the New Wave and its feedback relationship with the counterculture and the literary avant garde accomplished was not to break speculative fiction out into the broad literary culture or the commercial mainstream of publishing, but to develop another fringe SF readership for a different sort of science fiction.

  The endless Star Trek and Star Wars novel series then created fringe readerships for themselves that were larger than the previous readerships for all SF combined, and more, much more, their commercial success spawned commercially cynical open-ended novel series, like the Dune series churned out by Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert, that aren't tied into any media series. Now it's such second order derivative novel series and the media tie-in series which have become the core of “major SF publishing” in terms of the bottom line numbers, and in the end, therefore, of how much of what gets published.

  What does this have to do with literary worth, thematic content, or even old-fashioned “sense of wonder"?

  Nothing at all.

  These days, as I hope I have demonstrated by examples, much if not most of the exciting literary action for relatively adult, relatively sophisticated readers of speculative fiction, be it science fiction or fantasy, is out there on the fringes, either published by small presses, or sometimes down there in the midlists of SF majors like Tor or Del Rey, where the readership demographics are more or less the same.

  That's where SF publishing has been for some time now. The central stuff kept the black ink on the balance sheet of the imprints of corporate conglomerates, where that means their survival and the jobs of the editors, and the interesting literary action was pushed out to a clade of disparate fringes.