“The End of Science Fiction”: A View of the Debate (Part Two)

Two weeks ago, The Fix ran the first part of this article, an examination of the long-running debate on the “end of science fiction.” The first half of the article discussed the changing cultural conditions in which science fiction writers work, which many observers have suggested has diminished the relevance, vitality, and range of science fiction, in particular the “end of science”; our changing expectations about the future; and the internal development of the genre itself, as viewed through lenses like the organic analogy, the genre’s dialectics, the reading of science fiction as a whole as a movement, and the influence that changes in media have had.

This second and final installment concerns the business environment in which science fiction writers work, with particular attention to two aspects of it: the widely perceived decline of the magazines that have traditionally been regarded as the genre’s standard-bearers; and the state of book publishing today.

The Decline of the Magazines
It has been said that the health of science fiction can be judged from the health of the science fiction magazines. Historically, they played a very important role in science fiction’s development: Amazing Stories, not only under its founder Hugo Gernsback, but later figures like Cecil Goldsmith (who also did notable work at Fantastic) and Ted White; John Campbell’s Astounding; Galaxy, under Horace Gold, and later, Frederik Pohl; J. Francis McComas and Anthony Boucher’s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; Science Fantasy, under E.J. Carnell; New Worlds, particularly in Michael Moorcock’s time, to name just the most obvious examples. OMNI magazine, while devoting most of its pages to science fact, also played a similar role with Ellen Datlow as its fiction editor.

The pages of these publications offered a way into the field for new writers, not only in the form of first exposure, but a place to hone their craft; a laboratory for experimentation; a hub for new movements. However, it is arguable that no magazine in the market is proving a great success at doing these things today. It is notable that where the big names in previous generations tended to enter the genre via this route, it is notable that the two biggest names in post-cyberpunk—Neal Stephenson and Ken MacLeod—both bypassed this route, and produced comparatively few short pieces which ended up in non-genre magazines or wholly original collections even after they had made their names. (This, the editors tell us, was the reason why the Rewired post-cyberpunk anthology included nothing by Stephenson.)

The Economics of Magazine Science Fiction
It may, of course, be that Stephenson and MacLeod are flukes. Many of today’s major writers still publish short fiction in the magazines (quite a few of them on a regular basis), and a discerning reader can still find some excellent fiction there. However, it is also the case that the handful of “professional”-grade publications still operating in this shrunken market are no longer able to do some of the things they used to.

One is that, with only a few exceptions, like Analog, or the new magazines founded by Jim Baen (Jim Baen’s Universe) and Orson Scott Card (Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show), they have no room for novelettes and novellas, so that stories over ten (or even five) thousand words long are exceptionally hard to place.

Not unrelated to their concentration on such short works is the fact that writing fiction for magazines can no longer be a significant source of income for a writer. H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard, and Philip K. Dick famously toiled in wretched poverty writing for such publications; but the combination of the existing pay rates and the scarcity of placements make even that highly implausible today.

Indeed, that problem for the magazine market was part of the rationale given for the launch of Baen’s and Card’s magazines, with their greater willingness to consider long pieces (and relatively high pay rates). However, it remains highly unlikely they will succeed, since the magazines no longer seem to be in a position to command a large, paying audience. Not only is it the case that the competition from electronic media (ever more prolific and accessible with every laptop and every cell phone usable as a television) is too powerful for the magazines to regain much ground from them. The truth is that even the print market is problematic because where once upon a time the magazines were the source for science fiction readers due to how little genre material appeared in book form (and even that had usually made its first appearance in serial form in the magazines), today there is so much available in that form that anyone can sate an appetite for it without ever picking up a magazine. This even goes for those who like to read short fiction, who can simply turn to anthologies and collections whose editors have the advantage of not being tied to a schedule, and can fill up their volumes with the very best material from the whole field’s magazines over a period of years or decades. (Much of the product would not be available without the magazines, but that does not neatly translate into greater support for them.)

This is even more the case with the “pulp” fiction market on which the magazines once had a lock (and which were key to their paying the bills by catering to those simply looking for adventure and spectacle) than the more upscale stuff. What remains of that now seems to be largely filled by media tie-in novels riding the coattails of films and television shows that have reached vastly wider audiences that any print piece of science fiction.

Accordingly, it’s hard to picture any short story magazine offering anything interesting to a broad audience that it cannot just as easily get somewhere else. Indeed, some even suppose that the remaining audience consists mainly of old loyalists whose passing can be traced in the falling number of subscriptions and sales, as Warren Ellis recently suggested in his blog. And the response on the part of the magazines seems to be defensive, trying to preserve their established niches by seeking material that fits their often specialized needs (as an editor at one of the larger magazines, to remain nameless, told me in an e-mail exchange a couple of years ago) rather than looking to discover innovators, let alone launch a revolution. A more perfect recipe for continued decline is hard to picture, though at the same time, there may not be an alternative to this rear-guard action.

The Limits of E-Publishing
Of course, one may ask, “What about the Internet?” Anyone can post anything they want, and there are plenty of short story magazines that wouldn’t be possible without it, so that it certainly does afford space for creative activity.

Nonetheless, there is the problem of format. Reading off of a computer screen is simply less comfortable than reading off a printed page, and not everyone wants to lug a laptop with them everywhere they go. (How long has smart paper been “just around the corner,” like so many other promised technologies?) Printing an electronic edition of a book or a magazine as an alternative to this can also run you as much or more for paper and ink than actually buying the hard copy, so it doesn’t save money on that end.

Additionally, precisely because e-publishing is such an open field, only a comparative handful of such sites can stand above the cacophony of cyberspace, and they are generally not taken as seriously as they might otherwise be, because, as Ellis points out, “we [still] associate print magazines with an intelligent curation process overseen by functional salaried adults.” And in any case, the rating of a magazine as professional, or close to it, is still tied to how much it can afford to pay its writers.

In short, money still matters. And those expected to lay out money for such enterprises in turn expect to make money from them, something that has proven far from easy, as the 2005 shutdown of the Sci-Fi Channel’s SCI FICTION (widely believed to have been due to its failure to be a moneymaker) makes all too clear.

Consequently, contrary to widespread hopes (and the fears of a few elitists), the mere existence of computer networks does not magically democratize the world, or even this particularly technologically-oriented branch of literature.

The State of Book Publishing
While broad pronouncements about the publishing industry are difficult to make because of its extreme secrecy about virtually all important data (compare the availability of information on box office grosses to that of book sales, for instance), it cannot be said that book publishers have taken up the slack. Of course, it might be unreasonable to think that they could in the best of circumstances. The frequency and regularity of a periodical with an established audience, the comparatively limited risk involved in alloting a few pages of an issue to a new and different writer or idea (compared with book publication), made it much simpler for the magazines to perform the functions discussed in the last section. Hypotheticals aside, it is also widely accepted that decision-making at the large publishing houses has increasingly moved out of the hands of editors, into those of executives and accountants, and there has been little open disagreement about the aftermath.

On Breaking In
One of the most remarked upon changes has been that literary agents, not editors, increasingly act as the field’s gate-keepers with the major publishers refusing to look at unagented submissions. Agents, of course, didn’t ask to have the burden of being the talent-spotter dumped on them this way, and quite frankly they don’t seem all that inclined to take it on. And so, just as publishers don’t want unagented submissions, agents don’t want to take on unpublished writers, a significant catch-22 for aspiring authors. (That is especially the case given the greater difficulty writers have making a name for themselves in magazines.)

Of course, it seems that the business must accept new blood sometime. As James Michener once pointed out, every year some authors die, or retire, and someone must fill their places if the whole machine is to continue running, which presumably assures up-and-comers a chance. Besides, it can’t reasonably be expected that every one of them will be a grandmaster from their first book out, can it? As novelist Ken Follett tells would-be authors on his website:

My first novel was not very good but it still got published…a publisher read it and thought, “this guy could be going somewhere.” He published it because he thought I might write something better one day.

The idea that a would-be author can hope for such patronage strikes me as grossly overoptimistic, not because I think Follett is trying to mislead his readers here—I don’t—but because Follett, like so many of today’s Big Name authors, broke in at a different time (something that greatly complicates the advice that many of the Big Names dispense). While the romantic idea that the publishing industry is beating the bushes for that hot new talent that will set the world on fire is still with us (and keeping the “how-to” industry alive), editors are rarely and decreasingly in a position to make long-range bets on unknowns. As the late Thomas Disch pointed out in his brutally honest take on the genre’s past and prospects, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of:

Writers tend to consider distinction and originality as virtues, but they are anathema to publishers, who value those writers most who can be depended on to turn out…product that will move through the channels of circulation at a dependable, steady rate.

Media tie-in books of the kind mentioned above; the product coming out of the book packagers which got so much attention in the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal; the transformation of the names of bestselling authors from Robert Ludlum to James Patterson from a mark of personal craft (however dubious) to a cheap(er) brand label—are all intended to achieve this result. (Indeed, Ludlum’s case would suggest that Michener was wrong about old authors eventually having to make space for new ones.) When publishers consent to make a half-wit celebutante a bestselling author, or pay a semi-literate pundit or politician a king’s ransom for an utterly worthless book, much the same process is at work (at least, when sheer venality isn’t the motive).

Whether or not these approaches actually translate into higher sales and greater revenue, they mean fewer slots for new books by anybody and everybody, and especially from new writers (least of all writers in need of apprenticing, whatever their ultimate promise). These opportunities, after all, don’t go to the outsider looking for a first credit (barring connections like Viswanathan had), but to the underemployed pros of whom there is no shortage, especially not in today’s tight market. And when these do land the kinds of jobs described above, they are also not doing something else—producing really original material (or if they’re not up to that challenge, getting out of the way and making room for new writers who might be able to).

Even under the best of circumstances, it is easy to be cynical about the whole process, given the unending conflict between money and art, and the sheer number of people fighting to get through the door. (One has to wonder: can any selection process which must judge from among so many for every single opportunity, and so few opportunities at that, truly be rational, let alone fair?) However, the realities described above contribute powerfully to the doubts that an “intelligent curation process” like the one Ellis recently wrote about exists at all anymore; to the suspicion that not only are connections and celebrity helpful for a first-timer, but that without such connections or celebrity, the submission of anything is a gamble dependent on some freak stroke of luck not just to get a positive result, but to receive any consideration at all.

Acting on just such a suspicion, Sunday Times journalists Jonathan Calvert and Will Iredale submitted two Booker Prize-winning novels under the names of aspiring authors to 20 major publishers and literary agencies. Rather than enthusiastic interest (or a well-earned charge of plagiarism), they received form rejection letters from virtually everyone they approached.

Buying Literature by the Pound
Nor does it help that the industry is opting for longer books, a problem noted by Robert J. Sawyer in an essay of his own on this subject almost two decades ago, but which seems to have only grown since.

Back in the days when the pulps controlled the market, books rarely got much beyond 60,000 words, as Robert Bee noted in an article on the subject in the April issue of IROSF. However, a well-known literary agent (who deals in science fiction, among other things) confirmed what a lot of people have long suspected when he briefly included in his site’s guidelines a flat statement that works in that range were unsalable. Those publishers which indicate a minimum length in their guidelines almost never ask for fewer than eighty thousand words, and if you walk into any bookstore or library, you tend to see rather longer books than that on the “new” shelf. (Indeed, between the reticence of magazines about publishing longer works, and the disinterest of book publishers in shorter ones, works in the 10-80,000 word range are almost unpublishable, and a writer maximizing his chances would keep the stories under five K, the novels in the vicinity of a hundred K and up, ignoring a vast swathe of historically very worthwhile literary territory. Gregory Feeley put it quite nicely in his article on the subject: “If I really wanted my next novella to reach a wide audience, I should make it 600 pages long.”)

Even established authors seem to be feeling the pressure to invest time and energy that might otherwise be used more productively into lengthening their narratives (not only in the form of bigger books, but sequels, trilogies, and series that drag on long after their time). However, it is again the case that this demand hits new writers hardest, even overlooking all the extra space used up on the shelf by the fatter books and unnecessary sequels. Less experienced authors simply have a harder time generating really long narratives at any given level of quality. Long books are also harder to write when a lousy day job from which you can’t take much time off is your only source of income, putting working people at a particular disadvantage that is likely worsening in an economy characterized by longer hours, longer commutes, and greater insecurity. These things all take a toll on housekeeping, child-rearing, and community life; they also take their toll on such efforts.

Alternative Paths
The unpromising situation is testified to by the fact that new “how-to” books are rather more likely than before to recommend expensive, risky, and traditionally disreputable self-publishing to would-be authors. Such a scarcity of opportunity hardly encourages the risk-taking that produces significant innovation, either on the part of those already in the field but not in so powerful a position that they can do what they damn well please, or those fighting to get in. On the contrary, it may well mean a tightening of all those unwritten rules about what writers can and can’t do.

Such changes, of course, afflict all of literature, not just science fiction. However, it seems that science fiction, which for a long time may have actually benefited from the perception of it as a “marginal” part of the literary world, is especially vulnerable in a more thoroughly commercialized field. One reason is that it accounts for just three percent of book sales, hardly the thing to attract support from the Suits. (By contrast, romance novels, broadly defined, are commonly said to constitute roughly 50 percent of the market; thrillers of various kinds, another 28 percent or so.)

As a literature of ideas, a great deal of quality science fiction is resistant to the kind of “high-concept,” squeeze-it-all-into-one-sentence,” marketing-first mentality that prevails in the electronic media to which publishing has become so closely tied, and which it has increasingly come to resemble. Weaker sales and weaker corporate support feed each other in a vicious cycle underscored by the rarity of recent science fiction bestsellers unconnected with an established media franchise in recent decades. (And even the media tie-ins may be in trouble over the long term, given the substitution of reality shows and other cheap, “unscripted” programming for everything else on television, and the fact that the costs for major motion pictures are still spiraling out of control, a $300 million budget increasingly routine.)

At the same time, because the ghetto walls remain up, the arts crowd that is supposed to be willing to damn sales figures and toast quality where they find it can hardly be counted on to extend its support. The small presses that may seem to offer authors an alternative to the locked doors of the big houses rarely go in for this sort of material, for instance, especially given the very narrow focus of most of them (such as regional writing). (And of course, direct-to-e-book publishing is in a less developed state than the webzine.) Is it little wonder, then, that so few of today’s science fiction writers are as well known to the general public as the big names of the Golden Age?

What Next?
With theoretical and applied science a less fertile source of inspiration; science itself diminished in its cultural influence and apparent promise; the ability to envision a future, particularly a positive future, weakened by decades of economic and technological disappointment, even as the idea of a technological Singularity has become widespread; the aging of the genre, and in particular the exhaustion of its early contradictions and gaps as a fruitful source of tension; much of the gas in the genre’s engine has already been used up, and new ideas are a lot harder to come by. At the same time, a much-tightened market has reduced the opportunities for writers (particularly new ones), making it harder for whatever new ideas really may be out there to find expression.

What remains is a highly fragmented field, one whose strengthened sense of tradition can easily be read as a greater tendency to look backward than forward (evidenced in subgenres like steampunk). Additionally, the boundaries between science fiction and other forms of popular and elite literature (never drawn with perfect neatness) are continuing their long drift toward greater blurriness, with the breakdown of “realism” in so much postmodern writing, and the steady absorption of so many science fiction tropes into the mainstream. Reflective of such absorption, what remains will likely be a stock of concepts, situations, and devices (perhaps slowly expanding) that writers in general draw on in writing their comedies, dramas, adventures, and romances, without anyone really thinking of the latter products as science fiction.

Many tropes of what we today think of as belonging to that genre are also likely to enter the larger store of mythological imagery, right along with the stuff of Greek myths and Medieval romances, especially when they have the makings of a “biblio-niche” which can, when all is said and done, still survive on the desire of fans for “another ride on the same merry-go-round rather than novelty,” as Disch put it. The galactic empire story, the postapocalyptic adventure (driven by anxieties which may wax and wane but never entirely go away) certainly have proven to be that. I suspect, however, that just as mainstream writers already use science fiction tropes without calling them that (who refers to Philip Roth as a science fiction writer?), these kinds of stories will increasingly be thought of as fantasy, rather than the reverse. (Commercially, we already seem to be well on our way to that destination, with fantasy outselling science fiction by more than two to one, and fantasy’s simpler marketability already proven.)

Meanwhile, science fiction as a fiction of ideas, especially ideas founded in science, science fiction as a fiction of extrapolations from what we already know to explain what we do not—science fiction in this narrower, “purer” sense will become increasingly rare. Its most typical expressions, the stories of scientists and their inventions and discoveries and other doings; the stories about people who suddenly have to deal with some shocking development, with the scientific possibility underlying it key to the tale’s draw; the stories that purport to seriously imagine the world of 20 or 50 or a 100 years from now (if only as a way of making a point); science fiction as John Barnes uses the term in his article, for the most part; much of this has already come to seem old-fashioned and will be of ever less interest to anyone beyond a small group of hardcore enthusiasts because it cannot withstand the kinds of processes described. (Stories set in yesteryear’s version of what the twenty-first century will look like have a much shorter shelf life than science fantasy set in the year 8000 A.D.) And it is this which will mean the decay of a distinctive science fiction genre as a living, breathing, growing, and developing thing, becoming a “zombie,” perhaps, but really living on only in the descendants carrying its widely dispersed genes.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, someone, probably many someones, will pick out a point, a year, a decade, a final worthy piece, and identify it as The End. People have done this many times before, of course, but the difference is that it’s likely to stick at this time, meeting with enough approval that it gets to be widely accepted, and mindlessly repeated, proof that the inertia, the denial, the clinging to a dwindling stream of creativity as proof of a long life ahead of the genre will have run its course, and life come to be distinguished from afterlife, likely sooner than the optimists expect.

Nonetheless, this picture assumes the convergence and continuation of a lot of factors, and one of the things you find out when you spend any time predicting the future (or just looking at how people have done it before), is that not only do things rarely proceed in straight-line fashion, but also that while history tends to repeat itself, it never does so perfectly. And this article certainly is not making a case for determinism on this issue. I believe there is a case to be made against this assessment, and while all comments are welcome in the forum, I particularly invite those with thoughts on that subject to write in.