Pity. I was going to offer to start one, on a small but expandable scale and at my firms expense if you’d said no. You know I could do it on my end. But I’d need connections to get the writers to participate.
Maybe a quarterly pub that exclusively prints stories from the sub-30 year old author crowd.
I’ll support one idea that was floated above. I think scientists are often too busy to write and are ill-trained to write. If you demand that all sf be scientifically above reproach, then you have to settle for the handful of people who can pull that off.
FYI, I’ve started a new CS thread on a related but distinct question: Is SF fandom dying?
Robert L. Forward, for one.
Well, Forward’s dead, but Greg Benford is still alive. There are others, of course, and a lot of ones who have passed away.
I’ve got an anthology from the 1960s entitled Science Fiction by Scientists. Interesting read – I hadn’t heard of a lot of the writers, but others I had. Not the usual crowd (Asimov, Hoyle, etc.) Norbert Weiner wrote SF!
That’s a huge reason for me. Somewhere in the early '90s, the comfort level price point for new hardbacks and paperbacks passed my “impulse buy” threshold. I almost never buy a book new, and much of what lingers on the used bookstore shelves is crap.
I think SF has become a very tight market, with publishers pushing “marketable” mass-market appeal books (like the horrible Dune prequels), instead of taking risks with fringe authors. Often, I will have to special-order any of the Nebula/Hugo/PKDick nominees I want to read, simply because they only ever appeared in limited-run small publishers and never got picked up by a publisher who could make the Barnes and Noble shelves. And these are award nominees! I can’t even imagine how fast poor unestablished authors disappear without ever being read.
9 times out of ten when I go to buy science fiction, I buy it from the used bookstore. I think that speaks for itself, considering that I am an avid reader and SF fan. The older stuff is better. Frank Herbert’s ideas seem fresher than Neil Stephenson’s. Vinge and Varley wrote stories that are like ripe peaches compared to the raisins you get today. Plus the prices are reasonable. There’s no way I’m going to pay $15.99 for a book that I can get at the used bookstore for $3.00.
Plus, so much of fantasy is utter shite. Goodkind is a hack. So is Jordan - Wheel of Time should have been subtitled “My Retirement Plan by Robert Jordan”. Magic the Gathering? No thank you.
So here I am, a huge SF fan who spends very little money on SF books. I think I might be pretty typical in that respect.
BTW, current young adult literature is booming with witches and supernatural and fantasy stuff. Perhaps we will experiance a renaissance when these readers mature?
Perhaps, but don’t hold your breath. I know more than one individual who reads or at least read Science Fiction and couldn’t get into Fantasy and more than one individual who is the other way around.
There is, often, a qualitative difference between SF and Fantasy–not a difference in quality, a difference in approach–a difference like that between blue and green, or blue and purple. So young people reading about witches and supernatural and fantasy stuff may grow up into middle aged people reading about witches and supernatural and fantasy stuff, but not ever “mature” into readers of “true SF.”
I’m afraid so. I was quite a trial to my very mundane parents. My grandfather, who loved SF, let me read his collection of Analogs. He also passed quite a few novels my way, too.
Science Fiction is different than the Western, because the latter focused on a fleeting, bygone era that inevitably faded from popular interest. SF is a subset of an elemental part of storytelling: What If? There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. It may diminish from certain mediums (like what’s happening in print right now), but hold the faith. I predict that we’ll keep seeing more flavors of SF. If you take SF&F in as a whole, it looks to me to be the biggest section of the bookstore. Look at it the other way around – the genre is subdividing itself more-so than ever. Unfortunately for me, I have little interest in Magical Fantasy. I’d rather those shelves be lit up with Soft & Hard SciFi. Perhaps there will yet again be a resurgence, or we’ll continue to see even more flavors of ‘What If?’ storytelling.
In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying the resurgence of SF television. (Lost, BSG, Eureka, Daybreak, The Lost Room, Heros, etc.)
When I started collecting in high school I haunted used book stores, but mostly for magazines. New books were .50 or .75 (or $.95 for a monster like Dune.) I got all the Ace SF Specials new, even with not a bunch of money.
Now I buy books used also - why not buy 4 used for the price of one new? There are very few good enough to buy new - Pratchett and some Baxter, and that’s about it. Anyhow, with my queue, if I buy new, unless I really, really want to read it, it will be available used until I get to it.
But sf isn’t unique - the New Yorker had a piece on the things the average hardback buyer could do if they swore off hardcovers.
That would be true if there weren’t an overlap between the two genres, with some of the best writers easily shifting between SF and Fantasy. Zelazny, Silverberg, Donaldson, Martin, Simmons, Wolfe, LeGuin - are they Fantasy writers or SF writers? Does it matter?
So some kid may read a fantasy story from his favorite writer, and if the writer’s next book is SF, the kid would probably read it too. I started reading Zelazny’s SF after devouring his Amber books; conversely, I generally don’t read historical fiction… unless it’s written by Neil Stephenson.
My advice to SF writers, then, is: broaden your appeal. Write Fantasy, horror, historical fiction, maybe even nonfiction. Get them to like your writing and they’ll like anything you write, even “hard” SF. And if they get that far, maybe they’ll start reading SF on their own.
Buying new hardbacks is something that you might do later in life even if you only bought used books and paperbacks when you were younger. I’m now slowly replacing the crummy-looking thirty- to fifty-year-old used books and the (then) new paperbacks with new hardbacks now that I can afford them. The old books go to either (1) the book exchange that a local science fiction club I belong to has every year, (2) the auction at a fantasy convention I go to every year, or (3) Christmas presents for my nieces and nephews. I get better-looking books and nothing goes to waste.
Alessan,
There is some validity to what you say. In fact, there is a lot of validity to what you say.
However, it isn’t true for everyone. There are plenty of people who do NOT read everything a beloved author writes–especially if it crosses genres. I know an avid reader/librarian/instructor of new librarians who adored Andre Norton–so long as Norton wrote Science Fiction. My instructor tried more than one Andre Norton fantasy book and just couldn’t get into it. For this lady, Science Fiction and Fantasy involve different ways of looking at the world, and explaining the world, as much or more than they do whether there are aliens and spaceships or swords and magic. She is not alone.
Objection number two: it probably says something about me, but I’m annoyed by the suggestion that somehow a fondness for fantasy is a less mature and sophisticated taste than a fondness for SF is.
This sounds like you think that every SF writer could write these other genres if they would just stoop so low in order to bring people to the One True Genre.
The reality of the marketplace tells us that this is not in general true. Only a minority of people follow a writer across genres. The more writers work in various genres the more their total sales suffer. All publishers these day push for writers to stick to one genre, or use a pseudonym if they really want to work in a different genre. Or even different series characters within the same genre. Numerous mystery writers have to use a pseudonym when they start a new series. Using their own name hurts their sales, which hurts orders from the chains, which hurts the original series. Most pseudonyms these days are open secrets so that the minority like you can follow if they wish, but the general readership - the vast majority - doesn’t know or care.
Then how do you explain the succes of the writers I mentioned?
Zelazny - wrote mainly SF, but his most famous work is Fantasy.
LeGuin - ditto.
Simmons - started in Horror, shifted to SF. Successful in both.
Martin - started in SF, now probably the the most celebrated High Fantasy writer in the business.
Wolfe - constantly blurred the border between the genres. Famous for writing SF., now writes Fantasy.
Donaldson - author of three major series, two Fantasy, one hard SF. Short strories alternate between.
Kay - started in high Fantasy, no writing something approaching historical fiction.
Stephenson - started in SF, now writes historical fiction with slight fantasy elements.
Gibson - “father of cyberpunk” (Sterling is the mother), latest novel had no SF elements in in whatsoever.
They’re old. So old that they became Brand Names before the game changed. Brand Names are immune to the rules that the multitude of lesser mortals face. James Patterson had five (5!) books hit number one on the Times bestseller list in 2006 despite being incapable of writing an interesting page. Why? Because he’s a Brand Name. How did he become a Brand Name? Nobody knows.
None of this has any impact on the general run of writers. We know what happens to them. We have the sales numbers to prove it. Exceptions do not prove the rule. They remain exceptions.