# Need Asimov expert! **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 30, 2012, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802 "2012-06-30T13:20:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/21 "2012-07-04T00:18:19Z")
Exapno Mapcase, could you explain to me in what sense you’re disagreeing with me? What you say in posts #17 and #20 doesn’t seem to disagree in any significant way with what I say in post #18. You may be reading more into my post than is there. ---
**Author:** ![MrDurden](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@MrDurden](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDurden)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/22 "2012-07-04T01:16:55Z")
While we’re in this thread… I faintly remember a collection of short stories and in one of my favorites there was a husband and wife with two ‘kids’ one of them was an android child who was sweet and loving and the other one a real human who was a horrible kid and a fire happened and well… you can guess which one the wife saved. I can’t remember the name of it, nor can I remember the finer plot points. I’d like to reread this and the others in the collection. Anyone have any ideas? ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/23 "2012-07-04T01:58:03Z")
Doesn’t ring a bell, but reminds me a bit of the movie _A.I._ ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 2:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/24 "2012-07-04T02:05:24Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > There was simply no way to obtain enough good stories in the years 1972 through 1975 to fill all the anthologies he was editing in addition to all the other magazines and anthologies that existed then. Soon readers figured out the average quality of stories in his anthologies wasn’t very good, and writers figured out that it would be better to submit their work first to other outlets. Publishers then quit giving Elwood contracts for anthologies. By 1980 the science fiction market had recovered from the effects of Elwood. > [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Exapno Mapcase, could you explain to me in what sense you’re disagreeing with me? What you say in posts #17 and #20 doesn’t seem to disagree in any significant way with what I say in post #18. You may be reading more into my post than is there. A) He didn’t buy all that many stories in the first place compared to the overall size of the market. B) Many of the stories he did buy were first rate. (And I didn’t even mention the major _Epoch_ anthology because it was co-edited by Silverberg. That took first place in the Locus poll of 1976.) C) Major writers submitted work to him all the time. Those are all factual statements. You also make some claims that I don’t have facts on but wonder about. D) I don’t know what readers thought. How do you claim to know? E) I don’t know why or even if publishers stopped giving him contracts. He might have given up the workload if it didn’t produce enough returns. How do you claim to know? F) In what way did the market recover by 1980? How was 1980 any different from 1976? Seems to me that I have plenty of disagreement with you. You are, admittedly, stating the general wisdom, but my point from the beginning was that I never understood what basis in fact that had. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/25 "2012-07-04T03:57:34Z")
> [@](#): > > While we’re in this thread… > > I faintly remember a collection of short stories and in one of my favorites there was a husband and wife with two ‘kids’ one of them was an android child who was sweet and loving and the other one a real human who was a horrible kid and a fire happened and well… you can guess which one the wife saved. > > I can’t remember the name of it, nor can I remember the finer plot points. I’d like to reread this and the others in the collection. Anyone have any ideas? That was definitely an Asimov, but I can’t remember the title, and nothing from _The Rest of the Robots_ seems to match. ---
**Author:** ![Rala](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@Rala](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rala)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 6:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/26 "2012-07-04T06:22:38Z")
> [@MrDurden](#): > > While we’re in this thread… > > I faintly remember a collection of short stories and in one of my favorites there was a husband and wife with two ‘kids’ one of them was an android child who was sweet and loving and the other one a real human who was a horrible kid and a fire happened and well… you can guess which one the wife saved. > > I can’t remember the name of it, nor can I remember the finer plot points. I’d like to reread this and the others in the collection. Anyone have any ideas? That’s “Kid Brother”. I read it in [Gold](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/438743.Gold). ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/27 "2012-07-04T13:11:10Z")
First, Exapno Mapcase, note that you only quoted my second paragraph, which I thought was obviously the less important part of the point I was making. The first paragraph was the real heart of what I was saying, which was that he had no longterm effect because his anthologies were a significant part of the market only for three or maybe four years. So that’s why I don’t think that you’re disagreeing with me in any significant way. So what do you mean by saying that you mostly disagree with me? Second, let’s go through the years for Elwood’s anthologies: 1964 1 1965 1 1966 1 1967 1 1968 1 1969 3 1970 1 1971 1 1972 4 1973 15 1974 20 1975 7 1976 3 1977 2 1978 1 What proportion of the science fiction market were his anthologies over his busy period? I would say that twenty anthologies in one year were a lot of it. Do you have some exact figures for this? The Wikipedia entry says that at one point his anthologies were a quarter of the market: > **[Roger Elwood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Elwood)** > > Roger Elwood (January 13, 1943 – February 2, 2007) was an American science fiction writer and editor, who edited a large number of anthologies and collections for a variety of publishers in the early to mid-1970s. > Born and raised in South Jersey, Roger Elwood started his professional writing career shortly after graduating from high school. > Elwood edited two wrestling magazines, The Big Book of Wrestling and Official Wrestling Guide, on a contract basis in 1971–72 for Jalart House, an Arizona p... I never said that he didn’t publish some first-rate stories. Of course he did, and I would have mentioned that if I had chosen to write at a little more length. What I said was that the average quality of the stories wasn’t very good. That’s quite a different statement. I was one of those readers back then, and I remember hearing it discussed that the anthologies weren’t very good on average. The comments on his anthologies in the Wikipedia entry were typical of what I heard. I presume that the publishers must have caught on to this, since after 1975 they only published six more of his anthologies. I wonder if those anthologies were ones contracted before and only published later. I didn’t say that writers quit submitting to him. I said that they only submitted to him after other markets. That’s also quite a different statement. Do you have some figures on the number of anthologies published each year before and after Elwood? The Wikipedia entry quotes from Teresa Neilsen Hayden on Elwood. She says that it appears that the reason that his anthologies didn’t have very good stories on average was that he went out of his way to pick unpublished or little published authors. She says that it appears that he paid so little that better authors didn’t want to submit to him. The Wikipedia entry also talks about his founding of Laser Books on the model of Harlequin Books but for science fiction. That didn’t last long either. He was also criticized for that. ---
**Author:** ![Fenris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fenris/32/498_2.png) [@Fenris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fenris)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/28 "2012-07-04T13:48:14Z")
A more complete quote from Teresa Neilsen Hayden > [@](#): > > What’s safe to say is that there are no very creditable explanations for his flood of anthologies in the mid-1970s; that the publishers who bought them would never have done so if they’d had any idea that he was carpet-bombing SF publishing with anthology projects; that many of his anthologies (if not all the stories in them) were well below par in terms of their quality; and that the subsequent collapse of the anthology and story-collection market did long-term damage to science fiction as a whole. From [here](http://www.jonathanstrahan.com.au/wp/2006/02/16/roger-elwood-and-the-anthology-market/) As an aside, didn’t Piers Anthony sue the crap out of Elwood for “butchering” one of Anthony’s novels (by adding a co-author without Anthony’s consent) for Laser books? Heh…except for his first two or three Xanth novels\*, how could you tell if someone “butchered” Anthony’s prose. 😉 \*And let’s give credit where credit is due, Anthony pretty much single-handedly broke the idea that had been pushed by Lin Carter and his (wonderful) Adult Fantasy series for Ballantine that Fantasy novels had to be High Art (note that out of roughly 70 novels in the line, only one (_Land of Unreason_) is outright humor and “light” fantasy, and maybe a few others (the Kai Lung stuff, and depending on your tastes the James Branch Cabell stuff) is even funny. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Lin Carter set the tone for fantasy for maybe 10 years ('65-'75-ish) and Anthony broke through that idea and showed that there was a market for lighter, funny fantasy. (The real credit though, goes to Judy-Lynn DelRey for publishing it. I miss her stuff–used to be that from about '75-'85, any book I picked up from Del Rey was guaranteed to be something I’d enjoy) ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/29 "2012-07-04T16:42:07Z")
Wendell, I’ve said more than once already that yours is the conventional viewpoint. It’s a subjective viewpoint, though, which makes disputing it near impossible. The only way I can poke at it is through the numbers to see if they match up. I’m not interested enough in the issue to go through every anthology and magazine of the day doing counts. But the field of sf is full of obsessives, and much of the info has been compiled by others. In particular, I can point you to a [blog posting](http://www.jonathanstrahan.com.au/wp/2006/02/16/more-on-elwood/) by Johnathan Strahan, specifically commenting on the Wiki entry by Teresa Neilsen Hayden. He lists the number of original and reprint anthologies every year from 1941 to 2004 and shows how many of them were by Elwood. (Info provided by Bill Contento, who is an expert among experts.) Did Elwood kill the market? Well, there was a slight dip in original anthologies but the bigger dip didn’t start until 1982. That’s hard to place on Elwood’s shoulders. And Strahan doesn’t do one thing he should: break Elwood’s anthologies into original, youth, and reprint. Take Elwood’s peak year of 1974. Elwood put out 21 original anthologies and only two reprints. But eight of those were the 48 page books aimed at the children’s market. If you subtract those, Elwood put out 13 and everybody else put out 19. So Elwood had less than half of the adult anthology market and none of the magazine market. Normally you cannot get me to regard _The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction_ with anything less than awe. I know very well what a totally gob-stopping amount of work was required for it. More than most. I wrote several dozen entries for a competing project that never saw print. And never paid me. Still, anything that large must contain a few mistakes. And one major one appears in the Wiki article which quotes it as saying that “At one time it was estimated that Roger Elwood alone constituted about one quarter of the total market for SF short stories.” This can’t be true. His total output for his peak year was about equal to any one of the monthly sf magazines. And there were were several small magazines that appeared and disappeared. \*Vertex \*was around that time. _Science Fiction Monthly_ in Britain debuted around then. The men’s magazines always picked up a number of sf stories: \*Playboy \*printed big names and several writers got their starts in the Playboy imitators. Plus, again, he was less than half of the original anthology market itself. Strahan casts many doubts on Hayden’s argument in his article. The subjective elements are harder to refute but one thing should be noted. Hayden wasn’t there. She was too young. She entered the professional editorial ranks many years later, when Elwood was a vanished and legendary figure. I’m perfectly wiling to believe that Elwood wasn’t a great guy or a great editor or a great contributor to the field. I’m focusing on the statement that he killed the anthology market. I’ll concede that maybe publishers felt subjectively that they had been burned and drew back. But whenever I look at the numbers I can’t find any evidence. The number of non-Elwood original anthologies went from 19 in 1974 to 16 in 1975 and up to 30 in 1976 and 29 in 1977. Some death. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/30 "2012-07-04T17:20:08Z")
But I wasn’t supporting the conventional viewpoint. The conventional viewpoint is that Elwood killed the anthology market in the long run. My point was that wasn’t true. The Strahan blog makes it clearer than I did. Not only didn’t Elwood depress the number of anthologies for a few years after the peak of his editing (up to 1979, I guessed), but he didn’t even depress the number of anthologies (if you subtract his anthologies) for the period of his peak and the few years afterwards. Here are the number of anthologies that Elwood didn’t edit for each year: Year—Number of Non-Elwood Anthologies 1941: 1 1942: 1 1943: 3 1944: 1 1945: 3 1946: 6 1947: 3 1948: 3 1949: 7 1950: 9 1951: 16 1952: 19 1953: 28 1954: 31 1955: 21 1956: 11 1957: 6 1958: 18 1959: 16 1960: 16 1961: 15 1962: 25 1963: 38 1964: 34 1965: 41 1966: 52 1967: 39 1968: 52 1969: 45 1970: 52 1971: 73 1972: 52 1973: 75 1974: 77 1975: 70 1976: 79 1977: 86 1978: 69 1979: 75 1980: 82 1981: 74 1982: 67 1983: 62 1984: 66 1985: 85 1986: 92 1987: 109 1988: 127 1989: 132 1990: 137 1991: 147 1992: 126 1993: 120 1994: 142 1995: 157 1996: 141 1997: 146 1998: 142 1999: 106 2000: 114 2001: 123 2002: 128 2003: 147 2004: 129 So if I was wrong about anything, it was about the fact that Elwood had any effect on the anthology market at all. In so far as I was agreeing with the conventional viewpoint, I was saying that Elwood might have had some effect for a few years, but he didn’t have a long-term effect. Now that I look at the numbers above, it appears that he had very little effect. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/31 "2012-07-04T21:24:26Z")
> [@Fenris](#): > > As an aside, didn’t Piers Anthony sue the crap out of Elwood for “butchering” one of Anthony’s novels (by adding a co-author without Anthony’s consent) for Laser books? Heh…except for his first two or three Xanth novels\*, how could you tell if someone “butchered” Anthony’s prose. 😉 “But What of Earth” - he later published it in the original form, with editor’s comments [Piers Anthony | Incarnations of Immortality Wiki | Fandom](http://incarnations.wikia.com/wiki/Piers_Anthony) ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2012, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/32 "2012-07-07T19:13:57Z")
Sorry but must comment on some of the “up posts”. Personally I was introduced to SF by reading an uncles collection of pulp magazines back in the 60s, though the mags were quite a bit older. I was totally hooked, the ideas were often completely original; and commented on society, astro physics, history and god knows what else. They were truly original and thought provoking. But genuine SF died the death several decades ago, its Space Opera now, todays ideas and science dressed up in futuristic garb. Call me a reactionary if you will, but when people start mentioning names from the post 2000 I reach for my shotgun. The only decent IMO, writer now is Banks, and he’s incredibly imaginative but sucks at completing stories. ---
**Author:** ![Lynn\_Bodoni](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e47c2d/32.png) [@Lynn\_Bodoni](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lynn_Bodoni)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2012, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/33 "2012-07-07T19:19:26Z")
> [@](#): > > But genuine SF died the death several decades ago, its Space Opera now, todays ideas and science dressed up in futuristic garb. Vernor Vinge. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2012, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802/34 "2012-07-07T19:58:30Z")
Lust4Life, I’m not a moderator, and I’m not claiming that I have any say on what can or can’t be discussed in a thread. However, your post doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything previously mentioned in this thread other than the fact that it’s about science fiction. In particular, no names of authors whose writings were mostly post-2000 were mentioned at all in this thread, so I don’t understand what your comment about such authors has to do with this thread. The points you mention in your post are interesting, but I suspect that you’ll get a better response if you start a new thread about the quality of recent science fiction as opposed to older science fiction. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/need-asimov-expert/626802.md?page=1)