Sedgewick - The Fork in The Road

SF-TH Inc
The Fork in the Road: Can Science Fiction Survive in Postmodern, Megacorporate America? (Le
Chemin qui fourche: la science-fiction peut-il survivre dans une Amrique postmoderne et
mgacorporative?)
Author(s): Cristina Sedgewick
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 11-52
Published by: SF-TH Inc
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SF IN POSTMODERN, MEGACORPORATE AMERICA 11
Cristina Sedgewick
The Fork in the Road: Can Science Fiction
Survive in Postmodern, Megacorporate America?
There's a lot of loud, bitter complaining and dire dystopia-construction going
on in the House of SF these days. Publications as diverse as Science Fictiont
Eye, The Science Fiction Review, The New York Review of Science Fiction,
and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction have been featuring
columns and articles on the decline (and in some cases the predicted
imminent fall) of SF, the plethora of trash filling SF racks in bookstores, the
near-impossibility for previously unpublished "maverick" writers to break
into the field, and the short shelf-life of quality moderately-selling books not
already pegged as "classics." Lively and noisy as such polemics can be, the
discussion takes on a sharper, more personal edge when waged by writers
talking off-the-record. Though not carried on publicly, these personal
discussions are commonplace. As one author who has been publishing SF for
20 years reported recently (requesting anonymity):1
The stories I have [about the publishing scene], however depressing, aren't
particularly shocking to anyone working in this field. In addition to my own
experience, my sources are other writers and one editor who spoke to me at
length. In general, I sensed more bitterness at this [SF] convention than I felt at
the same gathering last year.
Most published discussion of SF's trouble has focussed on the trickle-
down symptoms affecting readers and writers, without reference to the
economic and political structures from which they flow. The selection of SF
to be found on bookstore shelves no longer satisfies readers; the conditions
for publication are becoming increasingly intolerable for writers: these are
symptoms of a complex monster of a problem that encompasses every stage
of SF's publication, from its writing, to its production, to its distribution. But
to date only editor/critic Kathryn Cramer has essayed (in print) to look
beyond internal explanations for diagnosing the symptoms. More commonly
we read that "soft" or "New Wave" or "Dangerous" or "Feminist" SF has
"killed belief in the future" or otherwise "corrupted" SF.2 Taken singly,
suich explanations blame certain types of SF for having imperilled the entire
House with their imputed deviations. But taken as a whole they reveal a
widespread sense of deprivation of the type of SF that their propounders
want to read (or publish).3 Unless one is determined to privilege one type
of SF (and group of finger-pointers) over all others, any internal explanation
12 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 18 (1991)
must be seen as a red herring that serves only to distract attention from the
more deeply rooted sources of the problem. Besides internal explanations,
writers on the subject also tend to favor piecemeal analyses that focus on
particular symptoms in isolation. Piecemeal analyses thus decry "pack-
agers"4 for having corrupted the genre and stolen shelf-space from more
original work; chain bookstores for their surveillance over the sales records
of the work of both writers and editors; big money from Fantasy for raising
unrealistic standards of profit for publishers; obscenely huge advances for a
few writers, pittances for most others-with rising prices for the reader; the
failure of SF criticism to be "hard-nosed" and "intellectually uncompromis-
ing"; and the superfluity of F&SF being published, swamping the reader in
trash.5
The true parameters of the problem are probably not visible to most
members of the SF community. The single most important fact that anyone
who cares about SF needs to know about SF publishing is that the industry
to which the fortunes of SF have traditionally been linked has evolved and
altered over the last few decades such that its raison d'etre has become ir-
relevant-perhaps even inimical-to the interests and desires of SF readers
and writers. Ideally one would like to believe that publishers, distributors,
and bookstores exist primarily to broker relations between readers and
writers, matching the books readers want to read with the writers who want
to write them, resulting in a blissful conjunction of supply and demand on
the one hand (with a reasonable profit for the brokers whose capital and
entrepreneurial spirit make the whole transaction possible) and Art on the
other. One might argue that in the early history of SF such a blissful
conjunction did obtain, for the development of SF as a genre did in large
part depend upon pulp publishing. In the postmodern world, however, where
multinational conglomerates own most publishing houses and bookstores,
such a paradigm rates as an obsolete fantasy. Readers', writers', and even
editors' interests are not necessarily identical with those of the multinational
corporations producing and distributing SF. I propose to adumbrate this
divergence of interests and examine not only how it affects the ability of
readers to access the kind of SF they want to read, but also its impact on SF
writers and their work.
1. No problem or crisis simply arises spontaneously out of a momentary
concatenation of events (though the presentation of current events by the US
media might lead one to think so). Our difficulty in getting beyond internal
and symptomatic explanations for SF's present fix stems in large part from
our failure to see the development of SF in terms of its evolving relation-
ship with the multicorporate world of publishers and booksellers. More
importantly, though SF's problem is related and parallel to that currently
afflicting all US fiction-publishing, certain aspects of SF's problem are
peculiar to the genre and must be understood as an outcome of SFs own
particular development. A sketch of this history is therefore in order.
(a) In pre-modern (i.e., pre-bourgeois) times, aristocrats supported the
production of literature (i.e., poetry and prose). Patronage of the arts
swelled the ego and prestige of the aristocrat, granting him that ineffable
satisfaction of contributing to culture and civilization and thus promoting
The Good, The Beautiful, and The Sublime. Without the support of a
patron, single-sheet publication was about the best any verbal artist could
hope for. All other verbal production remained in the strictly oral realm.
(b) With the development of capitalism (and the increasing mechani-
zation and spread of printing and the expansion of literacy) family-owned,
bourgeois firms gradually took over the publishing of poetry and prose.
Such firms reaped only a modest profit by today's standards-sufficient, of
course, to keep them in business-but their owners enjoyed engagement in
a relatively elevated area of business not quite as tainted with the crass as
was trading in pork belly futures or coal, for instance.
(c) In 19th-century America, these family-owned firms published not only
"high literature" in books and "quality magazines" (i.e., magazines for
people of quality), but also "pulp": cheap paperback books and story papers
(i.e., magazines in newspaper format) with women and young people as their
principal readership. Many pulp writers wrote for the money-Louisa May
Alcott, for instance (whose potboilers are in such violation of today's taboos
that little of her output would have made it past the delicate sensibilities of
1990 editors).6 Between 1890 and 1920 the "quality magazines" were grad-
ually replaced by popular magazines (Munsey's, McClure's, et al.) and the
story papers and dime-novel series by the pulp-paper fiction magazines,
which by 1920 had begun to specialize by genre (Detective Story Magazinie,
Western Story Magazine, Love Story Magazine, all published by Street and
Smith); at about the same time as book-publishers began establishing special
lists for the same categories. In the late '20s and early '30s, SF became
another of the pulp-magazine genres.
(d) In the '50s, paperback book publishing took off, culminating in a
boom of paperback originals by the early 1960s. Many new writers (as well
as veterans with interesting books) got their start in that boom. Although the
dictatorships of pulp editors and pulp formulas (such as the one insisted
upon by the Scott Meredith Agency, whose formula has-whether they know
it or not-been adopted as standard criteria by the majority of SF editors
editing today)' heavily influenced the development of SF writing, it should
be remembered that editors like Gernsback, Campbell, Boucher, and Gold
and publishers like the Ballantines were all devoted to SF as literature rather
than simply to the financial bottom line.
(e) "What happened since then," to quote Joanna Russ, "and what has
continued to happen,"
is first of all
[that]
about 1975 money got very tight in everything....The country
started going into a depression.8 Which it has continued to go into ever since....
What happened also was that by the '60s and '70s you start having the big fish
eat the littler fish and the bigger fish eat the big fish and the even bigger fish eat
the bigger fish and so on. So what you have finally in the '70s is more and more
and more book publishers suddenly being bought up by really big business.9 Like
RCA. I mean conglomerates that are huge. And when that happens, sooner or
later in spite of everyone's stated intentions they first of all start marketing books
as if they were canned tomatoes, standardizing things...and the bottom
line gets to be the only important
thing.1?
Some examples of the giant conglomerates that Russ is talking about and
the publishers subsumed within them include:
(1) Newhouse (said by Locus [December 1989] to be the largest such
conglomerate in the US), which owns Random House, Ballantine, Del Rey,
Fawcett, Shocken, Ivy, Knopf, Pantheon, Crown Publishing group, and
Villard, plus several British publishing companies;
(2) British-owned Penguin USA, which includes in the US not only
Penguin, but Viking, Dutton, Dial, NAL, Roc, DAW, Signet, and Mentor;
Australian Rupert Murdoch owns a 20 percent interest in this concern-the
same Rupert Murdoch who himself controls HarperCollins (sic), scores of
newspapers, magazines, scholarly, scientific, and technical journals, and
television stations throughout the world, as well as Fox Studios and Sky
Television (a four-channel satellite service in Britain), and many of the
world's leading news services;
(3) Paramount Communications, Inc. (a subsidiary of Gulf +
Western),
which owns Simon & Schuster, Baen, Pocket Books, Prentice-Hall, and Arco
Publishing;
(4) British magnate Robert Maxwell's Macmillan, which owns Tor,
Bluejay, Macmillan, and St Martin's (all of them but a part of Maxwell's
empire, which controls hundreds of newspapers in Britain alone);
(5) MCA, which owns Putnam, Berkley, Ace, Avon, and William Morrow
(and has just been taken over by Matsushita Electric Industrial, a Japanese
multinational);
(6) Time-Warner, which owns Little, Brown, Warner, Questar, Popular
Library, Scott Foresman, and the Book-of-the-Month Club (plus WIC, the
world's second-largest record company, HBO, Cinemax, American Television
and Communcations Corporation, Warner Brothers, and dozens of
magazines-Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, People, etc.);
(7) German-owned Bertelsmann, which owns (in the US alone)
Doubleday, Bantam, Dell, and The Literary Guild Book Club (plus RCA
and Arista records, and Gruner & Jahr, publisher of some 40 US maga-
zines)."
As one commentator remarks,
The global media oligopoly is not visible to the eye of the consumer. Newsstands
still display rows of newspapers and magazines in a dazzling variety of colors and
subjects. Bookstores and libraries still offer miles of shelves stocked with
individual volumes. Throughout the world, broadcast and cable channels
continue to multiply, as do videocassettes and music recordings in dozens of
languages. But if this bright kaleidescope suddenly disappeared and was replaced
by the corporate colophons of those who own this output, the collage would go
gray with the names of the few media multinationals that now command the
field. (Bagdikian, "Lords of the Global Village" 807)
Those familiar with these megacorporations will note that not all of them
are US-owned and that most of them dominate other areas of the media
besides book publishing, thus facilitating what Donald Maass calls "vertical
integration" (one of the effects he cites of mega-mergers). As an example
of vertical integration he notes Paramount Communication's ownership of
Star Trek:
Paramount Studios makes the movies and produces the TV show; Pocket Books
publishes the novels; S&S Software markets the computer game, and so on.
To discover the hidden 'vertical' value of a publishing company, you have only
to look at what they own. Warner owns D.C. Comics. Simon & Schuster owns
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. You follow.
Publishers follow, too. So do financial analysts. They like to call vertical inte-
gration the creation of 'synergies,' a buzzword as meaningless as they come. (35)
The effects of these "synergies" are felt in more than one way by writers.
My anonymous source relates that a writer told her in late 1989:
There are people working in this field who are not only good science fiction
writers, but are also major American writers. But they have to work with editors
who are busy juggling lists full of movie tie-ins, comics tie-ins, novelizations, and
'shared-world' junk-and they see the work of these writers as just more of the
same.
Apart from the damage an oligopoly necessarily inflicts upon those it
subsumes, the creation of giant conglomerates throughout the 1980s has
been at enormous expense.'2 "The fact is," literary agent Richard Curtis
writes, "that modern publishing has been erected over a major geological
fault" ("Agent's Corner," February i99o).13
(f) Having to do business with megapublishers, writers began to face
special problems. Different imprints owned by the same megapublisher, for
instance, were no longer allowed to bid against one another for an author's
work (as they had before they had all been bought up). In Curtis's words:
"The number of options for authors and agents has become severely
curtailed" ("Agent's Corner," December 1989).14
(g) After the Tolkien phenomenon and the unanticipated success of
Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), publishers acquired the idea
that a lot of money could be made from SF. They not only began to publish
more of it; they also started trying to figure out what makes an SF novel a
bestseller one can be certain of reaping a windfall on and began to assume
that genre books should have hundreds of thousands of readers-or none at
all. The successful packaging of romance (by Harlequin, Silhouette, et al.)
and fantasy (by Judy-Lynn Del Rey) further inspired publishers to think of
SF as a potential mass-market product that could be stocked in grocery
stores like tomatoes, cabbages, and Harlequin Romances-or, as Russ likes
to say about fantasy, shelved "by the yard."'5
The notion of transforming SF into a mass-market phenomenon marks
the first major divergence between the interests of SF and the aims,
strategies, and thinking of those who publish SF. What the select SF
readership chooses to read is not necessarily the choice of a million other
readers. Yet the desire to repeat the Heinlein success marked the beginning
of the industry's conflation of the SF readership with the mass market.
Should such conflation be applied across the genre (as many SF publishers
are already doing), a book or author's success with the relatively small SF
readership alone will no longer suffice to meet the industry's bottom line.'6
(h) The bookstore chains have become paramount in determining what
and how publishers publish.'7 (They now account for roughly 60% of all
book sales in the US.) Not only do the chains exclude small-press titles
from their stores; they have established a vicious cycle whereby publishers
are required to send them an inflated minimum number of copies of a mass-
market paperback, the covers of which can be returned (and their texts
destroyed) should said copies not be sold by a given date (as is increasingly
the case).'8 Further, in order to hold on to their shelf-space in the chains
(for which the big publishers compete among themselves), the publishers
now find it desirable to bring out an exorbitant number of titles each
month-in effect throwaways produced simply to hold on to their shelf-
space. (According to John Glusom, Senior Editor at Charles Scribner's Sons,
the average shelf-life of a book in the US is 90 days ["Books and Bucks"
181.)
This practice has in turn made possible (and attractive to publishers)
the "packaging" of shared-world series,'9 which has been one of the greatest
generators of throwaway SF written "to spec" (i.e., to the publisher's
specification[s]) and marketed through association with a star name. For the
SF reader, the chief effect of this increase in titles has been the burying of
interesting titles in the trash, so that by the time one hears of them they may
already have been destroyed.20
(i) Given their strengthening grip on the publishers, the chains have
taken to dictating the size of print-runs2' and through their veto-power have
begun exercising censorship over books either for their content (especially
if gay or lesbian in orientation) or for the poor showing of the authors'
previous books. Charles Platt recently reported that the chains are now
keeping track of which editors handle "losers," attempting thereby to spike
the old process whereby literature-loving editors balanced quality midlist
books (i.e., books that publishers carry because they believe they deserve to
be in print rather than because they expect to make a profit on them)
against the profits of bestsellers ("The Vanishing Midlist" 50). We can
expect further refinements of this rationalization of marketing through B.
Dalton's and Waldenbooks' new computerized bar-coded card systems,
whereby "consumers" are rewarded with ten percent discounts for allowing
their purchases to be recorded and analyzed.22
Certain parallels to the bookstore chains' tremendous influence over the
publishing industry naturally spring to mind. The closest historical parallel
I know of is the clout that Mudies' Lending Library (and a few other
subscription libraries like it) wielded over 19th-century British publishing.
"'What will Mudie say?' was the invariable question that arose in publishers'
offices when a new novel was under consideration" (Altick 297). Mudie's
power to censor, like that of the chain bookstores in the present-day US,
came from its position as the publishers' chief customer. The lending
libraries not only received special discounts, but had an arrangement with
the publishers to keep the price of books too high for all but the wealthy to
afford and to refrain from reprinting novels in cheaper editions until popu-
lar interest in them had waned.23
Bantam's decision to slash the size of its print-run of Samuel R. Delany's
Flight from
Neveryon
(1985)-this as a response to Barnes & Noble's
decision (apparently on learning of its "gay content") to slash the order they
originally intended to make and restrict the book's marketing to their eight
largest East Coast stores-offers a present-day example of how megacor-
porate oligopoly on distribution and publishing enables non-readers to
exercise quite effortlessly the power of censorship over books that could
otherwise be expected to sell well. (The two previous books in the series sold
a quarter-million copies each.) After having slashed the distribution of the
third book in the series, the chains and corporate publishers pulled the
noose of censorship even more tightly around The Bridge of Lost Desire, the
fourth book in the series. Bantam rejected it without reading it; and though
Tor expressed interest in it, that publisher refused it when B. Dalton and
Waldenbooks declared "they would not take copies of any Delany novel"
(Platt, "Two Kinds of Censorship" 43).24
() Afflicted with bestseller fever and the need to sell books by the yard,
publishers began to throw all their efforts and exorbitant amounts of capital
into creating bestsellers. (Providing multimillion dollar advances is part of
the "hype" process whereby bestsellers are thought to be made.) But they
have consistently lost vast sums of money in the process.25 Not surprisingly,
my anonymous informant writes that in the Spring of 1990:
An agent (not my own) told me, 'You're better off if you can talk a publisher
into risking a big wad of dough on you, because, even if he loses money on your
stuff, you'll still have a certain reputation. You'll be in a better position than the
guy who has small but steady sales and actually makes a small profit for them.
You see, they're all looking for the big kill, the big bestseller.' Casino operators
have a better grasp of economics than most publishers.
Literary agent Curtis points out that rather than develop promising
writers already on their lists, many editors prefer to buy with huge advances
authors who have been pegged for bestsellerdom, an inevitably money-losing
proposition as well as being damaging for "midlist" SF writers. "We will see
either fewer books, fewer authors, or fewer dollars," Curtis sums up.
"Something's gotta give. And when it does, you may be sure it will be the
authors who end up giving it" ("Agent's Corner," February 1990).
(k) Last but not least, US tax law now militates against publishers'
maintenance of extensive backlists. Thus, as Michael Levy points out:
authors whose books might be slow but steady sellers are likely to be dropped
in favor of writers whose work is more likely to make a short-term splash. Even
when serious authors do find their works in print,
they're
likely to stay available
for a shorter period of time, either because of smaller print-runs or-one hears
horror stories-because hundreds of copies are being pulped for tax reasons.
(Levy 46-47)
2.1 The advent of megacorporate publishing and book distribution has
infused SF publishing and marketing with the goals, strategies, and methods
of a late-capitalist, postmodern version of industrialism. As I quoted Joanna
Russ saying above, simple profitability no longer suffices to placate the
business side of the reading/writing equation. In an age of mergers and
takeovers, companies acquired must do better than simply stay in the black.
The net effect of the bottom line for SF has been the perception by pub-
lishers that SF books can (and must) attract a larger audience than
dedicated SF readers collectively constitute. Why settle for tens of thousands
when one can sell to millions? Or publish books that demand several
readings instead of trash not worthy of permanent space on a "consumer's"
bookshelf?26
In her four-part essay "Sincerity and Doom," editor Kathryn Cramer
describes the publishing industry's attempts to routinize SF book-writing and
marketing. She cites Harlequin's Roger Elwood's Laser Book series as:
the most extravagant and outrageous attempt to make science fiction books into
interchangeable product....The selling point of the whole line of books was that
the books would be as alike as possible. A Vice President of Harlequin (one Mr
O'Keefe) actually said in public with almost painful sincerity, on a panel at a
Westercon in the 1970's, that wholesalers 'treat books like cabbages' and that
'they don't care what's in a book'; that although the books were intended to be
very much alike (so much alike that the names of the authors did not appear on
the publisher's order forms) that 'to talk about them as formula novels is not
quite right. They are criteria novels.' He justified the effect of the Laser series
on the science fiction field by saying they
[sic]
Harlequin would 'use [the
series]
to expand science fiction into areas where it is not usually read.' In response to
a question from Charlie Brown regarding the fact that, until that time, science
fiction publishers had made a good portion of their profits on backlist, he
responded 'our [Harlequin's] success has always been right up front or not at all.'
(10)
According to Cramer, commercial failure killed the series in spite of its
wide distribution.
Nevertheless, SF publishers have continued to produce what Cramer
(above) calls "the criteria novel" and to market SF novels "like cabbages"
in grocery stores and discount warehouses as well as in chain bookstores.
And she credits Judy-Lynn Del Rey with being the first SF editor
to make the great transition from regarding the audience for the book as readeis
to regarding them as consumers.
She became able consistently to bend the books enough to convince the sales
force that sold Del Rey books that the books all adhered to the blueprint of the
Commercial Science Fiction Novel or the Commercial Fantasy Novel and were
proper criteria novels. Because of the financial success of the Del Rey
line-which may originally have had more to do with Judy-Lynn Del Rey as a
charismatic leader of sales forces than with the books themselves-editors at
other companies are strongly encouraged to take the same attitude toward their
books and establish criteria that might encourage salable product.
Once the market is trained to believe in her strategy, it no longer matters
whether it is the books that sell, or the belief of the industry that the books will
sell, that sells books. (10)
The result, according to Cramer, was to create a routinized process, whereby
"they could have been selling shoes or toothpicks (or Mr O'Keefe's cab-
bages) for all that it mattered." The books became interchangeable, their
goodness "irrelevant to the process" (ibid.). Every book could be treated in
the same way by the editor, the publicity department, the sales force, the
buyers, and the bookstores.
Obviously not all SF publishers follow such a mass-market, "criteria
novel" formula. Yet the basic idea that genre books are to be published for
mass-market outlets (or not at all) certainly dominates all major SF
publishing today. Whether or not (and for how long) the bookstore chains
give shelf-space to a given book can make or break it. According to Charles
Platt, bookstore chains routinely monitor authors' sales records, by which
they then determine how many copies of an author's new book they will
order (or whether they will carry it at all) based upon the author's past
record with them ("The Vanishing Midlist" 50). Given such conditions, those
publishers who have fallen into the habit of regarding chain bookstores as
the primary venue for marketing their products27 have been tempted into the
kind of thinking that Cramer describes, framing the terms of the market as
a dichotomy between bestsellers on the one hand and sure-fire "criteria"
sellers on the other. Books that either the bookstore chains or corporate
publishers label as "controversial" or "non-commercial" or "difficult" don't
of course fit this dichotomous arrangement; consequently, they get squeezed
out into the cold-regardless of their authors' sales' records.28
Hence, the tail now wags the dog: if a bookstore chain executive decides
to ban a particular author's work, said author then becomes a pariah to
publishers-even when the author has in the past sold over the one-million
mark. Similarly, print-runs can be decided by the attitudes of chain-
bookstore executives.29 The lesson is clear: the reading desires and
commercial demands of SF readers are irrelevant. A given book's publica-
tion and distribution depend upon corporate decisions that are unlikely to
be based solely upon the book's merit-or upon its potential appeal to SF
readers. The formula romances and the "Star Wars" (war) porn, which you
can always find on (chain) supermarket checkout racks, serve corporate
purposes. Rachel Pollack's Clarke Award-winning Unquenchable Fire or
Delany's Neveryon series apparently do not.
2.2 If classical capitalism did indeed rest upon supply and demand,
competition and diversity, postmodern capitalism decidedly does not.
Multinational megacorporate capitalism has invented more than one
"supply-side" economics. In the late-20th-century "market economy," supply
does not respond to demand, ever. Such an idea is strictly retro. Instead,
demand is manufactured (through the mundane brainwashing techniques
that drive the US economy) in response to supply-ergo, Mr O'Keefe's
cabbages. Late-capitalist industries never ask if there is a particular demand
before they decide to produce a product, only whether marketers will be
able to sell it. The entire US economy as it is currently constituted would
smash in a day or two without the confidence tricks, brainwashing techni-
ques, and consumer surveillance and intelligence machines of the sales,
marketing, and advertising sectors (which are probably more significant and
wield greater power than, say, the banking or military sectors, though
fortunately for the latter, the former see it in their interest to serve them
well and faithfully-perhaps because they are really all in bed together).
The key postmodern capitalists involved in the production of SF today
are the bookstore-chain and publishing corporations. For postmodern
capitalists the most important characteristics of a product are that it be in
assured, constant supply, predictable, and from a marketing perspective
always and ever the same (which is to say, product units need to be nearly
indistinguishable from one another so that every one of them can be treated
identically and routinely by every link in the production chain-i.e., industri-
alized).
The establishment of such a process and the attitude necessary for
maintaining it would seem to be trivial from the bookstore-chain corpora-
tions' perspective. Nowhere is the process so routine as in a chain bookstore
-where all authors' sales and customers' purchases are monitored and all
decisions about what to stock and where to stock it are made from above,
imposed upon the on-site store employees through a set of routine
instructions to be followed to the letter. (Book-lovers following the
traditional choice of employment in a bookstore would in such a workplace
find themselves powerless to deviate from the formula.) The only area for
individual initiative and non-rationality would seem to be located in the
corporate offices, the place where the real decisions about books get made.
But apparently the postmodern capitalists who distribute the majority of US
books have even that angle covered. "I once spent an evening," Cramer
confides,
listening to a rising young B. Dalton buyer explain (with disarming sincerity), in
a classic display of Morlock Macho, how he knew which book would sell and
which wouldn't and that he wasn't fool enough to risk company money on a book
merely out of love (i.e., merely because he thought it was a good book!). Buyers
at the chains are generally not encouraged to read books before they buy them.
The science fiction buyer at Waldenbooks, David Thorsen, maintains that he has
read little sf-ever. (9-10)
It can thus come as no surprise to hear that chain bookstores consider
themselves in competition, not with other booksellers, but rather with
vendors of other products, such as shoes or electronics.30 Clearly for
corporate book-distributors, philistinism must be a prerequisite for making
decisions about which books to buy and how many. "Love" of good books
would merely introduce a threatening, irrational element into an otherwise
rationalized industrial process, and thus must be considered a handicap for
the chain-bookstore buyer. The ideal buyer would be incapable of being
contaminated with "subjective" feelings about the product.
But what about the other set of postmodern capitalists SF depends upon?
Here is where the "Criteria Novel," the Judy-Lynn Del Rey "Commercial
Science Fiction Novel," the various "packagers," and the Harlequin Laser
Series come in. If the chain bookstores demand a standardized product the
marketability of which can be predicted, megacorporate publishers want
above all to supply what bookstore-chain buyers demand-as well as
products that can be used to create other, "tie-in" products to be marketed
in other divisions of the corporation.3" While those in the upper reaches of
megacorporations owning several divisions of publishers may share the
general attitude of their brethren in the bookstore chains, one can well
imagine that it requires a good deal of mind-bending for book-loving editors
to accommodate it. "What this process-the hiring, advancement, and
promotion among the employees of publishing companies-has produced,"
Cramer writes,
is an industry full of people who desperately need to believe in the deepest
reaches of their souls that by memorizing the blueprint for The Book That Sells
one can learn to recognize the kind of book that members of the general public
will enjoy reading, will buy, will recommend to their friends. They want this
because of their very normal desire to have the feeling that they are doing a good
job. (10)
Similarly, we may assume that some of the employees of publishing com-
panies would also like to believe they are helping bring good books into
existence. From Platt's interviews with leading SF editors ("The Special Case
of Bantam Spectra"; the boxed inset "The Editors Strike Back" to be found
in "The RAPE of Science Fiction"; and "Inside Science Fiction"), it would
seem that they at least have no problem reconciling the contradictions
involved in the postmodern capitalist production and marketing of SF,
though one must wonder whether the managers of fastfood franchises
actually believe their hamburgers or fried chicken to be better and more
desirable than real food. (For a graphic comparison of mass-book production
to the fastfood industry, I recommend the May 1990 cover of The Voice
Literary Supplement, which depicts "McPublisher's" "Have it our way" and
"Over 7 billion sold" assembly line of McBooks pouring out of New York
into the US countryside.)32
But what of the ultimate source of the product-viz., the SF writer?
How do the corporations assure a bland, canned product as safe to market
as shoes, toothpicks, or cabbages? Or, to borrow the VLS graphic metaphor,
how do they manage to reduce talented chefs to flipping ersatz hamburgers
at Mickey D's?
Well one might ask. The longtime author of SF who supplied me with
anecdotal evidence reported personal knowledge of four SF writers (that
source included) now working on "mainstream" novels:
We love science fiction. We would like to keep writing it. We still aspire to be
writers who might equal the achievement of some of this field's best writers. But
we can't afford to do it, or don't have the encouragement that would make us
want to continue at the moment. Too many editors lack any sense of the field's
history,
or its past accomplishments....They want the 'big book,' the 'brand name,'
or salable junk to fill in the lists....The fate of a book, based on how many
preorders chain bookstores make and how much push the publisher decides to
give it, is determined before it's out, and often before it's written....Literary
considerations have nothing to do with this, and even true business sense is
lacking-because many publishers to this day make much of their money from
their backlists of 'classic' stuff, written during a time when publishers still took
the long view. Right now they are, like so much of American business, poisoning
the well or doing deals instead of turning their attention to what they are, in fact,
supposed to produce.
Literary agent Curtis, noting that in their industrialization of book produc-
tion megapublishers have proven to be efficient only at losing money, offers
much the same picture.33 By Curtis's "own rough estimate," we are now left
with only 25% of the trade publishers that existed 25 years ago, and are
reaping the "bitter harvest" of the "takeover mentality": "Good books
orphaned, good editors turned out on the streets, good authors forced to
choose between writing formula novels and finding other occupations
entirely, good publishers being acquired, assimilated, and ultimately
destroyed" ("Agent's Corner," February 1990).
How is it, then, that not all writers tire of being treated so poorly and
stop producing the SF product the publishing and book-chain corporations
want to market like cabbages?
3.1 If the industrialization of publishing is an outcome of postmodern late-
capitalist values and strategies, the professionalization of the SF writer marks
the creation and constitution of its subject-producer, professionalism its
ideology,34 and the discourse of professionalism among the preconscious
processes interpellating35 the subject-producer (i.e., the SF writer) with the
images, myths, ideas, and concepts that that ideology embodies. The
privileging of the writer who makes a living because she or he is responsive
to "market awareness" or obedient to an editor's demands exemplifies the
myths and images of the ideology, to the point that all writers who write for
less than a living wage are dismissed as either egotists without regard for
their audience or merely would-be writers. Publications like Locus and
Scavenger's Newsletter serve that ideology and offer forums for developing
the discourse of professionalism. Processes of interpellation-the means by
which SF writers are brought to internalize the ideology as well as the
mechanisms for suppressing resistance to it-can be as simple as the
wording of a letter from an editor to the writer, the terms in which a review
is written, or how writers are taught in workshops to regard their own
writing. That these policing functions are performed unconsciously, without
any notion of serving an ideology, make them all the more potent in their
effects. In this section I propose to examine the professionalization of the
writer and its implications for SF as a genre literature.
3.2 The professionalization of the writer is necessary to the industrializa-
tion of publishing. Most readers and unpublished writers assume that the
SF they find on library and bookstore shelves arrives essentially unmediated
by the managers, technicians, and sales staff necessary for a book's
production and distribution. The scenario depicted in the Australian film My
Billiant Career (1979) is utterly plausible and satisfying to naive book-
buyers everywhere: the writer produces a manuscript, lovingly interrogating
every word, comma, and semicolon; mails it off with a kiss and a prayer to
a publisher; receives a letter from the publisher saying the manuscript will
soon be a book; and voild, the text duly appears in print-exactly as the
writer wrote it-on the shelves of one's neighborhood bookstore. Unfor-
tunately, the scenario is a lie, though literary critics still seem to go on falling
for it, generating criticism that assumes the author-whether Hemingway or
Heinlein or John Q. Obscure-chose to use those words and that punctua-
tion, an assumption necessary for close textual analysis. But in fact,
Hemingway's text was bowdlerized, Heinlein's editors routinely required
changes for ideological reasons, many first-time SF novelists are required to
insert boy-girl romance into finished texts where such interpolations are
textually inappropriate, and almost no writer can boast the privilege of
escaping the meat-axe treatment from those rhythm- and tone-deaf folks
known as copy-editors.36 As for protagonist Sybilla's route to publication
through the slush-pile, few slush-piles still exist. The editors most likely to
be interested in non-criteria, non-standardized SF are inaccessible except
through agents. (And who can blame them for wanting to escape the flood
of trash?) In short, the myth was never completely true.
For the industrialization of publishing to work, however, the notion of the
writer as an independent artist must now go entirely. Given the logic of
current editorial trends, Cramer dystopically extrapolates, "the grim future
I have forecast is a world in which 99% of all books are written by
computers, a world in which a few handcrafted books-novelties, if you
will-are still written by live human beings" (14).
But it is not necessary for publishers to develop computer programs to
write SF for them. A whole area of SF loosely referred to as "packaged"
or "shared world" series demonstrates how easily "packagers," editors, and
"brand-name" authors can exploit writers with little-known or unknown
names.37 For decades SF writers have been churning out novels for less than
minimum wage compensation solely in order to live on the wages of
writing.38 And since writing has been so badly paid in pulp genres, in order
to be able to write full time one has always had to churn it out in an endless,
written-to-order, poorly remunerated stream (the equation being quantity =
a [barely] living wage), even if it might not be exactly the kind of writing one
would really want to be doing. The only thing new-if it is new, and of this
I can't be certain-is the rising moral valency of "professionalism."
"I used to think that 'professional' meant you knew what you were doing
and you did it well," Russ remarked in her interview with me.
Then I found out in academia that 'professional' means you never tell anyone
else your salary and you never find out what theirs is. You never join a union
or promote a union, you never take your students' part against the administra-
tion, and what professional means there is simply an obedient employee. And
that's exactly what
they're
talking about here. A professional does whatever the
market forces or the editor require, period. No matter what it does to the story
or the book or whatever. In short, to be professional is to have no integrity.
What particularly makes "professionalism" a dangerous concept is the
confusion with which it is used by those not critical of it, a confusion
lubricating the further exploitation of writers and exacerbating all the worst
aspects of the industrialization of publishing. It is used differently by
different people and in different contexts, which would seem to make
nonsense of any attempt to treat it as a single, distinct concept. But language
has a force of its own not likely to respect these differences. I suspect the
confusion of the different things "professionalism" has come to connote has
already begun to be conflated in many vocabularies-and this at the very
same time the word has been accumulating moral force. It would be
instructive, therefore, to examine what different people mean by "pro-
fessionalism," how it relates to the publishing industry, and the effect it has
on individual writers.
Publications like Locus and Scavenger's Newsletter use the term "pro" or
"professional" in a quite specific, positively valorized way. Magazines, for
instance, are "pro" if their circulation exceeds 10,000, are nationally
distributed at newsstands, and pay at least three cents a word for stories.
Thus in 1989 quality publications like Interzone and Pulphouse rated as
"semi-pro" while Analog weighed in as "pro."39 On the denotative level,
then, "professional" has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with
institutional and economic criteria. On the connotative level, however, we
read a different story. Locus writers consistently assume a patronizing
attitude towards "semi-pro" or "non-pro" publications and writers.40 And
Scavenger's Newsletter, with a readership of hundreds of "non-pros," reveals
downright sententiousness about the holiness of pro-dom.4' We can't
mistake the message: real SF writers make a living at it, are "full-time pros."
33 The message is not lost on writers. Consider how the valorization of
the "professional" works for Bruce Bethke, an articulate, self-identified SF
"hack" for whom "writing is integral to [his] being" (Jennings 9):
I write nonfiction; I write technical manuals; I write fiction in other people's
universes. Where's the difference....Is someone who tells a story with absolutely
no regard for his [sic] audience-and lives on family money, arts grants, or an
assistant professor's stipend-necessarily any more noble than someone who
decides what to write based in part on what he thinks will sell? I'm a writer. I'd
rather make my living by writing-even if it's not exactly what I'd choose to write
in an ideal world-than by driving a forklift and dreaming of writing my one
great story 'someday.' (Jennings 8).
We meet up here with a rigidly dichotomous logic. Bethke positions the
"pro" vs. the "pure artist" in oppositional terms that insist that a writer who
does not make a living off writing has no regard for "his" (perhaps this
sentence doesn't apply to Russ or any other women in this category?)
"audience" since such a writer is apparently satisfied at being published in
a magazine with a circulation of 500.42
Let us compare in Bethke's terms Maverick, a mass-market shared-world
book he wrote, with, say, Natalie Petesch's The Leprosarium, a brilliant
dystopian fiction published in 1978 by a literary quarterly out of the
University of Missouri-a novel long out of print, a novel we could
reasonably describe as obscure. Who, exactly, are the audiences for these
respective SF novels? On the face of it, because B. Dalton and Walden-
books for a few weeks carry the mass-market book, obviously Bethke's
audience must be hundreds of thousands of B. Dalton and Waldenbooks
shoppers. (Bethke puts Maverick's audience at 150,000-200,000.) Petesch's
book, on the other hand, may presumably be lucky to number its audience
in the hundreds (not counting, of course, resale in used bookstores and
lendings and borrowings from one SF reader to another). Or, to put the
question another way: Who were these respective authors writing for when
they wrote their SF novels? Bethke would say that Petesch was writing for
her ego and he himself for B. Dalton and Waldenbooks consumers. But it
is here that Bethke's reasoning breaks down. By his own description, the SF
hack is not writing for readers at all, but for editors (and possibly for
packagers and book-chain buyers as well):
To give you some idea where I stand on the hack/artist continuum, Mavenick
was written to spec. Pick up the characters here, deliver them there, have fun
along the way, but don't violate the Asimov canon. I did, in some of the Robotic
Law dilemmas-probably John Sladek's influence-but when they said those
passages had to change, I said, 'It's your book.' (Jennings 8)
Whose regard does this passage suggest Bethke is writing for? Surely not
the 200,000 B. Dalton and Waldenbooks shoppers he hypothesizes as its
audience. By his own account, Bethke wrote Maverick to editors' orders.
They employed him; and they're the ones he must please, not readers ("I
said, 'It's your book"'). In short, Bethke's ideal writer ("the better grade of
hack") works to please editors with whatever product it is they've decided to
market, while the writers he despises-the ones who don't make a living
from
writing-work to seduce readers. And Petesch? For whom did she
write The Leprosarium? I doubt she wrote it for the editor who published
it. My guess is she wrote it for readers like me. I can't, of course, pay
Petesch what mass-market editors can pay the writers they employ. But
does that make me any less of an audience than a mass-market editor? And
does it make her any less of a writer than a "pro" like Bethke?
When Bethke goes on to deny that "artistic" writers are writers at all, the
dichotomy becomes not one of either having "regard" for one's audience or
not, but of either doing it for the money or simply dreaming about doing it.
("Real writers" make a living doing it, even if it means writing 25 books a
year, always "on spec"-an attitude characteristic of your basic garden-
variety literary macho, who views money as virilizing an otherwise "sissy"
activity.)43 Is Bethke being hyperbolic? Or would he also repudiate most of
the SF written before 1960 and much of the best written since?
3.4 The metaphor of writing as prostitution dates back to Classical Greek
times." It's easy to see why. Writing (like painting, photography, sculpting,
acting, music composition), whatever its subject matter, is an intensely erotic
pursuit. "To write: to love, inseparable. Writing is a gesture of love....Read-
me, lick-me, write-me love" (Helene Cixous, quoted in Gallop, 165). And the
relation of money to writing has always been troublesome. Brian Sta-
bleford, with special reference to SF, claims: "In terms of economic theory,
publishers stand in much the same relationship to writers as pimps to pros-
titutes or drug-smugglers to the peasants who grow opium poppies" (37).
This may once have been true, and it may still apply in some special
cases. Certainly I have no problem thinking of the writer seducing and
pleasing the reader for recompense. Fiction writers on the whole have
lavished a wealth of pleasure upon the world; and-unless one is a born aris-
tocrat-pay for work accomplished is not intrinsically degrading. But I would
argue that, for the most part, the "prostituting" of the writer has nothing to
do with the consumers/readers at the other end and everything to do with
the editor/publisher, whom Stableford places in the role of pimp.45 As
Cramer has noted, increasingly the real "johns" of the writer are editors
(11). I would take her argument a step further, though, and add that buyers
for the chains are also clients-important clients, clients with the power to
make and break writers (and editors). The corporate end of the mass-
marketing "consumerist food chain" would have readers become incidental,
merely "masses" to be manipulated by advertising gimmicks and exploited
with a standardized product produced by formula-driven professionals.
Similarly, television shows are sold not to viewing audiences, but to
advertisers. What readers want to read is no more relevant to mass-market
publishers than what the owners of television sets want to watch is to
network executives. That the mass-marketing "consumerist food chain" has
run into problems precisely because readers with diverse rather than
homogeneous, easily-predicted desires are not entirely cooperating suggests
that perhaps the economic reasoning upon which this system has been
predicated is flawed in its initial assumptions. In short, the elevation of the
"professional" marks a shift in the writer's audience, such that a buyer for
a bookstore chain who never reads SF, rather than the ordinary readers
whose purchases bankroll the industry, has become the writer's real
audience.
Given the depressing reality, one can understand why writers like Bethke
find the valorized image of the professional so appealing. Multinational
capitalism humiliates almost everyone. Personal myths like Bethke's go some
way towards easing the pain.
3.5 The hazards of the professionalization of the writer implicate more than
written-to-order books. Bruce Bethke touches on this subject, too:
By contrast,
Cybeqpunk
is my book. When NAL asked me to make the ending
'just like Neuromancer only different,' I took it to Baen. Is that a clear enough
illustration of integrity for you? Oh, one last thought: In writing, at least, there's
no such thing as a victim of the times. Nobody holds a gun to your head and
forces you to write a Han Solo novel. You're free to write whatever you please,
or even to quit writing if you find the idea of market awareness too
odious. (Jennings 8)46
Bethke tells us here that for his books (as opposed to those written to spec,
which he calls their books) he will refuse to turn his work into a clone of
another writer's successful SF novel and that his means of refusal lie in
taking his book from a megapublisher like NAL to a subsidiary (of Par-
amount Communications Inc.) like Baen. Yet he attaches a cautionary rider
to his story of independence. "Market awareness," this rider implies, must
operate for anyone writing any kind of SF. Oblique as this reference is,
Bethke here seems to be applying the caveat of publishability to any notions
we might cherish about the writer's independence, despite his just-cited
exercise of integrity (thus confirming his earlier opposition of the "pro" to
the "pure artist").
Is Bethke splitting hairs to insist that "market awareness" and integrity
aren't contradictory, that the "professional" can be independent as long as
there are "independent" (i.e., non-megacorporate) publishers around for
writers to resort to? I think he is. He may have been able to resist NAL's
pressuring him into the criterion of the moment (i.e., "like Neuromancer").
But even so, he's prioritizing "market awareness."
I wonder just how much of a distinction we can honestly draw between
the ultimate respective impacts of the NALs and Baens on SF publishing.
Consider the implications that Cramer sees of "criteria-publishing" for the
future of SF:
If the carefully crafted novels-written by the most talented and promising
writers in the science fiction and fantasy fields-fail to meet the unspoken
criteria...the editor will simply reject the books (brilliant or otherwise). If
significant percentages of the editors in the field are looking for novels which
meet the same criteria, authors censor themselves to make sure that they are
not wasting years of their lives on books that no one will publish. (14)
Cramer here points to the author's drive to self-censor as one of the
principal dangers of criteria publishing.
I would argue that Bethke's "market awareness" encompasses not only
criteria publishing and written-to-spec "packages" but independent work as
well, and that "market awareness" operates as an internal cop. If in fact the
attitude a chain buyer takes towards a book determines its future (as is now
the case with more and more publishers), must we not come back to the
same question we raised about Bethke's "audience"-namely, whether the
"market" in "market awareness" refers to book distributors and store
executives or to readers? Or to put it another way: If corporate needs and
aims require the standardization of SF production, will the consumer's desire
for one-of-a-kind cans of tomatoes (rather than a limited number of name
brands endlessly replicated according to the same vat-produced recipe)
continue to be of interest to editors working for publishers who consider
bookstore chains their primary market?
Although distribution, size of print-run, and advertising are all important
issues when it comes to "market awareness," the writer's bottom line tends
to be publishability.47 This is true whether the writer is a "pro" like Bethke
or a "non-pro" who supports herself or himself teaching or operating a
forklift or editing for a living. While Joanna Russ has taken more risks than
most SF writers and has consciously made and carried out the decision not
to make her living from writing, she talks about the problem of publishability
in this way:
I know I've been censoring myself and I have to fight it all the time. Because
I think no one will ever print this, absolutely not, no one will touch it....I was able
to write Kittatinny because when I first thought of it I also thought of a market,
which was one of the small feminist presses, Daughters, Inc. And that was very
freeing to know I could do whatever I liked in there. But it's usually not the
case.
Russ knows that when she worries about publishability she's got self-
censorship riding her back.48 If a writer of her integrity and creativity finds
it impossible to banish this particular demon, who can be surprised when
those determined to eke out a living writing-doing any kind of "hack work"
(as they themselves call it-to the point of Bethke's looking upon writing
SF to spec as being the same as writing technical manuals) so long as it's
writing-preach the Gospel of "market awareness"? This is a serious
question for readers who value unique, complex, challenging SF. Several of
Russ's books-including those ignored by critics-must be considered
unique, not least because they haven't been cloned into poor mass-market
imitations. But even if a few authors of Russ's stature are able to escape
censorship by editors and copy-editors, by her own account self-censorship
remains a problem as long as writers have reason to believe that non-stan-
dard work will not be considered publishable.
Publishable is the criterion by which almost all writers determine their
text's basit worth. Publishable supplies the justification, if not the motive
force, of writing. It's also another of those interpellation cops policing the
writer-probably the single most powerful source of self-censorship the
writer ever has to grapple with. "If it's good, it'll get published," one
constantly hears. And of course every tale that's told about editors rejecting
books that later become famous merely reinforces that myth, since the moral
of the story is that though something may be rejected thousands of times by
myopic editors, quality will eventually out, thereby proving that the system
does indeed work.49 And how can one blame writers who, upon being
published, decide that it was the quality of their text that earned them a
place in print? The myth is almost irresistible to well-published writers, for
it validates their work. But as if belief in the myth (and the need to repeat
it to others) weren't bad enough, people often make the syllogistic error of
taking the statement "If it's good it will eventually be published" to mean
that if it is not published it must be no good.
In short, the concern for publishability-itself increasingly determined by
the unstated criteria for "safe" publishing by mass-market-driven publishers
-manacles both the "pro" and "non-pro" SF writer to the fears, whims, and
prejudices of the publishing establishment. Since the latter is becoming
dominated by people who do not read, the question of publishability grows
increasingly trickier and harder to gauge on the part of writers. In such an
atmosphere, innovation and originality can only be regarded by the writer as
an odds-against gamble-whether the writer hopes to make a living or
"merely" have his or her work published.
Obviously some people would argue that the professionalization of the
writer has been a positive force for the SF field at large. I would reply that
such an assessment requires our assuming that turning readers into con-
sumers and publishers and bookstore-chain buyers into the writer's primary
audience is for the best. I can see why some writers, most editors, and all
bookstore-chain buyers would be likely so to assume. But for most readers,
I imagine, standardization of product is about as desirable as 57 "different"
brands of canned tomatoes are to the person who likes eating them straight
off the vine.
3.6 Presumably not all publishers consider bookstore-chain buyers their
primary market, nor are all looking for sure- and best-sellers. I have in fact
heard tell of several editors still interested in quality SF. Yet non-market-
driven censorship has been-and continues to be (perhaps more than ever)
-a problem in US publishing. As independent-press publisher Barbara
Smith bluntly notes, "[publishers'] lists still reflect the narrow-minded racism,
elitism, sexism and heterosexism of those who control them" ("Books &
Bucks" 18). Indeed, this form of censorship persists despite the amount of
profit there is to be made on books that are feminist, lesbian, gay, and
generally politically incisive.50 And as Russ and others have observed about
radical work in general,5' the more successful radical books are, the greater
the resistance those writers will face to publishing more of their work:
I have talked often to women who are journalists or psychologists who write and
publish as feminists. The more successful your books get, the harder it gets to
publish them. That was true of mine, too. You'd think that if somebody pub-
lished a book and it was a runaway bestseller everybody would want the next
book. No way! No way! Not if they're weird, if they're feminists for example. The
attitude is more 'How did that get through?' I don't know of
anybody
[feminist]
whose books have really failed economically. No publisher has been hurt by them
as far as I know.
[But] [t]hey
still won't touch them....Editors [are] just saying
'That stuff is wrong.' Or 'It's bad and I don't want to touch it and I think you're
disgusting.' If you tell a publisher there's real money in this, they know there
is....There have been quite a few editors and publishers saying things like this.
Not just in science fiction; again it happens everywhere. 'Oh nobody really wants
to read this,' you'll hear: 'feminism is no longer a trend.' And then you'll say,
'Look what this sold, look what that sold.' 'Oh they're flukes, it won't happen
again.' And if you believe that professionalism means doing anything you have
to to make a living, for anybody, on any terms, you are going to be rather pissed
off if a book obviously does not do that and the author does not feel it necessary
to do that.
The "professional" writer, taking the editor or packager for his or her
audience/employer, will obviously feel it necessary to respect the conventions
of non-market-driven self-censorship as well as market-driven self-censor-
ship. But what about the "non-pro" writer who makes an honest effort to
write un-self-censored, without regard for "publishability"'? Editor Ellen
Datlow, in an interview in which she makes cynically clear not only that her
definition of "pro" accords with Russ's, but that she dislikes dealing with the
kind of writers who would object to her interference and "line-editing" of
their work, offers an astonishingly frank example of how some editors
consciously regard themselves as their readers' censors and protectors.
Datlow may not be representative (apart from the fact that she is not a
writer, Omni-her primary though not only publishing venue-is not really
an SF magazine), but her frankness exposes what I imagine operates
unconsciously, in an attenuated form, in most short-fiction editors. In an
interview in Science Fiction Eye, Datlow admits that she doesn't really know
what her Omni readership wants:
I don't feel I'm reflecting my readers' taste, I don't know what my readers' taste
is. I'm reflecting my taste in my choices. As far as
trying
to change my readers'
taste, I'm trying, in a way, to broaden their minds. If I love an offbeat, and
believe I can get away with it, I'll publish the story. I think I can get away with
either more or less-depending upon the type of story it is-than I could
publishing a science fiction magazine. There are stories that I didn't feel I could
publish because I found that they would be offensive in a certain way that I
didn't think would be acceptable to my audience. Not offensive to me necessarily.
Since I don't know who the audience is, it is only this perception I have of what
the Omni audience is.
(Bryant
57)
Datlow's confusion and ambivalence about her readership and her role
anent it are probably normal for editors of short fiction. A few magazines
(Interzone, for instance) actually attempt to gather quantified data on who
their readership is and what they want, but inevitably find that a large
segment of their readership refuses to play the game. It is hardly surprising,
then, that editors chiefly use imputed readership stupidity or taste as their
last resort for ratifying an editorial decision. Part of the time they see
readers as paying consumers, and the rest of the time as people with whom
they share literary interests. But the way this confusion works out for SF
and its writers is ominous. Datlow's generalization, that she insists upon
"understanding" every word of a story because "I think my readership would
want to know what's going on," must make any writer with ambition cringe,
since only the most simplistic and pedestrian of stories could ever meet such
a criterion.
Worse, though, is the notion of editors as "gatekeepers" there to protect
their readers. Consider Datlow's description of her decision to reject a story
by Margaret Atwood-also characteristic of attitudes I've run into:
Margaret Atwood sent me a terrific, wonderful, well-written, brilliant story, that
was also the bleakest science fiction story I've ever read in my life. It was from
the same universe as A Handmaid's Tale. When I finished that story I thought,
'I'd go out and kill myself rather than live in this universe.' I didn't feel I could
inflict that on my readers. So what if it wins the Nebula? It's a great story, but
I didn't feel I could publish it. It was too...let's go out and slit our wrists time.
(Bryant 64; ellipsis in original)
Such gate-keeping amounts to an editorial imposition of the ideological
bottom line. (By "ideological bottom line," I mean the normative standard
whereby a White, middle class, US-born heterosexual male after reading a
given story still feels chest-beating proud of and secure in his all-of-the-
above identity.) The standard differs according to the given editor's-male
or female-perceptions about what such an ideal reader's reactions would
be.
Though most editors are probably unaware of their own ideological
bottom line, some are quite specific.52 The ideological bottom line has
always been around, of course. Russ, for instance, recalls John Campbell's
attempt to enforce his ideological bottom line:
I think the problem in any kind of market is not even that editors ask you to do
it, but that first of all some people gladly comply because they are making a
living doing this and they don't see themselves as having anything to defend in
the way of any kind of integrity, you know, they are working for the market and
that's fine. Yes, I think that goes on all the time. I once had a spat with
Campbell, the first and last time we had anything to do with each other in, I
think, the early sixties. He wanted to buy a story of mine, but he wanted some
changes made. I told him, in effect-this happened through my agent, who
thought it was rather funny-I told him it was my story. He said it was his
magazine. I think both of us were quite right.
Editors' attempts to get writers to tone down or alter their writing in the
service of the ideological bottom line is interpellation at its most effica-
cious.53 (Ideology works all by itself.) No one has to plot or intend bad
things to innocent dupes: no matter how nice we all are, it works.
The formula "My Story, His Magazine" should be engraved in the hearts
of all writers and editors or stamped on their foreheads. It offers a warning
as to the dangers of writers and editors using the student-mentor relation-
ship as a paradigm and the peril of taking publication as a passing grade.
Between those who write to make a living and those who think a successful
story is one that pleases an editor regardless of his or her interpretation of
the ideological bottom line, it's a wonder any original or subversive SF ever
gets written (much less published).54
And in fact few SF books that could be described as politically challeng-
ing, feminist, lesbian, or gay in orientation are "getting through" these days.
Presumably at least some such books are being written, if not published.
But an awareness that most of what is published respects certain conventions
of censorship must be having a chilling effect on writers ("pro" and
"non-pro") who care about publishability. Such censorship has nothing, of
course, to do with business, finance, or salability. Feminist or lesbian writing
sells well. There's a strong demand for it that small presses have been
cashing in on. That B. Dalton will sabotage a book should its executives
discover the book has "gay content" simply offers publishers a pretext for
censoring writers. Delany's experience with Bantam's and Tor's rejections
of the fourth book in a series that had always sold well exemplifies the
lesson. Similarly, the ideology of "professionalism" rationalizes the process
of writers' censoring themselves long before their work reaches an editor's
desk, thereby making them their own interpellation cops and decreasing the
necessity for the bookstore chains to censor SF more directly.
4.1 One can much more easily attack and defeat a conscious conspiracy
than a set of assumptions and values few people ever question. One cannot
of course question (much less resist) ideology that one is unaware of.55 And
awareness of it always already constitutes resistance to it. But the fact that
even as resisting a writer as Russ can still find herself in daily peril of
succumbing to this ideology's processes of interpellation testifies to the
power of its grip on all SF writers. And the fact that the megacorporate
bookstore chains have been able to render Delany "unpublishable" testifies
to its grip on all SF readers. Accordingly, we need to question whether any
writer can work independent of the worst aspects of the system, no matter
the writer's integrity, no matter the respectfulness and fine intentions of
many of the system's editors. Blandness and the repression of original,
challenging ideas characterize the apparently safe, surefire product of the SF
publishing system. While exceptional, singular individuals may somehow
create oases of difference, they never, ever change the system. It is out of
fashion in SF circles now to knock working in/through the system, but
anyone familiar with the history of systems knows that SF's current plethora
of extrapolations clinging for dear life to the status quo demonstrates
timidity and failure of imagination. Most current SF regards systems either
as playthings for talented, energetic (s)heroes, or as inevitable and intrac-
table as the weather and death (which, ironically, unlike social and economic
oppression and political repression, are often in the SF imagination
overcome by the wonders of technology-the lesson being that human
society and values are for most SF writers well-nigh immutable). Yet unless
SF divorces itself from the system that has it by the throat (i.e., the
publishing and book-distribution oligopoly), silence, complicity, and
co-optation (and not the flourishing of any particular brand) will kill SF.
It may be that some readers (and writers) of SF dismiss the seriousness
of the situation on the premise that if it is only "radical" or "gay" or
"feminist" work that's having a hard time with the system as it is currently
constituted, the industrialization of the production and distribution of SF and
the narrowing of choice can be lived with, since at least something that can
be called SF continues to be published. But "the trouble with censorship,"
Platt warns, "is that once it has been successfully used against something you
don't care about, it tends to be used against something that does matter to
you-by which time, the machinery for repression is securely in place, and
repression itself has become an established precedent" ("Two Kinds of
Censorship" 44).
Sad to say, the issue looms far larger than our being offered too much
trash and too little diversity; nor is it confined to the difficulty maverick
writers like Dan Simmons experience trying to break into print or the
resistance highly acclaimed writers like Delany and Atwood meet in their
attempts to breech the ideological bottom line. Thus Morris Phillipson, who
left Vintage Books in 1964 after serving five years as its editor to take up his
present position as Director of the University of Chicago Press. writes in the
Village Voice in the wake of the Pantheon Affair:56
What is at stake here is not the right to publish; what is at stake are the rights
of ownership affecting how thought (verbalized, printed, distributed, bought and
read) contributes to shaping political, cultural, and intellectual life. Under a
totalitarian government, no one can endanger entrenched, orthodox, political
policies no matter how repressive. In a free-market republic no one can endanger
the right to enlarge legally permitted profit no matter how indecent. Concealed
under the rhetoric that differentiates these two kinds of powers to control is that
single universal principle that we all know perfectly well: he who pays the piper
calls the tune. (You call the tunes only on your own time.)....Is the life of the
marketplace overwhelming the life of the mind? Yes. For most people. The free-
market opportunities for the 'indecently MORE' tend to destroy distinctions
between worthwhile and worthless means to those ends. This is the route to
becoming a Banana Republic. ("Books and Bucks" 16)
To be sure, George Will has pronounced the eradication of "left-leaning"
books (particularly Pantheon's list-including, for instance, books by such
objectionable authors as Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite
Duras, and Gunther Grass) a neat thing, a veritable triumph of capitalism.
He finds such an outcome only rational for books that "reek of contempt for
America, and for bourgeois society generally." "Around the world," he
proclaims, "scores of millions of victims of leftism are embracing the
discipline and rationality of free markets because they understand the
connection between consumer sovereignty and the responsibilities of political
democracy."5" Will's triumph of the "free market" and its "severities" would
entail the suppression of all good SF for the reason Harlan Ellison implicitly
offers when he observes:
34 SCIENCE-FHCTION STUDIES, VOLUME 18 (1991)
Entertain, yes! That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automati-
cally, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story
is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire
knows that all writing, one way or another is subversive. It is guerilla warfare
against the status quo.
It is not whimsical that the Falwells and Swaggerts and Meeses of the world
seek to burn books: they correctly perceive them to be dangerous. Kafka tells
us, 'I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a
book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read
it?' ("Nackles" 38)
But John O'Brien, editor and publisher of the Dalkey Archive Press,
extrapolates: "While risky books will survive with the smaller publishers,
totalitarian governments may discover that Americans, with our censorship
of the marketplace, have stumbled upon the most effective means for
controlling new and unconventional ideas: permit the books to be published,
but make them compete with 'what people really want to read,' what editors
want to review, and what stores will stock" ("Books and Bucks" 16).
This prediction is already playing itself out in reality. As I write, several
European conglomerates are waging battle over who will control the press
in Hungary. Though apparently all areas of the Hungarian press are being
contested, of these Magyar Nemzet, the
country's
most influential daily
newspaper, is considered the most significant site. According to New York
Times reporter Celestine Bohlen, the Government as well as the newspaper's
staff "have publicly defined the battle in raw political terms." Not surpris-
ingly, the Hungarian Government favors French press baron Robert Her-
sant, who owns the conservative Le Figaro, since it "is concerned about an
overly hostile press at a time when the country is about to enter a difficult,
painful and possibly unstable period of transition" (Bohlen).
Sonoma State University's Project Censored announced as the number
one under-reported news story of 1989 the global threat to freedom of
information consequent to the domination of the world's media (the most
important newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast stations, movies,
recordings, and video cassettes) by five major media corporations. The same
people who own most publishing companies also own most other media
outlets throughout the world.58
4.2 Will challenging, innovative SF survive in postmodern megacorporate
America? The answer to that depends upon the initiative and independence
of the SF community. The stranglehold the lending libraries had over book
publishing in 19th-century England might have gone on forever had enter-
prising individuals not taken advantage of contemporary technological
advances in both paper-making and the printing process. We in the late 20th
century are witnesses to advances in technology, too.
Whether we have the strength and will to break the bookstore chains'
and megapublishers' hold on genre publishing is another question. The first
step requires recognizing that the interests of these megacorporate oli-
gopolies are not SF's, and that where SF genre publishing is concerned their
only interest is in marketing a product to as vast an audience as possible, by
way of hijacking the popular appeal of what Norman Spinrad calls "sci-fi"'
i.e., a commercial Hollywood/TV subset of SF (cf. Spinrad 18-23). If the SF
community does not learn to see that its interests are distinct from the
publishers' and bookstore chains', not only will the censorship and exploita-
tion of writers continue, but the percentage of "trash" Nancy Etchemendy
spent a year drowning in will grow ever higher and the availability of work
of Delany caliber dwindle inexorably.
NOTES
1. The author in question provided anecdotal material for this paper with the
stipulation that anonymity be assured. While the desire for anonymity might strike
some readers as a mark of paranoia, cowardice, or deliberate deception, two of SF's
most prominent practitioners have separately communicated to RMP rumors of
instances of two SF writers' being "punished" for complaining (in house) about
particular conditions of publication. Since my anonymous author-source is of good
repute and not known for making wild assertions, I have assumed that those
anecdotes related were told in good faith.
In addition to thanking that source, I would also like to express my gratitude to
Joanna Russ for allowing me to interview her and for reading and commenting on
an earlier draft of this paper, to Susanna J. Sturgis for her provocative correspon-
dence, to both K. Wilham and my partner for their input, to R.D. Mullen for his
assistance with portions of section 1 of this essay, and most of all, to RMP for his
editorial help and guidance.
2. The premiere issue of The Science Fiction Review carries two articles mourning
the decline (or death) of SF, explicitly charging the humanist orientation of post-New
Wave SF for having "killed belief in the future." This theme frequently recurs today
among those who believe the only good SF is "hard" SF, and even among those who
do not. Charles Platt opines:
Thus from the New Wave, via the Dangerous Visions series, thence Damon
Knight's Orbit anthologies and Milford writing workshops, evolved a generation
who used the props of science fiction (aliens, time travel, starships), without any
real interest in plausibility as their predecessors had known it. A new 'soft'
science fiction emerged, largely written by women: Joan Vinge, Vonda McIntyre,
Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller. Their concern
for human values was admirable, but they eroded science fiction's one great
strength that had distinguished it from all other fantastic literature: its implicit
claim that events described could actually come true. ("The RAPE of Science
Fiction" 46)
(See "The Hard Stuff' in Spinrad for a more sophisticated discussion of the
oft-drawn distinction between "hard" and "soft" SF.)
It is likely no accident that Platt fingers only women writers for interests that are
shared by male writers he treats more sympathetically in the same article, given the
several sexual metaphors he uses throughout the piece. He most particularly favors
comparing SF itself to a prostitute: "The
body
of literature that I love has been
doped up and defiled, draped in fake finery and turned into a flabby old hooker
smelling of festering lesions and cheap perfume," he writes in the third sentence
from the top. He also describes SF as "wedded" to a "crippled, corrupt mentally
retarded" form "dying for lack of intensive care." And as quoted above, he resorts
to that old chestnut of the terrible "softening" that women writers have wreaked.
I'm not quite sure where the upper-case "RAPE" comes into his metaphoric scheme.
He fails to identify the rapist, and specifies no explicit relationship between the rape
and the softening and prostituting. Certainly he strikes out at a variety of targets,
from women writers to packagers, publishers, chain bookstores, film producers, and
even himself. My best guess is that Platt means to suggest that some unnamable
beast (he does refer to a beast in his piece) is raping an SF that has been debilitated
by women writers, an SF that has been corrupted by prostitution. (For an older,
more constructive view of writing as prostitution, see notes 44 and 45, below.) No
matter his spreading the blame thickly and widely, he still insists that it is SF itself
which has been corrupted, making it a problem inherently internal to the genre.
Michael Levy, on the other hand, mourns the absence of this sort of fiction Platt
and others say is "killing" SF:
Since 1982 the number of science fiction and fantasy books published has
increased steadily each year...yet, as anyone close to the industry will tell you, it
is now harder than ever for unknown but serious writers and, in some cases, for
once widely-published writers, to get their work into print. This is particularly
true for authors known for either their political content or their literary
experimentation. If you don't believe this, ask yourself when you last saw a new
novel by Joanna Russ, R.A. Lafferty or just about any serious British writer other
than Arthur C. Clarke at your local Walden Books or B. Dalton's....Increasingly,
important volumes are seeing their first and sometimes only publication under
the auspices of the small presses. (46)
"The problem," according to Levy, "is that our publishers have gotten more
conservative."
3. See Robert A. Collins' letter to the editor, SFRA Newsletter #176 (Apr. 1990):
14, for a summing up of the discontent.
[E]ditors
want two things only right now: big names and proven categories.
Books by new authors rarely get published, and then only if they can be sold as
'just like Heinlein, just like Bradbury, just like' whoever else has been selling
well. A truly different and original SF book by an unknowtn author could not
possibly be published by a mass market house today....
So those of us who admire the truly original, truly provocative, marvelously
liberating classics of SFs past are up the proverbial creek. An occasional miracle
does happen sometimes, but that's what it will take from now on to duplicate any
of the breakthroughs of SF's past. Dena Brown was right: SF did better when
it was in the gutter. It has been the victim of its own 'media success' during the
past decade-the moguls now take it just seriously enough to consider its
potential for profit.
Collins cites the case of Dan Simmons as an example of the near-impossibility
of maverick writers
breaking
into
print
in the
genre:
Consider a rarity, a new writer who is also a true artist, a man like Dan
Simmons, for example. He won the World Fantasy Award years ago for his first
novel, Song of Kali, published by a small house named Blue Jay, which folded
shortly afterwards. At the time, he had three more novels 'in the can,' but despite
his critical raves nobody would publish them. It took the combined efforts of
legions of influential people (like Ellison and Silverberg) to finally get him a
mass market audience. Then suddenly the books all came out at once. Locus
called 1989 'The year of Dan Simmons,' because again the books got rave
reviews. But if they don't start selling like hotcakes, Simmons will be right back
where he started.
(An unusual feature of Collins' letter is his indictment of the institution of fandom,
which he sees as a tool of the industry.)
Dissatisfaction with the status quo is not universal. Alexis Gilliand (in "Rapid
Eye Movement," the letters column of Science Fiction Eye #6) suggests that
complaints about and dissatisfaction with today's SF simply reflect disproportionate
expectations and an inflated sense of SF in the "good old days."
4. For those who don't know what "packaged" mass-market books are, I supply
Platt's description:
If they [editors under pressure to pick
bestsellers]
can't afford big names they'll
find some cheap and sleazy substitute. They'll use bribery and flattery to
persuade a famous author to allow other people to write books sharing the
scenario that he created in one of his early works. The famous author is paid
purely for the use of his name, which goes in giant type at the top of the cover.
The relatively unknown author, who actually writes the book, receives a pittance
and sees his name in minuscule print at the bottom of the cover. A flagrant
example of this practice is Isaac Asimov's Robot City series, masterminded by
New York's genius of exploitation, Byron Preiss. ("Vanishing Midlist" 50)
5. For analyses blaming "packagers," see Platt's "RAPE of Science Fiction," Levy
(47), and Collins' letter to the editor (cited above in note 3); for the (related)
too-much-trash theory,
see Platt's "Inside Science Fiction"; for censorship by the
bookstore-chains, see Platt's "Two Kinds of Censorship"; for publishers' rising
expectations due to the big money that has been made in Fantasy, see Hartwell's
"Dollars and Dragons" and Platt's "The Vanishing Midlist" and "The RAPE of
Science Fiction"; for obscenely huge advances, see "The Impact of Publishers' 'Star
Wars'?," in which Robert M. Philmus asks whether a few genre advances of the
order of Stephen King's $10,000,000 for print and film rights for two titles has
anything to do with the rising price of books or with their print-life; and for the
theory that US (unlike British) SF has been damaged by the lack of "fully rounded
criticism," see Spinrad (217-25).
6. The holiest of taboos, the one it's an absolute no-no to violate, is depicting a
male character as powerless, or caught in a situation of powerlessness (especially at
the hands of some person or force considered female), unable to do anything to
affect the situation. Woman-to-woman sex (whether merely allucied to or depicted)
seldom flies with editors either, unless they're working for independent feminist
presses. "There has been a taboo" also, Spinrad asserts,
against publishing anything that tells the truth about the sixties...for many years.
One may wax sadly nostalgic about lost youth from the point of view of aging
ex-hippies in the present, one may publish thrillers set in a 60s time frame, one
may now even write about the Viet Nam War, but one may not publish a novel
directly about the Counterculture of the 1960s that deals sympathetically with the
vanished spirit thereof. I have come upon any number of unpublished novels in
this vein by published writers. Upon attempting to get a contract for such a novel
myself, I have been told by publishing executives and agents in words of one
syllable that such a thing, no matter how well done, is unpublishable. (42)
For other taboo topoi, see Steve Resnic Tem, "Let the Darkness In," Gauntlet, 1
(1990):
30-35.
Critics often blame writers rather than editors for this lack of edge, especially
when the writers are women. In two recent articles Veronica Hollinger, for instance,
assumes that feminist SF writers have chosen to "ignore postmodernism and post-
structuralism," and in thus failing to consider the fact that few editors will publish
"postmodern and poststructuralist" feminist SF when they are offered it, she creates
an edifice of speculation upon a basically false premise (viz., that the feminist SF that
does get published has not been cropped and curbed by censorship and self-
censorship). Similarly, Joan Gordon suggests that feminist SF writers need to start
creating non-passive, gentle, nurturing, peace-loving female characters. Even if it
were true that feminist SF writers haven't created such characters (a point I do not
concede; certainly Bruce Sterling's Laura, whom Gordon holds up as an example
to feminist writers, is about as conventionally feminine a character as you ever find
in SF-especially compared, for instance, with Russ's Whileaway women or Butler's
women who kill), the fact is that such characters are anathema to editors-at least
when they come from women (i.e., not male) writers. The editors of Science Fiction
Eye rather nicely demonstrate the point in action with an instance of graphic
interpellation: the illustration with which they chose to grace the first page of
Gordon's article (a cyborg in five-inch spike heels, with a stretch of cyborgian
gartered thigh showing) undercuts the supposed feminist orientation of the piece by
sending readers the message that no matter how women transform themselves,
ultimately women's bodies, however cyborgian, are always primarily the object of the
male gaze.
7. The most succinct statement of the Scott Meredith Plot Skeleton I've yet seen
is Damon Knight's: "You gotta have a hero, and the hero's gotta win" (Damon
Knight, "A Reply," The New York Review of Science Fiction #24 [Aug.
19901:
15).
Brian Stableford provides a more expansive description: "Begin by establishing a
sympathetic lead character who is faced with an urgent problem, then show how his
(or her) preliminary attempts to cope with the problem make things worse, before
he ultimately contrives by his own efforts to bring about a solution" ("The Way to
Write Science Fiction" 35). Given the narrowness of such a formula's
ideology,
strict
adherence to it precludes most political dissent. Unfortunately, most SF editors
today continue to deem stories that do not run along these lines incorrect,
unacceptable, unfinished, even unreadable.
8. This assertion may surprise people who rely on the rhetoric of politicians for
their perception of reality. But even conservatives no longer gagged by the exigencies
of running for office admit to the phenomenon-though the (Republican) retired
Governor and Senator I recently heard discuss this used the term "severe decline"
instead of "depression."
I should also add another factor few people like to acknowledge: the problem
that one in four American adults is functionally illiterate. Undoubtedly this level of
adult illiteracy has something to do with the crisis in publishing, but I lack the
competence to say to what extent-or precisely how-it impacts on SF publishing.
9. For a description and analysis of the corporate takeover of publishers by
"non-publishers," see Calvocoressi and Bristow.
10. Russ defines the bottom line thus: "People not simply trying to make a profit,
but to make as much profit as possible....This kind of thing is very destructive when
you're selling stuff like movies or books. Because the point isn't: Can the thing make
it's way reasonably well? The point is it's got to be the greatest biggest success that
ever happened anywhere."
11. This list is based on information taken from Bagdikian ("Lords of the Global
Village"), Locus, S.F. Chronicle, and Kathryn Ptacek's The Gila Queen's Guide to
Markets.
12. Roger Cohen opens "Rupert Murdoch's Biggest Gamble" with an example
of the downside of being owned by a megaconglomerate-namely, an instance in
which Murdoch summons his top two British aides and tells them they're wasting
money by having too many pages in his "flagship" newspaper The Sunday Times,
and that they must therefore cut eight pages from it-all because Murdoch has run
his corporation (of an estimated net worth of $6.7 billion) into $8.7 billion of debt.
Multinationals inexorably pursue the course of incurring an ever-increasing amount
of debt to fund forcible takeovers of thriving operations (that on takeover instantly
become insolvent). In every case following takeover, the subsidiaries are squeezed
to the limits of what they can bear, quarter by quarter. Thus the newspapers
Murdoch has acquired are expected to pay for other acquisitions-for instance, the
debt taken on to acquire TV Guide, for which even Murdoch concedes he probably
paid $500,000,000 too much.
13. Richard Curtis writes regarding the "merger and acquisition binge of the last
decade":
Underlying the takeover mentality during this period was the assumption that
larger companies, employing greater efficiencies of operation, could succeed
where smaller firms failed to cope. This assumption has proven tragically
incorrect, and we are now reaping the bitter harvest of that attitude: good books
orphaned, good editors turned out on the streets, good authors forced to choose
between writing formula novels and finding other occupations entirely, good
publishers being acquired, assimilated, and ultimately destroyed. ("Agent's
Corner," Feb. 1990)
14. In the December 1989 issue of Locus, Curtis offers other examples of new
ways megapublishers have of ripping off writers, including the acquisition of
subsidiary rights for a sister company within the corporation without keeping faith
with the so-called "arm's-length" approach that supposedly prevents the corporation
from price-fixing at the author's expense.
15. For more on the evolution of this marketing strategy, see Platt's "Vanishing
Midlist" and "The RAPE of Science Fiction," Hartwell, and Cramer.
16. In pointing out that challenging, innovative SF not only makes it into print
in Britain but is highly appreciated by critics and editors to a degree unknown in the
US, and in raising the question as to why such SF often does not make it into print
at all in the US (which, I might point out, is a much larger market and thus
theoretically capable of sustaining more diversity), Spinrad contrasts the recent
history of SF publishing in the US with that in Britain:
In the United States, science fiction was transformed from a minor publishing
genre with consistent low sales from book to book, no matter who wrote them,
into a major sphere of commercial publishing. In Britain, this never quite
happened. In Britain, science fiction writers like Ballard and Aldiss were able
to achieve general literary acceptance, Ballard via the congruence between New
Wave SF and experimental literature, Aldiss via the publication of a series of
literate mainstream best-sellers. In America, this, generally speaking, did not
happen.
So while American science fiction writers had the possibility of bestsellerdom
dangled before them, British SF writers, thanks to the New Wave, had the
possibility of acceptance into the general literary culture. As one American editor
has observed, 'The New Wave lost in the US and won in Britain.' (192)
I am not convinced that a perceived congruence between SF and experimental
literature would have done SF much good in the US. Experimental literature in the
US tends to be even more marginal than SF is. The US publishing establishment is
basically philistine in orientation-of which Pantheon's recent fall (vide note 56) is
only one glaring example. Most of the best fiction-writing in the US is published, not
by the large companies, but by small presses, which are ignored and denigrated by
the US literary establishment strictly because they lack the economic clout of the
megapublishers. John O'Brien, editor and publisher of the Dalkey Archive Press,
notes:
A book in America does not have a life unless it gets reviewed and distributed;
neither process guarantees success, but without them there is little hope that a
good book from a small publisher will sell more than 1000 copies....If a Random
House is doing a first novel or translation, it must be worth paying attention to,
because otherwise Random wouldn't be doing it; if a small publisher is publishing
the same book, it is assumed (often correctly) that the book was turned down in
New York-and therefore that there's something wrong with it. ("Books and
Bucks" 16)
It is no accident that school teachers in the US often have to moonlight at
second jobs, while CEOs make hundreds of millions a year even when their
companies are losing money. These are the values of postmodern, late-capitalist
America.
17. In the Fall of 1990, RMP sent a questionnaire on US book publishing to
roughly two dozen SF editors currently working in the field. Of those who
responded, most said that the chains have "some" impact on selection of titles and
the length of time they were kept in print. Amy Stout of Bantam Doubleday Dell
most astonishingly responded that the chains have no impact on either of these
aspects. The two book editors who requested anonymity were the only ones who
said the chains had "a great deal" to do with which titles were published, and one
of them said that the chains also have "a great deal" to do with how long they were
kept in print.
18. Curtis asserts that the practice of making unsold books returnable to the
publisher for credit is the "fundamental, indeed fatal, problem with trade book
publishing." Though hardcover books are now also returnable, he attributes the
origins of this practice to the creation of the modern paperback book industry. He
details the routine as follows:
Every month, paperbacks are delivered to distribution centers and placed on
trucks for delivery with the monthly issues of periodical publications. The truck
drivers themselves place the books on racks and shelves. At the end of the
month, the drivers remove unsold books from the racks at the same time that
they are collecting unsold magazines. Then they replace the supply with new
titles and bring the books back to distribution points. As it is too expensive to
return actual paperback books to publishers' warehouses, and for publishers to
recycle them, publishers accept torn-off paperback covers as proof that the books
have not been sold. ("Agents Corner," Feb. 1990)
Curtis notes that with the rising competition for rack and shelf space, the return rate
has soared to "staggering proportions commonly posted today by even the
best-managed publishers: 25%, 40%, 50%, and even higher" (ibid.).
19. Platt describes a "shared world" series as follows: "Preiss [a 'packager'] tells
you he has an attractive proposition. He's persuaded a genuinely Big Name to
sponsor a new series that will be written by other, lesser names, sharing a fictional
'universe' that the Big Name created long ago in one of his early works. His Name
will appear on the new novels in huge type at the tops of the covers, while the
lackeys who actually write the books (for maybe $4000 apiece) will receive credit in
microscopic print at the bottom" ("The RAPE of Science Fiction" 48). Also see
Levy 47.
20. There is some question as to whether the number of titles is increasing,
decreasing, or remaining constant. The editors queried by RMP (see note 17) answer
variably on this question, though the preponderance of respondents said they were
publishing more. According to Levy's 1988 survey of SF, "since 1982 the number of
science fiction and fantasy books published has increased steadily each year, and this
was true again in 1987" (46).
Like most SF readers I know, I on occasion am told about a book only to
discover it is "out of print," at which point I must look for it in secondhand
bookstores. My anonymous informant writes:
A professor who teaches a science fiction course told me [in the Fall of 1989],
'There are a lot of recent books I'd like to use in my course. Trouble is, by the
time I find out about them, read them, and decide I want to use them, they're
out of print, with no way of telling when they'll be back in print, if ever.' This
is how the same books, those the publishers have decided to keep on their
backlists, get taught year after year and written about over and over again in
journals.
As to the difficulty of sorting through the trash, Collins suggests that "Sturgeon's
law needs updating-about 99 percent of genre books these days are crap." See also
Nancy Etchemendy's witty description of her experience serving on the Nebula
Awards Jury.
21. The importance of print-run size cannot be overstated, as is demonstrated by
an anecdote provided me by my anonymous informant:
Writer A is a writer of many years' standing, with awards to his credit. Before
the publication of one recent novel, he set up interviews and publicity for it on
his own. The books came out [in the Summer of
19891,
with a first printing of
approximately 30,000 copies. Within a couple of weeks of publication almost all
the copies had been sold, and bookstores were unable to reorder more. The
writer, ready to launch his publicity campaign, called his editor. 'The novel's sold
out its print run," he said. 'Now's the time to reprint, when I can reach more
readers with interviews and such.' 'We can't reprint,' the editor explained. 'You
see, it's only sold 30,000 copies, and that's not enough to justify reprinting.'
The writer prointed out they had only printed 30,000 copies, all of which sold in a
couple of weeks, but the editor stood firm...and thus helped that writer acquire a
reputation for being able to sell only 30,000 copies.
My informant noted that one paperback house won't keep books on its backlist
unless they sell at least 60,000 copies-which is, of course, not possible if the
print-run falls below 60,000.
22. See "Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Crown Announce Discount Programs," Locus,
Apr. 1990: 7. The article quotes Waldenbooks' Senior Marketing Director Ron
Jaffee: "It's a wonderful target-marketing opportunity. We know what people bought,
where they bought it, how many times they shop in our stores, and what types of
books they are buying right down to the ISBN number."
23. Hollywood and the recording industry offer other examples. In this regard,
Curtis's allegation ("Agent's Corner," Sept. 1990) that the bookstore chains demand
large sums of money for "advertising" a particular book under threat of not carrying
that book at all is a "Dirty Little Secret" all too reminiscent of the 1960s' "payola"
scandals arising from recording industry payments to radio stations and disk jockeys
to play certain records. Curtis also reveals ("Agent's Corner," Oct. 1990) that
wholesalers charge 25, 15, 10, or 5 cents per paperback book for "slotting" them in
respectively desirable positions on bookracks-thus adding to the cost the consumer
must pay. Curtis quotes Harlequin Books Executive Vice President Michael D.
Muolo as saying that brutal competition for space "has forced publishers to increase
prices to the point where pricing is no longer an ally but has become an enemy of
volume."
24. Arbor House published The Bridge of Lost Desires in November, 1987, and
St Martin's brought out a mass-market paperback edition in 1988.
The chain reactions of the players in this affair is instructive. The first two books
of the Neveryon series sold a quarter million each; but someone who had read an
advance copy revealed at a buying conference at Barnes & Noble that the book had
"gay content," prompting Barnes & Noble to cut its order for the book in half;
subsequently, the publisher (Bantam) decided to cut the print-run of the third book
in half (to 70,000) and when that sold out did a second edition of only 15,000. Next
B. Dalton and Waldenbooks announced they would not stock any book by Delany
in any of their stores, so Bantam rejected the fourth book in the series, and Tor
afterwards followed suit. As Platt notes:
Any writer must bow to the workings of the free market. But in this case, the
market isn't really free. Two enormous bookstore chains now control what kind
of books will be published in America....Ten years ago, editors were not in the
habit of consulting B. Dalton and Waldenbooks before deciding whether to
publish a novel. Today, however, if a writer moves in a direction that alarms the
booksellers, or if he acquires the stigma of poor sales figures, his future work is
placed in jeopardy. ("Two Kinds of Censorship" 43-44)
25. For a case in point, see Gayle Feldman, "The Best-Seller Blues: Hard
Lessons from a Cosby Book," New York Times Book Review, 10 June 1990: 11, 44-45.
Richard Curtis describes the fever and desperation of this failed approach to surefire
profit-taking, as well as its effects on midlist writers, in his February 1990 column in
Locus.
The parallel Blockbuster Fever has been bedevilling Hollywood as well,
throughout the 1980s. The most noted instance of a Hollywood studio taking a bath
at the box office is Heaven's Gate, the cost of which has been variously estimated
between thirty-six and fifty million dollars. The film (for whose promotion United
Artists reportedly spent $500,000) closed after playing one week in New York.
26. "Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits
of our society," Roland Barthes writes,
which would have us 'throw away' the story once it has been consumed
('devoured'), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book,
and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children,
old people, and professors), rereading...multiplies it
[the
text] in its variety and
its plurality...rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the
return of the different). (S/Z 16)
27. Special deals between megapublishers and the bookstore chains created the
"frankenstein" (I'm thinking of the James Whale film) which the chains have become
over the last decade.
28. Avon editor John Douglas talked openly about this to Platt:
'Everybody has an implicit imperative from the management to buy the most
salable books possible,' he agreed with
[Platt],
but added, 'I don't think many
editors actually take on projects they dislike. They buy books they like that they
think they can make salable. Remember, some of them have legitimately
conservative tastes.' ("The RAPE of Science Fiction" 49)
Delany's
books apparently fall into the "controversial" category now that
bookstore-chain executives have "discovered" the "gay-content" in his books.
29. Again, print-run size is critical. No matter whether the print-run sells out
in one week, the book will not get a second edition if it is under the threshold of
copies-sold established for print-runs (see note 21). In the same way, Bantam could
argue against taking the fourth book in Delany's Neveryon series by pointing to the
decline in the numbers of copies sold of the third title compared to the first two
-despite the fact that the third book sold out the reduced print-run Bantam allowed
it ("Two Kinds of Censorship" 43).
30. "Bookstore people," Curtis writes, "often talk about their businesses as
competitive not with other bookstores but with other types of enterprises that might
generate more revenue per square foot of sales space. Chain-store executives often
say that if a branch doesn't bring in enough money, it can be replaced by a shoe
store or electronics shop" ("Agent's Corner," Sept. 1990).
31. See my discussion of "synergies," which appears near the end of section (e)
on p. 15, supra.
32. See Spinrad, 182-97 and 217-25, for a discussion of the lack of respect on the
part of SF publishers for SF as literature and the deleterious effects he believes this
has had on the genre as a whole.
33. Samuel R. Delany, in a letter of 28 Aug. 1990 to RMP, cites Michael
Wendroff's MBA thesis research into how decisions are made by senior ad-
ministrators at 18 major publishers-and particularly Wendroff's conclusion that
"Publishing is not a business." According to Delany, "Wendroffs conclusion was
that there was 'no correlation' between the principles by which the various programs
were run and the success and failure of those programs. Thus, in Wendroffs words,
the 'most hallowed principles' by which publishing is run would seem objectively to
have the status of 'hunches' or 'superstitions."' Cf. note 25.
34. By ideology I mean a system of representations (images, myths, ideas, or
concepts) endowed with a specific historical context and functioning within a given
society. Contrary to popular usages of the word (usually with obvious ulterior
political motives), ideology in the (Althusserian) sense I have in mind is not a
conscious set of ideas by which one calculates moves and
strategies,
but an
inescapable prism mediating one's very perception and experience of reality.
Ideology "works all by itself," mostly at a preconscious level. See, especially, Louis
Althusser, "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays (NY & London, 1971).
35. Althusser likens interpellation to the most commonplace police hailing. For
example, when a woman suffers sexual harassment on the street, the harasser(s) are
"hailing" her, enforcing a particular construction of femininity. Teenage girls learn
early that the street is a hostile place where their presence is sanctioned under
particular circumstances only. Hearing about women who were raped when they
were out alone after dark, especially when those discussing it remark on the woman's
stupidity or culpability for being where she did not belong, cues the internal cops
inside of women, inculcating in them certain received notions of woman and woman's
place in the world. This is interpeilation in the service of sex-role ideology.
That interpellation constituted by advertisers' objectification and sexualization of
women also serves sex-role ideology though interpellation is not the advertisers' chief
intention. But while the frequently-iterated message that woman is "meat" is
generally merely implied in advertising in order to attract consumers to a product or
service, it is nevertheless the primary message that gets through (to women, at least).
Another instance of presumably unintentional interpellation is the George Bush
campaign's infamous Willie Horton commercial. That ad, while primarily aimed at
presuading voters to "consume" the Bush candidate, did so in terms of a stereotype
appealing to White racist fears; and in that way, a racist ideology was as much
intricated in it as a sexist one is in ads packaging women as meat to lure consumers
to buy a particular product. Indeed, the Horton ad's chief message was to reinforce
racist fears and stereotyping.
In the context of the publishing scene, I construe messages about "pro-
fessionalism" to be interpellations-largely unintentional (since I doubt all the people
singing the song of "professionalism" have any conscious knowledge of what they are
in fact
promoting)-aimed
at constituting the SF writer as a (more or less docile,
easily exploited) subject-producer.
36. Richard Curtis from time to time mentions such horrors. See, for instance,
his November 1989 "Agent's Corner," where he provides the following summary:
A concise biography of a successful author might read something like this: His
[sic] first contract gave his publisher total control over everything. When he
achieved a modest popularity, his publisher gave him consultation rights. After
he became very popular, he secured 'Approval not to be unreasonably withheld.'
At length he became a star, and his publisher gave him total control of
everything.'
It's interesting to note that a first SF novel commands something in the
neighborhood of one or two cents a word-a rate considerably below what most
magazines pay even "unknowns"-for giving up its textual autonomy.
But of course some magazine editors require textual changes, too. A recent
review in Locus of a Women's Press anthology dryly notes of "Boobs," the
immensely popular story by Suzy McKee Charnas, that it "restores a tougher ending
than was used in the original magazine appearance."
To be fair, I should add that during my interview with Joanna Russ she several
times mentioned editors who treat authors' texts and titles with respect. But since
of the editors she cited those who are still in the business are not accessible to
unagented writers, I don't think it's unreasonable for innovative, previously
unpublished SF writers to assume that it would be either a waste of time or a
dangerous mistake trying to interest a randomly drawn commercial editor in their
work.
37. See Richard Curtis's column on writers finding themselves in the position of
foremen exploiting other writers (Locus, Sept. 1989). See also Cramer, and Jennings'
interview with Bethke.
38. See, for instance, Brian Stableford's methodical, lucid exposition of just how
the numbers (don't) work out for all but superstar writers. He mentions a friend of
his writing 34 books in one year. Sam Moskowitz attributes as much as 12,000 words
per day to a husband-wife duo who claimed to be making a good living thereby
("The First Canadian Science-Fantasy Magazine," SFS 17 [1990]: 87).
On the other hand, Joanna Russ notes in a letter to me that
for a long time s.f. writers couldn't write only s.f. and survive. The 30s and 40s
were certainly like this, to some extent the 1950s. James Blish, for example, was
a technical writer or some such for a tobacco company for years until he retired
in I think his late 50s. The kind of professionalism talked about in your
essay-i.e., making a living at it-never worked for more than a small handful.
39. See, for instance, Locus's "1989 Magazine Summary" (Feb. 1990).
40. Locus, for one, while often mentioning or even briefly reviewing (after a
fashion) small press books and magazines, adopts the attitude of an adult looking at
a piece of kindergarten art. See note 16 for a parallel attitude in mainstream
literature.
41. For the full flavor of this attitude, consider J.N. Williamson's binary list of
"10 Things You Shouldn't Confuse If You Want to Be a Writer:
1. Wanting to write something, even knowing you can.-And doing it; 2.
Researching a yarn to the last possible place or date.-And writing it; 3.
Novels.-And short stories (Length's not the only difference.); 4. Your personal
experiences.-And fiction; 5. A story.-And a vignette; 6. Knowing you have
written a fine tale!-And submitting it; 7. A really fresh, different idea.-And a
twist on an old one; 8. Reading a pro's advice to you.-And honestly, fully acting
on it. 9. Placing a story somewhere (congratulations, too!)-And selling it; 10.
Your friends' or family's comments on your work.-The comments of profes-
sionals. (Scavenger's Newsletter #76 [June 1990]: 19)
Janet Fox remarks at the end of this list: "To the 10th item I'd probably add, be
thrilled that anyone loves what you've written-take it with appreciation, and use it
to keep going-but don't confuse it with what a full-time pro in writing has to say.
By the same token, remember that pros are people and err; they should never be
confused with God!" Perhaps not confused with God, but certainly be held up as
"experts."
Given what kind of writer "full-time pro" can denote, this turns out to be quite
dangerous-interpellative-advice to anyone interested in doing more than hackwork.
Williamson's binary format makes clear what he thinks of "pro" vs. "non-pro" and
non-paying publication in one of the best literary magazines vs. publication in
Analog, for instance. One must wonder, though, whether he thinks a "full-time pro"
like Bethke superior to Russ, who teaches rather than writes for a living. Speaking
as a reader, I'd say Williamson has omitted the most important indicators of whether
or not a given piece of fiction "works" and that his omission has something to do
with this problem of taking editors, not readers, as one's audience. Do people want
or need to reread the work? Do they laugh, cry, shout, or behave violently when
reading or talking about it? Do they find it necessary to discuss it in detail; does it
arouse them sexually or intellectually? For the writer these are unmistakable signs
that can be neither faked nor misread. And they certainly communicate a great deal
more than a contract in the mail, desirable as that is. This strikes me as a question
of audience. If the "pro's" audience is first and always an editor, then we're going
to have to rewrite all the existing texts on Muses and where SF comes from.
42. "The pure artist does it strictly for his [sic] own ego; publishes in circula-
tion-500 quarterlies that pay in contributor's copies; and writes two short stories a
year" (Jennings 8). I don't, I confess, quite understand what ego has to do with
publishing without pay. Van Gogh, to take an extreme example, never made a sou
(much less a living) on his art. Years after his death, however, his work has become
a commodity fetching more per square inch for its owners than real estate in
present-day Tokyo. Though the history of a creative work's commodity status can
tell us a great deal about capitalism, I doubt it can tell us anything about its creator's
motives in producing it (unless, perhaps, we are talking about the work of what
Bethke calls "the base hack," and even then I'm not sure its commodification can be
taken as the entire story). Surely Bethke would agree that it would be simplistic to
describe Van Gogh's production of unsalable work as simply a matter of "ego"
(especially since so many people now recognize it as "art" rather than the
outpourings of a madman).
This sort of reasoning simply reflects how, when applied to creative work, the
language of commodification tends to frame everything in its terms of reference,
however inappropriate it might rationally be to judge creative work by strictly finan-
cial criteria (as the bookstore chains insist upon doing). This privileging of the mass-
marketed product is analogous to thinking that only Hollywood makes "real" films.
National box office distribution, or nothing. Millions of readers or none. How many
copies of a book does Bethke think constituted a bestseller in the 18th century?
43. While women who are unpublished take on the role of the mad, delusive
hysteric, men who are unpublished or not paid for their writing have instead feared
being thought effeminate or "sissy." I've always suspected the male response to a
lack of institutional ratification of their work has something to do with the fact that
the novel as we know it was in England and France invented and developed by
women (in England, by Aphra Behn 30 years before Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe,
in France by Madame de Lafayette), a fact most of us manage to forget most of the
time but which must lurk quite uncomfortably close to the surface for some male
writers. For a fascinating look at the playing out of such anxieties in the power
struggle White male academics waged (and won) for control of the canon in the
1920s, see Paul Lauter, "Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary
Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties," Feminist Studies 9.3 (1983): 435-63. It is
interesting to speculate on why painters are less likely to be called "cranks" or
"sissies" when they pile up work that doesn't sell. Tom Disch's exploration of this
area of the writer's psychic landscape offers some suggestions. See "The Squirrel
Cage," in Fun With Your New Head (NY, 1968): 99-113.
44. Catherine Gallagher discusses this ancient link as well as writing's related
association with femaleness in general.
45. "Prostitute" is a general term that could conceivably apply over a wide range,
even in its most literal sense (i.e., as designating a person who sells sexual services).
In its most traditional application to the writer, the subspecies of prostitute most
likely conjured up would be the hetaira. Writers who work to spec would more
suitably be described as meat puppets or Stepford wives. The hetaira wouldn't stay
in business long if-like a Neuromancer meat puppet or a Stepford wife-she lacked
will, consciousness, and intellect.
46. Alfred Bester also engaged in two kinds of writing. Would he, though,
consider "market awareness" appropriate for both? Not according to Platt: "Alfred
Bester once remarked that he earned much more money when he wrote for
television, but science fiction was the only field that allowed him to write without
making compromises. The audience was smart enough to meet him halfway"
("Vanishing Midlist" 50).
47. About once a year The New York Times Book Review runs an autobiographi-
cal piece detailing the process whereby a fiction writer is tamed and shaped by the
New York publishing establishment. According to these confessionals, concern for
"publishability" in the course of writing the second book becomes an essential (and
not always unconscious) element of the writing process. Sadly, those writers who
find it impossible to write a new book when the old one has not yet been sold don't
realize this for a long time to come. And when they do, they feel betrayed-and
self-deceived. Many writers, of course, never do see it. Ideology, the saying goes,
"works all by itself."
In an essay reflecting on her experience writing SF, Lee Killough ruefully notes
that "experimentation is always chancy," and describes a daring short-story idea she
conceived but never attempted to work out "because I was afraid no editor would
buy [such] a story." "Did I deprive myself of valuable experience by not trying the
story anyway?" she asks of herself. "How else can a writer grow except by
experimenting, by trying something new, by stretching?" Perhaps, she concludes,
I will write that story...one day. After all, what is a storyteller or science-fiction
writer who takes no chances? I don't love the genre for playing safe. That is not
what science fiction is about. Exploration is playing with imagination, examining
possibilities, asking the impossible plausible. ("In the Country of the Mind" 82).
Avon SF editor John Douglas's "suspicion" that writers are dissatisfied by low
pay, not by unpublished work, simply denies that writers worry constantly about
publishability, especially when writing novels. It's a little like Marie Antoinette's
infamous remark about peasants too poor to buy bread-"Let them eat brioche"-or
Ronald Reagan's insistence that people who live on the streets prefer homelessness
to sleeping indoors in their own safe beds. On the other hand, Douglas also admits
that editors "buy books that they like that they think they can make salable.
Remember, some of them have legitimately conservative tastes" (Platt, "The RAPE
of Science Fiction" 49). I'm not sure what the legitimately is meant to do in that
sentence, but my guess is that Douglas is saying that "management" (as he calls the
editors' bosses) isn't twisting editors' arms. Which presumably makes that kind of
censorship okay.
48. Russ further elaborates on the writer's struggle against self-censorship in
Louise Armstrong's "The Circle Game II":
The self-censorship has always been my enemy and I've seen it in others. Back
in the sixties when I wrote my first Alyx story...I remember being so frightened
that I almost wrote with my eyes shut....I'm thinking now of a novel...which is
again an uphill battle; frivolous, self-indulgent, openly Lesbian, sheer lagniappe,
etc. I feel ashamed of it. (It's getting so that if I don't feel ashamed and scared
of something, I know it's no good.) Much of what I've done in short stories in
the last few years I can't even think of as 'art' (which is terrible self-censorship)
....The work's not half as good as it could have been [if we were] given the
freedom of publishers like Daughters and money (which means time) and the
whole climate of not being ignored or told you're weird or silly and seeing others
doing fine work which isn't censored, dispraised.... (9)
49. The Tale of the Unrecognized Masterpiece must reign as one of the all-time
favorites of the editors of The New York Times Book Review, since they see to it that
readers are continually regaled with it, just in case they've forgotten it. A sub-genre
of this form is the tale of writers submitting their work (including prizewinning,
already-published books) under pseudonyms, to test editors. Doris Lessing and Jerzy
Kosinksi are the most famous examples of authors who have done this. In all the
examples I've ever heard of, the editors bombed out and insisted the stuff was
unpublishable trash.
50. Government-based censorship in the US is sharply on the rise. In the last
few months, we have seen a museum indicted, musicians arrested, record-store
owners harassed with court injunctions, art photographers hounded by the FBI, and
all recipients of federal arts grants required to promise to practice self-censorship.
Apparently neither self-censorship by the artists nor market censorship suffices any
longer to control artistic production to the satisfaction of the more repressive
elements in the U.S.
51. For an excellent report on and feminist analysis of women writers and the
publishing industry, see Louise Armstrong's "Circle Game." It is interesting to note
that the university presses-which like commercial presses take a great interest in the
economic viability of their enterprises-can't publish enough women's studies books.
It is a fact that there's a huge, affluent audience for feminist literature. Editor
Barbara Smith of the Kitchen Table Press notes that one particular anthology of
writing by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back, has been reprinted again
and again. It sells in independent bookstores and through the mail, and has
generated a market by
word-of-mouth,
not advertising. But as Smith observes, large
publishers have no idea how to market such books, how to reach their audience. (I
myself doubt if
they'd
want to, no matter how much money were in it.) At a time
when megapublishers are reeling, feminist presses are thriving-despite their inability
to win shelf-space in B. Dalton or Waldenbooks. The answer? They've formed their
own networks of distribution, they've carved out channels of communication with
their potential readership. See also Seal Press publisher Barbara Wilson's and City
Lights editor Amy Scholder's remarks for more on what
publishers,
large and small,
have to learn from independent feminist presses ("Books and Bucks" 13-15, 18).
52. Russ recounts an (unsubstantiated) anecdote to underscore the lack of
interest corporations have in making money when it means breaking their own social
taboos:
Desert Hearts, I have heard-I can't vouch for this but it's a nice idea-...has been
seen by more people than Rambo, across the U.S., just by theater admissions.
More people. Hollywood still will not do [a film like] that. You can bet your
boots they're not going to make another one because of that. And I think that's
also a factor in editors' and publishers' decisions.
For substantiated and concrete examples of hot-selling radical writers meeting the
corporate publishers' stone wall of censorship, see Armstrong's "Circle Game."
53. Emily Alward ("Dimensions and Dilemmas of Editing, Scavenger's Newsletter
#72 [Feb.
19901:
2-3) mentions running into "editors who say the following:
'Whatever problem the protagonist has, he or she has to solve it solely by his or her
own efforts."' As Alward comments: "I wish them luck in coping with post-Reagan
America."
54. Editors have a number of ways of communicating to writers what is taboo.
What is absent from anthologies, magazines, and publishers' lists probably influences
the writer most strongly, albeit indirectly. Next in importance might be the pattern
of rejections a particular author receives. For short fiction, however, the key form
of interpellative communication from editor to writer is the personalized rejection
letter. Rejection letters and notes serve any or all of four purposes: (1) to keep the
writer sending more mss. the editor's way; (2) to justify the rejection of a story,
especially when the editor is having trouble rationalizing the rejection to her/his
satisfaction when the usual reasons cannot be invoked; (3) to suggest ways in which
the story could be made acceptable; and (4) to give the writer a more precise idea
of the editor's taste and wishes (sometimes transforming the rejection letter into an
editorial shopping list).
Judging by the correspondence published every month in Scavenger's Newslet-
ter, one might conclude that many writers lack the confidence and independence to
keep from falling into the trap of regarding the editor as an authority figure whom
the good writer must please in order to become a "pro." The "pros' pleases editors,
sells stories, is submissive to editorial opinions, and will shape the work to meet the
editor's approval. A letter by Dana Cunningham (SN #80 [Oct.
19901: 17-17A),
however, suggests that growing confidence in one's work can go some way towards
challenging this authority structure. She recounts a conversation she had with
Gardner Dozois at a convention in which Dozois said that he asked for revisions on
almost every story he published, but that "three-quarters of the stories I ask for
revisions on I never see back." Cunningham describes the change in her attitude
from eagerness to do anything an editor asks, simply to get the story published, to
awareness that even small changes can fundamentally alter the story, in ways that
obliterate its original point.
55. Scavenger's and Guidelines' correspondents worry excessively about whether
or not an editor was rude or kind, but seldom about an editor's asking them to
compromise their writerly integrity (for an exception, see notes 53 and 54). It
apparently goes without saying that writers will naturally do whatever the editor tells
them if the end-result is publication. One particularly insipid example can be found
in the Summer 1990 issue of Guidelines, where Kelly Davis, in "An Editor: Friend
or Foe?," concludes: "Editors can be a writer's friend. They are not your enemy. If
you let them, editors can become your teacher as well."
56. The Pantheon Affair burst upon the world of letters in late February 1990.
By most accounts, former Bantam Doubleday Dell executive Alberto Vitale's replace-
ment in January of Robert Bernstein, Random House's CEO, precipitated the affair.
Vitale apparently ordered Pantheon's managing director, Andre Shiffrin, to cut
Pantheon's list by more than one half; Shiffrin resigned in protest, and most of
Pantheon's editorial management and staff soon followed. A New York Times article
pointed out that Random House's 1988 acquisition of the Crown Publishing Group,
as well as losses in its British publishing holdings, probably provided reasons for the
decision to squeeze Pantheon.
One can easily imagine how a number of factors would influence Vitale's decision
to slash Pantheon's list. As Bagdikian remarks: "Heavy indebtedness and interest
payments on junk bonds or other borrowings require quick cash all the time. The
smallest reduction in profits for a quarter or a year means squeezing every part of
the operation for quick cash" ("Assembly-Line Publishing" 102). (Cf. the example,
mentioned in note 12 above, of Murdoch's down-sizing The Sunday Times because
his corporation had taken on an excessive debt in its merger-mania.)
Imprints like Pantheon serve a variety of purposes to the megacorporations that
acquire them. As Bagdikian says,
They often made quite satisfactory profits for their former owners who liked
books and were less interested in some ultimate Wall Street coup. Sometimes
the small imprimatur lost money; but for a conglomerate with many other
operations making high profit margins, a loss leader can be useful to reduce
taxes. The small house could be maintained at virtually no cost as a unit for
developing future profitable authors....It is not unknown that in order to offset
taxes, the parent firm often employs creative bookkeeping to charge the smaller
imprint extreme 'administrative' and other arbitrary costs. This is one reason
why publishing houses rarely disclose their real numbers on a subsidiary or
imprint that they shrink or kill. ("Assembly-Line Publishing" 43)
One cannot doubt ideological considerations also play a role in deciding what is
valuable and what is easily, perhaps even happily, dispensible. For more details and
analysis, see "Assembly-Line Publishing" and "Pantheon Furor Continues."
57. Ironically, while Will rages at "leftist intellectuals" for using the term "market
censorship," he himself gloats at the ditching of books through what he calls "the
market's severities." The only explanation I can think of for Will's attitude (beyond
the desire merely to censor anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan) is that he is
applying an
elementary economics course's definitions of capitalism within an Adam
Smith framework without accounting for late multinational merger-maniacal forces
dominating the so-called "market." To enjoy the full impact of Will's vitriol, be sure
to see "Liberals Flock to Save Pantheon," his March 25, 1990 column syndicated by
the Washington Post Writers Group.
58. Many news media owners have special interests at stake in the way news is
reported. Viewers of NBC news, for instance, would be wise to remind themselves
that General Electric owns it and can flre Tom Brokaw or any other NBC News
employee if its CEO doesn't like NBC's coverage.
WORKS CITED
Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader. A Social History of the Mass Reading
Public, 1800-1900. Chicago, 1957.
Armstrong, Louise. "The Circle Game." The Women's Review of Books 4.5 (Feb.
1987): 9-10; 4.6 (Mar. 1987): 9-10.
Bagdikian, Ben H. "Assembly-Line Publishing." Tikkun 5.3 (May/June, 1990): 42-44,
102.
. "Cornering Hearts and Minds: The Lords of the Global Village." The Nation
248.23 (12 June 1989): 805-820.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Tr. Richard Miller. NY, 1974.
Bohlen, Celestine. "Hungarians Vying for Control of Freed Press." The New York
Times 9 Sept. 1990: A6.
"Books & Bucks: A VLS Symposium." Voice Liternry Supplement #85 (May 1990):
12-19.
Bryant, Edward. "A Conversation with Ellen Datlow." Science Fiction Eye 1.4 (Aug.
1988): 55-68.
Calvocoressi, Peter, & Ann Bristow. Freedom to Publish. Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1980.
Cramer, Kathryn. "Sincerity and Doom: An Eventual Review of James Morrow's
This Is the Way the World Ends," Parts 2 and 3. The New York Review of Science
Fiction #3 (Nov. 1989): 9-12; #4 (Dec. 1989): 13-16.
Curtis, Richard. "Agent's Corner," columns appearing monthly in Locus, 1989-90.
Ellison, Harlan. "Nackles: An uncensored teleplay." Gauntlet #1 (1990): 36-42.
Etchemendy, Nancy. "The Year of Reading Franticly." Quantum #36 (Spring 1990):
15-17.
Gallagher, Catherine. "George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the
Jewish Question." Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ed.
R.B. Yeazell. Baltimore & London, 1986. 39-62.
Gallop, Jane. Thinking Through the Body. NY, 1988.
Gordon, Joan. "Yin and Yang Duke It Out." Science Fiction Eye 2.1 (Feb. 1990):
37-39.
Hartwell, David. "Dollars and Dragons: The Truth About Fantasy." The New York
Times Book Review 29 Apr. 1990: 1, 40-41.
Hollinger, Veronica. "Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism."
Mosaic 23.2 (Spring 1990): 29-44.
. "Feminist Science Fiction: Breaking Up the Subject." Extrapolation 31.3 (Fall
1990): 229-239.
Jennings, Phillip C. "An Interview with Bruce Bethke." The New York Review of
Science Fiction #19 (Mar. 1990): 1, 8-11.
Killough, Lee. "In the Country of the Mind." Women of Vision: Essays by women
writing science
fiction. Ed. Denise Du Pont. NY, 1988. 69-82.
Levy, Michael. "The Year in Science Fiction." Science Fiction and Fantasy Book
Review Annual 1988. Ed. Robert A. Collins & Robert Latham. Westport &
London, 1988. 37-50.
Maass, Donald. "Mega-mergers: Staying Alive in the Land of the Giants." Science
Fiction Chronicle 11.10 (July 1990): 34-35.
"Pantheon Furor Continues." Locus 24.5 (May 1990): 5, 64.
Philmus, Robert M. "The Impact of Publishers' 'Star' Wars?" SFS 13.2 (July 1986):
231-32.
Platt, Charles. "Inside Science Fiction: Too Many Books." The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction 79.1 (July 1990): 65-70.
"On Alfred Bester," Interzone #23 (Spring 1988): 48-49.
"The RAPE of Science Fiction." Science Fiction Eye 1.5 (July 1989): 44-49.
"The Special Case of Bantam Spectra." Science Fiction Eye 2.1 (Feb. 1990):
19-21.
"Two Kinds of Censorship." Interzone #25 (Sept.-Oct. 1988): 43-44.
"The Vanishing Midlist." Interzone #29 (May-June 1989): 49-50.
Spinrad, Norman. Science Fiction in the Real World. Carbondale, IL, 1990.
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1989): 35-39.
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1990): 7.
RESUME
Cristina Sedgewick. Le Chemin qui fourche: la science-fction pew-il suvivre
dans une Ambique postmodeme et
migacopautive?-La
SF fait face a un
probleme fondamental: elle s'est alliee a une industrie de l'edition dont la
raison d'tre est sans rapport et parfois me^me hostile aux interets et aux desirs
de la communaute d'ecrivains et de lecteurs de la SF. Comme toutes les
corporations multinationales postmodemes, 1'edition cherche a standardiser
ses produits et a gerer createurs et consommateurs afin de maximiser ses
benefices. Ecrivains et les editeurs ont aide l'industrie a atteindre ces buts en
souscrivant a l'idee de 'professionalisation,
"
une ideologie qui encourage les
auteurs a viser les editeurs et les cadres des grandes maisons d'edition comme
public. Puisque pour les "professionals" le desir de plaire aux patrons est plus
important que leur propre imagination creatrice ou leur vision individuelle, il
en resulte que les ecrivains professionels de la SF s'autocensurent consciem-
ment et inconsciemment afin de s'aligner avec l'ideologique de ces me?mes
patrons. Les pressions a se plier a ces exigeances ideologiques ont atteint unt
tel niveau aujourd'hui que me^me les auteurs qui s'y opposent consciemment
ont du mal a y resister. On conseille vivement a la communaute de SF
d'arracher la SF a l'emprse de ces mega-editeurs et de ces chatnes de maisons
d'edition pour satisfaire a la diversite des gouts, chose a laquelle l'industrie de
l'edition ne s'interesse guere. (CS/ABE)
Abstract-SF has a problem: it has linked its fortunes with a publishing
industry whose raison d'etre is irrelevant (perhaps even inimical) to the
interests and desires of the community of SF readers and writers. Like all
postmodern multinational corporate sectors (which it has largely become), thle
publishing industry seeks to standardize its product and efficiently manage its
producers and consumers in order to maximize its profits. Writers and editors
have assisted the industry in accomplishing these objectives by subscribing to
"professionalism," an ideology that encourages writers to take editors and
bookstore-chain executives rather than readers as theirprimary audience. Since
"professionals" place pleasing their employers above their own creativity and
vision, professional SF writers censor themselves both consciously and
unconsciously in order to meet their employers' perception of the ideological
bottom line. The pressures on SF writers to toe this ideological bottom line
have become so massive that even consciously resisting writers find them
difficult to withstand. The SF community is therefore urged to wrest SF's fate
from the hands of the megacorporate publishers and bookstore chains so that
diverse tastes can be served by diverse books, something the publishing industry
has no interest in doing. (CS)

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