Strange Horizons Discussion Forum: The Publishing Industry—from the Reader’s Perspective, by Debbie Notkin

"So what is the reader's interest in the arcane, profit-driven, and often bizarre world of publishing?"

The interest that I have is that I'd like to support certain editors (types and individuals) as "representatives" of my reading tastes. I'd like to feel that "my" editors are out there: scouring submissions and offering comradely support for brilliant futurists, eclectic stylists, intelligent revolutionaries, and even offbeat-but-entertaining crackpots, who're typing up stories that the authors think "ought" to be written. I'm kind of turned off by the approach to s-f writing that goes: give them the old buffola, but ring changes -- do it so well that they'll love it.

As you know, I'm rooted, longtime, in the visionary eclecticism (or crackpottedness, if you want to call it that) of science fiction: from Olaf Stapledon and Murray Leinster, A.E. Van Vogt through Phil Dick to Kornbluth & Pohl, Fritz Leiber, Robert Sheckley, R.A. Lafferty, Ursula Le Guin, James Tiptree, Joanna Russ.

"So," you might say, "Don't we have Suzy Charnas, Ted Chiang, Ken MacLeod and China Mieville, now (not to mention Gene Wolfe)? And, setting aside visionaries and revolutionaries, doesn't current s-f have great and funny storytellers -- storytellers with more cohesion in their writing styles than any of the grandmasters had thirty to fifty years ago?"

Yes. But as an s-f reader, over the past ten years, I'm finding fewer new books per month that I really want to buy and read -- while many more new s-f books per month are actually being released. One explanation for this, of course, is that I'm just old and used up, after fifty years of reading. Younger and more active minds can truly delight in the variety of the current s-f marketplace.

But, inwardly, I still feel like I'm looking, each month, for anything that might stimulate my sense of wonder. I wish s-f magazines could still buy "first rights," and publish two and three-part serials by leading s-f authors. And I wonder what my monthly s-f experience would be like if distribution channels permitted the publication and sale of more original mass-market paperbacks.

I have the subjective feeling that it's getting harder, over time, for science fiction writers to use the "ought to be written" yardstick as the primary incentive for their work. S-f may actually be better than ever, now -- as a number of people are ready to argue. But I have a strong feeling the market isn't targetting me as a consumer, the way it once did.

Maybe that's all I'm complaining about (feeling that I'm no longer the prime marketing target for s-f publishers). The conjecture about the market discouraging "ought to be written" as a primary author incentive may be old codger chauvinism. I'm not sure.