Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow Page 4

  A number of smaller publishers began to join the giants, and by 1950 there were half a dozen regular trade publishers in the sf field, plus the half dozen more specialist fan presses, and all were thriving.

  These were hard-cover publishers; the paperback houses were yet to be heard from.

  Some of the larger and more daring houses had already begun to get their feet wet. Pocket Books had published The Pocket Book of Science Fiction almost a decade earlier. New American Library had begun to sign up some of the hard-cover books for paperbound reprint. Bantam Books had published one anthology, Shot in the Dark, edited by Judith Merril, and was showing signs of interest in more. But no paperback house had actually begun a "line" of science fiction.

  Then Ian Ballantine, who had been president of Bantam Books, left that company to open up shop on his own as Ballantine Books. Ballantine was (and is) an enterprising and original soul, and was willing to take a chance on science fiction on a continuing basis. The first two books he bought were both from me, as it happens—Star Science Fiction, first of a series of anthologies of original science fiction stories, which I edited; and a novel that C. M. Kornbluth and I had written for Galaxy, where it was published under the title of Gravy Planet. Somewhat revised and slightly shorter, it appeared in simultaneous hard- and soft-cover editions from Ballantine as The Space Merchants.

  Some of the magazine editors, who had been gung-ho for the new fad of hard-cover science fiction book publishing, looked askance at seeing the books come out in paperback form. They felt that the paperbacks represented serious competition where it counted, in the marketplace. It took nearly twenty years for their worst fears to be realized, but they were right.

  Paperbound books reach much the same market as magazines. They are on sale in the same candy stores, drugstores, bus terminals, airports, and hotel lobbies; they are distributed through the same national distributing concerns. But they are intrinsically easier and therefore cheaper to distribute than magazines, in that they do not have an official off-sale date. Magazines stay on sale only for the period of issue. Your December issue of Analog is no longer a salable commodity on January 1st. The paperbound book that comes out on the same day can still be sold the following month, or the following year, or any time at all—at least, up to the point where it becomes so thumbed and shopworn that it has to be returned for decency's sake. Or, more likely, the dealer wants it out of the way to make room for new stock. The competition for newsstand space is ferocious, and even paperbacks have grave trouble in staying on sale long enough to reach their optimum audience; but at least they do not have a self-imposed termination date, as magazines do.

  By 1953 Ballantine had a lock on nearly every major sf writer as far as his paperbound book rights were concerned: Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Robert Sheckley, John Wyndham, and a dozen others. As other companies came into the field they had to be content with the books Ballantine had somehow overlooked, or had not wanted in the first place. Some, even so, were markedly successful, particularly Ace Books which, under the editorship of Donald A. Wollheim, quarried out a highly successful list of primarily adventure sf books—they are sometimes called "space opera." But Ballantine was first and even now, more than two decades later, it retains a list that includes more acknowledged sf classics—the books that are taught in the college courses and go back to print year after year—than any other paperback house.

  In spite of this new competition, the magazines were enjoying a new and even more high-flying boom than ever before. The old magazines were multiplying themselves—Amazing was publishing the thickest issues ever seen, rebinding them to sell as quarterlies and bringing out companion magazines. New ones were appearing. The publishers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, feeling the need to expand their list to get some of those scale economies working for them, listened to Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas's suggestion and tried a "one-shot" (i.e., a magazine that may or may not ever have a second issue, depending on how well the first issue sells) called The Magazine of Fantasy. It sold; they tried it quarterly, then bimonthly, then brought it out every month under the expanded title of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or F&SF for short. In upstate New York, a publisher named James Quinn tried his luck with If (still surviving, though under its second subsequent set of owners), and an Italian publishing company that had made a pile of lire out of confession comics in Europe decided that the same thing would work in the United States. It didn't, as it happened; but they were also looking for scale economies, and so they elected to publish three or four additional magazines, more or less at random. One of them happened to be science fiction, and is the only survivor of the firm. It was called Galaxy and, under its brilliant editor H. L. Gold, did in the 1950s almost a repeat performance of what John Campbell had done in the '30s and '40s in attracting new writers and reviving old ones, and imposing a new and more literate personality on sf.

  By the middle of the 1950s the number of existing American sf magazines had reached an all-time high-some thirty-eight separate titles, including a few that were marginal in that they dabbled in other fields than sf (Weird Tales, for example).

  Then three things happened almost at the same time, and all three of them were bad for sf magazines.

  The first was a disaster that smote all magazines, and it had to do with distribution.

  Magazine (and paperback book) publishers do not ordinarily send their publications directly to your corner newsstand. They use a system of distribution which has survived essentially unchanged since Frank Munsey got his start a century or so ago. The publisher sells the whole edition of his magazine at about half the cover price to a national distributor. The national distributor breaks up the edition and sells it, fifty or five hundred or several thousand copies at a clip (as many as he can, depending on what the market is for that particular magazine) to the six hundred or so local wholesalers who divided up the United States. The local wholesalers put that magazine, along with all the other magazines and paperbound books and odds and ends they handle, on their trucks, and send them around to the local newsstands. The newsstand puts them on sale. Each of these people takes a piece of the fifty percent or so that is the difference between the cover price and what the publisher gets for it in the first place; and each of them has the privilege of returning all unsold copies to the place they got them from for full refund.

  What happened in the 1950s was that the big old American News Company, first and largest of the national distributors, was taken over in a stock raid. Some canny investors had noticed that the cash value of the real estate and other properties ANC owned was a lot more than the aggregate value of the stock. So they bought up the stock and liquidated the company. They made a fortune in capital gains, but in the process they put ANC out of the business of distributing magazines.

  The worst part of it was that ANC had a unique position among national distributors. It was so large that it maintained its own entire network of local wholesalers around the country. All of the other national distributors combined (they were collectively called "the independents") shared the same parallel network. When ANC folded, all of its local wholesalers folded with them, and every independent wholesaler in the country became an instant monopolist. Costs went up. Services went down. All magazines were hurt, and many of them folded.

  The second event also affected all magazines; it was called television. What TV meant to magazines was unwelcome competition for the advertising dollar. More and more advertising money poured into the boob tube, and much of it came right out of the budgets that had once been allocated to buying space in periodicals.

  Those two things affected all magazines—and still do. The third event was of peculiar importance to the sf magazines, and it was Sputnik. No one had guessed that that first puny venture of man into space would have a disastrous effect on sf publishing, but it did. The little steel basketball the Russians coaxed into orbit turned much sf into reality, and apparently readers began finding in their dai
ly newspapers what they had once had to buy sf magazines to read about. (It seems probable that something similar occurred after the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima, but it was obscured by the greater publishing disaster of paper rationing and postwar upheaval.)

  If editors and publishers had expected any effect at all from the explosion of man into space it was a hopefully beneficial one. They acted that way, almost all of them, scheduling articles on the space program and switching the main themes of their covers from Bug-Eyed Monsters to orbiting hardware. They probably would have been better off staying with the BEMs because, for a solid year after Sputnik, magazine circulations slid down and down. In the last few years of the '50s the mortality rate was terrific, and the decline has continued to this day. As of this writing (January 1973) there are only about four or five real magazines of sf alive in the United States today, and most of them are showing symptoms of unease.

  There may have been one additional factor operating at the time of the great weed-out of sf magazines. It may even have been the most important one.

  There simply were not enough good stories around to fill thirty-eight science fiction magazines. Even if there had been, there were not enough good editors to select them. Most of the great boom crop of the '50s consisted of terrible stories.

  In an ideal world the effect of this would be that the bad magazines would die and the good ones flourish. It isn't an ideal world. Unfortunately, most casual readers of sf do not know one magazine from another; they do not even know one writer from another (a terrible truth most writers are reluctant to recognize), and so a bad story hurts everyone. With thirty-eight magazines in the field, the most one can expect is that the average reader will find himself in a bus terminal or a candy store, look for something to read, decide on an sf magazine, and pick up the one that looks most promising in some arcane way. (No one knows exactly what makes one package sell better than another, either.) If he reads it and enjoys it, he may pick up another sf magazine for the return trip on the bus. If he doesn't, perhaps he'll buy a newspaper or a mystery instead. The bad magazines turn marginal readers off to the good ones, and the trouble with turning off marginal readers is that there are so many of them. Maybe each one of them only buys one or two sf publications a year, but there are millions of them, and only some tens of thousands of dedicated almost-every-issue-of-everything addicts, and so if you lose the marginal readers you have lost most of your chance of making a profit.

  Now it is 1973, and those are the three main channels for the publication of science fiction: the magazines, the hard-cover books, and the paperbacks.

  There are others. For instance, there have always been science fiction comics, both in strip form in the daily newspapers and as comic magazines, back as far as Buck Rogers and the Big Little Books of the '30s. Science fiction does appear in general magazines. The stories in Playboy in particular are high in quality, and because Playboy pays ten or twenty times as much as any sf magazine does, they do attract some of the best writers in the field. And of course there are films, TV series, and other forms of dramatized science fiction. They are of varying merit, but they exist, and there are tens of thousands of people who consider themselves addicted to science fiction because of, say, Star Trek but have never bought a magazine or book.

  Battered and bruised, the magazines still survive. Partly they keep going because of the dogged loyalty of their hard-core fans, perhaps even more because of the dogged loyalty of their publishers and editors, most of whom operate on hopes and fringe benefits more than on actual tangible dollars taken in. (In 1972 one science fiction magazine editor was eligible for welfare because his salary was so low. The case isn't typical—but it's scary.)

  Would it matter if every science fiction magazine folded, as long as the books in paperback and hardcover editions kept coming out?

  It would probably matter a lot. It probably has seriously damaged the field already to have them in doubtful shape, if only because they are the time-honored, and also the easiest and best, vehicle for recruiting new writing and art talent to the field. To see how this works, just think of some reader—it could be yourself—out in, say, Sweetwater, Texas. You've read a lot of stories. At some point you think to yourself that you could write a story as good as some of the stories you see published. (That's what most of us did, at some time or another, and out of every hundred of us who thought this, perhaps one or two turned out to be at least partly right.) So you write a story.

  Then what do you do with it?

  If you have been in the habit of reading science fiction magazines, you have likely noticed that on the contents page there is an editor's name, and an address, and some wordage (perhaps only "We accept no responsibility for the return of unsolicited manuscripts") which suggests that they do, indeed, expect to have some people send them stories to consider. So you put your story in an envelope and mail it off to the magazine. If it is good the chances are it will be bought (if not by the first magazine, then by the second or nth), and you have become a "pro," are eligible to join the field's trade union, the Science Fiction Writers of America, and quickly find yourself in touch with all the other pros and their collective expertise. They will gladly share it with you. It is a friendly field. And so you are on your way.

  But if there are no magazines, or they are so scant that they never show up in Sweetwater, what do you do with your story? Even if the books come your way, they are less inviting, and certainly less personal.

  So very likely you do nothing at all with your story. One of the most famous of all sf stories, The Skylark of Space, languished in a desk drawer for seven years for that reason. Doc Smith wrote it because he wanted to, but since there was no science fiction magazine when he wrote it in 1919, he did little with it until Amazing Stories appeared in 1926.

  This easy road to professional writing has become pretty hard going, and it has had its effects already. More and more of the new writers come into the field through personal contact of one sort or another—fandom primarily, but also sf conventions, clubs, writing courses, or the sheer happenstance of running into somebody well connected in the field. There is no way to estimate the loss, or to prove that there are dozens or hundreds of good new writers out there who simply have not happened to make connections. But it is probable that this is so.

  To some extent, the gap is being filled by that unusual phenomenon of the sf field, quite unknown in most categories, the anthology of original stories.

  These are much like magazines in most ways. An editor gets a contract with a book publishing house, hard-cover or soft, to provide them with seventy-five thousand words or so of new, previously unpublished science fiction stories. He writes or phones those authors he would like to have represented in it, and gets from them enough stories to make up his book. There are dozens of these volumes around. I was the editor of the first such series, the Star Science Fiction anthologies published by Ballantine beginning in 1953. Other major series since then have been Damon Knight's Orbit collections, Harlan Ellison's three Dangerous Visions books, a large number edited by Roger Elwood, and others. But there are few really new writers in any of them, and almost none who have spontaneously generated themselves in the way described above. Ellison prints a number of new writers, but most of them come out of the writing courses he teaches. The other editors rely almost entirely on established professionals.

  Anthologies in general are an important feature of science fiction book publishing. It took book publishers a long time to believe that this could be so, for in most fields anthologies are traditional losers, but in sf they are no less popular than novels or single-author collections, and often sell better.

  The sf anthologies come in all varieties. There are "theme" anthologies of all descriptions (a dozen sf stories all laid on the planet Mars, or Great SF Stories About Doctors, A Treasury of Science Fiction Stories About Pussycats, etc.) There are "best" anthologies; in 1972 there were five separate volumes, each purporting to contain the selected best storie
s of the year. And there are endless numbers of plain anthology anthologies, representing some individual editor's choice of stories he thinks customers may have missed and would like to read. When you consider how few new short sf stories are published each year (long ones are hard to fit in), and how many anthologies are waiting to gulp them up, you can see duplication is common. A good sf story may be defined as one that has appeared in a minimum of five anthologies. Some stories have appeared in fifty. (This is not an exaggeration; my own story, The Midas Plague, has appeared in thirty-five.)

  Altogether, science fiction is a respectable fraction of the total publishing industry. In the United States it is probably the most successful category, beating out mysteries (traditionally the most successful line) by a fair margin and infinitely outdistancing Westerns, war stories, romance stories, and Gothics, year in and year out.

  It is hard to put numbers to the phenomenon, but here are some estimates which, if not wholly reliable, probably come close to what happens in an average year:

  All science fiction magazines combined (including those sf stories which appear in other magazines) probably publish in the aggregate some two-and-a-half to three million words a year, for which they pay authors somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand dollars. Of the stories in magazines, about half of them in numbers of stories are shorts (up to six thousand words), a little more than a quarter are intermediate-length novelettes and novellas (six thousand to twenty-five thousand words), and the remainder are novels, most of them ranging from fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand words. In terms of total wordage in the magazines, the percentages are probably about fifteen percent in short stories, thirty-five percent in the intermediate lengths, and fifty percent or better in novels.