Slow SF

A lot of sf writers, myself included, want to have literary values in their genre fiction, and a lot of them, myself included, sometimes write as if the way to do that is to add more words. It's not.

Threads merge, next three posts!

One possibly interesting thing is that there seems to have been an explosion in small-press venues for short sf over the last five or ten years (disclaimer: I have no idea what if any small press venues were actually out there pre-1990 or so, so I may be entirely wrong about this). Are there enough of these venues to account for some of the dent in the sales of the Big Magazines? And a lot of them seem to favour fantasy/slipstream/whatever stories, and a lot of them seem to welcome stories that are ... not plotless, but less plot-driven than sf traditionally is. Responding to a market need? Would a traditional-sf-focused 'zine have legs?

Would a traditional-sf-focused 'zine have legs?

SF Age was , if I remember right, that very kind of magazine. It went under, though. I don't know if that's an answer to your question :) I would certainly enjoy seeing some of the small-press zines doing SF, or have a market specifically for SF the way SF Age was. I just keep hearing that it's hard to get SF submissions anyway. The market is clogged with fantasy or the slipstreamy fantasish stuff. However, thsi si third hand info, so it could be wrong.

I'm going to ignore the complexity of the issue and focus on just a couple of points.

Congratulations, you're channeling the president!

But seriously folks...

This, I think, is where you and I differ most dramatically. My goal in writing is to leave the reader feeling they've had a good read. Anything else (like literary content) is beside the point. Let me put my money (or at least my fiction) where my mouth is: "Requiem" in the latest issue of Absolute Magnitude is intended as little more than a romp. There's a young quirky character who gets into trouble, meets up with some aliens, learns a few cool things, and sets his feet on the steps of a bold new personal future. Pfft. It's just supposed to be fun. It's not likely to win any awards, but I do believe it leaves the reader smiling and in a better mood than when they started.

As a writer, I don't think there's much more you can reasonably hope for than that.

As a writer, I want to mess with people's minds!....mwahahaha...

I have no objection to that kind of story. Or to writers that write them. :-)

I myself am tempermentally neurotic and earnest (not to mention physiologically in disharmony with sugar), plus I think there's a whole big barrel full of things you can at least hope to do with your fiction. Fizz is fine, but sometimes you want baby zucchinis sauteed in butter, or really dark chocolate, or, say, barbecued salmon. Wait a minute, I was going to say something profound about writers' goals, and here I am talking about salmon again.

I blame at least some of it on anthologies. They can suck up the few stories that well-know novelists (and less well-know novelists) write in a year. Also, when I was in my short-story reading heyday (as in, that was all I was reading and I was reading a lot of it), I mostly purchased anthologies. If even a fraction of readers are like I was, it puts a strain on magazines.

But anthologies can pull from magazines and pick and choose what they include. Magazines must consitently put out a number of stories every month, regardless of anything else. When deadline is reached, they need something to fill the pages. As someone who made teh attempt to put out a magazine, it's a bitch. You want the best possible quality but sometimes time runs out and you're left with "well, it's not bad and it's certainly better than most of the other crap we've gotten - let's run it." No, it's not the best way to get stuff out there, but with pay rates being what they are (SFFWA still lists professional rates at 3 cents a word) a smaller magazine and even some of the larger ones have to take what they can afford and hope for the best.

To probably no one's surprise, I very, very much agree with what you're saying here.

You don't have to be a "teenaged boy" to value compression and speed over discursion and decoration. I do, and I'm 46. The world is full of worthwhile things I can do with my time. What that Bester paragraph says to me is: I will get to the point with elegance and economy, and I will not waste your time.

Whereas I, as a teenaged boy...

...developed a love for style and decoration in writing that hasn't left me yet.

Here's what I realized from your (very good) post: Sturgeon's Law applies also to units of prose smaller than "story." Must remove 90% paragraphs, sentences, words.

Bt prly nt ltrs.

I let my subscriptions lapse because my tastes had changed, but the stories in the magazines had not. Like the bookshelves, the magazines seem stuffed with a lot of "more of the same." Unlike the bookshelves, I can't pick and choose those few stories that speak to me, I have to pay for a whole subscription to an entire magazine. It stopped being worth the money.

Science Fiction: More Complicated

Judith Berman, you make several good points. However, I think that it is more complicated.
(1) "audience... used to be teenage boys" but might not be, now. Women have found their place in the field as writers, editors, readers, and tough on asocial boys.
(2) "attention spans got shorter" or media act as if this is so. But, if so, short shorts and short stories in general should be proliferating, rather than trilogies.
(3) "Science fiction used to be adventure fiction." Well, that and so much more. Sure, Verne and Wells wrote great adventures. But Verne was also fascinated by the advance of science and technology as such -- a defining aspect of the field that he and Mary Shelley and radio hacker Hugo Gernsback others helped to create. Wells said that he considered himself a Socialist first, and a writer second. Be that as it may, it underlines the didactic component of Science Fiction. It is trying to teach us something, or motivate us to do something. I could go on, but I wanted a foot in the door of this debate, because you touch on some very important topics.

Re: Science Fiction: More Complicated

>(2) "attention spans got shorter" or media act as if this is so. But, if so, short shorts and short stories in general should be proliferating, rather than trilogies.<

Although, I have heard people comment that short stories require *more* attention. Sure, they're shorter than books, but also often more dense. I know myself I can continue to read a book even when my attention wanders, & when I realise this, I can generally catch up again without having to return to the point where my attention began to wane. Whereas with a short story, you have to keep up.

Attention Markets

New media don't replace old ones; they just jostle with them shoulder-to-shoulder. But new hours in the day are far and few between, so they have to compete for attention.

I figure we've had a bunch of new media arrive in the past three decades, and they're competing directly for the attention of the SF magazines' traditional core readership.

Three decades ago your normative adolescent male couldn't go and chat on the internet or play a computer game (except "Pong"). Narrative RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons were in their infancy. Video recorders were exotic and expensive. Camcorders, personal stereos, other gizmos, were feature-poor and expensive (if they existed at all -- the Walkman was technically feasible in 1965 but didn't really arrive until 1979/80). These technologies all mediate narratives or let you pin your own sound track on your thoughtstream. We tend to forget how plugged-in and personalized our world has become, compared to the bad old days. Back then, if you wanted mindless action narrative the magazines and books were the place to go. These days you might equally well play Doom III or hit on your pals via IM. There are more options to fill the same number of hours, so it probably shouldn't surprise us if the magazines' share of the attention market is shrinking.

Re: Attention Markets

Charles Stross has hit the nail on the head here.

"Three decades ago" = 1975. I'd just been awarded my M.S. in Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Artificial Intelligence/Cybernetics. My M.S. dissertation was a data structure and algorithm for parallel automated theorem proving on massively parallel computers which did not yet exist. My thesis advisor and I had not yet noticed that a major computer company had stolen and commercialized this work. I had started my Ph.D. research on what is now called Artificial Life and Nanotechnology, neither field having a name at the time. Now and then I'd wander over to the student union building, home to "The Blue Wall" which sold more beer than any other venue in all of New England, to play a monochrome racing car videogame.

A few years before that, I was world champion of the first two commercial videogames: Pong and Computer Space (later repurposed as Asteroids), as 11% owner of the vending machine cartel at Caltech, where we beta tested these games before the inventor founded Atari.

I'd played proto-RPGs, including ones lasting several days, run by the State Department, but had no interest in this new Dungeons & Dragons thing that Nick Smith and others raved about ("not for the game, but for the meta-game.")

I got Ted Nelson, creator of Hypertext and Hypermedia, speaking to our department, and soon had an Imsai, a processor technology Sol-20, and a Cromemco hooked up via S-100 bus, in a high-level language network operating system, running a prototype of hypertext and hypermedia with hotlinks and stick-figure animation.

I am usually about 30 years ahead of the curve. I'm an explorer of the Ideocosm, the space of all possible ideas, before the mountain men come and blaze the paths that pioneers follow, before the wave of early adopters, and so forth.

And even so, I mostly read my science fiction in books and magazines (although for some years I'd been typing them on punch cards, then DEC-tape). Email was tedious. There were few distractions, except the usual drugs, sex, and rock and roll of my generation.

Things are different now. The future is here, but (as the sage says) unevenly distributed. Science Fiction helped create the very technology that coexists and displaces science fiction in books and magazines.

We're on the on-ramp to the Singularity. I've been here for a long time, but it's getting too crowded to be a good on-ramp from which to hitch-hike.

Did I mention that I invented, and published first, Artificial Meteorite Strike Spectroscopy, the key technology of the Deep Impact mission, culminating in a few hours? My science fiction products has always been displaced by my changing the real world. Other than lack of sufficient remuneration and recognition, I can't complain. It's not a perfect future, but it's much better than where we came from... and folks such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein all stated clearly that they were trying to create the future, in part by their own research, in part by inspiring the SF readers who would do the heavy lifting.

The present of science fiction

That Bester quote: I have a vision of my Clarion cohorts (and perhaps me as well) yelling, "Show, don't tell!" I wonder if writing workshops have had the unintended consequence of making many writers so self-consciously arty that it's all we can do to blow up a planet anymore.

With so much working against sf magazines -- and I think best-of-the-year anthos do have something to do with it, as well as media -- a better question might be why they still exist at all. Certainly there's no mainstream equivalent, unless you think people buy The New Yorker for the one short story each week. (Hmm, why DO people buy The New Yorker? Well, I subscribe even if I rarely read more than the cartoons, because the two or three articles I *do* read each month makes it seem worthwhile to me.)

Maybe we should all move to Hollywood and take our scripts with us...

I'm finishing up a science-fiction novel and now you're telling me (or your agent is) that nobody wants to read that kind of stuff? But -- but -- why did SINGULARITY SKY or CHASM CITY or THE SUNDERING get published, to cite just a few of the books I can see from where I'm sitting? And five years ago I honestly had not heard of Charles Stross (sorry, Charles) or Alastair Reynolds. Obviously SOMEBODY is buying these books, presumably reading them, and theoretically getting something out of them that we don't get from , oh, STARGATE SG-1, amusing as it sometimes is.

OTOH, the last book I bought was THE FAMILY TRADE, which seems to be fantasy...

--Tom Marcinko

Re: The present of science fiction

That Bester quote: I have a vision of my Clarion cohorts (and perhaps me as well) yelling, "Show, don't tell!" I wonder if writing workshops have had the unintended consequence of making many writers so self-consciously arty that it's all we can do to blow up a planet anymore.

In fact you are always telling the reader things when you write. Sometimes you really do have to write sentences like, "It was raining." "She had red hair."

from Kathryn Cramer (www.kathryncramer.com)

Judith: You might be onto something, but my sense from reactions to stories in our Year's Bests is that there is no consensus on which stories are the bad or boring ones. One person's favorite is the dull story that makes another give up and go somewhere else. From an editorial standpoint, it would be really nice to believe that magazine editors have the power to just change the mix or give writers a swift kick in the right body part to turn around the decades-long slide in subscription levels, but for the most part the editors are already doing that. That's why we still have sf magazines in spite of disastrous changes in news stand distribution, competition from media (like this) that didn't exist 20 years ago, etc.

Re: from Kathryn Cramer (www.kathryncramer.com)

My original comments were directed, not at a global analysis of the situation, but at questions of sf writing craft, and at differences in same that have crept in over the last 40 years. Not all those differences are bad, of course, but I would still maintain that I'm more likely (and others are too) to read a story whose content doesn't much appeal to me if the storytelling is crisp and to the point.

I'd like to present an "ordinary punter's" perspective. I don't buy SF fiction magazines, and I was thinking about why.

I've never bought an sf fiction magazine. The only ones I've read are four that were 'lent' (a year or so back, although I still have them somewhere) to me because they had Lois McMaster Bujold's novel 'Cetaganda' serialized in them (i did read most of the other stories as well). These were about ten years old, so I don't expect they represent magazines today.

I think the main barrier to me buying fiction magazines is the price. I'd be looking at a commitment of £20-30 to subscribe for a year. Whereas a novel would set me back £5-7 quid, or more often in my case, £1 to park the car while I change my library books.

While I prefer the story arc of a novel (in the same way as I prefer my TV shows to have season-long story arcs), I do like short stories to make up a proportion of my reading and I don't get to read as many as I would like. Sure, plenty are available online, but I don't often read them as the good ones are lost in the crowd and its hard to lose myself in a story while blinking at a screen I spent too long in front of anyway, sitting in an uncomfortable desk chair.

I find that I do spend about £30 a year (which I can't really afford) on the SF news magazine SFX. I started buying that (in less financially strained days) when free copies arrived with my PC Format magazine (I've since cancelled that subscription due to financial strain). I've stuck with SFX when I could spend the money on actual fiction mainly to hear from a broad authoritative source what's going on across the full range of SF, where i'll be sure to find something that interests me, and to know what to keep an eye out for in the library. Of course, with SFX I could cancel the subscription and pick it up on odd ocassions in the newsagents. I can't remember ever having seen a SF fiction magazine in even the most comprehensive newsagents.

If there was a magazine that i'd seen some samples of, liked, and didn't so much of a financial commitment, I think I'd be interested. I'd love the idea of knowing fiction I (at least mostly) enjoy is going to drop though my door every month or two. I'd love reliable, discerning guidance as to what short stories are worth reading.

I'm not trying to provided answers here. (I've been awake for far, far to long for that.) I'm just hoping to provide useful data.

Price of Science Fiction Magazines

aboulic2 makes a good point. Science Fiction Magazines have 5 types of competition, to use the Harvard Business School framework of Dr. John Porter.

(1) Competition with other magazines in the same market (i.e. Analog versus Interzone, etc.). This type is the one most often considered in publishers' decisions.
(2) Competition with suppliers, on the cost of paper, printing, shipping, and the like. The rising cost of gasoline in the USA affects trucking costs, and so forth.
(3) Competition with customers, namely the issue raised by aboulic2 on the subscription and newsstand prices.
(4) Competition with the government, in matters such as taxation and regulation. This includes import duties, with, for instance, Australia erecting a barrier against easy penetration of British and American fiction, allegedly to support Australian authors.
(5) Competition with other technologies, as discussed above by Charles Stross and myself. Science Fiction Magazines do live in the same world as DVDs of feature films, computer games, and the World Wide Web.

Without a detailed plan for facing all 5 types of competition, a given magazine will eventually fail. Without an industry-wide coalition, the whole spectrum of magazines might fail. Both subscriptions and newsstand sales fall each year. Only the cheap costs of production, and the fact that not too many copies need to be sold to maintain cash flow, keep the medium alive. Without a written plan for success, one follows an unwritten plan for failure.

It's about fun.

Oddly enough, I've used the same subject for three of my introductions in my short SF podcast. My thesis, however, was that a lot of short fiction just isn't as fun as it used to be. It may be better from a standpoint of prose competence, but it's not as fun. If anyone really wants to hear what I said about it, you can listen to episodes 4, 5 and 8. In a nutshell, I think it comes down to three problems:

1. Languid pacing and energy. (That one's been covered here pretty heavily.)


2. Stories that are too introspective: high-flown literary elegies about angst-ridden artists and the like.


3. Stories that are too reflective: they're set in the present day or an exact analogue, about present day problems, with a protagonist who's an awful lot like a science fiction writer. The skiffy element is incidental or metaphorical, and there's no light irony or escapism.

Of course there are still a large number of stories that I'd call fun -- and if any of you have one, I hope you'll send it to Escape Pod so we can narrate and podcast it (we're a paying market!) -- but the above three categories are represented so heavily in even the best magazines today that I often have a hard time mustering the enthusiasm to open a new one.

Re: It's about fun.

I've been thinking about this issue in one or another guise for a long time... will start a new thread... but in short: it's the obligation of serious fiction to be fun. Though probably what I really mean is "engrossing." Why should something be hard to read because it's serious?

What I keep coming back to is the fact that, with a single notable exception, no modern SF/F fiction magazine has ever devoted any serious effort to tapping the sizeable audience that reads media and tie-in SF/F fiction. Instead, the major SF/F zines seem committed to featuring stories as unlike tie-in fiction as possible and columns that treat media SF as devilspawn (Spinrad in Asimov's) or conspicuously ignore its existence (almost everyone else).

The sole exception cited above was the next-most-recent incarnation of Amazing, under Kim Mohan, which featured a variety of media fiction (mostly involving the Star Trek universe). One can make good arguments that all three of the most recent iterations of Amazing have suffered from serious problems of one sort or another, but I don't think the decision to include media fiction was one of them.

Deity knows there's an audience for it -- it's visible in the commercial success of tie-in novel programs, even after the source TV series goes away. It's visible in the long-term success of projects like Pocket's Strange New Worlds Star Trek anthologies. It's visible on the Web in the persistent survival and prosperity of media-driven fanfiction (and whatever one's view of the legal status thereof, there's no denying that surprising numbers of people both write and read it).

Of course SF magazines that attempt to ignore or marginalize readers and consumers of media SF are seeing their audiences shrink -- because consumers of media SF represent a large and growing share of the overall SF market, whereas the SF readership that agrees with the Spinrad faction that tie-ins are capital-E Evil is an increasing minority.

A magazine published under the Viacom or Time/Warner or Fox umbrella, featuring fiction set in various of their franchise universes, would likely be successful and profitable -- and might very well, particularly if edited with the right "spin", be a great boon to the SF/F magazine sector in general.

Didn't Dragon Magazine used to publish fiction? As I recall, they accepted fairly length stories, too.

I would think there would be a market for this.

Get right to the story

Haven't been reading the magazines *or* the anthologies much, lately. So I can't comment much on the current state of the world.

That said, I think 'Get right to the story' is and always has been good advice. And it seems to me anyone who thinks it contradicts 'literary value' hasn't been thinking too hard about just what literature is.

I think it's pretty hard, mind you, to pin that down, tho', so I guess it's excusable.

As a modest beginning, however: the cover of my copy of Tevis' *Mockingbird* calls him 'the bridge between SF and literature', and I think that's a decent comment.

Not sure this is all of what makes that book what it is, but what I'd bet on is: his characterizations are vivid and convincing, and he writes with a marvellous conviction that he's the first person telling this story, no leaning on presumptions that readers might know this genre. And it just *feels* original, to me, and has a sense about it that the story really matters.

And it also gets right into the story, and keeps it moving.

I'd say all of that together, and probably the very soulfulness of the thing, that's 'literary value'.