Before the Science Fiction Writers of America presented its annual Nebula Awards Saturday night, it held a series of panels addressing the contemporary state of the genre, culminating in a “publishers’ summit” that brought together editors from three of the major New York sci-fi houses, along with an indie press guy and a German publisher—and then the whole thing pretty much turned into a debate between moderator Norman Spinrad and Tor‘s Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
Spinrad set the opening mood with his pessimistic declaration that “the general feeling is that the state of publishing is not very good right now,” comparing the present moment to “when the dinosaurs were replaced by mammals.” After some of the other panelists spoke, Nielsen Hayden rexplored the notion that the hardcore SF fan who had long constituted the genre’s target audience was gradually being replaced by a young reader who delves into all sorts of popular culture, only some of which is science fiction and fantasy. Bantam senior editor Anne Groell ran with that ball, talking about her own experience seeing fantasy titles cross over to romance audiences. “There’s a lot of freedom in how you can cross genres today in ways you couldn’t before,” she said, to which Spinrad countered that he believed it was harder for established SF/fantasy writers to make that crossing than writers from other fields who added fantastic elements to their writing. “Science fiction creates a floor,” he insisted, “but it also creates a ceiling.”
From left: Groell, Nielsen Hayden, W.H. Horner of Fantasist Enterprises, Spinrad, Piper Verlag editor Carsten Polzin, and Del Rey VP Betsy Mitchell.
(In a post-panel discussion with other observers, though, we quickly established that Dan Simmons didn’t seem to have that problem, nor did Neal Stephenson, nor William Gibson—and, someone suggested, if Spinrad has had this problem, maybe it’s because historical novels about Vercingetorix and Cortes aren’t necessarily the best candidates for massive crossover appeal in the current market. That’s absolutely not a knock on the novels themselves; I like the opening chapters of The Druid King and I’d love to see an American publisher pick up Mexica so I could read that, too. In the interest of full disclosure, I should also note that his novelette “The Big Flash” scarred me for life when I read it as a teenager, so I’m something of a fan.)
The debater grew fiercer when Spinrad suggested that “the chains are the enemy of writers as a class, and ultimately publishers as a class,” a complaint Betsy Mitchell described as “a fruitless exercise,” and which Nielsen Hayden more forcefully rebutted by talking about how Barnes & Noble and Borders helped bring a wide selection of reading material to small cities and towns where, as in the case of his Tempe childhood, the local bookstore was “a few new paperbacks in a stationery shop.” Where SF had been hurt, he said, was in the demise of independent distributors who would supply supermarkets and drugstores with paperbacks as well as periodicals. “The golden age of science fiction publishing,” he said, “was when you could buy Fun With Your New Head in a spinning rack at Rexall’s.”
Then there was a brief argument in which Spinrad suggested that publishers were using Bookscan as an excuse to ditch any fiction that wasn’t safely commercial, and Nielsen Hayden refuted that assertion, and in the few minutes remaining in the panel I tried to steer the conversation back to something Spinrad had said at the very beginning of the hour, when he took a shot at mainstream books that look and feel like science fiction but “are not very good on an intellectual level althought they may be better than what’s being published in the genre on a prose level.” To me, this simply didn’t make any sense; say what you will about The Plot Against America, its problem isn’t a lack of intellectual rigor—as Nielsen Hayden and Groell pointed out, Roth’s novel is merely the most blatant case of authors and editors who, not having read decades’ worth of science fiction, fail to realize the extent to which they’re reinventing the wheel. And, as Mitchell added, the best hope for crossover appeal lay with those novels that one could take to one’s editorial colleagues and say things like, “Yes, it’s fantasy, but read it, it’s amazing.” (Like, say, the million-dollar Gargoyle?)