On the Subject of Bestsellers

Years ago, I wrote an editorial on the relative lack of new best-selling names in the sf field in recent decades. I said then that by 1990 it was evident that the sf field had ceased to add to the pantheon of national best-sellers grown in the genre up to the early 1980s. And as the older writers in this group passed on—Heinlein and Asimov in particular—only Arthur C. Clarke and Anne McCaffrey were left. Finally, years later, Orson Scott Card joined that select company. The new bestsellers otherwise were all either fantasy or marketed as mainstream, not genre (Neal Stephenson, for example). And with each year the number of best-selling fantasy names increases.

Now while that last is still quite true, there has been an interesting and hope-inspiring expansion of the sf list to include Lois Bujold, David Weber, Eric Flint, among others, and even Richard Matheson, whose I Am Legend, first published more than fifty years ago, finally made him a major best-selling writer. And there are the Dune novels, continuing. And Scott Westerfeld.

The case of Scott Westerfeld is particularly interesting: after publishing several good sf novels, he became a number one bestseller by hitting it big in the young adult market with excellent sf novels for teenagers (the Uglies, Pretties, Specials series). He is such a success in that market that it makes his very real achievements in adult sf look pale. In the post–Harry Potter world, childrens and young adult publishing is a field drenched in new fantasy and progressively more open to science fiction. The kids don’t see genre stuff as anything out of the ordinary, and many of them like it, without particularly identifying themselves as genre readers.

And that’s a growing aspect of the adult readership as well. Fiction bestsellers such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union are indistinguishable from sf, as are a number of well-regarded but not quite best-selling works of contemporary fiction. I am not talking about the mainstream novels that borrow from sf without being situated in genre, such as the magnificent works of Haruki Murakami, but books such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, that really are sf (just without the label or the genre marketing signals). Readers of contemporary fiction under forty don’t see genre stuff as anything out of the ordinary, and many of them like it as an occasional part or their reading, as long as it is well done.

While many of the old prejudices of the literary journals and reviewers against genre clearly persist, still the world is changing. H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick are collected in The Library of America, which exists to publish the canon of American literature. A survey of the reviews of those two volumes is instructive if you care to see prejudices aired and, often enough to give us hope, challenged.

There is a whole other discussion to be had on the influence of film and tv and games on bestsellers, but not one I care to pursue just now, except to say that the most likely way to become an immediate bestseller is to have a big, successful film made of your novel. 

I am truly grateful for the existence of sf bestsellers, for they perform the priceless function of carving out space in the distribution system to keep the genre alive. And I believe the living genres are the cauldron out of which creative innovation in initially unfashionable styles may occur, and fairly often does. 

—David G. Hartwell

and the editors