And now the news

From NYRSF ISSUE #247, March 2009

I refer of course to the classic sf story by Theodore Sturgeon. Any of you who do not see its relevance to the present state of the world and sf need to go back and read it soon. It is an idea of Robert A. Heinlein’s, set to the musical language of Sturgeon, and at the center of the question of prolepsis in sf.

It is now a plausible scenario that all the professional printed sf magazines in the U.S. will cease publication this year—along with many other magazines. The circulation figures for sf publications as printed in the Locus summary show dire progressions downward for all magazines in 2008—and Realms of Fantasy will cease publication as of April 2009. As I write, there are conflicting reports that fifty percent of the magazine distribution in the US is about to cease business—some reports say it has in fact happened, some deny it. What is certain is that there is a per-copy surcharge just levied on all magazines by two huge distributors, and that some big magazines, such as Time and People, are refusing to pay it. What is also uncertain is how this will affect the distribution of mass market books in the US—mass market books are distributed to non-bookstore locations by magazine distributors, who put the books into airports, supermarkets, and Wal-Mart stores, for instance. But these are only five percent of the distributors’ business. The Trumps of Doom interpretation for sf is that it will bring about a short-term cascade of returns on all titles from the distributors, and then decrease the already decreasing distribution of all sf and fantasy, forcing nearly all smaller books into unprofitability. The end result of that scenario would be a sharp, sudden decrease in the number of mass-market paperback titles published by the end of 2009 and a concomitant increase in pressure to publish more titles in trade paperback. I don’t even want to speculate at this point on what it might mean for electronic publication, which is just beginning to show some noticeable profitability. Let us consider this all a dystopian sf scenario for the moment, and we will report back next month.

I had hoped to devote this editorial entirely to John Updike, but a condensed version will have to do. Updike was one of the principal arbiters of literary taste in the U.S., a writer of extraordinary talent, and, like Edmund Wilson, a fine book reviewer, principally for The New Yorker. Like W. H. Auden in the generation before him, he was interested in science as well as literature, and Updike was the single most influential force in establishing the literary acceptability of Ursula K. Le Guin in the mainstream in the US. He uttered an authoritative marginalization of science fiction as a whole in his New Yorker review of my own A World Treasury of Science Fiction—in part authoritative because it came from a selective sympathizer. He set up his discussion with what he called the crucial question: “What keeps science fiction a minor genre, for all the brilliance of its authors and apparent pertinence of its concerns?” His answer I always found unsatisfactory: “Each science fiction story is so busy inventing its environment that little energy is invested in the human subtleties.” My short version response is that this is fairly clearly a restatement of the Modernist position that good literature is solely about the inner life of characters in ordinary situations. Science fiction is general does not attempt that but excels at the behavior of characters in unusual and at best entirely plausible invented settings. I invite our readers to comment.

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors