Fantastic Metropolis

Josh B. Lukin: Aqueduct Press states on its website that “Although feminist science fiction has been thriving for thirty years, its role as an oppositional literature means that it will almost never be ‘mainstream’ enough to attract an audience that makes works best-selling blockbusters or even meets the bottom-line criterion of corporate publishers and booksellers that prevails in the industry today. As a sad consequence, the leading publishers often decline to bring fine works of feminist science fiction into print.” That’s a bold statement to make, inasmuch as it could incur the enmity of mainstream editors who either think they’re uninfluenced by ideological concerns or, having read ten thousand incompetent authors each week, each of whom thinks his/her work is getting rejected because it’s too revolutionary, habitually dismiss such concerns. What interests me, however, is your term “oppositional literature”—especially in the light of your having written a few years ago that “one is allowed to be emphatically, loudly oppositional exactly to the extent that one makes reaction against the status quo... one’s central focus” and that any “attempt to get away from the dominant or hegemonic frame of reference and develop ideas without respect to the issues already in the forefront of public consciousness” goes unperceived. So you’re not worried so much about the reception of the oppositional as that of the alternative. And the fact that oppositional culture gets suppressed more actively than alternative culture, in Raymond Williams’ formulation, is not a consolation when the benign neglect suffered by alternative culture makes it impossible to hear. Right?

L. Timmel Duchamp: I don’t see any reason for mainstream editors to be irked or offended by that statement. I tend to feel sympathy for the plight of such editors today since I imagine that most of them chose that line of work (which is in every way arduous) not because they wanted to pursue the maximization of profit for their employers, but because they love literature that’s beautiful, striking, and even challenging. I see them working hard and trying to produce the best books they can. After having read André Schiffrin’s The Business of Books, I can only assume that they’re hedged about with constraints that limit what they can do—constraints that someone who loves literature likely needs to disavow if, unlike Schiffrin, who decided to start a small press, they’re to remain in their jobs. In the past, editors aimed their lists at readers like me, who spend thousands of dollars a year on books (and almost nothing on clothing, movies, and other elastic purchases), readers hungry for subtle, sophisticated work. These days the target audience isn’t readers like me, but people who buy bestsellers and little else. In the past, the big sellers subsidized the more challenging work. The conglomerate publishers, however, would like to eliminate the midlist and market only big sellers and the books that enhance the vertical integration of their most profitable products (viz., movies and the various products developed to exploit them). So editors do the best they can under difficult circumstances.

Under the conditions of today’s publishing marketplace, editors working for profit-oriented publishers cannot acquire books that they can’t convince their marketing departments the chain bookstores will order in large quantities in advance of publication: this, after all, is a basic condition of any editor’s employment. I presume that the ways in which editors are influenced by ideology are so much a part of the taken-for-granted corporate structures in which professionalism and work are embedded that such influences must be nearly imperceptible to everybody. That’s why the question of ideological influence will never be simply that of an editor’s reading a manuscript and rejecting it in an outright act of ideological censorship. Most editors would be appalled at the very idea of vetoing publication on such grounds; people who aspire to become editors in the first place are usually liberals in the classic, Lockean sense of the word. Why did the major book publishers pass up Carol Emswhiller’s Dick Award-winning novel The Mount? Or the novel by Gwyneth Jones that Aqueduct Press will be publishing in Fall 2004? We will probably never know. But I’d be surprised if the reason weren’t based on either the publishers’ or the chain-bookstore buyers’ assumption that the books would not have a “general” appeal and thus would not sell well enough to justify their being published. Both novels assume their readers are smart, attentive, and politically progressive. Perhaps marketing “wisdom” deems that novels written for such an audience are necessarily commercially marginal. Perhaps, too, there was a problem of “intelligibility,” which I’ll elaborate on in a moment.