The Disappearance of the Literary SF Mass-Market Paperback
Author’s note: I originally wrote this piece in the summer of 1998. Publishing is a constantly evolving business. Therefore, some details no longer reflect the current situation, but the overall climate still follows my pessimistic scenario much too closely. I’ve added a new coda (Coda Redux: 2002) that briefly discusses some new developments; otherwise, here is the piece—with minor edits—as I conceived it in 1998.
I have recently emerged from twelve years spent in the trenches of the publishing industry: retail bookselling. For most of that time, my principal function was that of owner, manager, and buyer of Nebula, a specialty SF bookshop in downtown Montreal, which I founded in 1989 and then sold in June of 1998. The world of book retailing and I had been evolving in ways that, increasingly, did not make for easy cohabitation. Throughout this period, my love for challenging fiction, especially genre-bending works and literary SF, stood—and still stands—unmollified. This love affair, like so many others, made me vulnerable to the inevitable reality of loss—in this case a slow process which has long saddened me: the disappearance of the literary SF mass-market paperback. If love and loss are the subtext here, then the context is my experience as a bookseller.
1989: An Overview
UK publishers were putting out an astonishing quantity of books, including much of the fiction that was piquing my interest, and keeping many more classic titles in print than their North American colleagues. Lou Aronica was publishing many good genre books for Bantam, although they unfortunately went out of print rather quickly. St. Martin’s may not have published a great number of genre titles, but the few that it did publish proved to be admirably quirky and erudite (and, important in light of later developments, most of these were seeing both hardcover and mass-market publication). Carroll & Graf, a newer publisher, was carefully selecting and releasing, in mass-market, choice titles from the heritage of genre fiction, hence bringing back into print many neglected classics. Small press publishers seemed plentiful and healthy, with a wealth of new titles coming out every season. There were good books aplenty, many of them in affordable mass-market editions, making it all the easier for me to get pleasure in the dissemination of the literature I cared for and loved. Miraculously, Montreal was home to no other SF bookshop. So there I was, poised to spread the good words of Geoff Ryman, J.G. Ballard, Michael Blumlein, Garry Kilworth, Lucius Shepard, and their ilk to the reading public. And for many years, that’s just what I did.
The Disappearance of the Literary SF Mass-Market Paperback
In 1989, the literary SF mass-market paperback was already showing signs that it was on its way to becoming an endangered species. R.A. Lafferty, a critically acclaimed, award-winning author whose writings had influenced many of the fantasists who came into prominence in the 1980s, now had to rely on extremely obscure small presses to get his books published—many of which were created to ensure the continued availability of his work. These and other small presses were indispensable and many good books might never have seen print if not for their existence, made necessary by a publishing climate that was gradually less receptive to midlist literary SF: publishers were infatuated with the lucrative ascension of the fantasy/quest series that were catering to the big markets created by role-playing and the Star Wars films and with the temptation of equating SF with easily marketable tie-in novels. Simon & Schuster had closed its adventurous SF line, Timescape, a few years previously and had opted, when it came to SF, to concentrate solely on Star Trek novels.
Bantam had started to experiment with marketing and packaging the paperbacks of some of its more literary SF authors (John Crowley, Lucius Shepard) in what was becoming a lucrative format and genre for publishers, the literary trade paperback. Vintage and Harcourt Brace were well on their way to successfully repackaging their entire paperback lines in this way, with other literary publishers, like Penguin for example, not far behind. These Bantam books were not marketed as SF, though the covers of this unsuccessful, short-lived line were cleverly designed in a way to potentially appeal to both mainstream and genre readers.
(Here I need to specify that when I talk of trade paperbacks in this text, I mean only books reprinted, from hardcover or mass-market, into a trade paperback format—and not trade paperback originals, which are something different in the life of a book.)
