Fantastic Metropolis

Coda: 1998

Around the world publishers have all swallowed each other, including in the UK, where it resulted in the disappearance of many imprints and in a radical reduction of the number of in-print genre classics. Lou Aronica is still fighting the good fight, publishing good genre and genre-bending books for Avon, emphasizing mass-market publishing and even offering a $3.99 selection every month to help foster an audience for emerging writers of note. St. Martin’s publishes good, quirky genre-bending fiction that much too rarely makes it to any paperback format, virtually ensuring its long-term obscurity. Carroll & Graf’s program of reprinting genre classics has dwindled away into oblivion. After years of slim pickings, genre small presses are making a careful comeback. There are good books being published, though increasingly few of them in affordable mass-market editions, radically reducing the potential number of readers who feel they can purchase these, or any, books. So here I am lamenting the corporate accounting strategies that rule today’s publishing world, hoping that there will always be a place on publishers’ lists for works by William Browning Spencer, Kim Newman, Rachel Pollack, Robert Reed, Paul Di Filippo, and other writers of vision and integrity—and an audience to welcome them.

Coda Redux: 2002

Since I originally wrote this piece, more classics have returned to print. A few examples: Vintage has expanded its successful marketing of Philip K. Dick to “literary” mainstream audiences to other classic sciencefictioneers such as Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Samuel Delany; Del Rey has launched a line devoted to reprinting genre classics (although for the most part it is simply repackaging books that were previously available in mass-market into trade paperback); Gollancz has recently been reissuing SF classics in a variety of formats; and print-on-demand (POD)—a new player responsible for the lion’s share of classic reprints—has entered the arena.

Vintage’s strategy is a good one. I’ve seen its attractively designed line of literary SF trade paperbacks racked with mainstream fiction as much as with SF. What Vintage is doing is expanding the market for these writers. An incentive for new readers: the price point for these books is at the lower end of trade-paperback pricing. Meanwhile, Tor still prices its trade paperbacks too high to attract new readers in any appreciable number. I wish someone would follow Vintage’s lead with a line of books by active SF writers.

For the most part, diversity in the genre lists—in any format—of the big publishers is dwindling. More and more, all we’re seeing is novels by the top-selling writers, copycat series, and generic potboilers. One shining exception is John Jarrold’s Earthlight imprint over at Simon & Schuster UK. For example, Earthlight has been publishing a string of high-quality literary SF mass-market originals by writers such as Richard Calder and Eugene Byrne. In the US, David Hartwell edits two annual mass-market best-of series that ensure that mass-market readers will still have access to current trends in SF and fantasy short fiction. But the general state of SF publishing is better exemplified by Al Sarrantonio’s recent Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, a bloated and pretentious anthology that self-importantly compares itself to Dangerous Visions while its contents—with perhaps a handful of exceptions—are dreadfully banal and in no way visionary.

Small presses—both traditional and POD —are responsible for an important portion of the exciting work being published. To name a few: Golden Gryphon is releasing an impressive string of hardcover-only story collections by a diverse range of contemporary genre writers; PS publishes important new novellas in limited editions (to be later reprinted in omnibus hardcovers by Gollancz); POD publishers like Big Engine and Cosmos are putting into print both classic and new works that might otherwise not find a home; and one of 2001’s best SF novels—Ernest Hogan’s Smoking Mirror Blues—was published by Wordcraft of Oregon. I admire the work of these publishers, but I can’t help but wonder: Who reads these books besides the select few aficionados actively hunting them out?

As for literary SF mass-market paperbacks… the future still looks grim. Nevertheless, editors such as John Jarrold and David Hartwell soldier on, proving that, while desperate, the situation is not hopeless.