Is Science-Fictiondom Ready for the Future It Helped Invent?
Each issue we'll have an open discussion on some topic of interest to our Readership & Writership. This issue, we begin a series on a very practical aspect of Titanzine's future:
Zines: Where to from here?
Our first viewpoint is offered by author Jack Egan.
Don't get too relaxed... YOU'RE NEXT!
Kent, Washington, Earth, Sol December 1998
Dear Fellow Terrans, et al.
I opened my big mouth and wound up being invited to kick off this discussion on the future of Zines. A forgivable sin all ‘round, I hope!
But the topic is sound, and important to all of us SF&F Readers, Writers, Editors and Publishers. As such, we have always shown our concern for the future.
Please join me in applying our collective intellect to a most non-fictional aspect of our favorite fiction: Survival!
No doubt you have heard of SFWA (Science Fiction
Writers of America--also referred to as "Science Fiction & Fantasy
Writers of America" by a faction to whom the distinction matters--to me,
the initials "SF" have long since lost their hard science overtone, if
they ever possessed it). SFWA is the premier "pro" writer group in SF&F
these days, founded by Damon & Kate Wilhelm Knight and a core of other
SF&F writers back in the early-mid-60s.
The organization manages the Nebula Awards, and does a very creditable job of representing the general interests of a fair portion of SF&F writers to the publishing industry, amongst other notable activities. A new president (Bob Sawyer) and staff were just elected this past summer, and they have been hard at work tending to administrative changes in the organization. Some matters are afoot which the Reader/Writership of Titanzine may want to think about--perhaps even come up with some input on... Matter of fact, we may want to get other sister/brother Zines involved, as well.
The dawn of electronic publishing is long past, of course. Still, Zines are barely five years old, even if you count some of the earliest, really raw efforts of a few computer geeks back in the late 80s and early 90s. But Zines are multiplying like crazy. Some of them are very good. All are publishing the work of writers, young & old, who have otherwise decided not to fight to hawk their wares in the highly overcrowded souks of the "pro" publishing markets. Some of these Zines are, candidly speaking, not that good, being assembled by often younger, less experienced or less gifted amateur editors, from a pool of writers of widely different abilities. Yet, all are providing a very valuable service to the world community--just doing so with differing levels of professionalism (or amateurism, as the case may be).
Most writers (even old farts like myself) think that this explosion in the means of developing amateur writer audiences is not just a good thing, it is a GREAT thing. Our next generations of writers (and editors!) will have had much more on-stage exposure than we ever did--the whole Wired world, after all! It can’t help but improve both the numbers and quality of the Next Generations. Also, the Zine movement is providing an amelioration of the unfortunate tendency of a "mature" genre to become locked up by a few editors, publishers, and commercially-driven product purveyors, whose tastes in plot and substance seems to be becoming more jaded every year.
As evolution biologists are fond of pointing out, when selection pressures dramatically change, there is an explosion of new species, giving rise ultimately to those new forms from whom will emerge the new dominant denizens of the world. The Web--or more precisely, the entire communications industry--is rapidly and surely providing exactly that kind of turbulent evolutionary stage for SF, and indeed, all of our many methods of communicating ideas.
The problem is this:
Making a living at writing SF is becoming, paradoxically, more and more difficult as the means of reaching an audiences is becoming easier and easier.
At the risk of oversimplifying, this is so because the publishing industry, as it existed prior to, say, 1990--the paying publishing industry, wherein a writer might hope to clear something better than minimum wage for his efforts--was based on modest markets growing huge, whose needs were met by a relatively few writers. The advent of amateur publications has made available lots more published material, much of it able to be read for free. This has cut into the potential paying audience for the pro publishing houses. Coupled with this (and probably even more important) has been the parallel, incredible increase in other forms of SF-oriented entertainment purveyors (movies, TV & games), distracting would-be readers from SF’s simplest (arguably "purest") product, the written word.
As a result, the pro markets have been consolidating, cost-cutting. Pro SF magazines have been folding faster than the dinosaurs, to be replaced by new publications with lower pay scales, longer reply times, and smaller circulations. Paperback publishers have dropped SF and Fantasy lines, and some have maneuvered themselves toward positions where they can more dictatorially call the shots in writer-publisher contracts. SF/Fantasy writing at the moment, in other words, is becoming not just difficult to make a living at, it is rapidly becoming impossible to do so for all but a dwindling per centage of writers.
There are several schools of thought about this situation.
The doomsayers think it will only get worse for the writers. More and more writers are appearing, cranked out by SF-degree-granting programs, or just born from interested amateurs who try for the gold ring. There aren’t enough markets to support them.
The optimists allow that, after a period of tumultuous change, things will restabilize, driven by market forces. The publishing industry, they point out, never really has been stable. Change has always marked societies’ communications manifestations. But, after the world rebuilds its nervous system in the new digital/cable/satellite rubric, economic niches will become more apparent. Supply and demand will reach an accomodation.
To me, these viewpoints are not opposites. They are identical.
In the short run, all of us individual dream-dreaming, key-tapping, idea confluency suppositioning machines are going to find it very difficult to obtain payment for our lonely efforts. And likely in the long-run, too.
In response to such worries, there are some well-meaning groups who think that unionizing writers, in the same way that the Screen Actors Guild and other entertainment industry representative groups have organized, is a necessity for "protecting writers’ interests." There are some powerfully persuasive arguments for this viewpoint, which I won’t go into here. I do, however, urge all Zine readers, writers and editors, to examine them with the seriousness they are due.
Other groups believe that writing--and SF in particular--is basically a highly individualistic pursuit; that many of its best ideas came from people who are just passing on important insights gained elsewhere, who would never fit well into a union-style rubric. That market forces will act, anyway, often in ways not predictable by either the publishers or the writers. And that the loose confederations of writers already in existence (such as SFWA), should remain just that, loose confederations. Drawn together where battle must be joined, to be sure, but not straight-jacketing their memberships with highly exclusory rules of admission. This group sees a danger in a "Cold War" developing between publishers and writers, which might backfire against the writers, since there are now apparently so many of us that we compete for scarce marketing slots at each other’s expense.
I am sure there are other ways to describe the melee.
So what, if anything different, do we do about it all?
If Isaac were here, he’d point out that, when he started writing for John W. Campbell, he was lucky to get $20 for a story. In spite of his legendary prolificacy, writing only became a major income for him much later... and he still saw it necessary to obtain gainful employment at Boston University as a professor of biochemistry. (Of course, he liked the job, too. It gave him a captive audience, and access to the idea-generating, supporting infrastructure of academia.) Heinlein was a Navy man and an engineer, before finding his calling, and was assisted at times by a financially independent and supportive wife. Clarke is a physicist and professor... The list goes on. You get the picture. Even for the legends, they didn’t start out thinking of writing as their mainstay. They wrote ANYWAY. Self-perpetuating Entertainment/Industrial Complex-style writing careers were latecomers to the scene.
Even so, Asimovs, Clarkes and Heinleins were, are, and always will be rare. The rest of us will settle down to whatever pace of creativity we are able (usually barely) to support, and our ideas will conflux with the other idea-transmission mechanisms of our world, and the dance will continue, with us observing from the sidelines much of the time.
OK. Cosmic overviews are nice. Everybody wants to be able to glimpse the forest with relation to the mountains, sky and stars once in awhile. But meanwhile, we need to find a few tree-stars to chew on.
So, how can we make SF&F p.a.y.?
Computing machines still cost a thousand bucks and more (though that’s changing). Each writer has to have one, now. His editor may have two or three, plus is supporting, somehow, a website or three. How can this new nucleus of SF&F-generation/distribution function for longer than it takes the first couple of transistors to burn out? Electrons don’t rattle around those propogation chutes for free, y’know!
As it has begun, the government was behind funding the Internet’s development, and still supports its function in many, many ways, some obvious, and some quite subtle, if not downright devious. Commercially, those little Java applet ads running on your web pages can dig up a few bucks here and there, but no one... NO ONE... claims to be making much money at ANY current market-oriented method of exchange available on the net today.
This cannot and will not continue.
Change in most industry comes usually in painful spasms, kept as far apart as humanly possible by every imaginable sort of business operations/legalistic/personal-life contortion in the repertoire of its leadership. The publishing industry is about to endure one of its most wrenching yet, by most observer’s lights. A change, in spite of hyped prognostications, hardly yet begun. Though they don’t like to admit it, publishing mavens DO NOT KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT.
There are so many other forces at work--from a world tottering on the brink of the outbreak of widespread anarchy-producing terrorism; to a financial global market so newly-born that none of its creators or practitioners have yet gotten their footing; to a political and social scene not yet come to grips with the most powerful destabilizing forces ever faced: world-wide, organized drug pushing, and AIDS; to the slipping resolve of governments to maintain the literacy of their citizens (and subsequently losing their citizens’ informed involvement in the governing process, a prelude to the rise of new forms of despotism, and certainly a failure of democracy in any meaningful sense)...
Whoa. Heavy!
Given the magnitude of uncertainties facing us as SF-providers--probably not a new thing under the sun, just quicker in lethal economic effect these days--what kinds of things can we do to contribute to our own survival as an idea-purveying species?
I’ve got a few ideas. But I'm much more interested in hearing those of the readership/writership of Titan and her sister and brother Zines.
Whether we like to admit it or not, the coming world of publishing, education and entertainment is already in our hands. Wouldn’t this seem to be a good time to use the communications means we have already developed, as platforms from which to hash out some assessments of the future we are already building?
Hey, we wouldn’t want to grow lazy and idle, with nothing to else to do but lay around and read Zines all day, right!?
In the coming issues, we will print articles and discussions representing the viewpoints of Readers, Writers, Editors and Producers of Zines, E-books, and other entertainment/ education modes, on the topic of our common future. We may even go afield from SF&F, if the contributions warrant.
Your input, regardless of where you fit within the spectrum of roles, is highly valued. This is an important, formative time for that complex social life form, the SF&F Reader/Writer. Let’s hear your voice!
NEXT ISSUE: We might be asking YOU to write the next one!
Plus YOUR INPUT & FEEDBACK