IGMS Issue 28

by IGMS

  George also had a saying for that, which was "Do not argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel." [Laughs.]

  SCHWEITZER: Did you find things different when you edited books? Presumably you didn't have to read the slush pile. How does that work?

  McCARTHY: There really wasn't much of a slush pile by the time I got into books. Things were mostly agented. Agents then as they do now would target a specific editor with what they thought he or she would like. So generally people would send me stuff that they thought would appeal to me. As with short stories, you don't have to go too far into it to know if it's going to work for you or not. You can't tell a reader when they pick up a book in the library, "Just hang in there. It gets better." [Laughs.] It's true of many books that they do get better and they do sell well despite the fact. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo takes, I don't know, a hundred pages before it gets better, but people kept going with that one. It does get much better, though. I will say that for it.

  I don't think there's that much difference between books and short stories when it comes to editing. When I would get in a manuscript it would either be something that would appeal to me or wouldn't. There are just things I don't like. I don't like sword-and-sorcery particularly. I don't like epic fantasy with made-up names with apostrophes in the middle. So when I would get something like that I could automatically say, no, not for me, and if there was someone else in the house that I thought might like it I would pass it on to them if I thought there was something to it. But if it was a book that caught my attention - I do this now with my clients - if there is something about it that appeals to me, I will go through an extensive rewriting process.

  SCHWEITZER: For a book editor, how much of a conflict is there between what you like and what you think your company can publish profitably?

  McCARTHY: Well, there is always that conflict, but I think that most people have given up on being able to do beautiful, twee, little arty books. Those have all gone to the small presses now and the indie houses. There are some gorgeous small press books out there, but a commercial publishing house wouldn't be able to do them, not successfully. So the best you can do is a marriage of the two houses, which is something that you like and you think is well-written and commercial. There is no reason why that can't exist under the same title. Absolutely none.

  SCHWEITZER: Do you feel that within the last twenty years there has been a significant narrowing of what is considered commercial in science fiction?

  McCARTHY: In science fiction, there's nothing that's commercial in science fiction anymore.

  SCHWEITZER: I mean, you and I can remember when it was possible to publish R.A. Lafferty in mass-market paperback. This would be beyond wildest dreams now.

  McCARTHY: That's never going to happen again. Those were the days. The golden age of science fiction was twenty years ago, really. The only kind of science fiction that I see selling at all these days are epic space operas with interesting, intricate plots. George R.R. Martin in space, that kind of thing. Your basic anthropological science fiction, first-contact science fiction, social science fiction, I think those are all going the way of . . . sad things.

  SCHWEITZER: Is this because the culture is no longer interested in science fiction or because book distribution has turned into a monopoly which cannot serve the public effectively? We had John Hemry as a guest at PSFS last month telling us how he had to change his byline to Jack Campbell to fool the Barnes and Noble book-acquisition software.

  McCARTHY: My clients do that all the time. I have so many writers writing under so many pseudonyms, you have no idea. If you've got a bad track record; talk about the long tail - that goes with you. It is your permanent record. Remember how your teachers were always threatening you that that's going to go on your permanent record? Now you really do have a permanent record, and the only way to get around it is to change your name. It's worked very successfully for a number of people. There's no shame in it. It's just the way things work.

  What was the original question?

  SCHWEITZER: What is so much less commercial now than it was twenty years ago?

  McCARTHY: I wish I knew. I know there has been a big shift in the reading public. At dinner tonight I was talking with Lee [Weinstein, Shawna's host at this PSFS meeting] and he said, "What kind of science fiction does your daughter like to read?" and I said, "None. She doesn't like to read science fiction at all." She only reads fantasy occasionally. She is just not into speculative fiction on any level, other than very rare instances. I can't name a couple. She has not read Twilight, I will say that for her. [Laughter from audience.]

  But I think that there has definitely been a shift in the reading public, and I think that science fiction caught up with our world too much. Back in the '50s and '60s it was always progress, progress, progress. There were always electric lights and spaceships and fast cars. I think that progress has let us down in a lot of ways and given us things that we weren't expecting and none of the things that we were. Where's my flying car? I want my flying car, but it's not here. How about an elevated walkway over a shining city? But I don't have that either. Society has outpaced science fiction in a lot of ways. Especially planetary-exploration science fiction was one of the things that I really liked, first-contact stuff. As it became clearer and clearer that we really are a teeny-tiny speck in the middle of the middle of nowhere, the idea of getting into a rocket ship and going to meet some aliens became increasingly unreal. I don't think readers go for it as much. The galactic empire idea. Nobody is going to come and invade us any time soon, I don't think.

  SCHWEITZER: Isn't it ironic that people are giving up on space at precisely the moment when we are discovering that the galaxy really is filled with billions of planets?

  McCARTHY: [Laughs.] That is ironic, but if Newt Gingrich becomes president we'll be living on a Moon base. [Much laughter from audience.] He'll get is some jobs on the Moon. [Laughs.] Great place, but no atmosphere.

  SCHWEITZER: At three dollars an hour working at Wal-Mart on the Moon.

  [Someone in the audience remarks that NASA has just closed its program for taking applications for astronauts.]

  SCHWEITZER: You mean there will be no more astronauts? Maybe J.G. Ballard had it right all along. Do you think he had it right about the Space Age?

  McCARTHY: I don't remember what his take was.

  SCHWEITZER: Retired, elderly astronauts, rusting gantries, people who saw the Space Age begin living to see it end, and no one much caring or believing it ever happened

  .

  McCARTHY: Absolutely, I think he had it right all along. I think he was absolutely right on the money with that. It's very sad. Back in the day it was so exciting to think that maybe we could go to other planets and there would be interesting people there to meet. Now if we did, the Fundamentalists would probably send some missionaries out to convert them, and if they didn't they'd bomb them into submission and that would be that. I am particularly pessimistic about the future of science in our society in general.

  SCHWEITZER: There may be a more positive trend which came to my attention because I've just come off being a Philip K. Dick Award judge. That is, that most of the really interesting new science fiction is not being published as science fiction. I can't tell you who won this year, but the nominees are public knowledge, so I can tell you who I voted for.

  McCARTHY: Okay.

  SCHWEITZER: My first choice was a book called The Postmortal by Drew Magary. This is like an updated Pohl and Kornbluth novel. It's about what happens when someone discovers a cure for aging, which is first available illegally, then legally, and it changes society in various uncontrollable ways. It's got lots of neat little details. The first thing that happens when people realize they are going to live forever is that there is a big run on divorces. [Laughter from McCarthy and audience.] "Till death do us part" becomes quite frightening. Anyway, this book was published by Penguin in trade paperback as a literary novel. The story starts about 2015 but goes well into the
future. A story about immortality in the future is now mainstream enough that you don't have to put it in the science fiction category.

  McCARTHY: I think you're right about that. You do see a lot of stuff which is clearly science fiction being published as mainstream literature. [Michael Chabon's] The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a lovely, wonderful book. It's alternate history, but it was clearly published as a mainstream book. I think that there is a lot of this going on.

  SCHWEITZER: How do you as a literary agent feel about this? Do you sometimes take a science fiction novel by one of your clients and try to get it published as mainstream?

  McCARTHY: I've tried, but it is not that easy, because if you have a track record in science fiction you are not going to be able to get published as mainstream unless you do it with a pseudonym. Most of my clients are too - "inbred" is the wrong word, but they have been brought up in the science fiction culture, in science fiction society, and there is a certain commonality of phrases and thought. It doesn't read quite the same way as an actual literary writer coming out of the Iowa MFA program writing a novel with science fiction themes. It's a different tone of the writing. That's just my impression.

  SCHWEITZER: Does this suggest that generic science fiction has become inbred and unpalatable to the general public?

  McCARTHY: I think to a certain extent it probably does. That's my opinion, that it's a little insular community, and people don't particularly want to get into it anymore. They're happy to read stuff that is outside. They see something with a garish cover and they don't want to read it on the subway. That has always been my feeling: is this a book I will read on the subway?

  SCHWEITZER: If the equivalent of The Space Merchants were published today, would it be published as science fiction?

  McCARTHY: Quite possibly not. I think that any trip down the aisle at Barnes and Noble to the science fiction section will find mostly comics, Star Trek, Star Wars, a lot of Batman stuff.

  SCHWEITZER: If you can even find a Barnes and Noble.

  McCARTHY: That's true.

  SCHWEITZER: I was just in one the other day, in Jenkintown, one of the three in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. I made a survey. It was interesting to note which writers have survived and which ones haven't. I noticed that Bradbury is doing very well. He had a whole shelf. Lovecraft is firmly established as a literary classic to an amazing degree. He's got Penguin Classics editions and Library of America and those leather-bound, gilt-edged editions just like Charles Dickens or Poe. I got the feeling that Heinlein was fading, because the only books by Heinlein were paperbacks of his worst books.

  McCARTHY: I think that if anyone was very politically incorrect for this day and age it would have to be Heinlein. I think he would find a very hard time finding a foothold in today's society.

  SCHWEITZER: I don't know. Don't you think he'd be really popular at Republican conventions?

  McCARTHY: [Laughs.] I think he would probably be more popular with Ron Paul supporters, myself. It's true that Isaac [Asimov] as survived.

  SCHWEITZER: Isaac has survived, but James Blish is gone. Fritz Leiber is gone. Edgar Pangborn might never have existed. Most of the familiar names we grew up with weren't there, and the science fiction section was about the size of the romance section, and it was about a tenth of the size of the mainstream section. So Fiction and Literature was larger than all of the genres put together. Although of course if you wanted to look for anybody from Jonathan Carroll to -

  McCARTHY: Jonathan Lethem.

  SCHWEITZER: Jonathan Lethem, they're going to be in the Fiction and Literature section. Is it possible then that what is happening is that the science fiction "genre" is getting sidelined within the science fiction field itself?

  McCARTHY: I think that's possibly true. The "literary" science fiction that we might have seen published in a science fiction imprint back in the day is now getting published as mainstream, and the genre fiction, the space-opera stuff that I talked about earlier, is the only thing that is getting published in science fiction, per se. There is a lot of fantasy that is being published under science fiction imprints too. In fact, probably more fantasy than science fiction.

  SCHWEITZER: So what advice would you give to a budding science fiction writer today, someone of genuine ambition and talent, who doesn't just want to write generic space-opera or military SF series?

  McCARTHY: Try to get into one of the major workshops, Bread Loaf or Iowa, or any of those that you can get into. Try to learn the language that they want you to learn, rather than the pulpy language that tends to have been the case in most science fiction up until about the 1980s.

  SCHWEITZER: You'd presumably have to avoid telling them that you were an infiltrator from the science fiction world.

  McCARTHY: Oh, no. You'd have to present your bona fides and just say that you have imaginative ideas. But you couldn't apply to Bread Loaf and say that you want to write a science fiction novel. You certainly could get in if you were a good writer and had a good sample to show them. I don't think they'd turn up their nose at a science-fictional idea anymore.

  SCHWEITZER: This implies that mainstream publishing has a kind of seminary system and you have to be a graduate of the right places to get published. Is this true?

  McCARTHY: Definitely. I can publish tons of paranormal romances and fantasies and YAs and middle-grade books, but if I wanted to sell a mainstream writer with a science idea to, say, Knopf, they'd have to have the right credits. Even if they didn't go to Bread Loaf or Iowa or something like that, they would have to have published in The Kenyon Review, places like that.

  One thing that interests me . . . one of the best science fiction novels of the past ten years as far as I am concerned is The Time-Traveler's Wife. That was never written as science fiction. It was never published as science fiction. But it's a science fiction book. I just think it's a beautiful, brilliant, gorgeously-written book. She just went in there with it. She's a poet, I think. Maybe that helped.

  SCHWEITZER: What would you as an agent do if the equivalent of The Left Hand of Darkness just came in the mail one day, from a writer with no credentials who has not been to Bread Loaf or Clarion? What then?

  McCARTHY: I'd call on my expertise and my acquaintanceship with the various editors at the various imprints and say, "I know it is not often that you take on an unknown but I think that this book is something you really want to look at." I did that recently with a YA book that I am trying to sell. If it's good enough. My voice is trusted by these editors, so that is how that would work. I am not going to send them crap and waste their time.

  SCHWEITZER: The secret of being a successful agent is being very, very exacting about what you are willing to send out.

  McCARTHY: Oh, absolutely. I see a lot of stuff that is perfectly saleable, but it is not what I want to be associated with when it goes on somebody's desk. I want them to say, "Oh, Shawna always sends me high quality books that I am going to want to read, not just 'Eh? This is fine.'"

  SCHWEITZER: We won't any names, but I am sure that as either a book or magazine editor you came to recognize certain agents and dread their submissions.

  McCARTHY: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

  SCHWEITZER: There is a certain agent we won't name whose submissions were frequently by names that haven't been published since 1947 and the paper is turning brown.

  McCARTHY: [Laughs]

  SCHWEITZER: You saw some of that, didn't you?

  McCARTHY: Actually, I did. I am absolutely positive I did. There were certain agents whose submissions I saw when I worked at Spectra whose stuff I didn't want to read because I was afraid I was going to like it, and then I would have to deal with that particular person.

  SCHWEITZER: Was this because the agent was a pain in the ass or you were afraid of getting their trunk?

  McCARTHY: A pain in the ass, basically. There were certain agents that I knew there was no point in even reading their submissions because they were always just crap. There are also people who s
et themselves up as agents in, say, Tennessee. A lot of times it would be the writer themselves pretending to be an agent. [Laughs] They'd say, "I am a literary agent in Tennessee and I found this marvelous manuscript that I think you ought to see," and at that point there were no literary agents in Tennessee. There were none outside of New York City. Maybe a couple in Los Angeles, but that was pretty much it. I think there was one in Chicago.

  SCHWEITZER: There was also Beth Meacham, who had her New York period, then took her practice elsewhere.

  McCARTHY: This was before Beth Meacham left town. It was all New York then. There was nothing outside of New York. It was like that New Yorker cover where he's the Hudson, and everything else is just a thin line. Yeah. It was all New York.

  [A pause.]

  SCHWEITZER: Well now that we've just depressed everybody -

  McCARTHY: I'm sorry. One of the things that people ask a lot when they find out what I do is, "Do you think that publishing is dying?" I absolutely don't. I think that publishing is becoming incredibly healthy. E-books are confusing everybody and the various digital platforms are confusing everybody. The fact that it is increasingly difficult to prevent piracy is confusing everybody. One of the things that I find really interesting is that the people who were saying back in the day, "Information wants to be free! Down with copyrights!" are now trying to copyright their stuff and saying, "Wait! They stole my idea! They plagiarized!" I am a great believer in copyrights and information not wanting to be free. Information wants to be paid for or none of us would have a job.

  SCHWEITZER: Writers like to be paid. It is a universal truth.

  McCARTHY: Yeah. I actually had two of my best years since I've been in the business in the last couple of years. So, knock on [she raps on table top] Formica . . .