by IGMS
SCHWEITZER: Or, to really rub it in, consider the following eccentric (but masterful) writers: Avram Davidson, R.A. Lafferty, David Lindsay, Clark Ashton Smith, Austin Tappan Wright, and David R. Bunch. If these writers were new, starting out now, do you think any of them would be able to have careers?
LUPOFF: That depends on how you define the word "career." I'm sure they could all get published today. Well, maybe not Wright, simply because Islandia is such a huge book. They might have to go to small presses but they could certainly get published. But could they make a living?
Darrell, remember that there was a time when I was a starry-eyed fan whose fondest ambition was to become a professional science fiction writer. The same is probably true of you. Let's pause to tug thoughtfully at our long white beards and wipe away a nostalgic tear.
Okay, back to the issue at hand.
Time was, seriously, when the idea of anyone's being a real, full-time, professional science fiction writer was quite beyond the pale. You can pick up old copies of Imagination or Thrilling Wonder Stories and read author biographies in them, and they all contain sentences like, "When not writing science fiction, Herman MacGruder earns his living as a sanitation engineer for the City of Detroit."
I invented ol' Herman there, but consider: H. Beam Piper was a track walker for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Hal Clement was a high school science teacher. Isaac Asimov was a college chemistry professor. Clifford Simak was a newspaper editor. Rog Phillips was a night watchman. Bertram Chandler was a steamboat captain. James Blish was a public relations flack. Fletcher Pratt was a respected military historian. Eric Vinicoff was (presumably, still is) a federal bureaucrat. Elizabeth A. Lynn is both a tax preparer and a martial arts instructor. With a little research we could extend that list indefinitely.
Somewhere along the way -- I think it would be in the late 1960s or '70s -- science fiction started to hit the big time. I suspect that it was the film 2001: A Space Odyssey that was largely responsible for this. Prices started rising and almost overnight it became possible to earn a living writing science fiction. But that seems to have been a bubble, and like the housing boom of the 1980s, it has burst and left a lot of people sitting in the wreckage of their careers, wondering what went wrong. It's tragic, but you pick up the pieces and move on, there's nothing else you can do.
And of course there are a few of us who are still making a living from science fiction. Maybe they're really that much better than everyone else, or maybe they're just lucky, or -- well, it's not for me to say. But for the overwhelming majority of science fiction writers, it's back to the future all over again. You either have a day job doing -- well, just about anything! -- or spread your writing across multiple genres -- science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, thrillers, you name it.
SCHWEITZER: You're involved with editing a small press yourself. Could you say something about that? You mention that small, POD presses make it possible to get anything into print rather easily. Yes, but has anyone solved the promotion problem? If there is no promotion, and no one knows to seek out these books, how are they to reach more than a few dozen readers?
LUPOFF: A few years ago I came across an odd little book by Harry Stephen Keeler published by a little press called Ramble House. I was so taken with the book that I sent a note to the publisher, a man named Fender Tucker. One thing led to another and Ramble House wound up publishing my novel Marblehead, which became a bestseller by the very modest standards of the small press world.
Eventually I did a little volunteer editing for Ramble House, and Fender was so pleased with my work that he asked me to take on an imprint of my own. That was an offer I couldn't refuse. I asked Pat to partner with me on it, and after a search for a name for the imprint we settled on Surinam Turtle Press -- in honor of a creature whose ugliness is rivaled only by its laziness.
Unfortunately we don't have any budget with which to buy properties, so we've had to rely on a good many excellent but forgotten works by authors like Gelett Burgess. When Burgess is remembered at all it's for his light poetry and children's books -- he created the famous limerick about the purple cow -- but in fact he was a first-rate novelist and his books hold up remarkably well after a century. We've done seven or eight of his books, and every one has real merit.
I've also been able to issue or reissue a number of books, either through Surinam Turtle Press or its parent company, Ramble House, that might otherwise languish. For instance, Jim Harmon was a rising young science fiction writer of the 1960s who contributed short stories to many of the magazines of the era. He was also one of my mentors, a brilliant teacher of fiction technique.
But early on he switched gears and became a distinguished cultural historian. But he'd left behind an unpublished science fiction novel, The Contested Earth. I was delighted to publish that book. There was Fox B. Holden, a '40s and '50s pulp writer whose one novel, The Time Armada, was serialized in Imagination but never had a book edition. I was able to secure rights from surviving members of the Holden family and we published the book through Surinam Turtle Press.
There was Mack Reynolds' very first novel, The Case of the Little Green Men. This book is a wonderful romp through the fan community circa 1950, leading up to a murder at a science fiction convention. Thanks to Mack's old friend Earl Kemp and Mack's son, I was able to get rights to issue this book, which had been out of print for almost sixty years. And there was Sideslip, a fine little science fiction -- hardboiled hybrid by Ted White and Dave Van Arnam. I got rights to this book from Ted and from Dave's widow, and we reissued it.
Then there's Jon L. Breen, regular book reviewer for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. No way I could persuade Jon to write a book for me, for no advance. But he was willing to compile a volume of his past essays and reviews that we published as A Shot Rang Out. It's a marvelous book.
I do wish I had the budget and the staff and the know-how that it would take to get these books onto the shelves of a thousand bookstores and into the hands of a million readers. We're making some progress in that direction, getting into some retail stores, distributing through on-line book dealers and getting listed on sites like Amazon.com and B&N.com, but we've barely scratched the surface and it is a very tough job.
SCHWEITZER: So, what are you writing these days? Are you still able to get anything out from the major publishers?
LUPOFF: My most recent books have all been collections and they've all been from small companies: Visions (from Mythos Books), Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix (from Crippen & Landru), and Killer's Dozen (from Wildside Press).
My next book -- it may be on sale by the time this interview sees pixels, it's already listed for sale on several websites -- will be back to the big publishers. It's a mystery novel, The Emerald Cat Killer, from St. Martin's Press.
Beyond that I've got enough projects lined up to keep me busy for many months, if not years. Rookie Blues -- a cop novel that's about 80% complete, that I put aside a long time ago and want seriously to get back to . . . Villaggio Sogno, a fantasy novel based on a short story that I wrote for a Mike Ashley anthology . . . Beneath the Karst, an adventure novel with vaguely Lovecraftian overtones . . . Transtemporal!, the long-delayed wrap-up of a trilogy including Circumpolar! and Countersolar! . . . and Dreams, the concluding volume of my three-decker including Terrors and Visions.
I've also accumulated a lot of shorter nonfiction pieces that ran in magazines ranging from the old Ramparts to F&SF to Locus to Andy Porter's Algol/Starship, and more recently in online periodicals like Arnie Katz's VFW and Earl Kemp's eI. A couple of publishers have approached me about putting these together as a sort of critical compendium crossed with an episodic autobiography. It's a monstrous chore, but I would like to do it if I can.
A lot of these projects are by way of tying up loose ends that have been dangling for years or even decades, but somehow when I shave in the morning that fellow who peers back at me from the mirror isn't the energetic twenty-something who started all these ent
erprises. I may not get them all finished in my lifetime, but I want to complete as many as possible.
SCHWEITZER: Thanks, Dick.
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