In bookselling, and therefore publishing, a category is a kind of publication separated out from “general fiction” to reach a special audience. Categories are shelved separately in bookstores or consigned to a special area on a mass-market rack so that readers can find what they want without shopping further. A category is a response to a specific audience demand. Obviously, the known factor of a preexisting audience, even if you don’t know precisely the demographics of the audience, guarantees a certain minimal level of success for books appropriately placed in the category-selling section.
It is lower than the top of a mass-market list that you find the “categories,” the mysteries, Westerns, Gothics, romances, occult nonfiction, groups of books for special audiences who are in some way identifiable markets, most of them analogous to the fiction categories filled by the pulps years ago. And most senior editorial personnel have had experience in buying and editing and publishing category fiction when they rise to specialize in the best-seller category, the category of flash and rewards at the top of the list.
As a fiction category in the publishing world, then, SF is only a specific case of “the categories.” Hangovers from the heyday of fiction magazines, the Westerns, mysteries, and Gothics are specialties that have fallen upon difficult times in hardcover and paperback, times from which SF (and romance) seems to have escaped, and only partially. For years there were notable specialists in category editing in both hardcover and paperback, some identified with only one category, some experts in several categories (Donald A. Wollheim, one of the first—and certainly of longest tenure—SF specialists, was also a Western specialist). Now most of the categories are comparatively low-sales sidelines from which the senior editorial staff has risen.
Editing for a specialized audience is considered limiting by the greater part of the publishing community, and whether truly limited or not, category editors occupy a lesser position in community esteem than general editors. This is probably another legacy of the pulp days, when pulp editors were considered a lesser breed, engaged in commerce to the virtual exclusion of any literary values (and this was usually true).
The freshman editors who are most often given “some categories” as their first assignment in publishing strive to rise out of that position as rapidly as possible to escape “typecasting.” There are, to the best of my knowledge, no full-time distinguished career specialists in the Western field among the editorial ranks, while most mysteries are edited by young men and women under thirty with the title of associate or assistant editor. The great generations of mystery editors have passed, with the great ages of popularity of mystery and detective fiction, once the profitable mainstay of most major publishers of fiction. Most mysteries are not considered important books, don’t sell as they used to in earlier decades, are not published in such numbers as before, and are separated into best-sellers (a few) and trash (the rest). Right now, there is a whole new generation of specialist romance editors, producing the category of fiction that dominates the early 1980s. Their books are hugely successful.
Yet over the recent decades, SF has maintained for a number of publishers a significant and growing share of the mass market in particular. And this has fostered the careers of a certain number of new specialist SF editors, Judy-Lynn del Rey, Jim Baen, Terry Carr, and myself among them; specialized agents such as Virginia Kidd and Kirby McCauley; and specialized illustrators, including Kelly Freas, Vincent DiFate, Jack Gaughan, and Michael Whelan. In spite of the malaise of category publishing in general, the environment has fostered a strength through separateness.
As the writers and editors know, if a work of SF succeeds well enough so that people outside the traditional audience must pay attention, then it will either be discovered to be not really SF but literature (e.g., the works of Ray Bradbury in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem in the 1970s) or be condemned as trash with literary pretensions. This is a heavy load for editors and authors to bear.
An editor or a writer is generally indulged as harmlessly crazy, a not very threatening nut, for devoting a career to SF. Certainly there is an audience for the stuff, but someone who wishes to be taken seriously does not associate with category fiction except perhaps at night, when one flirts with the socially unacceptable. It is important to understand the popular origins of fantasy and science fiction to put the present state of the art in perspective. SF is reviewed separately from other literature, is written, edited, and marketed for a select cluster of overlapping audiences, who go to special sections in bookstores and libraries to choose their reading matter. Science fiction, although it is published in hardcover, trade paperback, and mass-market paperback, is a pulp category long ago identified, and the mass presentation thoroughly dominates its publication in all forms. Readers know that their favorite category is not literature as it is fashioned by the dominant practitioners of our day, that it is just pop culture, but of a very particular kind that they seek out.
SF has such a specifically “nonliterature” image that the general reader will never attempt to read a work that is so identified. It is not too extreme to say that SF is so far from fashionable literature that it is identified and defined in the public consciousness by its worst examples, from degraded B movies to the lurid and/or livid cover art of its magazines and paperbacks (a sometimes tiresome leftover from the era of pulp magazine fiction). Ironically, this tradition of packaging even the most careful and literate SF as antiliterature is comforting to the core audience, an identifiable market, predominantly male (circa 60 percent of readers), predominantly under age twenty-one (circa 70 percent of books are sold to younger readers), who habitually buy and read almost nothing but SF. Some of them are part of “organized fandom,” the international community of fans who publish amateur magazines, run large and small conventions, write letters, and influence the marketplace in many ways. They have chosen to reject the self-consciously literary. One violates conventional packaging at the grave risk of offending the central audience. There is a peculiar community aspect to the SF field, though, which provides extraliterary support to editors and authors. The SF world is conscious of its separateness from the rest of literature and of publishing and has its own culture, which reveres the “pros” who write and edit. Not only writers but also editors are well-known public figures in this culture, which even has its own awards for editing (the “best editor” Hugo Award, presented annually by the World SF Convention; the Locus Award, given by the readers of a leading fan magazine). Both author and editor have a direct line of communication to a significant portion of the people who read what we produce, who praise and condemn through an international network of amateur publications (the fanzines), through conversations at the frequent conventions held nationwide, and through a number of systems of peer awards and public honors.
It is my impression that editors in no other field have the constant opportunity to interact with knowledgeable readers who approach with sincere praise for the entire publishing program, all or most of whose books they have carefully read and winnowed.
They will even buy you a drink sometimes, while they tell you which books or parts of books they did or did not like. This is always informative and frequently not unpleasant—they have bought and read them, after all. It is harder on the authors. The isolation of this culture has led to the characterization of the SF field by some insiders as a ghetto, by others as an exclusive country club.
If there is a single commandment for the SF editor, it must be: You cannot ignore the established SF culture and its standards. Many young SF editors have truncated promising careers over the years by raising the banner of the avant-garde in the SF microcosm, only to find their books or magazines without a core audience. A whole group of revolutionaries in the mid-sixties in England and America, under various rallying cries, declared the death of “old” SF and the birth of “speculative fiction.” These groups of writers and editors are now remembered as the “new wave.” Most of the editors ass
ociated with that movement are no longer active, although the movement did have a crucial influence on SF for fifteen years, partly by focusing the reactionaries.
All editors worth a nickel wish to improve the breed, by selective acquisition and individual editing. Yet the recurring idea that SF should become literature by replacing the clear, journalistic prose standards of the genre with one or another fashionable stylistic mode alien to the audience has, to date, invariably alienated the audience. Only sophomoric hubris can lead one to believe that the core audience has no defined tastes and can be won over by stylistic sophistication.
Yet one of the challenges for an editor working with SF is that a wider range of stylistic effects is permissible in a work of SF than in any other form of category fiction. Every significant SF author has a strong and individual style, for good or ill, that is the author’s trademark, and with which the editor must deal (and especially protect from insensitive copyediting and proofreading). One must identify the strengths of radically differing styles of SF and preserve them. At best, you may find yourself editing a manuscript on a level equal to the stylistic sophistication of the best contemporary literature. These golden moments occur all too infrequently in any editorial career, but are possible in SF.
Presently, three out of four SF specialists have college degrees, but I know of no SF editor with a science degree. Among the earlier generations of SF editors, most were self-educated—only John W. Campbell, the great magazine editor, who never completed his science degree at MIT, did get one later from Duke. So by rule of thumb, the primary qualification for an editorial job in SF is wide reading—and comprehensive familiarity with writing—in the field. Knowledge of literature is optional, though useful. An enthusiasm for the wonders of science is immensely helpful. The degree of your publishing experience, or a detailed appreciation of the everyday realities, the nuts and bolts, the crafts and finances, can make you or break you.
Fortunately, the SF culture, fandom, is a good practical training ground and has spawned a majority of the practicing specialists in publishing today, as well as many major authors. And most of them knew one another as fans before they were professionals. They learned about publishing in the fanzines, and through letters, and in conversation at conventions.
Dozens of first novels are published every year in the SF field, the short story is alive and well in the SF magazines and in slick markets such as Omni and Playboy, and the creative ferment and conflict within the SF culture is constant, fueled by the continuing changes in contemporary science. Universal competence in all the sciences is beyond the reach of even the most committed SF editor, and because the author chooses the special scientific content of the work, the editor must always be prepared to query new ideas and technical polysyllables, even at the risk of momentarily appearing an innocent to the author. For SF is founded upon what is known to science. One may speculate beyond what is known when writing SF, even to building great cathedrals of improbable speculation, but one may not contradict what is known without shifting the work into the realm of fantasy, where anything is possible and nothing is probable. SF authors sometimes write, and SF editors publish, fantasy, but the difference must be clear.
Fantasy and science fiction are closely allied in publishing, since both categories posit worlds that are not reality. The SF editor is most often a fantasy editor as well. Yet the most useful view for the working editor is to consider fantasy as conservative and pastoral, and SF as radical, technological, urban. There is a spectrum of variations, especially considering that for at least the last half century, many of the same authors have written both—a legacy, again, of the pulp magazines, which published both in the early twentieth century, before the battle lines were clearly drawn. There are several good histories of this period, the most useful of which perhaps is James E. Gunn’s Alternate Worlds (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975). Due to the historical yoke between SF and fantasy, the fantasy and SF category audiences are linked and often cross over the boundaries between the two, especially for favorite authors. As always, the presentation of the work as one or the other must be clear, the cover art a blatant declaration that tells the bookseller where to position the book so that readers who head straight for the fantasy and SF section will find what they prefer.
SF art and packaging is a direct descendant of magazine cover packaging. There have now been dozens of colorful books devoted to SF art, which feature various present and historical styles, giving many theories, but the common thread I see is that SF art is vivid, colorful, and depicts a scene or image that declares at first glance the futuristic or fantastic nature of the book. The art may range from abstract and surreal to magic realism, but the appeal is escapist.
The artists who paint these blatant declarations are generally a happy lot, often well-paid (packaging is such a crucial marketing element), and even more, aesthetically satisfied. It is common for a cover illustration from an SF book to be nominated for major awards in the field of illustration, and it is common among the better illustrators to hear one declare his or her preference for SF work, because it is easier to “get away with good art” in SF than in any other realm of commercial packaging in publishing (the painted-to-format romance cover is hardly enough to keep the mind alive). And furthermore, the illustrators have the best of both worlds, being valued members of the SF culture, which has regular honors for them.
I find myself, as I write, returning frequently to the SF culture to explain some of the peculiarities unique to the career of the professional SF editor. I recently attended a party in celebration of the annual Nebula Award ceremony, thrown in California by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In attendance were several book dealers, a number of editors, several agents, a scattering of artists, reviewers, at least two typesetters who are regular readers, and of course a large number of writers, over a hundred of them.
More than half the writers had never published a novel; some had only sold one or two short stories. It occurs to me that I have not encountered such a cross-section of people involved in an area of publishing anywhere other than at a science fiction event, and not only that, I could attend a similar event in the SF field two dozen times a year somewhere in the U.S. and expect to find a variant of the same party, even at a regional convention run by a bunch of teenagers and some older fans in Baltimore or Nashville or Seattle or Boston or Philadelphia.
I said earlier that the author invents the science in his story based upon whatever specialized knowledge he has or can research for his purposes. This is true, but on a day-to-day basis both writers and editors are operating within the framework of a common literary language which has evolved within the genre since the 1920s. By the early 1950s, SF had developed a useful repository of cliché locutions. Phrases and words such as “space warp,” “hyperspace,” and “hyperdrive” can be used in any SF story to lend scientific verisimilitude (and that old SF flavor) without explanation or lengthy rationalization because other writers in the genre have already explained and rationalized them, often in great detail, in many other stories. The core readership of SF already knows what the terms refer to, how they work, and can fill in the rationalization from reading experiences they have in common.
An author of SF can devote more concentrated attention to his thematic concerns, what is new and different and essential in his work, by taking his characters on a spaceship (one of the earliest of the cliché words) equipped with hyperdrive (generally, a faster-than-light space drive) through hyperspace (that abnormal space through which a ship on hyperdrive travels) to a distant and alien planet. Author and editor may know nothing at all about how the characters really would travel, but the clichés get them from here to there and the real concern is the characters and the environment and their thoughts and feelings and interactions.
Still, you must be aware that the specialized clichés do have a literal meaning, are not nonsense words or supernatural explanations. The text is to be taken literally in an SF story, not
metaphorically; the ability to do this is the basic imaginative leap required of a reader or writer or editor confronted with an SF text. Working with such a text requires certain forms of editorial concentration and experience not far removed from what is required by a work of poetry or avant-garde fiction. I was the editor and publisher of a contemporary poetry magazine, The Little Magazine, from 1965 until 1988, and I find that contemporary poetry has a similarly specialized audience, body of techniques and conventions, and image of opacity to outsiders. Editorial familiarity with a large body of contemporary work is a sine qua non. The inner consistency of the work and the artistic goals that it sets for itself position the work vis-à-vis the rest of the field and dictate your editorial stance.
As in every fiction-publishing endeavor, the majority of what gets into print in the end is ephemeral and mediocre, done to fill slots in the distribution system, to keep the sales force busy and the voracious readership, if not fully satisfied, at least somewhat entertained, and to maintain the authors as they build up to masterpieces planned or hoped for. The editors who work in SF know all this and persevere and are generally happy. I am fortunate to be among them.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 28