Chicon 7 Diary, 2012

Sunday, August 26: We drove up to Chicago from Cincinnati through five separate and distinct rainstorms, and finally arrived in late afternoon. The committee had given us a lovely suite on the 14th floor of the Hyatt (and the hotel had added a wonderful gift basket filled with goodies). We were directly (by maybe ten to twenty floors) below all those lovely party suites that were in constant use once the convention started.

We unpacked, went down to the main floor, and took a cab to our favorite Greek restaurant, the Greek Islands. This was the original, on Halsted Street, and little more than half the price of the branch that’s about two blocks from the Windycon hotel in the western suburbs. Wonderful meal, as always — mine never varies: saganaki, pastitsio, and dolmades — and then we returned to the hotel, where Carol finished unpacking and I set off to learn my way around the four subterranean levels where all the programming would take place.

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Monday, August 27: Met my cousin, Bob Hamburg, and his wife Glenda, in the lobby, got our car, and started off on the day’s Nostalgia Tour. Bob and I both grew up in Chicago — our fathers were in business together at one time — and we thought we’d like to re-visit our old haunts.

We took Lake Shore Drive north to Devon Avenue, passed through the Rogers Park area where Carol and I first lived when we got married and where Laura was born, then drove by the house Bob grew up in. Next we headed north to the houses Carol and I had owned before moving to Cincinnati. This was quite possibly the last look we’ll get at them; the last time we drove past them was 22 years ago.

They renamed a street or two, and it took us a few minutes to find our first house, which was at 3435 Old Mill Road in Highland Park, and since Laura was in the process of buying a house that month, I was flabbergasted by the difference in prices then and now. Our house was in a posh North Shore suburb — the same one Michael Jordan lived in — on almost two acres, on a private road, and consisted of 7 rooms, a completely finished basement with a wet bar, a balcony, a two-car sunken garage, and all the amenities — and we bought it for $32,000 back in 1967.

Our other house, the one where we raised most of our 23 champion collies from 1969 to 1976, was on a corner of Adlai Stevenson’s old estate in Libertyville. The house is 120 feet long, on five fenced acres. I couldn’t see the dog runs — they’ve built a huge privacy fence around most of it — but I did see that the corral for Laura’s horse is still standing.

We drove by a couple of shopping centers and parks, hit Carol’s favorite food store (Sunset Foods, the only one for 20 miles in any direction that delivered out in the upscale boonies), and on the way back to the hotel we stopped at a much-touted deli in Skokie called The Bagel, where we’d arranged to meet Joan Bledig. Great blintzes, and truly wonderful chopped liver.

When we got back to the hotel we found that some people were already arriving. The first ones we met were Luigi Petruzzelli — one of my Italian publishers — and his wife Marina, a delightful lady who spoke no English. Finally met Gio Clairval, who I’d recently collaborated with, and a handful of old friends. Carol and I had a snack at The Bistro at 151 — the hotel’s coffee shop — and then went back to the room, she to sleep, me to do the last writing I’d have a chance to do until the con was over.

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Tuesday, August 28: I met Luigi and Marina, Bob and Glenda, and Gio in the lobby, and we took a couple of cabs to the Field Museum, my favorite natural history museum in the world. Got to pay my respects to the Man-Eaters of Tsavo, Sue the Tyrannosaur, Carl Akeley’s battling elephants, Bushman the gorilla, and all the other exhibits, and Gio, who was born in Italy, lived in France, and now resides in Scotland, acted as Marina’s translator. We spent about five hours there, then returned to the hotel to greet our just-arrived dinner partners — Janis Ian and her partner Pat; and Lezli Robyn (who had finally gotten her marriage visa and arrived in the States four days earlier, after almost a year of bureaucratic hang-ups) and Jamie Driscoll, her fiancé.

The six of us were joined by Bob and Glenda, and took a pair of cabs to the Greek Islands, where Joan Bledig was waiting for us, and we had another magnificent Greek meal, then all went back to our suite to visit for a few hours.

Sometime around midnight I took Lezli down to the lower levels to show her around, and especially to show her the route to the adjacent Illinois Center, which had perhaps a dozen cheap restaurants. On the way back we saw Gio sitting alone in the bar (which also served late-night snacks), visited with her for awhile, and watched in awe as she polished off the biggest shrimp cocktail I’ve ever seen.

Lezli left to join Jamie, Gio and I stuck around another hour, I ran into Drew and Yvonne MacDonald (she’s the famous Yvonne From Cincinnati, who’s been written up in fannish song and story), and finally I went up to the suite to grab ten or twelve winks.

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Wednesday, August 29: Went down to the dealers’ room — it didn’t open officially until Thursday — and signed a bunch of my Guest of Honor book, Win Some, Lose Some, as well as a couple of dozen copies of Stalking the Zombie. (It was a very strange month, in terms of publishing. Almost every small and medium press I’d ever worked with wanted a book for Chicon 7, and as a result I had eight new titles out for the convention, the two I just mentioned plus The Incarceration of Captain Nebula and Other Lost Futures, Masters of the Galaxy, Resnick Abroad, Resnick on the Loose, Resnick’s Menagerie, and With a Little More Help From My Friends. A 700-page second edition of ¬Mike Resnick — An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Work, by Adrienne Gormley and Fionna Kelleghan, didn’t quite make it to Worldcon, but will be out soon and will certainly be on sale at the San Antonio Worldcon next summer.

After saying hello to all the dealers, I went up to the lobby and hung out for a couple of hours, greeting old friends from the fan and pro communities. Laura. who was doing some last-minute paperwork prior to closing on her new house, showed up in midafternoon, so I escorted her to our suite — she had one of the bedrooms — and then, at 5:00, Laura, Carol and I went downstairs where we met Dave McCarty, Steven Silver, and the rest of the committee and guests for dinner. They took us to Fulton’s on the River, where I had one of the four or five finest meals in my experience: a thick, rich, lobster bisque, the first lobster thermidore I’ve had since gorging on it for a week on the Kenya Coast some 20 years ago (and this was better), and a large crème brulee for dessert. Got to chat a bit with Toastmaster John Scalzi, Fan Guest of Honor Peggy Rae Sapienza, Agent Guest of Honor Jane Frank, and family and representatives of Artist Guest of Honor Rowena Morrill (who unfortunately was in the hospital during Chicon). A fabulous restaurant, and it’s on our must-eat-at list next time we’re in or near Chicago’s Loop.

We also picked up our badges, and I added a 36th little Hugo Nominee pin to my collection. And we got our program books. I plan to cherish mine for a long time. Instead of the usual — one person writing a long appreciation of the Guest of Honor — this program book had five people writing a page or two apiece. Barry Malzberg wrote about my accomplishments as a short story writer; Kris Rusch praised my talents as an editor; Lezli Robyn wrote about my “Writer Children” and all the beginners I’ve helped; Guy Lillian wrote about me as a fan; and Laura wrote an absolutely hilarious (and, she claims, true) piece about growing up with me as a father. The program book also gave a complete bibliography of all my books, including cover photos and every re-sale of each, and a comprehensive list of all my short fiction. Gotta love any book that does all of that, and runs photos of me with the collies, with a rhino in Africa, with my Hugos, and (of course) with Carol.

Upon returning to the Hyatt I attended Cincinnati fan Bob Hess’s 50th birthday party (in Yvonne From Cincinnati’s room, of course), then hit the Kansas-City-in-2016 bid party, the Boston-in-2020 joke bid party, and a couple of others, and even got some long, serious backrubs from BJ Galler-Smith and Jo van Ekeren. I also ran into Lezli and Jamie, who had a hell of a tourist day: Museum of Science & Industry in the morning, Field Museum in the afternoon, and a Cubs game at Wrigley Field in the evening. She even came back with a ball, something I’ve never been able to do after maybe 100 trips to Comiskey Park, and another 30 to Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. I also ran into George R. R. Martin, Phyllis Eisenstein, and a number of others that I’ve known since we were all starving writers in Chicago back in the 1960s.

And I had Yvonne From Cincinnati’s daughter solve a problem. I had invited all my Writer Children — well, those who were attending — to brunch on Sunday. But when I tried to make a reservation at the Bistro at 151, they explained that they didn’t take reservations for Sundays, because too many people reserved and then checked out without cancelling. But Yvonne From Cincinnati’s daughter is an executive at the Hyatt, so I explained my problem to her, and got a phone message the next morning that I had a guaranteed reservation for 15.

It’s nice to know people with clout.

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Thursday, August 30: This was the official start of the Worldcon, I dragged myself out of bed at 10:30 in the (ugh!) morning, took a quick shower and shave, and went down to the Bistro to have lunch with Leonid Korogodski, the publisher of Silverberry Press, which had just brought out Resnick’s Menagerie, a collection of 18 of my SF/animal stories (I had no idea I’d written that many; this started out as a little chapbook that kept growing and growing.) We spent a pleasant hour or so, and he later told me that he sold every copy he’d brought to the con, which always warms the cockles of a mercenary writer’s heart.

Carol, like me, has been going to cons for 49 years, has seen well over a thousand panels, and didn’t feel obligated to watch a bunch more, so while I was doing my performing seal act over the next few days, she and what I shall euphemistically call “the girls” went to the Art Institute, the Aquarium, took the boat ride down the Chicago River, and went shopping. She was always back in time to join me for dinner, and looked a lot fresher than I did as the con wore on.

The first panel of the day — well, of my day — was one on the science fiction scene in Europe. Nice broad topic. Only one problem: outside of me, the entire panel consisted of Luigi and two other Italians, charming and knowledgeable about the Italian scene, but pretty much limited to that . . . and while I’ve sold to something like fifteen or twenty European countries, I knew the audience wasn’t there to hear an American’s take on it — especially an American with agents in every country he sells, so I cut it short and we only used about 40 of our scheduled 90 minutes.

Next came Opening Ceremonies. The first guest to be interviewed by John Scalzi was Erle Korshak, the man who chaired the first Chicon and second Worldcon ever. To put it in perspective, Erle chaired Chicon I in 1940, 72 years ago!

I was next at bat. I gather the format was like some late-night interview show, but since I don’t watch television I’m just guessing. We exchanged some jokes and memories, and then I was followed by the other Guests of Honor or — in Rowena’s case — her stand-in. Whole thing took about 90 minutes, didn’t drag much, and seemed to please the audience.

I went right from Opening ceremonies to my reading. I drew a nice crowd, not quote SRO but it was a very large room. I read what had become Carol’s favorite of my humorous stories, featuring her favorite of my characters — Harry the Book, my Damon Runyonesque bookie who operates in a fantasy New York. The story, titled “The Evening Line”, will appear in Rip-Off, being published by Audible.com in both audio and print versions, and edited by Gardner Dozois. The conceit is that each story has to begin with a famous line from a public domain classic; I chose the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, which has been Carol’s favorite novel from the day I met her more than half a century ago. And then, to prove that I always was kinda good, I also read my first award-winning piece of fiction, “The Last Dog”, which I wrote and sold 35 years ago. Janis Ian and a few others were crying so hard they had to leave the room, he said with a satisfied smile.

Then it was dinnertime, and my friend and publisher Shahid Mahmud of Arc Manor Books took a bunch of us out to dinner. I’ve been editing the Stellar Guild line for him, a line that consists of a novella by a superstar combined with a novelette or novella set in the same universe and written by a protégé chosen by the star (not the editor), whose career gets a huge boost when he or she shares the cover with the star — and I’ll soon be editing Galaxy’s Edge magazine for Shahid as well. Eric and Lucille Flint were there, as well as Harry, Laura, and Rebecca Turtledove, Steve and Denise Leigh, and two protégés who will be doing Stellar Guild books with me in the next year or so — Lezli Robyn (and Jamie), and Janis Ian (and Pat).

Our ride got there a little late and the head table was already filled, but we had a very pleasant dinner sharing a huge wraparound booth with Eleanor Wood (my agent) and her son Justin Bell, plus Nancy Kress and Jack Skillingstead. Before dinner was over I’d signed Nancy to a Stellar Guild contract, where she joins Eric, Harry, me, Kevin Anderson, Mercedes Lackey, Bob Silverberg, and Larry Niven. Very nice food, fine company, and I got to tease Nancy about our forthcoming nude mud-rasslin’ match for the entire meal. Then, just before we left, Eleanor handed me a 28-book contract from Audible.com to sign and return to her before the end of the convention. Is it any wonder I enjoyed the meal?

We lingered in the restaurant for a few hours, and got back just in time for me to meet up with my screenplay collaborator, Harry Kloor — the only guy in history to get two PhD’s in two different sciences in the same calendar year. (So why is he wasting his time in Hollywood?) We chatted for a few minutes, he informed me that he was also producing a graphic novel based on my Widowmaker books, and then we went down to the bar area for a scheduled meeting with Steve Saffel of Titan Books.

When that broke up, Brad Torgersen and Laurie Tom, two of my Writer Children, spotted me and came over to say hello — and in Brad’s case, to return my house key. He was a two-day drive from the con, so I told him to spend the first night at our house, try not to steal my Hugos, leave his car in the driveway, and take the Megabus from Cincinnati to Chicago, then drive back to Cincinnati with Carol, Laura and me. (Laura also took the Megabus. I’ve heard so much about this thing that one of these days I really must try it out.) Anyway, I’d collaborated with Brad on three stories and Laurie on one during the previous few months, and they were both looking forward to seeing a copy of With a Little More Help From My Friends, which contained my collaborations with them, as well as with 19 others, some top pros like Harry and Nancy and Eric, some Writer Children like them.

CFG — my home club, the Cincinnati Fantasy Group — always has a hospitality suite at Worldcon, and Chicon was no exception. The SFWA suite was open too, as were bid suites/parties for London in 2014, Orlando in 2015, Spokane in 2015, Kansas City in 2016, and a few others, including a very nice party hosted by FenCon, a Dallas convention that had flown us down there a few years ago.

I returned to our suite for a break at about 3:30 AM, caught up on my e-mail and Facebook messages, realized that it was after 4:00 when I finished, and since I’d gotten up a bit earlier than usual, decided to go to bed. 4:00 AM is early for me, at home or at a convention, but as it turned out, it was the latest I’d go to bed for the rest of the convention.

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Friday, August 31: This was the Big Day — Guest of Honor speech day, which (I was told) was the way it finally hits home to you that you have indeed been given the highest honor the field has to offer.

I got up at 10:30 (again!), met with some guy who interviewed me for a local paper, made my way down to the lower levels at a quarter to noon, met up with Shahid Mahmud and Karen Haber (Mrs. Silverberg), and waited for Bob to get off his panel with Connie Willis at noon, at which point we raced out the front door and into Shahid’s waiting car.

Explanation: Bob and I grew up in Jewish neighborhoods — he in New York, me in Chicago — and became addicted to deli food. But we now live in areas that don’t have delis, so every Worldcon we make an appointment to have lunch at the best deli in that particular Worldcon’s city. The problem here was we were both very heavily scheduled, and were due back at 1:30 for our next obligations. Shahid got us there — since I’m a native, I directed him — and sure enough, Manny’s lived up to its billing. Bob assures me he loved his pastrami sandwich, and I had the best chopped liver I’ve ever experienced. I don’t remember what we had for desert, but we were back in Shahid’s car and racing for the Hyatt by 1:20, making it with three minutes to spare.

I should add that although Shahid is a publisher and publishers always pay, lunch was Bob’s treat, and Shahid just lucked out and got a free meal. Back at LACon 4, the 2006 Worldcon in Los Angeles, Bob had driven down from Oakland. The committee had asked him to emcee the Guest of Honor ceremonies, and he begged off, suggesting me. I agreed provided he’d pay for lunch at the deli. Well, the nearest good deli was maybe a dozen miles away, and at the last minute Karen took the car to go shopping, so while Bob paid maybe $25 for lunch for the pair of us, I paid $75 for cabfare…and based on that, I insisted that he owed me lunch in Chicago. (I forgot to ask during the intervening six years.)

So at 1:30 I sat down in solitary splendor at an autographing table, and opposite me were my daughter and perhaps 20 good friends. The reason: my Guest of Honor book, Win Some, Lose Some, contained all 30 of my Hugo-nominated short fiction pieces, winners and losers both — and each story was introduced by a different dignitary within the field, all of them long-time friends.

And for 90 minutes, without a let-up, we autographed copy after copy after copy of that 600-page book. I wanted to get all my “introducers” to inscribe my own copy to me, but we were so busy and the line was so endless that I had to wait until the signing period was over before I could get my copy signed. I was told we signed something like 130 books in 90 minutes . . . and it was not an inexpensive book. A very flattering way to start the day’s programming.

Then I went over to Off World Designs, where Doug Klauba, the cover artist for Stalking the Zombie, and I spent 45 minutes signing t-shirts bearing reproductions of the cover art (and take my word for it, nothing is harder to sign than t-shirts.) When that was over, I did a 45-minute signing at Larry Smith’s table, with no belly dancers to attract buyers for the first time since Chicon 6 in 2000.

Then, at 4:30, BJ Galler-Smith and I climbed onto the stage, and she interviewed me for an hour and a half.

We had dinner with Luigi and Marina Petruzzelli, Gio Clairval, a pair of Luigi’s Italian friends, plus Lezli and Jamie. I’ll be damned if I can remember what we had, so it clearly was neither superb nor terrible.

Then, at 9:00, it was time for my speech. Laura had apologized earlier in the day for missing it, but she had a dinner obligation with her editor/publisher, Betsy Wollheim, who has been publishing her delightful series of comic fantasies (which bear titles like Disappearing Nightly, Dopplegangsters, Unsympathetic Magic, Vamparazzi, Polterheist, and the like.) Then I found out that Random House had invited just about every member of SFWA for a four-hour boat ride on Lake Michigan. Then the committee announced that the Moebius Theatre Group (which I fondly remember from when they produced Warp and its sequels 40 years ago) would be performing a live play starting at 8:30. I remember mentioning at dinner that at such time as I outnumbered the audience I was calling off the speech.

Turns out that I drew a pretty nice crowd anyway, maybe 400 to 500. I never use a prepared text, I just talk . . . and Carol had told me that I should do funny reminiscences rather than serious/pedantic commentary, so that’s what I did, and — I have it on video disk, thanks to Allen Batson — the audience laughed its collective ass off for 75 minutes, and I even sneaked in a couple of serious (if brief) observations.

Gave a podcast interview back in the suite, then went around to the parties — Tor’s was jammed, as usual — with Luigi, Harry Kloor, Writer Child Brennan Harvey, and a couple of others. I ran into Ruhan Zhao, who’s been instrumental in helping me sell to China, and also saw Kay Kenyon, one of my more accomplished Writer Children, with whom I had promised to have a business discussion, so she and I went down to the bar and spoke for an hour. Then it was back to the parties, but around 2:20 I wended my way back to the room, where Carol was happily reading her Nook, and climbed into bed, unheard-of at prior Worldcons. Part of it was that they worked me very hard at this con (not that I didn’t enjoy every minute of it), long days broken only by business meals; but in truth, the other part is that I just can’t do as many back-to-back-to-back 20-hour days at 70 as I could at 35 and 40.

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Saturday, September 1: Another seemingly endless and yet totally delightful day. Woke up at 9:30 AM (double ugh with yogurt on it!), took a shower while Carol thoughtfully made some coffee, and then at 10:30 I spent an hour signing Stalking the Zombie and the British import, Masters of the Galaxy, at Bob Garcia’s American Fantasy Press table, then made my way over to the Bistro for lunch with my Chinese friends. There was Ruhan Zhao, and his son Muxing (who is going to become one of my Writer Children; this kid — I think he’s still in grammar school — is writing stories that are better than 90% of what I find in the better slush piles.) I also met Wu Yan, who is the head of the biggest science fiction society in China, and I finally met Meizi Wang, the lovely girl who is my translator for the short stories I sell to ¬¬SF World, the Chinese magazine with a circulation of 500,000 per issue. I also gave both Ruhan and Wu Yan a list of all the books I have not yet sold to China, and since I seem to be reasonably popular there, hopefully some good will come of it.

At 1:00 I had a panel on “Magical Musicals”. The musical theatre is one of my passions, and the only person in science fiction who I will freely grant knows (far) more about the subject than I do is Laura Frankos, Harry Turtledove’s wife, who has written a wonderful book on it. More to the point, Laura and I have been trading bootleg videos of plays in performance for years, and both have huge collections. The Female Person From Colorado (yclept Connie Willis) was also on the panel, as were Rich Lynch and Leah Zeldes. Lots of fun, and I think Laura and I named a lot of SF and fantasy musicals that most people didn’t know existed. (Like what, I hear you ask. Like Dandelion Wine, which was so poor it never made it to Broadway; or Charlie and Algernon, based on “Flowers for Algernon”, which was a short-lived flop both in England and then in America. And a number of successes that most people don’t realize are fantasies, like Assassins and Follies, until you point out the fantastic elements.)

Then came the panel that everyone is still talking about, that’s up on You Tube and Facebook and is the most popular panel I ever experienced at a Worldcon — and the only one to receive a 5-minute standing ovation. It was titled “The Secret History of Science Fiction”, the panelists were the current Guest of Honor (me), and four previous Guests of Honor (Bob Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, George R. R. Martin, and Gardner Dozois), and all we did was tell funny (make that hilarious) and frequently salacious stories about previous conventions. I think there may have been minimally more stories about the 1968 BayCon than any other, though we covered the peanut butter costume, the skinny dipping, the Male Chauvinist Pig Award, the lime jello, the origin of the Hugo Losers Party, and every other legend that one or more of us experienced. We could have done another three hours without slowing down, but most of us had 4:30 panels to get to.

And at 4:30, I hosted a slide show I had put together for the con, titled “Baby Photos”. I described it — accurately, I think — as photos of beardless and braless young wannabe writers, juxtaposed to photos of the wrinkled, decrepit, incontinent writers we became. 120 photos with my descriptions, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. I still have the CD, so I can do it again at some regional con.

At 6:00 — and you’ll notice that again I’d been on the go or onstage since 10:30 in the morning — we had another business dinner, this time with our friends Bill Schafer, Yanni Kuznia and Tim Holt of Subterranean Press. Bill has published four of my books in the past three years, including The Incarceration of Captain Nebula for Chicon, and has been running Lucifer Jones stories (my favorite of my characters) three or four times a year for four or five years, and he also badgers me into turning out an almost-annual African novella. It was a pleasant meal, and when it was over Carol and I had to attend the masquerade. We’d been told that emcee Jan Howard Finder was going to say some nice things about the costumes we did in the 1970s, and we thought it would be rude not to be there. Just as well we went. The first two rows were reserved for all the Guests of Honor and Special Guests; we were the only two to show up.

I have to say that Worldcon masquerades have changed from the 125 to 150 costumes we had to compete against. There were only 25 costumes, and three of them were in the Children’s Division. I think the serious costuming has migrated to DragonCon and ComicCon.

I hit the Baen party, and visited with a number of friends in the SFWA and CFG suites, but again, it was forcibly impressed upon me that I can’t get by on 4 hours’ sleep a night at a Worldcon the way I used to — one or two nights, sure; but not night after night after night — and again I gave up the ghost at 3:00 AM, which as readers of my Worldcon diaries know has been an aberration prior to 2012.

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Sunday, September 2: Sunday began with the 11:00 AM brunch I hosted for my Writer Children. We got a totally secluded area of the restaurant. Invited were Lezli Robyn, Kay Kenyon, Brad Torgersen, Brennan Harvey, Laurie Tom, Nick DiChario, Gio Clairval, BJ Galler-Smith, Janis Ian, Toby Buckell, Ron Collins, and Laura (my real writer child, who just turned 50 and probably resents being considered a child), plus Carol, of course. Ron went into the emergency room with some bug the night before and didn’t make it, but I’ve spoken to him since and he’s doing fine. Anyway, these were all writers I helped, collaborated with (well, except for Laura), bought from, introduced to editors and agents, and “adopted”. There are another ten or eleven who didn’t make it to Chicon, but it made more sense to spend a few hundred dollars on the brunch than spending it throwing a party where I wouldn’t know two-thirds of the attendees. Everyone else gorged on the huge buffet; I had 6 cups of coffee and tried to wake up.

After the brunch, I went off at 1:30 to a truly dull panel on why pros write for fanzines, or which pros write for fanzines, or which fanzines pros write for, or some such. It featured Andy Porter, Dick Smith, and myself. Bob Silverberg was supposed to be on it too, but he had the brains to be a no-show.

Then at 3:00 I did my “official” autographing session, and found myself signing right next to Jack McDevitt. We have The Cassandra Project, a reasonably major collaboration coming out from Ace in November, and it was nice to be able to chat with him while we both signed for seemingly endless lines of fans. His line petered out after 83 minutes; mine made it 85, and I teased him mercilessly about that for the final five minutes of the session.

Then I popped over to Shahid’s Arc Manor table. He’d reprinted the first three Lucifer Jones books (Adventures, Exploits, and Encounters), as well as the re-titled Shaggy B.E.M. Stories (which is now Bug-Eyed Monsters and Bimbos), and was selling a bunch of my Farthest Star titles for Ralph Roberts, who had to cancel out at the last minute.

After an hour at Shahid’s, I met Carol, Eleanor Wood, her son and his fiancé, and we walked a short block to the Palm restaurant in the Swissotel (spelled right). After Fulton’s on the River and The Greek Islands, it was the best meal I’d had in a couple of months: lobster bisque, veal parmesan, and a chocolate pastry. The Hyatt has an upscale restaurant, Stetson’s, where a few publishers took us at Chicon 6 back in 2000, but it closed for renovations two days before the con officially started — not the best foresight in the world.

After dinner we went picked up Shahid and Laura and went to the Hugo Reception. Theoretically I could only take one guest for myself and one for Lou Anders (he was stuck with his publisher, Pyr Books, at DragonCon, and I was accepting for him if he won), but that was ridiculous. The Hugo Reception is always filled with the same un-nominated crowd, and this year was no exception. I got permission in advance from the committee to bring my extra guests, but we could have walked right in anyway, just as everyone else was doing.

After a few minutes we were ushered to our reserved seating area, John Scalzi stepped out, and the Hugo ceremony was under way. John made a truly fine Toastmaster, and the committee had the brains to get rid of a two-decade-long tradition that slowed the ceremony down and did nothing to enhance it: they eliminated the guest presenters and let the Toastmaster, who is theoretically chosen for his or her wit, do all the talking and hand out all the awards. Lou lost Best Editor, Long Form, to Laura’s editor, Betsy Wollheim; and my story, “The Homecoming”, lost to Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie”. I couldn’t be upset about it; Ken is a wonderful young man, and he wrote exactly the story I would have written were I a Chinese-American writing on that particular subject. I think the biggest surprise of the night was that the bestselling novel — not just fantasy novel – of the year came in fifth, though George R. R. Martin did get a Hugo in a different category.

John moved the ceremony right along, and while I didn’t put a timer on it, it felt like we got through it in a reasonable 90 minutes or so.

I hit the Hugo Losers Party, then went up to George Martin’s catered invite-only party, spent some time visiting up with Gardner Dozois and the Female Person From Colorado, stopped by CFG a couple of times, made it to the SFWA suite, and wound up back in our own suite at 1:30. I checked e-mail and Facebook, found I’d developed a second wind from somewhere, and went back to the parties for another couple of hours and enjoyed the hell out of it, and also got three story assignments for upcoming anthologies . . . but again, I was in bed and asleep before 3:30.

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Monday, September 3: Last day of the con, and another early (well, for me) day. Got up around 9:30, showered and injected coffee into a vein, then ran a program item that showed DVDs of five short movies that had been made from my stories, mostly by film school students: “Metal Tears” (from “Robots Don’t Cry”); “Neutral Ground” (from “Neutral Ground”); “The Faith Machine” (from “Article of Faith”); “His Award-Winning Science Fiction Movie” (from “His Award-Winning Science Fiction Story”); and “Do Not Take the Name of the Lord in Vain” (from The Branch). It was the last-named that got the producer-director excommunicated from his church and thrown out of his country (Andorra) for 15 years.

That took from 10:30 to 1:30. Then I had a panel with four of my collaborators on what it was like for them to collaborate with the Guest of Honor. There were Brad Torgersen (3 stories), Lezli Robyn (7 stories), Eric Flint (a story, 3 co-edited anthologies, 3 years co-editing Jim Baen’s Universe, and a novel under contract but not yet started), and Harry Kloor (a screenplay, and, it turns out, a graphic novel adaptation of my Widwmaker novels). It went smoothly enough, especially when I got Eric and Brad talking about collaborations they’ve done with people other than me, and at 3:00 PM the last panel of the last day was finished.

But I wasn’t. Carol and I then had to attend closing ceremonies, where I got the distinct impression that Chicago is already bidding again for 2022. We had planned to help Lezli celebrate her birthday at Navy Pier, and Carol — a Ferris wheel junkie — was really looking forward to riding the big one there, but she came down with a mild version of the same bug that had hit Ron Collins and Gio Clairval, and we stayed in the hotel and had room service send up our dinners.

I had three boxes of books to take home, and no room in the trunk what with Laura’s and Brad’s luggage in addition to ours, so I imposed on fellow Cincinnatian Debbie Oakes to carry them home in her car and deliver them to us at the weekly Wednesday CFG dinner in two days.

There wasn’t much in the way of parties, but I was too exhausted to visit most of them anyway, so I spent a couple of hours in the bar with BJ and Lezli and anyone else who stopped by (and thank goodness the bar didn’t insist that we teetotalers buy drinks!) and another hour at CFG, and I think I was in bed before 2:30.

I really do think my hours were compromised by the exhausting schedule. I’m writing this at 5:30 AM on September 24, and this’ll be the 8th or 9th night in a row I’ve been writing past 5:00. (Of course, I’m sleeping til midafternoon each day too.) I suppose I’ll know for sure next year when I’m back to maybe 3 panels, a reading, a kaffeeklatsch and a signing spread over five days.

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Tuesday, September 4: Carol, Laura, Brad and I piled into the car. I drove the first 2-1/2 hours, to LaFayette, and Brad drove the last 3, to Cincinnati. We dropped Laura off, then went home, where Brad — who does computer support for a living (until the writing gets too lucrative, which we all hope is soon) — fixed everything that was wrong with Carol’s laptop and transferred all the data and programs from my beat-up XP to my brand-new Dell tower with Windows 7 and made it work mostly like XP, which is the best system Microsoft ever made (so of course they continue to “improve” it to the disgust of most users).

And while Carol was unpacking and laundering and puttering, and Brad was computering, I had a little time to do some reflecting. I remember our first Worldcon — the 1963 Discon — as vividly as if it occurred just last month. I remember seeing giants like Isaac Asimov handing out Hugos to other giants like Jack Vance and Phil Dick, and I remember wondering, if I worked my tail off and improved my craft for the next 20 or 30 years, if someone, somewhere would let me touch one. As I write these words I can stand up, walk 20 feet, and touch a bunch of them.

I remember that Murray Leinster was the Guest of Honor, and that because of that honor, which had been bestowed only on the tallest of our giants, on people like Heinlein and Campbell and Clarke and Doc Smith and Asimov — Williamson wouldn’t gain that honor for another 14 years, and it would be 23 mire years before it would be given to Bradbury — I felt compelled almost to whisper their names in awe.

Well, I was very young and very impressionable. These days young is another union, but I’m still very impressionable, and I’m still in awe of the accomplishments of our field’s giants, even though most of them have become my good friends. I occasionally get the feeling that there’s been a terrible mistake, that of course I didn’t really win all those Hugos, and surely they read off the wrong name when they announced that I was to be the Chicon Guest of Honor . . . but until someone shows up to explain that there have indeed been a series of embarrassing blunders (and probably even after that happens), I remain the happiest science fiction writer in the world, I love what I do, l love all the professional and fannish friends I’ve made, I love my life, I’m proud as hell that I was Chicon’s Guest of Honor, and I wish there was a way to thank everyone who has helped to make it possible. I suppose the closest I can come is to keep writing the best stories I can, and I plan to start another one the second I e-mail this diary to Guy Lillian for Challenger 36.

NOTE: this article first appeared in the pages of SFWA Bulletin 141, Spring, 1999.

MIKE: The first four truly influential short story editors in the field were John Campbell, Anthony Boucher, Horace Gold, and Mike Moorcock. I don’t think there’s any serious debate on this point. Oh, you might want to name Hugo Gernsback, too, but his importance was as an innovator and publisher, certainly not as an editor.

It wasn’t all that difficult to define what Campbell wanted. The best exemplar was Robert A. Heinlein, of course, but Asimov, de Camp, the Kuttners, all practiced the rigorous extrapolation Campbell demanded, and most of them could push a noun up against a verb with some skill. Not as beautifully as Sturgeon, who remains Campbell’s outstanding exception, but good enough to please the editor and the readership.

Boucher (and, to be sure, his partner McComas) brought the story of literary ambition to the field. It didn’t much matter if it was science fiction or fantasy; if it was written as well as it could be written, then Boucher was a receptive market. And with Unknown long dead, his magazine has remained the best fantasy market for the past 49 years.

Horace Gold liked sharp-edged social satire. It’s hard to imagine an issue of his magazine without a contribution from Pohl, Sheckley, or Tenn, and certainly he was the driving force behind Bester’s The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, which to this day still read as if they’re five years ahead of where the field’s currently at.

Moorcock was the ringleader of the New Wave. Ballard was to Moorcock as Heinlein was to Campbell, but he also published Disch, Spinrad, Aldiss, anyone with the will and the skills to try the “new thing.”

The concept of slanting a story existed back then. As I say, it wasn’t difficult to figure out what Campbell would and wouldn’t be willing to buy. Ditto for Gold. Ditto, if you could evaluate your literary capabilities, for Boucher. Ditto for Moorcock.

Now let’s move the clock ahead a few decades. Who is the outstanding short fiction editor in the field today? Clearly, that honor goes to Gardner Dozois. He’s won ten of the last eleven Hugos for Best Editor; more stories from his magazine have won Hugos and Nebulas than from any rival; and his annual best-of-the-year anthology, though it has had occasional competition, remains the definitive yearly state-of-the-art analysis.

So the first question is, can one read a few issues of Asimov’s and determine what he likes with the same certainty that one could pinpoint the tastes of the four above-named editors?

Personally, I think not. I’ve sold him close to 20 stories. So has Pat Cadigan. I doubt that Michael Swanwick has hit him on less than 90% of his submissions. Ditto Jack Dann. Ditto Janet Kagan. And if the five of us (to say nothing of his occasional contributors such as Robert Silverberg and William Gibson) have much in common besides our SFWA memberships, I don’t know what it might be.

So my question is: is Gardner’s taste that catholic (hardly a bad thing, though in this field an unusual one) . . . or, and here’s the key question, is it because science fiction has become so all-encompassing that there are no more barriers left except self-defeating, limited ones like, say, an all-cyberpunk magazine when that sub-genre never had as many as 20 practitioners at one time? Or, to put it another way, is it impossible for one short fiction editor, even one as pre-eminent and brilliant as Gardner, to shape the field as his predecessors did? And if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

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BARRY: The last editor who truly shaped the field in significant and continuing ways was Judy-Lynn del Rey. Isaac Asimov pointed this out, noted that she had had as great an impact upon science fiction or fantasy as John Campbell, maybe more, because she had more money to pay and far more words to buy. What was really interesting, Isaac noted — she died in February of 1986, this was the content of his eulogy at the memorial service — is that no one really understood that at the time. Her influence just kind of crept up and around and only after she was so suddenly gone did people for the first time realize how much she had changed the terms and contents of almost everything that followed her. (How she changed it can be the subject of another dialogue.) Her effect is no less pervasive a dozen years later. In effect, she shifted the concept of the audience, vastly widened that audience because she saw no reason why a popular science fiction or fantasy author could not be successfully promoted to the general readership assuming a certain kind of slant and a fair amount of promotion. There had been bestselling science fiction and fantasy novels prior to del Rey Books, but they were isolated cases, they were not programmatic. Judy-Lynn was putting five or six novels a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

Gardner Dozois is no less important and certainly no less able than Judy-Lynn del Rey, but his situation is entirely different. He is dealing in the magazine rather than the book market, he is buying short stories, novelettes and novellas, and he has no promotion budget — nor has the circulation of Asimov’s exceeded 100,000 at any time since 1985 when he became its editor. These are in no ways reflections upon his skills or the high quality of his magazine. It has everything to do with factors of distribution and audience (this is simply not an era kind to the fiction magazines) and with the fact that science fiction isn’t as it was in Campbell’s time, a field centered in the short story. The magazines were, right through the mid-sixties, the point of origin for almost everything important or interesting. With the collapse of the magazine distributors, and the advent of mass market conglomerates (to say nothing of media science fiction), all of this changed. Work short of novel length became marginalized.

The magazines remain vital as a point of introduction and as markets where novels and careers are originated and appear in early form . . . feeder lines, as it were. But they don’t pay enough, aren’t widely enough read to have any significant influence. Science fiction in the 1940s was synonymous with Astounding; add Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction and the same could be said of the 1950s. (Ballantine, Doubleday and Ace, the major science fiction book publishers of the time, were deriving most of their material by reprinting or expanding upon work that had appeared in the magazines.) That’s certainly not the case now. Surveys in the last decade have shown over and again that there’s surprisingly little overlap between magazine and book buyers, that most buyers of books don’t read the magazines any more (or at all).

That having been said, I’d note that Gardner can in my opinion be understood: his magazine contains two kinds of fiction. One kind is the fiction to which he responds and for which he genuinely cares, another kind is the fiction he thinks he ought — as a mass market editor — to run. The magazine has won awards in both categories and Gardner has been as content hanging around with one kind of story as the other; he gives no external sign of policy or preference, which is the sign of a competent editor. But I think that I can tell the difference, and I am smart enough to offer no clues or speculations as to which the works of frequent contributors X, Y and Z represent to the editor.

All editors — those who hang around to buy more than 50 stories, anyway — can be figured out. The really eclectic ones (like James Quinn at If so long ago, who appeared willing to buy anything) are just as predictable that way.

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MIKE: Before we go any further, I should point out that there are occasionally factors, for better or (usually) worse, that have nothing to do with editorial taste.

For example, I’ve edited some 20-plus anthologies, an overwhelming percentage of them original anthologies. These days you can’t sell — or at least I can’t sell — something as broad-based as Universe or Orbit or New Dimensions. If you can’t tie the stories to a theme, something the editor thinks the marketing department can get behind and push, you’re not going to make a sale.

So I would contact maybe 15 established writers (gotta have those names on the covers) and 10 newcomers (can’t pay back, so gotta pay forward), and make assignments. And because the books were written to themes, because I knew that none of the writers involved would have sat down to write a science-fictional Sherlock Holmes story or an Alternate Kennedy story without my encouragement, I felt a certain obligation to buy those stories, even if they weren’t quite what I wanted. Oh, I’d offer suggestions, and send them back for rewrites if they needed them . . . but if the suggestions were ignored and the rewrites didn’t do the job (and thank heaven it didn’t happen very often), I’d buy them anyway and bury them in the middle of the book. I’d never have done it with a non-theme anthology, but as I said, if someone’s going to write a story on a particular subject solely because I request it, then I have an obligation to pay for it. Or at least pay a kill fee (an honorable alternative, but one which I never chose to do.)

My anthologies were by invitation only, of course; no anthology advance — which isn’t very much after you pay the writers — is worth the effort of reading 500 slush stories about Kennedys or detectives or dinosaurs. And because they were, in truth, closed anthologies, beginners would resentfully tell me that it was unfair to them. Yet from 1991 through 1994 I bought more than 40 first stories, which I think is probably more than the three major magazines bought between them. You talk to people at conventions, and on the computer networks, and the ones who run workshops, you don’t have any trouble finding good new writers.

Getting back to your comments, I agree that Judy-Lynn del Rey was the most commercially formidable book editor the field has ever seen. But we’ve had others who deserve their fair share of glory, too. Certainly Terry Carr established his reputation for all time to come with the two incarnations of the Ace Specials. The only problem is that they constituted less than four years of a program, separated by more than a decade. I would say that for continued excellence — by which I mean picking those books that could not only win awards and get great reviews but also sold well in the marketplace — no one has an extended track record to equal Beth Meacham’s at TOR.

(And let’s not forget Don Wollheim, editing 60 Ace science fiction titles and Ghod knows what else every year. I thought of that when, during the Ballantine acquisition of Fawcett some years back, it was announced that Fawcett was paying 192 editorial personnel to put out 180 books a year.)

But even a fine editor is often held hostage to a less-than-fine budget. Take, for example, Amy Stout. When she was in charge of ROC, she simply didn’t have the budget to buy the writers who were eager to work with an editor of her quality. Then, a couple of years ago, she moved over to del Rey, and in the space of a few months she had acquired a number of Names who had just been waiting for someone to give her enough money to afford them.

But you know, Barry, you didn’t quite address my question, so I’m going to reword it a bit: do you foresee a day when a Campbell or a Judy-Lynn del Rey can re-shape the short fiction or novel field as definitively as those two stalwarts did — and, if so, what do you suppose those changes will be like?

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BARRY: Well, those are direct questions, aren’t they? I hate direct questions; because they implicitly demand direct answers, and I’d rather talk about what the meaning of the word “is” is, even though I’m not a veteran of the Oxford Union or Yale Law. (No politics, please, we’re science fiction writers.)

I don’t foresee a day when “a Campbell or a Judy-Lynn del Rey can reshape the short fiction or the novel field as definitively as those two stalwarts did.” The market is just too fragmented, the audience scattered, segmented. In Campbell’s time and even in the 1970s before Judy-Lynn del Rey there were one or two or at the most three or four kinds of fantasy or science fiction, and as Arthur C. Clarke noted in a memoir, “Everybody read everything.” There was a defined core, some kind of center: an idiosyncratic, strongly-defined editor placed at that center could create changes immediately felt . . . first by writers responding to the demands of the editor, then by the audience not too much later. The field as I understand it was so compact in 1937 that Campbell could make it over in less than four years. Even in the 1970s Judy-Lynn needed no more than four years to change everything, not only because of the obvious success of her line but because in her wake editors everywhere — magazines, too; covers took on a del Rey look — imitated her. Brilliant as they were, Campbell and Judy-Lynn were nonetheless predictable, their prejudices and preferences were clearly defined and work could be aimed at them. That — as you noted at the beginning of this dialogue — doesn’t seem to be the case with the present editors.

So now we have 124 kinds of science fiction and fantasy, redefinition and compartmentalization breaking the field into ever smaller segments and encouraging not one readership but a host of demi-readerships which may intersect with one another in certain ways and might, that dreaded term, be persuaded to cross over by writers with a somewhat broader appeal . . . but it isn’t a circumstance which could be shaped as easily (if at all) by a single, determined (even willful) editor as was the case in 1937 or 1973 when the 27-year-old Campbell or the 30-year-old Judy-Lynn del Rey could survey the fields of design, rolling to the horizon.

And yet, all that having been said, could Campbell himself have been predicted? Could Judy-Lynn? In the first case, science fiction was a small part of the pulp action magazines, five or six titles in a field of several hundred, submerged by the mystery and Western and romance pulps. Anyone handicapping would have made science fiction was more (or most) likely to perish, certainly to pre-decease the air war magazines or Street & Smith’s leader, The Shadow. Campbell had a penny a word to offer to an uninspiring group of writers, best typified by Arthur Leo Zagat, a prolific pulp writer who did some science fiction too, but with no particular understanding or sophistication. (Of the writers Campbell found in place, only Simak and Williamson were still publishing at the end of the 1940s.) And yet, as we know, he did remarkably.

Judy-Lynn was looking at a pretty-good-to-great backlist at Ballantine, none of whose titles except possibly Arthur C. Clarke’s managed significant sales. She was looking at a market for adult fantasy which Lin Carter, in a distinguished series with introductions to classic novels, seems to have definitely proved did not exist. She had less money by far to spend than some of the new conglomerate publishers — NAL, Dell, Fawcett — who had had a great infusion of cash. And yet, within four years, she had taken over the field. As I wrote somewhere or to someone when she died (venue and provenance of my work are slipping away; sometimes I feel like poor old Cornell Woolrich, “Did I say that? Where did I say it?”), by 1977, “If you wanted to succeed, you either did it the way Judy-Lynn del Rey did or you failed. There was no middle ground.”

Great editors (and even very good ones) are anomalous; they impose themselves upon conditions. Sometimes the imposition is so powerful that years later the historians miss the point and confuse cause with effect. (“Science fiction just before World War II was a field poised upon the edge of great success because the war would give us the bomb and enormous public interest in technology” is a good example to me of that kind of wrong-headed appraisal.) But at least in their case, cause is effect.

So if someone of equal ability finds herself in a position to acquire a great deal of work, such changes may occur. Strong editors clear the room, install their own furniture.

I have no idea what those changes might be. If I had a clear vision of them I might be such an editor myself; but I’ve never claimed, in editorial terms, anything beyond speed and competence. “I could tell a good story from a bad story,” I wrote a long time ago about my brief tenure in 1968 as editor of Amazing Stories, “and that struck me at the time as being the least that could be asked of an editor . . . but I learned in due course that, in fact, it was the most.”

Terry Carr was a good guy and a great editor who had two separate fabulous careers at the Ace Specials, separated by more than 15 years. That’s remarkable. It’s like David Cone having two 20-game seasons nine or ten years apart. But although Carr’s books were profitable in the long, long run, most of them distinctly were not in the short. Carr had an enormous effect upon writers, significantly less of an effect — at least during his tenure — on the audience. That doesn’t make him less great than Judy-Lynn del Rey, but it makes him a different kind of editor altogether.

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MIKE: You know, when you get right down to cases, there has been another sea change in the field. Problem is, it didn’t come from an editor.

I’m talking about mediabooks, of course. Walk into any superstore, and the mediabooks have their own shelf space. Just the Trekbooks and the Wookiebooks alone seem to constitute a third of the sf and fantasy titles these days — and most writers of category SF and Fantasy would love the mediabooks’ royalty statements, if not their royalty rates.

And yet (and I don’t think my memory is playing tricks on me) the first Trekbooks and even the first Wookiebooks weren’t the automatic kneejerk bestsellers that they’ve become. I don’t remember the Star Wars books dominating sales, or even being a noticeable program as such, until the advent of Tim Zahn’s trilogy, maybe a decade or more after the first of the Wookiebooks came out. And while Jim Blish made a buck or two with his Star Trek adaptations, the early Trekbooks — his, the Mack Reynolds novel, most of the Timescape Trekbooks — also gave no hint of the market domination to come. That didn’t occur until Pocket killed Timescape and began a full-fledged Trek publishing program.

So maybe the next truly major editor will be the one who, instead of picking Hugo winners or even bestsellers, publishes half a dozen titles in a three-year period that Hollywood picks up for big-budget movies. Maybe four will flop . . . but I think Lucas and Roddenberry have shown that you just need one major success to establish a billion-dollar spinoff industry (and in this instance “spinoff” of course includes an aggressive publishing program). Based on my experiences in Hollywood, which include selling a number of options and some sf screenplays in the past few years, I’d have to say that almost no SF writer, editor, critic or fan I’ve spoken to really understands what will and won’t work in Hollywood . . . so perhaps the first editor with a true grasp of Hollywood’s needs will be the next one to revamp the field. (No, I’m not saying it will be a Good Thing. Moral judgments are another union . . . or at least another dialogue.)

Now, you mentioned that you can’t slant stories and books the way writers used to, and I’ll agree. But that’s not to say that various publishing programs don’t have certain identities. For example, if I were writing about a war in space with lots of high tech hardware, I’d certainly think it had a decent shot with Baen Books. If I wrote a 1,200-page fantasy, especially with a strong romantic interest, I’d consider DAW. And if I were doing a book-length alternate history, I’d surely contemplate giving del Rey first look at it.

Okay, these houses didn’t create the forms that many people now identify with them, and they don’t publish them to the exclusion of all else . . . but the tendency of each house to like a certain type of story more than others is certainly there.

So I have a final question for you: is it a good thing for writers if magazines and publishing houses do have identifiable tastes and tendencies? And if you agree that many houses do have such tastes and tendencies, then does the editor with more catholic tastes stand at an advantage or disadvantage to those who wear their tastes on their sleeves? (Based on my initial observations about Gardner, I’d say an advantage — but is the corollary that the editor with catholic tastes must also have excellent taste, since he hasn’t got a clearly identifiable audience?)

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BARRY: I think you’re wrong about the pre-Zahn Star Wars. The novelization of the first film, as by “George Lucas,” sold and sold and sold. (Am I permitted to say that it’s my understanding that Alan Dean Foster ghosted the novelization and that this is pretty much an open secret in the way that it’s known by anyone who cares that the “Gypsy Rose Lee” or “Helen Traubel” mysteries in the 1950s — The G-String Murders and others — were written by Harold Q. Masur?) Judy-Lynn acquired the right to novelize the script while the film was in early pre-production (apparently no one thought it would be made; no other publisher offered on it) and paid very little. It’s sold millions of copies and of course is in print more than 20 years later. The re-release made it new all over again, and the second trilogy, all to be released within the next ten years, will put it into the hands of an entirely new audience.

Talk of editorial prescience. A lot of people thought that Judy-Lynn was just lucky, you know, fell into a backlist and then the Star Wars phenomenon, but if it were only a matter of luck science fiction and human affairs in general would have a different history. What did Casey Stengel say in the 1950s about Hank Bauer and Gene Woodling, who refused to try to pull the ball, who would hit 450-foot outs to the deep Yankee Stadium center field and then complain about their rotten luck? “Some of these guys complain about being unlucky, but if they don’t wise up to themselves they will be unlucky for the rest of their lives, which will be short.”

I agree with you that any editor who could acquire (not lease) a property or properties which became enormous media successes would be the most successful (if not necessarily the most “important”) editor in the years ahead. I don’t think this is likely to happen, however. It’s my observation that the really successful science fiction films have all come from original screenplays and that the adaptations have ranged from the marginally successful (Starship Troopers, say, or Blade Runner, which was a kind of critical success but which I suspect is still in negative earnings) to the commercially disastrous (The Postman, The Puppet Masters, Martians, Go Home.) Maybe the long-promised adaptation of Stranger in a Strange Land will be the rule-proving exception. (Okay, Total Recall was a big hit, but that was based on a short story obscure to the audience base for such films, and it was Shwarzenegger anyway. Doesn’t really count.)

The next great editor will be the next great editor. Beyond that tautology I can’t predict; greatness, particularly in what we still know to be an artifact of popular culture, is so self-congratulatory that it is almost anomalous.

So your final question: is it a good thing if magazines and publishing houses (as opposed to editors) do have identifiable tastes and tendencies? Sure it is — and in that sense the DAW editors and Jim Baen meet at least one of the tests of a good editor: there’s a distinct and linking theme to most of the material they publish. Baen, in fact, has created what most writers and many readers can think of as a “Jim Baen novel,” and that’s not a bad thing. His impact would be more directly visible to the SF community if he edited a magazine, obviously, but if you put that to him he’d probably give a one-word reply — Destinies — and shudder. Been there, etc.

Editors who claim catholic tastes can have no taste at all, of course. Looks pretty much the same from the outside. Of course, editors with no taste tend not to publish memorable material . . . but Silverberg’s Shadrach in the Furnace, I remind the membership, was written under the commission of Roger Elwood.

So who can mark taste or influence to an absolute standard, anyway?

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MIKE: First, a quick correction. According to Murderess, Ink, Gypsy Rose Lee’s mysteries were ghosted by one of my very favorite writers, Craig Rice, and not by Harold Masur.

I’d also take issue with your stand on Star Wars — The Book. Not that it wasn’t successful. Not that it isn’t still in print. But it was a paperback original (whereas the first Zahn title topped the New York Times bestseller list and sold over a million and a half copies in hardcover), and it did not prove to be the immediate precursor of a regularly-scheduled line of big-budget Star Wars books, which the Zahn trilogy clearly was.

You’re not exactly wrong about the movies, but despite the fact that film and science fiction have been around for the whole of this century, Hollywood hasn’t really gotten out of the gate on adapting SF books to film yet — or, rather, adapting the right books (which absolutely does not mean the best books). There are brilliant executives out there when it comes to making deals, but almost no one reads science fiction, and they keep listening to hype. Yet more and more of them are starting to pay attention, not only to the field, but to the box office. You didn’t really have to be a genius to predict that Ken and Barbie Go to War — excuse me: Starship Troopers — would top $100 million US in domestic gross; just as it shouldn’t have taken an Einstein to foresee that Do Replicants Dream of Colorless Dystopias — excuse me: Blade Runner — was never going to find a mass audience despite the brilliance of the sets and Harrison Ford’s drawing power. But, in something less than giant steps, Hollywood is getting better at it. The problem is that no one will know it for another two or three years.

Okay, back to the subject of editors. In closing, let me mount one of my hobby-horses and suggest that it’s past time for a living book editor to win a Best Editor Hugo. (Only Judy-Lynn del Rey and Terry Carr have won, each posthumously.)

As far as I can tell, I am the only free-lance anthology editor ever to even be nominated for the Best Editor Hugo. Since Damon Knight (Orbit) and Robert Silverberg (New Dimensions,) among others, were eligible for a number of years, I consider that worse than an oversight and only minimally less than a mortal sin.

Now, I’m not saying that the editors who have won the Hugo didn’t deserve it — certainly Gardner deserves all that he’s managed to accumulate, and probably more — but I do think it shouldn’t be a lead-pipe certainty that the editors of the major magazines will automatically make the ballot every year.

But (I hear you — and everyone — say) the fans do the voting, and they don’t know who the book editors are, and if they know who the anthology editors are they tend to forget them from one book to the next.

True enough.

Well, then, who does know who the editors are?

(Aw, you guessed.)

So perhaps the next time we discuss what to add to the Nebula ballot, we might stop fighting about Dramatic Presentation and consider adding a category for the men and women who keep us all in business.

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About my counterpart: Barry N. Malzberg‘s Beyond Apollo was in 1973 the winner of the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year; he twice won the Locus Award for nonfiction books of critical history and commentary on science fiction. Several short works have been final-listed for the Nebula and Hugo and Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins, the nonfiction works, were on the Hugo final ballot for Best Related Nonfiction as is his collaborative book with me of our collected Dialogues, The Business of Science Fiction. He was sole judge of the 1980 Writers Digest Short Story Contest. Along with 60-plus Dialogues, we have collaborated on four short stories.

PART 1 of 3

PART 2 of 3

PART 3 of 3

I think what accounts for the continuing popularity of the Dialogues is that Barry and I have an aggregate of 95 years in the field, we’ve produced well over 200 books between us, we’ve edited anthologies and magazines — and while we remain good friends, I think just about the only thing we’ve ever agreed upon is that God outdid Himself when He made Sophia Loren. So you’ll usually agree with one of us and disagree with the other, and at least that’ll put the little gray cells in motion.

— Mike

NOTE: this article first appeared in the pages of SFWA Bulletin 140, Winter, 1998.

MIKE: Today’s subject is the specialty press. They’ve been with us since the 1940s, and indeed discovered science fiction a few years ahead of Doubleday and Ballantine. There was Arkham House, which is still around, and Fantasy Press, and Gnome Press, and over the years there have been literally hundreds of specialty publishers. Some, like Phantasia Press and Underwood-Miller and Axolotl Press and Donald M. Grant, managed to put out a lot of titles; some published just one or two and then vanished. But they have always been an integral part of the science fiction field, so it seems that perhaps we should consider their advantages and disadvantages.

First, the good stuff:

1. They make it possible to get hard-to-sell books (and especially single-author collections) into print.

2. They make it possible to keep some or all of your backlist in print, which is just about impossible in mass market if your name isn’t Heinlein or Asimov or Bradbury.

3. If your book’s original publication was as a mass market paperback, sending an impressive-looking hardcover to those foreign markets that have not yet purchased it may very well sway at least a few overseas editors.

4. This isn’t exactly a financial consideration, but dealing with the specialty presses allows you to support that very important segment of the community in a very visible way—and I persist in believing that we need the specialty publishers.

5. The specialty presses will be more willing to take a chance on publishing some clearly non-commercial books—poetry, essays, experimental fiction, whatever. After all, they only have to sell 300 or 500 or 750 copies to a community that is already predisposed to buy what the author writes.

Now, the bad stuff:

1. The obvious: by virtue of being a small press, the publisher hasn’t got very much money. Which means you’re not going to get very much money for your book. I know of no small press that pays as much up front as a beginner would make for a mass market paperback original. Or anywhere near that, to be honest.

2. The corollary: since they don’t have any money, they’re not going to be able to afford a big print run, or much of an ad budget, or any serious publicity. That’s why they are small presses and not big presses.

3. If this is your book’s first publication, your eligibility for the Nebula and the Hugo will probably be used up before a mass market edition appears. Now, theoretically that shouldn’t matter; theoretically 200 or 300 (or even 50) motivated readers should be able to put a brilliant limited-edition novel on a ballot—but in the real world that just doesn’t happen.

4. Speaking of mass market, a specialty edition could make it more difficult to sell mass market rights, since some mass market publishers will insist on first book rights.

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

BARRY: Specialty press is a complicated topic: it uncovers the usual duality or ambivalence with which I regard all too much. I respond to this in two ways: as a historian (however presumptuous or uncredentialed) of science fiction and fantasy, and as a writer who has had his difficult adventures within and without the genre.

Historian: specialty press is essential to the present state of the art. In the early postwar period Random House and Crown came out with enormous anthologies of so-called Golden Age Astounding (Adventures in Time and Space, The Best of Science Fiction) edited respectively by Healey/McComas and Groff Conklin, proving that there was a post-atomic bomb audience for this work, and that science fiction — as Asimov wrote retrospectively — “wasn’t only for a bunch of crazy kids”. But the first systematized effort to get the novels and short stories of this period into print came not from Random House, Crown, or Simon & Schuster, but from fan presses created to fulfill just that mission: Gnome Press, FPCI, Shasta Publishers, etc. It was they who published Asimov’s Foundation and Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon and Bester’s The Demolished Man and Kuttner’s Robots Have No Tails and dozens more of what we take to be the classics of science fiction: through small advertisements in the science fiction magazines, through mail order, and through a good deal of private industry these presses put into permanent form—and proved modestly profitable—work about whose viability the trade houses and mass market publishers were still not sure.

God’s work certainly, and in his first book review column for Galaxy in 1965 Algis Budrys wrote about it all with a Proustian precision and remorse—but all of these specialty publishers overextended, exploited, and in many cases simply failed to pay the writers and went out of business. Part of this was due to their own incompetence and venery, part of it had to do with the fact that the trade houses, persuaded by the evidence of the specialty press’s modest success, decided that they could have a better-than-modest success if they were to factor out the incompetence. (No one ever gets around to factoring out the venery.) Doubleday, Ballantine, Avon, Bantam Books got themselves science fiction specialists to advise and edit and moved into the field in a systematic fashion. By the mid-1950s the specialty publishers were used up, finished, bankrupt, among the missing, although many of the titles they had first published—think of Foundation—remain in print half a century later and have generated a continuing audience and income. (Arkham House is the sole exception; it remains a profitable publisher to this moment . . . but Arkham, concentrating upon the works of Lovecraft and associated writers for most of its existence, was willing to work a territory which no trade publisher could be persuaded to undertake until “horror” became a category of its own in the 1980s.)

There is no science fiction market as we understand it without those specialty presses of the 1950s. Any contemporary specialty press, many of them coming into existence in the last ten to fifteen years, partakes of that tradition and should be supported, both in the abstract and as a practical matter. Furthermore, with the trade markets progressively closed to collections (other than by the most successful writers), backlist items by almost all of us and eccentricity of all kinds, the specialty press has a more important place in publishing; the small publishers are willing to commit to print work which Avon, Bantam or del Rey might have undertaken ten to fifteen years ago but are no longer willing, for economic reasons, to publish. This fusion of tradition and practicality makes the specialty press a laudable institution, one which should be on the submission list of almost every writer with an ad hoc determination to negotiate the best deal realistically possible with publishers, many of whom simply don’t have the time, money or commitment to approximate the trade deal.

That’s the historian speaking. The historian is the guy to whom to listen.

The writer has an unsurprisingly more equivocal take on all of this. The writer—or at least this writer, the person writing this, me, I—started serious life wanting to publish in the mainstream equivalent of what we now take to be the specialty press—Epoch, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, etc.—moving on from there (I would hope) to collections published in trade and mass market but certainly originating in these small-audience outlets. A concatenation of misfortune in placing my work in these markets, and—as I came to actually study the magazines to which I was submitting—a disgust with the arcane, self- serving, insular nature of most of the work which I found there, led me to flee the writing fellowship and to take the form rejections of Epoch seriously. I went to work for Scott Meredith in June, 1965 and made my signatory statement to my friend Arlene Heyman a few months later. “As between selling The Hudson Review which pays 2.5 cents US a word on publication and selling Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine which pays 5 cents US a word on acceptance, there is no contest: I want Alfred Hitchcock. If I can’t make it in the commercial marketplace, find a wide or at least wider audience, I don’t want to make it at all.” I pretty well exercised that principle (or lack of principle) for the next quarter of a century. Well, we see how all of that worked out.

Most of the novels and collections published by the contemporary specialty press—well, a lot of it, maybe not most of it, I exclude reprints of the kind you discuss—shudderingly reconstruct for me the marginalized nature of the so-called “literary” markets which I fled such a long time ago. Practically, I know that for many of us, it’s not only a good place to go, it’s the only place to go. Privately and in a private way I wouldn’t recommend for anyone else, I shudder.

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

MIKE: Okay, there’s another advantage, or at least a serious consideration, that I want to discuss, and that’s avoiding competition—not with other writers, which is both healthy and unavoidable, but with yourself.

I hear a lot of writers complaining that they can’t keep their backlist in print, and they blame everyone and everything from their hostile publishers to their spineless editors to the Thor Power Tools decision. And yet, I’m not so sure that having all your works available in mass market paperback at Barnes and Borders and Dalton’s and the rest of the chains is the brightest idea in the world.

Let me give you an example, and an explanation.

From 1991 through 1994 I edited about 20 anthologies. It was fun to do, and I got to bring a lot of new writers to the attention of the field.

And, I guiltily admit, I really liked the notion that in 1993 and early 1994 I could walk into a bookstore and find maybe 22 Resnick books on the racks—5 or 6 novels, which was par for the course, and 16 or 17 anthologies. Made a nice display.

Didn’t make a nice royalty statement, though.

Oh, I sold as many copies of Resnick books in 1992 and 1993 as I had in 1988 and 1989—maybe even a few more—but they were the wrong copies.

That’s when I learned that just selling 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 copies of books with your name on them didn’t matter. What mattered was how your most recent books—the ones for which you’d just cashed substantial checks, and which had not yet begun to earn out their advances—sold. And with 20 or 25 books on the stands, the Resnick readers were frequently choosing the wrong Resnick book.

My advances went down. They didn’t nosedive, but they were cause for concern, because I hadn’t figured out what I was doing wrong. I was winning awards, I knew I was writing better books than I had a few years earlier, and I knew I was known and read by more people each year.

Then I picked up some screenplay assignments, and because I was already working at capacity, I had to let something go, and I dropped the anthologies.

And lo and behold, I sold as many copies of my 5 or 6 novels as I had sold of my 5 or 6 novels plus my 15 or 20 anthologies. My advances went right back up, and I realized that I had stumbled on a Hidden Truth. I didn’t want to compete against all my old titles.

But I still wanted my backlist in print. I wanted fans who had missed my earlier books to be able to read them . . . and I wanted foreign markets that had passed on them one and two decades earlier to have another shot at them.

And here came the specialty press to the rescue—a trade paperback press in this instance. I made a deal to reprint Birthright: The Book of Man, a 1982 title that had been out of print for 13 or 14 years.

It would sell for $17.95 US, so it couldn’t possibly compete with my current mass market paperbacks.

It had a new cover, and a 1998 cover price and look to it, so I wasn’t sending around a $2.25 US paperback from 1982 to foreign markets.

It printed 2,500 copies, and has since gone back to press for another 1,500. Enough for fans, enough to send to 30 or 40 countries . . . but not enough to harm the sales of the mass market hardcovers and paperbacks that have to sell in order for me to make a living.

In other words, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, and I just signed a contract that will allow the publisher to do a number of 3-in-1 and 4-in-1 editions of my old novels. The first 30 of each to come off the press will go directly to foreign markets who, 15 or 20 years ago, saw the mass market originals of these books and said, “Resnick? Never heard of him. Let’s buy someone we know.”

So, yeah, I guess you could say that’s another argument, however obtuse, in favor of the specialty presses.

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

BARRY: The specialty press is unequivocally, inarguably the proper outlet for backlist items, for the restoration to print of those novels or collections we published 15 years ago and which—unless we are among the golden 15 or 20 writers in our genre—would be less likely (or not likely at all) to be taken on by the trade publishers. Specialty press does not in any way compete with the mass market or trade publications, it has different outlets for the most part (science fiction specialty stores will carry both items but the chains will not and the airport newsstands never), and it’s possible that not only a given work but a writer could find an entirely new audience through the specialty press. Nothing obtuse about that.

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

MIKE: Let’s move away from commercial considerations for just a moment and point out that a lot of specialty press books are fun.

For example, I edited a hardcover called Shaggy B.E.M. Stories a few years back. It consisted of 31 SF parodies, and even though it had stories by Asimov and Clarke and Poul Anderson, there was no way I could have sold it to mass market, because the problem with parodies is that you can’t appreciate them unless you know what they are parodying—and you’re simply not going to find 15,000 or 20,000 paperback readers who are that well versed in the field.

Since then I’ve edited Alternate Worldcons and Again, Alternate Worldcons, and Patrick Neilsen-Hayden and I co-edited Alternate Skiffy. A couple of years ago I brought back some stuff from the old Marvel Science Stories, stuff that was so terrible it was wonderful, in Girls for the Slime God. All four books went to specialty presses. Delightful experiences and delightful books, and about the time each of them sold its 600th copy, it had almost certainly reached 75% of its potential audience.

Bob Bloch’s Lefty Feep stories would never have found a mainstream publisher. Neither would Dick Lupoff’s Ova Hamlet stories. I doubt that any mass market publisher would have taken a chance on John Betancourt’s Swashbuckling Editor Stories.

So never overlook the fact that, along with trying to make a buck, there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun as well, and specialty presses are simply more willing to go along with your crazier notions.

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

BARRY: I’d add George Alec Effinger’s Maureen Birnbaum collection to your list, or the 1994 NESFA Press collection of my own “recursive” science fiction: 160,000 words of novels and short stories about science fiction itself which would never have been taken on in that form by any trade publisher. There’s still sometimes a place in mass market for craziness—Baen’s Carmen Miranda’s Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three anthology of some years ago, for instance—or at least craziness of a certain kind, but not much of it, and the great collections of John Clute’s criticism which are not crazy at all would not have been made available by other than the specialty press.

It’s very important, always has been, we need it, it’s irreplaceable. I don’t want anyone (including me) to confuse my emotional reactions with what is a difficult and encroaching circumstance . . . idiosyncratic work is less likely each year to appear in mass market, and yet it is work originally perceived as idiosyncratic—Henry Miller, Lolita, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, The Story of O—that really marks the stations of the true way. Science fiction’s equivalent of Ulysses today would have been for more likely to have been published by White Wolf or Mark Ziesing than by TOR or Del Rey. That doesn’t discredit anyone but it’s a fact.

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

MIKE: I’ve dealt with a lot of specialty presses over the years: Don Grant, Misfit Press, Axolotl Press, NESFA Press, WSFA Press, Wildside Press, Phantasia Press, Obscura Press, Nolacon Press, Farthest Star, Old Earth Books, Dark Regions Press, a handful of others, and I’ve learned a few things about dealing with them.

The main thing you have to remember is that most—not all, but most—of them are operating on a shoestring, and most of them are doing it as a hobby.

This means that you can turn in a book in 1992 and have it appear in 1996 (it’s happened to me). But because they’re usually one-man operations, it also means that if they’re motivated you can turn in a book in mid-July of 1997, and have it appear at the 1997 Worldcon six weeks later (that happened to me, too.)

It means that you can be contractually promised a certain amount of money, and wait a long time—and I’m talking years here, not weeks or months—before you see it.

The thing you must always keep in mind—and sometimes it takes some work, I’ll admit—is that these amateur and semi-pro publishers are spending their lunch money and their vacation funds to bring your book into print. If sometimes the project crashes, or extends into the next year or two, or if they promise you a Michael Whelan dust jacket and give you Joe Unknown . . . well, if you were selling first rights to Dune or The Space Merchants, you wouldn’t be dealing with a specialty press in the first place, right?

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

BARRY: Well, yes, that’s another fact. No one—not the publishers either—gets involved with specialty press in the hope of quick profit or much profit at all. Some places are, as we like to say, “businesslike” and reasonable—Arkham House notably—and quite a few are not. The publishers are indeed paying out of their lunch money or child support; if it’s you or the courts in line for the money guess who’s going to get paid? (Lawsuits aren’t going to do any more good now than they did in the early 1950s. “Judgment proof” are the last words that many of us will hear as our final confessions and complaints are taken.) But the money from mass market and trade doesn’t come that quickly either, and the conglomerates are no more eager to meet the terms of their contracts than the specialty publishers who were the subjects of Budrys’ exquisite first review column for Galaxy back in 1965. The conglomerates are not judgment proof, but do you want to undertake the time and expense and bad kharma involved in serious legal threats only to get marked as a troublemaker?

Thinking about this discussion I find myself at a slightly different place than I was at the beginning, which may be one indication of a remarkable dialogue . . . as the landscape for all but a narrowing range of mass market media-related science fiction and fantasy darkens, the differences presented to most writers by specialty press or the trade publishers are ever narrowing . . . and the specialty press publisher is less likely to have the voice mail permanently in an ON position.

But I’d still rather sell Hitchcock than The Hudson Review . . . (I did sell Hitchcock quite a lot through a very brief period almost twenty years ago. Never placed anything in The Hudson Review. Je regrette rien.)

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

MIKE: Time for an ounce of summary. I have on my desk a copy of the August, 1998 issue of Locus—the one that contains the annual Locus Poll.

28 novels got enough votes to be listed for Best SF Novel. Every single one of them comes from a mass market house.

22 novels got enough votes to be listed for Best Fantasy Novel. 20 came from mass market houses, and one of the other two is by Stephen King, who is going to be read no matter where he appears.

16 novels got enough votes to be listed for Best First Novel. 15 came from mass market houses (though one house—Farrar, Straus—is not exactly known for category SF.)

But when we turn to non-novels, the numbers tell a strikingly different story.

21 short story collections got enough votes to be listed as Best Collection. 16 of them were published by specialty presses.

10 non-fiction books got enough votes to be listed as Best Non-Fiction Book. It’s difficult to separate specialty presses and academic presses, but suffice it to say that 7 of the books were not from mass market houses.

8 art books got enough votes to be listed as Best Art Book. 4 of them were from specialty presses.

And, to cap it off, 3 of the 13 publishers with enough votes to be listed as Best Book Publisher were specialty presses.

I’m not saying to run right out and sell your magnum opus to a specialty press. That’s not what they’re there for. But I think the Locus Poll confirms a number of the conclusions we’ve reached here: the specialty publishers serve some meaningful and clearly-defined purposes, and I think the science fiction writer who disdains them is doing himself and his career a disservice.

• • • ● ● ▼ ● ● • • •

About my counterpart: Barry N. Malzberg‘s Beyond Apollo was in 1973 the winner of the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year; he twice won the Locus Award for nonfiction books of critical history and commentary on science fiction. Several short works have been final-listed for the Nebula and Hugo and Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins, the nonfiction works, were on the Hugo final ballot for Best Related Nonfiction as is his collaborative book with Mike Resnick, The Business of Science Fiction. He was sole judge of the 1980 Writers Digest Short Story Contest. Along with our 60+ Dialogues, we have collaboratd on four short stories.

QUESTION: Mike, do you think there are more new writers or fewer new writers trying to break into science fiction, now, versus when you were breaking in, and is it easier or harder now, versus then?

ANSWER: I have no meaningful statistics, but it seems to me that since there are more people, there are more new writers trying to break in. Will more manage to do it? That’s problematical. Back in the early 1950s there were 56 magazines; today there are 3 digests and about 16 e-zines paying pro rates — and if you sell a story every ten days, you probably qualify for food stamps. But back in the early 1950s, there were less than 100 science fiction books being published per year, and these days there are over 1,600. Certainly more writers can make a full-time living from science fiction; at an early meeting of the Science Fiction Writers of America at the 1966 Worldcon, it was shown that only two writers — Heinlein and Silverberg — were making as much as $10,000 US a year off their science fiction. (Asimov and Clarke were making more than that too, but primarily from non-fiction.) In 1992, a similar survey by a major fanzine showed that over 50 writers (and estates) were making over $75,000 US a year.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, what do you think the best kind of homework for a new writer is? Writing a lot, or reading a lot of books about how to write?

ANSWER: Nothing compares to writing, and then writing some more . . . and then, after taking a brief break, sitting down and writing again.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, can you please talk to us about Galaxy’s Edge and what the e-magazine will be about, what kind of fiction will be featured, and so forth?

ANSWER: The fiction will be divided 50-50, half reprints by Names that will help sell the magazine, half new stories by less-well-known names that we hope and think will sell the next generation’s magazines. Which is to say, half the new stories I’ve bought thus far have been by writers who do not yet qualify for SFWA membership. There will also be a column by Barry Malzberg, book reviews, and I’ll be disguising articles as editorials. Late news: starting with the 2nd issue, there’ll a science column by Greg Benford.

I wish I could open it to general submissions, but my writing schedule’s every bit as heavy this year as last year, and this year I’m also editing the magazine and the Stellar Guild book line, so until they can hire me some slush readers, it’s by invitation only — but I have invited a number of unknowns.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, was getting to be guest-of-honor at Chicon 7 one of the highlights of your career, and did you think when you were a fan that you’d ever be as well-known and well-regarded as a writer?

ANSWER: As a lifetime fan as well as a writer, I consider the Worldcon Guest of Honorship the highest career honor a science fiction author can achieve. It was certainly the greatest thrill of my career. I’ve had a lot of honors and awards, but nothing compared to that.

As for the other part, I know all writers have to be a bit egomaniacal when they’re going to spend months of their lives on a novel that no one will see until it’s done. They have to believe in themselves, and that the work was worth the effort. But honestly, I don’t think any beginner truly believes that he’ll someday be selected as the Worldcon Guest of Honor. In fact, if you’re dreaming really big, you think you might someday sell your second book.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, what advice could you offer to a writer who has written two or three books for a New York publisher, and now the numbers haven’t panned out and it’s back to square one?

ANSWER: By that I assume you mean that he’s dropped you. The usual advice is to write under a different name, but I don’t think two flops from one publisher requires you to hide your identity for the rest of your career. You were good enough to sell two books, so I assume you’re good enough to sell a third to a new house. You might change the thrust of your stories — a ridiculously far-fetched example would be if you wrote vampire romances, give space opera a shot — but two books that were good enough to sell, and may well have been mishandled or badly marketed, don’t spell fini to your career. You might also sell some short stories to remind people you’re still around while you’re repositioning yourself in the book field.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, do you think there is a future for mega-stores like Barnes & Noble? Will anything bring back the grocery store paperback racks?

ANSWER: I suppose Barnes & Noble will outlast me, though not by much. But kiss paperback racks good-bye. I can’t imagine that the mass market paperback isn’t moribund as I write these words.

Consider: you’re a publisher, you’ve brought out the hardback, paid for the typesetting, paid for the cover art, and now it’s time for a cheap $7.99 US edition. You can go the mass market paperback route, but if you do, you’ll have to pay for paper, binding, color separations, printing, and shipping; you’ll have to pay the national distributor and the local distributor; you’ll have to give the bookstore at least a third of the cover price, probably more, for every copy they sell; and you will, on average, gobble 50% returns which will require storage space. Or, since the typesetting and cover art are already done and paid for, you can pay a maximum of $15.00 US to format it for both Nook and Kindle, post it on Amazon, Barnes, Apple, Kobo, Sony and your web page (all for no expense), and you’re in profit on the third copy you sell. Why would anyone publish a mass market paperback under those conditions?

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, what do you think has been the smartest career move you ever made, but you didn’t realize you’d made it until years afterward?

ANSWER: The smartest career move I made was dumping my former agent and hiring my current agent — which I did back in 1983; check my career before and since — but I knew that the day I got her.

I love what I do, and I’m pretty fast, so I turn out a lot of books and stories, and I’ve also edited a couple of book lines and a couple of magazines, and I’ve written some screenplays . . . and suddenly one day I looked around and realized that if half the companies I was dealing with dumped me the next day, I still had more regular markets and outlets than most writers. It’s a comforting position to be in, and I’m there not because I was smart or foresightful, but because I’m fast and I love all aspects of the field. (My idea of relaxing is to take three or four hours away from working on a novel to write a short story.)

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, is it possible for an American writer to subsist on strictly overseas sales, either short fiction or novels?

ANSWER: No. Oh, I suppose you can make a theoretical case for it, but in the real world, you sell translation and reprint rights to your American books and stories. If you have no American publications, I don’t think you can make enough original foreign sales to pay the bills.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, will you be selling personalized hardcopies of your books on your web site, like Eric Flint sells on his?

ANSWER: No. As Humphrey Bogart might say, selling ’em is the publisher’s racket. Mine is writing them.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, do you see any value in an academic creative writing degree? If my goal is to be a published science fiction author?

ANSWER: Truly? None whatsoever. It might imply you have the talent it takes, but you can’t submit your degree to an editor, you have to submit books and stories.

I’m probably biased. In 1961 I needed six hours to get my degree. 52 years and half a thousand books and stories later, I still need six hours, so you can tell the value I put on it.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, is fantasy going to implode soon? Seems like the amount of copy-cat work is reaching a bursting point. What’s the future of the genre?

ANSWER: I don’t know the future of fantasy compared to romance, thriller, espionage, mystery, Western, etc. But I can tell you its future compared to science fiction, and I say this as someone who’s written in both categories and loves and respects both: It’s probably always going to outsell science fiction, for the simple reason that it places less intellectual (not artistic) demands on the reader. (No, I’m not saying that Tolkien and 500 other accomplished fantasy writers are for dummies. I’m saying that since few or none of their plots and background require a working knowledge of how the universe actually functions and the rules governing it, they are more instantly comprehensible — and less intimidating — to the average reader than science fiction.)

And please, before sending me nasty rebuttals, go take a look at sales figures of the past half century. Since the advent of Tolkien and the emergence of fantasy as its own category rather than a subset of science fiction, it has far outsold science fiction.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: I have a two-book deal with a New York house, but I feel they’ve treated me rather poorly, and the books have done poorly too. At what point can I stop groveling and walk away?

ANSWER: The moment you fulfill your option clause. In all likelihood, it gives them first refusal of your next book (or outline, if you worded it more advantageously.) If they’re treating you poorly and you’re not selling, then they should decline to bid on your next one, and you’re free. If they treat you poorly personally but they don’t want to let you go because you are turning a profit for them, then you need an explicit option clause. Let’s say you sell them The Linebackers of Neptune. You want that clause to give them first refusal of your next Neptune book, but to leave you free to sell The Defensive Tackles of Jupiter wherever you want.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, I’ve written and published some short stories which have gotten some attention, but writing books scares me. How did you get over being intimidated by book-length work?

ANSWER: I kept a stack of bills on my desk, and got even more intimidated by the notions of bankruptcy and debtor’s prison.

–==|||==–

QUESTION: Mike, what new material from Arc Manor’s Stellar Guild is coming? I see Kevin J. Anderson’s and Robert Silverberg’s contributions, what else is on the way?

ANSWER: The Stellar Guild line, which I’m proud to edit, features team-ups between major writers and protégés of their own (not my) choosing. They are not collaborations, exactly. The star writes a novella, and the protégé writes a prequel, sequel, or companion piece of approximately the same length — and the protégé shares cover credit with the star, which has to be a huge boost to an embryonic career.

Our first two titles were Tau Ceti by Kevin J. Anderson and Steve Savile, and Reboots, by Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin. Next came Beyond the Blue Shift by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, and On the Train by Harry Turtledove and his daughter Rachel.

We also have Stellar Guild books currently in press by Larry Niven, Nancy Kress, and Eric Flint — and I’ll be writing a pair of them before the year is over. And of course we’re just beginning. Ask me again in six or eight months.

. . . . . .

And that brings Ask Bwana up to date with all the questions that have been received for 2013.

Over the past decade and a half, award-winning writer Barry Malzberg and myself have contributed 62 of our Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues to the SFWA Bulletin. Some of them were collected by MacFarland Press a couple of years ago, and that book was nominated for the Hugo Award.

Starting in the next week or two, we’ll be re-running all the Dialogues here, interrupting the flow of them only when we’ve received enough new questions for another Ask Bwana column, Keep an eye out for them.

QUESTION: What’s something you think your successful writer proteges are doing right?

ANSWER: I suppose saying “listening to me” isn’t the answer you’re looking for. So I’ll say that they’re studying the markets and writing in every spare minute they have — and it must be working. Of the 22 who Hugo winner Maureen McHugh has dubbed “Mike’s Writer Children”, 9 made the Campbell Ballot for Best New Writer — and most of them are still around and still selling. As I’ve pointed out time and again, writers write. People who are never going to make it talk about writing.

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QUESTION: What new material do you have coming out in 2013 and 2014?

ANSWER: That’s always difficult to answer, since lag times vary so much these days, and I’m a relatively fast writer. The books I know for sure will be coming out will be the 4th and final Weird Western, The Doctor and the Dinosaurs; a mystery novel, The Trojan Colt; a co-edited anthology, The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs; a collaboration with Eric Flint titled The Gods of Sagittarius; at least one more mystery novel, probably two; the first and possibly second of a new science fiction series from Pyr; and a pair of Stellar Guild team-ups, one with Lezli Robyn and one with Janis Ian. Jack McDevitt and I are also discussing the possibility of another collaboration or two in 2014.

I would imagine I’ll have from 16 to 22 new stories out during that time, in magazines and anthologies, and probably about that many reprints. And of course I’ll be editing 12 issues of Galaxy’s Edge and maybe 10 to 14 Stellar Guild books.

Other than that, and conventions, and workshops, my time is my own.

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QUESTION: If you had to name some markets that are particularly friendly to new writers trying to break in with short fiction, which ones would they be?

ANSWER: Might as well be totally frank here. There are two reasons why it’s so much tougher for a newcomer to break into print. One — far and away the most common, and usually the only one given — is lack of talent, or at least lack of enough talent to compete successfully against what’s already been submitted and bought.

But there’s a commercial reason as well. Why do anthologies carry more stories by unknowns than, say, the digests do? Simple. An anthology might run 20 or 25 stories, so after it buys maybe 15 or so from “Names” that can be put on the cover and energize a sales staff, the editor can always sneak a few unknowns into the mix. I bought 40 first stories as an anthology editor in the 1990s, more than the three digests combined — but like I say, there’s an economic as well as an artistic reason. If I’m editing a digest, I might run 6 stories in an issue, and every one of those names has to be able to go on the cover and pull in some extra readers. It’s the reason you almost never see a novella by a virtually unknown writer; no editor is going to turn over half his magazine to a name he can’t put on the cover.

All that said, I would recommend the anthology market ahead of the magazine market for short fiction, and the e-magazine market ahead of the paper digests, for just those reasons. It doesn’t mean you’ll never see a new (or newer) writer in F&SF, Asimov’s, or Analog — look at newcomer Brad R. Torgersen, who’s practically a fixture at Analog — but it does mean there are easier venues.

Same holds true for books, where you’re on your own. They can’t bury you between Card and Willis. Your name and your name alone is on the book . . . and nobody knows your name. Again, a truly outstanding first novel will find a home just about anywhere, but for anything less — not a poor novel, but a merely good one — you’ve got the best shot at selling to a publisher who is committed to a large number of books per annum. Check Locus’s annual summary issue, see who the biggest publishers are (in terms of titles, not hits), and at least consider starting there. (The flip side is to sell to a small publisher, who can’t afford the names you have to compete against at a mass market house.)

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QUESTION: I am a new writer who has written half a dozen books, but all I ever get are form rejections from publishers and agents. Other than just writing more books, what can I do to get better odds?

ANSWER: After a handful of form rejections on each of six books, I don’t think writing more books is the answer. You might consider attending the better workshops. You might also consider showing the first couple of chapters to some pro who’s willing to take the time to read and comment on it (no working pro has the time to do this for entire novels, and it would be inconsiderate to ask one). You might try writing some short stories and see if they receive the same response. And at the risk of sounding cold and unfeeling, you might remember that less than one of every hundred wannabe writers sells, and less than out of every thousand ever makes a living at it.

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QUESTION: Are there any things about today’s publishing landscape that you like more, than when you first started?

ANSWER: Right off the bat, I like the money better. You want to know why most category writers held full-time jobs half a century ago, when I broke in? The average paperback went for 25 cents, sometimes half a dollar, and the average paperback royalty rate was 4%. That meant you made either one or two cents per book sold . . . and that meant if you sold 95,000 copies of a 25-cent US paperback, you still hadn’t earned out your munificent $1,000 US advance.

Other things I like?

Computers and e-mail. Saves a lot of postage, and since I’m blind in one eye and make tons of typos, it’s nice to have Spell-Check. It’s also a luxury to edit right on the screen and not endlessly re-type pages.

Conventions. I like to visit with fans (I remain one to this day), and it’s essential that I meet editors. When I first discovered fandom, there was Worldcon, Philcon, Midwestcon, Westercon, and out. Today there are a couple of hundred to choose from . . . and believe me, I don’t think anyone at my first Worldcon (Discon I in 1963, attendance about 500) ever anticipated the 50,000 that regularly attend DragonCon, or ComicCon’s annual 125,000.

A living wage. Consider: in 1971, the all-time record advance for a science fiction paperback was $7,500 US.

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QUESTION: So many people are offering writing workshops right now, either on-line or in-person. Do you think a writing workshop can be of any value to me, as a new writer? If so, which ones?

ANSWER: There are two I recommend. I’ve taught at one (Clarion) and judge the other (Writers of the Future), but my association with them has nothing to do with my recommendation. I base it on which writers they’ve “created” (i.e., taught and set loose in the publishing world), and their records of bestsellers, award winners, and longtime journeyman professionals is unparalleled. Not everyone who wants to be a writer is going to be, but if you’re got the right stuff (the write stuff?) these two venues are better than anyone else at drawing it out of you.

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QUESTION: Are you still a fan of new authors breaking in with short fiction, or are new authors wasting their time with short fiction?

ANSWER: I think what I’ve said is that it’s easier to break in with short fiction. Better is another union. I’ve never suggested that writing anything at any length is a waste of time (at least when compared with not writing it.)

When I was starting out, science fiction was in its final days as a predominantly short fiction field, and the traditional route for getting established was to break in with short fiction, hone your craft, build a reputation, and then move up to novels (and collections, which formed a sizeable percentage of the books published). But these days there are 3 digests, and the field publishes 1,600 new books a year, so even when you include the 15 to 18 e-zines that are paying pro rates (and most have no meaningful, dependable circulation figures), I don’t know that it’s any easier to break in with one type of fiction than another. With this exception: it’s always easier to break in with excellent fiction than with good, and with good than with poor.

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QUESTION: Does the Writers of the Future award carry any weight with magazine or novel editors?

ANSWER: I suppose it depends on the editor – and also on the writer. That’s a cop-out answer, I know — but I find it difficult to believe that Eric Flint or Patrick Rothfuss or Diana Rowland or Dave Wolverton or Stephen Baxter would not have careers if they hadn’t won, though winning was certainly a harbinger of things to come.

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QUESTION: Will there be any more Ask Bwana articles in the future?

ANSWER: As we accumulate enough questions for a new Ask Bwana article we’ll be posting it here. Right now I have one more in press, and after that we’ll be running something else that I think and hope you’ll find every bit as useful. It’ll be announced in the next column.

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QUESTION: Is SFWA worth my 80 dollars a year, if I am an up-and-coming writer?

ANSWER: It’s not the organization it was in the 1960s when it was formed and I joined and everyone in it was a writer. (Today there are over 1,500 members, and I can’t imagine that as many as 100 make a full-time living at it. In fact, if we reinstituted Requalification — sell three short stories or a novel every three years — I imagine we’d be under 350 members by 2016.) Certainly putting “Member — SFWA” doesn’t get you out of most slush piles, including mine.

All that said, there is a reason to join, and that is the Grievance Committee. Unless you’re married to or sibling to a hot-shot contracts and intellectual property lawyer, you can go broke really fast when problems arise. But the Grievance Committee has, very quietly and unobtrusively solved and resolved hundreds of problems — possibly thousands by now — for individual members over the years.

We’ve become pretty much of a social club. We haven’t evaluated contracts or agents in the Forum, our member-only publication, in decades. We haven’t run an audit of any publisher in decades. (We once got our members more than a quarter of a million dollars with an audit of a mass market publisher back in the 1970s). Hell, we — a writers’ advocacy organization — disbanded our Piracy Committee a couple of years ago.

But as long as we have the Grievance Committee, you’ll get your money’s worth twenty times over if you ever need them.

Oh, another reason to join: you’ll get to read The Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues every three months in the SFWA Bulletin. 

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QUESTION: You have collaborated with many other writers. What do you think the five biggest mistakes of collaboration are?

ANSWER: The single biggest mistake is beginning before you have decided who gets Final Say.

Other mistakes?

Not deciding on the byline before you begin.

Not discussing the story in detail — both the plot and the approach — before you begin.

Choosing a partner who can’t make the deadline.

Choosing a partner for certain strengths and knowledge before determining for certain that he possesses them.

That’s it for this column. I thought this would be the last before we begin running the ¬Dialogues, but we’ve got enough new questions for one more Ask Bwana. Look for it in another week or two.

http://www.galaxysedge.com/

The issue features Jack McDevitt, Robert J. Sawyer, Kij Johnson, James Patrick Kelly, Barry Malzberg, and more. It’s published by Arc Manor, will appear every two months, is free online, and can be purchased in paper, or for Nook and Kindle.