On the Old Scott Meredith Agency

I'm at Lunacon right now, using borrowed Wi-Fi in the lobby to check my email, so there's no time to finish up any of the real posts I should be doing. So, instead, here's a tangent from rec.arts.sf.written in March of 2008. I believe the original thread was about anthologies, but I tacked hard to starboard:

If I saw an old anthology where all of the stories were represented by one agency, I'd suspect that agency of packaging the anthology itself. I'd suspect it double if that agency were SMLA. That doesn't mean the agency was so great that they represented lots of writers, it implies that the writers got into the anthology because their agent made it a closed shop.

SMLA had what could either be termed honesty issues or image problems (depending on how generous one wants to be), but they also had a couple of excellent agents -- and an disproportionate number of the latter handled SF. You may just be seeing a selection bias effect -- SF guys are prominent on that list because they were prominent among the meat & potatoes of the SMLA list for a long time. (The top of the list, usually represented by Meredith himself when he was alive, were bigger at the time but often of more ephemeral interest.)