Ordering to the Net

Originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 4/6/07. It made more sense in context, but I think it's still amusing and/or informative on its own:

When computerized chain-store ordering started, in the early '90s, the problem was "ordering to the net." Say Joe Schlabotnik's first novel was A Is For Atomic; Big-Ass Chain Store took 50,000 copies, and sold 35,000 -- the sell-through was 70%.

Aha! says the ordering computer at BACS, we sold 35,000 the last time, so I will order 35,000 of Schlabotnik's new opus, B Is For Blaster. This time, the sell-through is slightly higher, and BACS sells 25,000 copies.

Next year, along comes C Is For Crashing Suns, and BACS takes 25,000. The year after, D Is For (Planetary) Destruction only gets 17,000 copies in. And they decide not even to order E Is For Ethnocide.

That's "ordering to the net" -- getting in just as many copies as were sold of the previous book. (This is how I've heard several SFWAns claim it operated, but I frankly can't believe major businesses would be that dumb for very long -- at worst, this kind of ordering only affected the middle and bottom of the list.)

Nowadays, that's not what's happening. There may be still writers whose careers were killed by that (if they're really slow, and have been goat ranching for the past fifteen years), but not many.

Nowadays, bookstore chains can easily look up the sales of previous books (particularly previous books in the same series) by any given author. And, if those sales are lowish to begin with, and falling from book to book (as does happen), the chain is certainly not going to order the new book in higher quantities, and possibly might not want it at all.

I won't say that most writing careers hit a death spiral at some point, but...it's a pretty common effect in publishing. There are plenty of writers who plateau at a comfortable level, but there are also some whose numbers go down steadily. (And a glorious few whose numbers are going up...may they be blessed in the name of Bookscan.)

A Silly Question

Does anyone else, when sending a blog post out into the ether by pushing that orange "Publish" button, mentally append "...and be damned!" nearly every time?

Because I do...

Just Read: Breakfast in the Ruins by Barry N. Malzberg

Careful readers might have noticed that I've been reading this book for the past few days.

Breakfast in the Ruins is an odd portmanteau, similar in its structure -- reprinting an old book with new stuff added on -- to Gene Wolfe's Castle of Days, a book otherwise completely unlike Breakfast (don't know why I mentioned it, actually). The first half of Breakfast is a reprint (with new introduction and afterwords) of Malzberg's "screw you guys, I'm going home" book The Engines of the Night from 1982. That part was the source of all of my various quotes and posts from earlier in the week, and is the more interesting part of Breakfast. The main part of Malzberg's SF career was from roughly 1965 to 1975, and Engines is a deeply sour look at the SF world in those days. (Which were already past in 1980; interestingly, Malzberg seems to believe both that it was a horrible, soul-destroying thing to be a SF writer in those days and that things were only getting worse. This is, the astute follower of the genre will have already realized, the quintessential Malzberg attitude: everything is always worse than you think, but it was even worse back in the day, and it's getting worse by the minute right now.)

The second half of Breakfast is in three sections:

• "Meditations," which are general essays on SF and culture, mostly from Pulphouse in the early '90s -- some of these are good and some are not-so-good, but they are all separate essays, not chapters of anything larger
  
• "Writers and Other Culprits," essays on various writers and editors, mostly from convention program books, NESFA Press introductions, and similar venues -- also exceptionally miscellaneous, and mostly in the hagiographic mode (all dead writers were geniuses, and are now unjustly ignored)
  
• "Ruthven Agonistes," a story plus fore- and afterwords about SF writer Henry Martin Ruthven, the protagonist of "Corridors," the story at the end of the original Engines

The original Engines (which is only otherwise available as a used book) is one of the great books about SF, in all of its glory and hideousness. It's invaluable for an understanding of the New Wave, even though I don't think Malzberg uses that term, and he's too obsessed with his own situation to even provide a thumbnail history of those times. (It doesn't matter: his obsession illuminates those times better than any more dispassionate history could have.) Malzberg, oddly, spends more time talking about the Fifties (his Golden Age of SF-reading, of course) than his own career, but I think that's because other people's failures were bad enough -- his own would be unbearable. As Malzberg says in the new introduction to this volume, "This is a work about losing and losers, conceived and executed in that mode." He explicitly means that genre SF is a crucible of losers, but we also have to remember that Engines is very much Malzberg's Fox-and-the-grapes moment. For those who hold to the pure Campbellian ideal of SF (battered and out-of-date as it is), Engines will be a book to make you gnash your teeth and hurl heavy objects around the room.

I have my doubts that the field was ever monolithically the way Malzberg depicts it; the descriptions of the sex-book field of the early '60s I've seen are, at worst, only slightly more soul-destroying than the way Malzberg saw the SF paperback mills of the early '70s, and I really doubt SF was that bad most of the time. Both areas did seem to be open to writers whose skills were perhaps not all they should have been -- I haven't read much of Malzberg's early fiction, so I really can't say if he fits into this category-- and either provided a trial under fire to better those skills (like such folks as Silverberg, Ellison, Westlake, and Lawrence Block) or a way to earn some money for a while before getting out of the business. Malzberg does seem to have been extraordinarily unlucky in his successes -- he won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award with a book (Beyond Apollo) that would have appalled Campbell (and did appall a large swath of the field), and got a steady job at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency when that, apparently, was the worst possible thing for his writing and his vision of his writing career. He also seems to have gotten the opportunity to write too many novels too quickly, none of which were much of a hit with the general SF audience.

Engines deservedly belongs on the short shelf of essential books about SF by working SF writers -- with The Issue at Hand, Trillion Year Spree, and In Search of Wonder. It's substantially less positive and nastier than any of those -- but, again, it is written by Barry Malzberg, and some things just come with the territory.

The new half of this book is more problematic: it's an accumulation of piecework that does not hang together to form any shape (either on its own or in conjunction with Engines), it's more than a little repetitious, and it's clear that Malzberg disengaged from a lot of the field between Engines and now. (And, on top of that, a good half of the "new" stuff is over a decade old -- so it doesn't depict the field as it is today.)

The best parts of the new stuff are the fragments of autobiography Malzberg gives us here and there, particularly an essay on his work at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. These pieces help to explain why Malzberg is who he is, particularly the horrors of the SMLA fee desk. Malzberg's day job, most of the past forty years, was there, and his job essentially was conning lots of would-be writers out of a few bucks each through upbeat pseudo-criticism about their generally lousy work. That half of the SMLA of Malzberg's day bears some resemblance to the worst vanity publishers of today, except, with SMLA, you didn't even get published at the end of it.

For those of us with a penchant for alternate history, it's interesting to speculate about a Malzberg who didn't go to New York, didn't get caught up in SMLA and the SF world -- would he have finally written a mainstream novel that could be published, round about 1970 or so? Could he have fulfilled his original dreams and become the next Philip Roth? That's the kind of story someone like Malzberg might write...well, not too much like Malzberg, since it would depict an alternate world with more happiness than our own, something Malzberg does not seem to believe in.

So the second half of Breakfast is not as strong as the first; that was inevitable, given the book's history, and Malzberg's career. But having The Engines of the Night back in print is still something to be happy about (a mild, it'll-probably-all-turn-out-horribly, Barry Malzberg kind of happiness), and the rest of this book is at worst along the lines of DVD extras and at the best very illuminating. As I said in one of my other posts about this book, I expect it to be a strong contender for the "Best Related Book" Hugo next year, and it's an important book for historians of the field -- particularly pessimistic ones.

Reports From Far Foreign Shores

It would be petty and churlish of me to complain that the latest Dave Itzkoff "Across the Universe" column in The New York Times Book Review only reviews little-known books from presses that don't do much SFF; this issue of the Book Review is devoted to fiction in translation -- always of minor appeal in the self-obsessed USA -- and so Itzkoff's column reviews five books originally written in languages that are not English.

(But I will wonder about the Book Review wandering into theme-issue territory; isn't that more the work of the Wizards and FHMs of this world? What next, the bikini babes of the deconstructionists?)

Anyway, Itzkoff manfully dug up some not-completely irrelevant books (Straight To Darkness, edited by Asamatsu Ken, from Japan; Babylon Babies by Maurice G. Dantec, from France; A Game of Perfection by Elisabeth Vonarburg, from Francophone Canada; Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko and Valdimir Vasiliev, from Russia; and Seven Touches of Music, by Zoran Zivkovic, from Serbia) and said plausible things about them. I could wish that he reviewed books of wider interest to the field (and to the wider world), but this was a directed result to begin with, so that was not possible.

I haven't read, or even seen, any of these books, so I can't comment on his critical judgments. (Though the Japanese books looks interesting to me.) He doesn't say anything that looks clearly wrong-headed, as he has done at times in the past. So this is about what you would hope for in a SF column from a major metropolitan newspaper: it covers a few books decently, and doesn't leave a mess on the floor.

If Itzkoff's columns were generally like this one, I'd have to stop making fun of him; I'm not sure if that would be a good or bad outcome. (It would be less entertaining for me, though probably better for the world and SF in general -- but I of course esteem myself more highly than I do the world.)

Please Slap Me If I Am In Imminent Danger of Turning into Dave Sim, But...

I really, really cannot stand the line of argument that goes "you cannot possibly care about this sufficiently, since you are not screaming with anger and outrage as I am. My position is thus more important than yours, because I care more deeply."

Such people need to be given whatever chemical treatment is necessary to allow them to view life dispassionately again.

And this isn't about Imus, honestly...

A Thought

If genre magazines spent less time analyzing the gender of their wanna-bes, and more time trying to connect with readers, perhaps there would still be a SFF magazine with a circulation above twenty-five thousand.

Locus Poll Rapidly Closing

I've just voted myself, because I realized the deadline is this weekend. So those of you with opinions on what's good in SF and Fantasy -- I name no names, please note -- and who do not want to spend $50 to participate in a similar fannish exercise, should participate here. As far as I can tell, Locus does give a damn about your voice. (Whoever "you" are.)

They even have convenient little drop-down menus, listing nearly everything one could want to vote for (I found one or two things in most categories that I needed to add myself, though, so a judicious poke through one's previous year of reading might be in order for those wanting to be really sure they voted for the best stuff). I note with shock and amazement that their lists are so complete that even I am included, in the "Best Editor -- Pro or Fan" category (though James Minz is not; I encourage you to add him, as I did).

If you read SFF, and want to encourage people to read what you think is the good stuff, go vote. If not, please stop whining.

Quote of the Week

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

A Modest Proposal

Since it's obvious that "those bastards" at the Hugo Awards can never be taken seriously until they reach exact gender equity, there is clearly only one thing to do:

We must demand that all nominations and votes for men (or productions created mostly by men) are discarded until women have won as many Hugo Awards as men have. No, strike that. Since women are clearly and obviously superior beings, until women have won twice as many Hugo Awards as men have. It's too late to fix the ballot for Nippon 2007, so we'll have to demand that the Hugos not be awarded at all this year. It's much better that way. We simply can't allow any more Hugos to go to men until this shocking situation is remedied.

Starting with the next nomination cycle, for the 2008 Hugos, only women and women-created productions can be eligible for the Hugos. Any votes for men, even really sensitive and nice guys who have won Tiptree Awards and have otherwise proved themselves, must be discarded. This shall continue until women have won the necessary number of Hugos, and the universe has been put into its rightful balance.

After that, "those bastards" will have to be closely watched, to be sure they don't backslide into their evil patriarchal ways of letting people vote for the things they liked best. We propose that, in every category, there shall be six nominees -- the top three female nominees, and the top three male nominees. It may also be necessary for votes for females to be weighed more heavily in the final round, if women do not win the awards in the correct numbers. Remember: there can be no excuse for letting men win awards!

This may seem heavy-handed, but, if the people who actually spend the time to nominate and vote for an award won't do things The Right Way, then those who know better will have to do it for them. We are sure that, eventually, they will come to love Big Sister.

Note: before replying, here or elsewhere, please read this.

All Malzberg! All the Time!

The opening of the essay, "On Engines Again," now available in Breakfast in the Ruins, originally written in 1992:

This exchange outside the student/faculty cafeteria at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, 7/22/89:

Bruce Sterling: Fifty years old and still writing! That would be horrible! When I'm fifty I hope I won't be still writing and involved in all this shit. I'd rather be dead than that pathetic.

Barry N. Malzberg: Oh, come on, Bruce. I'm fifty years old, well, I'll be fifty on Monday and I'm still writing or at least trying to write and I'm not pathetic.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, Barry, you're pathetic all right. You just haven't accepted it yet.

Footnote 1: Bruce Sterling was born April 14, 1954, which means Saturday is his 53rd birthday.

Footnote 2: "A Plain Tale from Our Hills," a new Bruce Sterling story available free online at Subterranean.

Pathetic or not pathetic? Discuss.

Signs of the Apocalypse, # 3792

Someone in a red squirrel costume rapping Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud."

No, I am not joking....

Malzberg's Top Ten SF Stories

I can't stop quoting Barry Malzberg!

This list is from 1980, and I wouldn't entire agree with it myself (even for stories before that date), but it's a strong list, so I figured I'd post it. Malzberg's version, in the essay "The Cutting Edge" in The Engines of the Night (and then reprinted in the new expanded version, Breakfast in the Ruins), also has his explanations.

1. "Vintage Season" by C.L. Moore
2. "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree, Jr.
3. "Particle Theory" by Edward Bryant
4. "The Terminal Beach" by J.G. Ballard
5. "Private Eye" by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore
6. "Sundance" by Robert Silverberg
7. "Anachron" by Damon Knight
8. "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester
9. "Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester
10. "E For Effort" by T.L. Sherred

I'd have picked "The Man Who Walked Home" as my Tiptree story, though I imagine most people would have ignored me and Malzberg in favor of "Houston, Houston, Do You Read" (or possibly "The Women Men Don't See").

But I completely agree with Malzberg on "Fondly Fahrenheit;" he quotes Silverberg as calling it the single finest short story ever to come from science fiction, and I'd even go further: it's one of the very best stories ever written by an American, period.

I won't do my own list now, but, after mulling it over for a while on the bus, I think my list would have Walter Jon Williams's "Dinosaurs," Bruce Sterling's "We See Things Differently," and Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me." (And maybe David Marusek's "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy." And maybe Ted Chiang's "Hell Is the Absence of God." But I'd really have to poke through books to jog my memory of stories from before 1990, before doing a list, to be fair.)

Killed by Science Fiction

I'm still reading Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins, and will keep sharing interesting bits until you all are sick of it. Here's the opening of a 1980 essay called "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963"

Kuttner died of a heart attack in his sleep, Kornbluth died of either a massive cerebral hemorrhage or a heart attack (depending upon whose version you accept), Clifton has has a bad heart for a long time. It drove him out of industry and undid him at a relative young age. But I think that the death certificated of all three should have listed science fiction under cause of death. H. Beam Piper, our only suicide, blew out his brains with a shotgun in the fall of 1964, but it did not appear to be the field itself that had done it to him: the sudden death of his agent, monies tied up, depression, a big gun collection. Kuttner, Kornbluth, and Clifton took it straight.

Cause of death: science fiction. You bet, Mark.

Anyone else killed by science fiction since then?

Meanwhile, in the category of "got the hell out of Dodge, denied ever living there, and died old," is Kurt Vonnegut, who died last night, after a fall, at the age of 84. He was a massive international bestseller and the voice of a generation, but never a SFWA Grand Master. I guess we showed him...

More New Wavery from Malzberg

Malzberg also made up a list of writers who did not appear in Campbell's Analog from 1960 through his final issue in December 1971:

• J.G. Ballard
• Brian W. Aldiss
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• Samuel R. Delany
• Joanna Russ
• Larry Niven
• Michael Moorcock
• R.A. Lafferty
• George Alec Effinger
• Gardner Dozois
• A.J. Budrys
• Terry Carr
• Kate Wilhelm
• Geroge Zebrowski
• Theodore Sturgeon
• Philip K. Dick
• Pamela Sargent
• Robert Sheckley
• Robert Zelazny

Now, why did the New Wave happen, again?

What I've Been Talking About

Right now I'm reading Barry Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins, a much-updated and expanded version of his 1980 kiss-slap to science fiction, The Engines of the Night -- which, by the way, is fascinating and will likely be the best non-fiction book on SF published this year and a shoo-in as a Best Related Book Hugo nominee -- and finding much to think about.

For example, related to the chats we had here and at rec.arts.sf.written about the New Wave, here's Malzberg, from his 1980 essay, "The Fifties," on the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, in the aftermath of the 1958 breakup of American News Service:

John W. Campbell at Astounding had wandered from Dianetics to the Hieronymus Machine to the finagle factor and was just beginning to topple into Norman Dean's Drive, meanwhile running stories by a few writers functioning under innumerable pseudonyms, with virtually the same plot, conception, characters, and outcome. Only Rich Raphael (who was gone by 1965) seemed to be able to break into and sell interesting work to ASF in those years; Campbell had no other new writers of any visible promise.

An unhappy, airless time. An end of time for many. So emphatically hopeless that when science fiction began to pick up once more in the mid-sixties, first with the British New Worlds and then with the fusion of new writers, new approaches in the barbarous colonies themselves, a new audience was unaware of what had been accomplished in the fifties and talked of the field's "new literary merit," "new relevance," "new excitement," "new standards of contemporaneity" as if nothing innovative has occurred before Ballard or Silverberg.

If you were interested in my post on the New Wave, you really should read this book. If you're interested in the history of SF at all, you probably should read this book. (Though I warn you: Malzberg calls it "a work about losing and losers, conceived and executed in that mode." Those of you for whom SF is the glorious handmaiden of Technology Triumphant, surging boldly on into the Uncharted Nether Regions, will probably not like his tone.)