ellen_datlow | Vote vote vote--and rec rec rec rec

Vote vote vote--and rec rec rec rec

Ok. Here's my impassioned plea/push/nag for anyone who reads this blog and is eligible to recommend stories and or novels for the various peer group science fiction, fantasy, and horror awards.
I know that some people feel that awards themselves are a bad thing and that they should all be abolished. I'm not talking to you. I don't believe that and I know I'm not going to change your minds.

Awards are NOT going to go away but they could become less visible (which I think is a bad thing). As an editor I really appreciate it when the stories/books I edit make final award ballots and win awards. And I think most writers are even more appreciative of this. It gives a sense of validation for what you're doing by your peers (for the Nebula and Stoker).

Right now is "award rec season" and there are discussions on both the SFWA Bulletin Board and the HWA Bulletin Board about how their respective awards are dying --not enough members are recommending works to even make a preliminary ballot.

Now some people think that this might be because no one likes the work being published.
Others that no one is reading enough short fiction to be interested in recommending works in those categories.
I have a really difficult time believing the first reason. I've been reading sf/f/h short fiction for twenty five years and have found no drop off in quality in any of those fields.

I can't answer for the second but I hope it's not true because if so my profession will die and I love editing short fiction.

If you care at ALL for the genre short story then I urge you to recommend the stories that you think are worth bringing to the attention of your peers.

This is totally off the cuff and I know if I thought about it more I'd have more to write--but I'd also probably just delete the whole post...

Comments welcome!

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hmm, well I suppose then both organizations will need to do an active effort to recruit and keep more members, is all.

Hugos - but you need to have attented Worldcon to vote for them, isn't it? or is that applicable only to the Campbell best new writer?

(there's too many awards, you know; they're blurring into one vast amoeba in my brain).

They building an even more impressive list of silliness, then.

So one of the people that has read more, professionally, of that stuff in the history of the known universe is locked out because of not having written some mediocre couple of stories for magazine X?

US post office (Craziest in world) dumped surface mail, too, does that make it worse?

No way would I subscribe and hope they make it through that given what other people have been saying.

Any evidence your superior taste is actually reaching a broader audience, then?

If not, what do you think the probability that you are right is, compared to the others of whom you speak, if this trend continues abd you don't reach such an audience?

Does the decline in voter turnout for awards track the decline in voter turnout in real world elections?

The audience for CW is growing with every issue, and is reaching out internationally (an advantage of the web, both in publishing international authors and in getting a worldwide, albeit English-reading, audience).

The increasingly inaccurately titled "big three" have seen their circulations decline each year and this trend will not stop. The response to this decline has been, as far as my reading, more of the same exact content associated with the declines. As far as the semi-pros, more people read CW material through the link I put up on my blog each month than many semi-pros have readers overall.

If you want to measure quality by way of popularity, then clearly the SF magazines are doing something very wrong. People are subcribing and then just not renewing. Newsstand returns are very high. Compared to even marginal publications on niche subjects, the circulation of SF mags is tiny.

If you want to simply test quality via reading, go right ahead. Frankly, if Ellen can claim that her reading tells her that there are plenty of good stories, my reading can tell me that most published SF/F/H short stories are tedious at best and awful at worst.

If it is growing, then some evidence, sure, if growing faster than your garden variety internet usage growth, perhaps, or other similar publications.

I may have read a story or two, I will have to check. At one a month, won't take long, regardless.

Online is more accessible for a lot of us, no doubt.

However, at several thousand stories a year, some will be outstanding, on probability. Likewise at the other end. The majority will be mediocre or worse taking into account the following:

Admittedly I have never read at the very low end just as mentioned by girliejones recently where one market had 4 issues in a row all stories 2 out of 5 or less, so a bit of a horrible tail, there.

Even if only to pick a random number (and lastshortstory will give a rough guide to this if they publish their numbers) 10% are 4 out of 5 or better, that will still leave a few hundred that are good.

Fascinating. Tell you what, have Ellen post her royalty statements for the last five anthos she did, and I'll put up the numbers for the last year of CW.

I always find it amusing how fanboys react to people whose material they didn't grow up reading.

Your attempt to place story quality on a bell curve is wrongheaded, and stories are qualitatively different from one another.

Qualitatively? No kidding. :) That has little to do with where they place. A tennis ball is qualitatively different to a story, too.

Sorry, but to a broad audience, in general, they are good, or not good. You yourself have said some are better than others, speaking of wrongheadedness.

Disagreeing with that common activity of rating material is one thing, if you are more of a 'literary fetishist' type that can't bear to bring yourself to do that, you aren't the only one.

I have read one, Orm the Beautiful, so I will give you that one if you chose I gave it 4.5 out of 5. Not sure that dragon archaeology is designed to appeal to a broader audience though. :)

Don't think I have seen any of the others, off the top of my head.

I didn't buy Orm the Beautiful. CW has two editors and two sections.

And no, readers won't say "good" or "not good" which is rather the problem. You're describing the casual reader. Short SF drove off its casual readers long ago. It now caters to an aging, shrinking marketplace of people who want to relive their childhood experiences .

There's also nothing inherent in the idea of a story that would lead to most stories being mediocre, some awful, and some few excellent. I know you don't understand that, but it's true. Stories aren't published randomly, so a curve doesn't apply. Any randomly chosen issue of MZB (to name a dead magazine) would almost certainly be chockful of crap. Any randomly chosen issue of Crank! (to name another dead magazine) would almost certainly be full of very good stories.

It just seems that such notions are beyond you. No surprises there — fanboy critics with numbered rating systems are rarely capable of reading for depth or quality.

If we're talking international venues, then the benchmark isn't the ailing American SF magazines but China's Science Fiction World, which sells about 300,000 copies a month and which might have a million readers [1]. SFW is doing well enough to have hosted the Chengdu International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival. My impression is that the Chinese currently tend to go for what would be considered fairly traditional forms of SF.

I think most reasonable people agree that outsourcing SF (in the restrictive sense) to non-American writers is the wave of the future. Americans can contribute to the field as consumers, the most valuable part of any commercial field.

The audience for CW is growing with every issue [...]

There's an obvious case to compare this to but unfortunately that experiment was derailed by other factors that will not apply to the Clarkesworld experiment. Also, in light of the other factors, I don't think I entirely trust their circulation numbers now.

1: Or about one person in 1,300. If one US magazine had a similar fraction of Americans as readers, they would have about 230,000 readers (But only about 80,000 subscribers, which isn't that much better than the Big Three). Clearly the problem here is that the US is horribly underpopulated and its niche markets are accordingly puny in absolute numbers. US SF editors should consider contributing money to campaigns to increase American TFRs [2] as well as immigration to the US to preserve their own futures. This could pay off in less than a generation.

Mind you, the Baby Boom didn't really pay off for the traditional SF magazines because the bloom in the early 1950s was cut short by the destruction of the American News Company. As long as there isn't some kind of headlong rush to consolidate magazine distribution into a few large and vulnerable companies going on today, it seems unlikely that a similar event could occur in the near future.

2: Humanely. Romanian-style programs need not apply. I'm not a monster and I think it is entirely possible that there is some humane path between the underpopulation of today and a more reasonable population density in North America. Even matching the UK's population density would get the US to about 2.5 billion people.

(Got here through James Nicoll's post.)

I have to admit that of the magazines, the only one that I actually read almost all the way through is Black Gate. This seems to indicate a shift away from what I want to read.

On the other hand, I've liked the various "year's best" anthologies that I've read, yours and others. They're certainly of a higher degree of quality than I see in the magazines. I don't have access to anything other than the aforementioned Black Gate (and that by subscription), F&SF, and Analog, though I know that there are other magazines out there, I might like them. Don't know. Can't spend the money to try them if I don't see them/know about them.

I realize distribution is a separate problem, but I thought I'd give one (non-member's) take on the issue.

It obviously isn't a bell curve, either, that should be pretty clear.

0.5 0.000
1.0 0.005
1.5 0.009
2.0 0.033
2.5 0.086
3.0 0.290
3.5 0.298
4.0 0.210
4.5 0.045
5.0 0.025

As what I have for a sample of genre fiction stuff, which will include a lot of 'best' type material, not your garden variety monthly magazine publication, which would shift it lower. If you had to read all the stories in a year and rate those it would look like different.

You could interpolate a continous function from this, but pretty clearly discrete. :)

If all you can manage is binary, or trinary, then do that. ;-)

Would be pretty impossible to grow up reading Elizabeth Bear, given that she is from North America as far as I know, and her approximate similar age, I would most likely have learned to read somewhat before she did.

Who else but a fanboy would be editing an internet fantasy magazine and writing the stuff, anyway?

SFW is hardly a relevant comparison, not anymore than pointing out the number of bicycles in China is when discussing the woes of the Big Three automakers in the US. I know the magazine fascinates you, but the entire line of argument is jejune, not the least reason being that I was talking about a) the Web specifically and b) the English-reading audience.

As long as there isn't some kind of headlong rush to consolidate magazine distribution into a few large and vulnerable companies going on today

Also, surprise, you're soaking in it!

But again, that's actually irrelevant. A more recent ID crunch happened a decado ago, but, and here's the big but:

what other sector of the trade periodical business would allow 5-20% decreases in circulation per annum for a decade without making any notable changes to the product, in either its content, design, price, format, name, etc.?

Can you name ANY?

Adding a social science number to a qualitative phenomenon doesn't make it quantitative.

Would be pretty impossible to grow up reading Elizabeth Bear, given that she is from North America as far as I know, and her approximate similar age, I would most likely have learned to read somewhat before she did.

Are you being coy, or are you really just as stupid as that sentence reveals?

Who else but a fanboy would be editing an internet fantasy magazine and writing the stuff, anyway?

One of the bright spots of the current era is that some writers and editors are actually emerging without having grown up in fandom. If anything will allow short SF to sustain itself, it'll be from this segment.

Stories are written by humans and edited and chosen by humans, not androids that never change and therefore they will vary, probabilistically.

If you don't understand that, then your grasp of simple early high school mathematics is very, very poor.

Stories are not chosen at random, no. They are chosen because they are better than the 99% of dreck that is written that isn't good enough, in general. Of those that are published, some are better than others. You have now said this twice. Even if you can't manage to go past that, then you have three ratings you have given already, not good enough, good enough to publish, better than what is usually published. If you are suggesting that everything you pick to publish is 5 star brilliant, and will be to everybody, that is just crazy talk in anyone's language.

To someone with , Crank! (which I have never heard of) would be chock full of crap, no matter what your opinion of it was.

You have sampled many fanboy critics with numbered rating systems then to have a large amount to judge from? :) If not, your methodology is flawed, and this would then be an exceedingly gross generalisation.

Just as flawed as suggesting that elitists with literati pretensions can assume to know how any given random person reads.

You want to get a large broad audience? They aren't going to care too much about allusions to Tolstoy or the brilliant use of semi-commas.

The quality that matters is do you not suck enough to read.

What does 'grown up in fandom' mean? You mean a convention goer, hanging out with writers, writing letters to magazines, that sort of thing?

If you have ever done any of that, especially adding on the the whole magazine and writing thing, you are a way, way bigger fanboy than me. :)

The Academy Awards don't bar directors from voting, do they? Barring editors is a bit like that, isn't it?

Stories are not chosen at random, no. They are chosen because they are better than the 99% of dreck that is written that isn't good enough, in general.

Nope. Some stories are chosen, for example, because they satisfy some need, such as the need to fill X number of pages, or because they are related to previous, better stories, or because there is a belief that a certain number of stories per year must be in spaceships, or because there haven't been any stories containing a wizard in a few months and this one is "good enough" to satisfy that, or because someone who doesn't write many short stories anymore sent in a two page flash fiction, etc etc.

Even if you can't manage to go past that, then you have three ratings you have given already, not good enough, good enough to publish, better than what is usually published.

Again, nope. There's good enough, good enough but not at the right time, not good enough, better than others, good but inappropriate for reasons of building an audience, good enough but too superficially similar to something else already published, not good enough but the publisher insists, good enough but the publisher says no, etc.

You'll note that a number of those categories have nothing to do with literary values.

If you are suggesting that everything you pick to publish is 5 star brilliant, and will be to everybody, that is just crazy talk in anyone's language.

Of course I'm not suggesting that. I am saying that anyone who is actually interested in reading quality fiction will acknowledge that the works I choose are of quality and ambition, even if they don't like the stories themselves.

This is not the case in most magazines. Some magazines actively militate against some attributes of quality, in that the audience they are hoping to retain is made up of people actively hostile to complex-compound sentence, or women characters, or certain types of politics, or "depressing" stories or "funny" ones, or stories that contain sex, etc etc etc.

You have sampled many fanboy critics with numbered rating systems then to have a large amount to judge from? :)

If the sample isn't large, it tends to be rather complete because of the small number.

At any rate, you've already spent a few posts fuming about literary fetishism, Tolstoy, semi-commas, etc., while also explicitly speaking only of satisfying ("do you not suck enough to read") so thanks for proving my implicit point.

Making a magazine that caters to your taste would exclude the broad audience of readers, most of whom read because they enjoy the act of reading, and not simply because they wanted to go into outer space when they were five years old, or because they stopped making Star Trek episodes.

Way to avoid the first question about coyness.

Growing up in fandom meaning the various consumption habits of fanboys and fangirls, which can include cons and such but also just deep reading in the genre at the exclusion of other reading, watching primarily SF/F tv, experiencing a certain level of perceived hostility about the outside world.

Now, another question: why do you think a writer who publishes SF/F must be a fanboy?

If you don't like it, why would you write it? You decide you can be really good at it, despite your distaste?

Do I want to keep reading Tolkien that I read when I was 7, or Donaldson and Michener and Herbert and Clarke and Bronte and Norton and Alcott at 12, or John Wyndham at 9, or Fleming and Campbell at 8 or Verne and Wells and Idriess and Marshall at 10 or Kundera and Carey at 15 or Tolstoy and Waugh and Fitzgerald and Fowles at 13 or Dostoevsky and Solhenitszyn and Malamud at 14, or Potok at 16? Etc., etc., etc., etc.

No, definitely not, I want to read new stuff, in general. Some will even be non-fiction. :) Maybe even short stories with arty pretension. ;-) Some old short stories by some of the above, possibly.

I will read Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes again, though, guaranteed. Likely indulge in some Edgar Rice Burroughs, too, now and again.

Remember, not everywhere is like where your fanboy self grew up.

With 2 tv channels or less at the time, not going to be much of that stuff on tv. Still isn't, even with 5 channels in a lot of places now.

Dr Who on Sunday evenings back in those days a pretty standard family activity for everybody, generally speaking.

Outside world hostility? Like going postal or shooting up schools?

No-one I knew defined 'likes to read a lot' as 'outside world hostility'. That would be some strange thesaurus there.

You're either confusing liking something with being a "fanboy" or suggesting that only fanboys would like SF/F.

The former is easily corrected: one may write SF/F because they enjoy playing around with certain forms, because the magazines pay whereas many lit journals don't, as an artifact of their own interests (i.e., they write what they like, and find out after the fact that only SF/F venues will publish it), because they write a whole lot of things for a wide variety of venues, etc.

As far as the latter possibility, I fear that increasingly that is the attitude. A by-fanboy-for-fanboy SF would quickly crawl up its own ass and cater to a shrinking audience. Indeed, that may well be what is happening after all.

And while you may not want to reread the Tolkien, etc., what some fraction of the audienc is just that. They want to read stories that remind them of being seven years old and discovering Tolkien. This is not the majority of the audience of readers, but this fraction does have more of a specific weight inside SF than in fiction in general and may be approacing a plurality of readers of the short stuff at least, which would go a long way toward explaining the otherwise confusing editorial choices made each month by editors who are more interested in keeping the last few rats on the sinking ship than they are for striking out to shore.

As a bit of an aside, I think it's pretty clear that for the last generation or so, everyone has had the same recipe for success in SF: get novelists that can appeal to TV-watchers, and then buy short fiction from those novelists if they manage to get popular. Needless to say, however, many TV-watchers don't want to read novels and many novel-readers don't want to read short fiction. The recipe has been a failure for the thirty years since Star Wars suggested it.

So, here's another recipe: if SF/F takes up about 7% of the marketplace for fiction consumption (in the US at least), why not publish SF that might appeal to the other 93% of people who are already in bookstores, looking for something to read, as opposed to chasing after people who enter bookstores only to buy DVDs or use the toilet?

Oh, that's easy: Super-hero comics. (http://www.zaksite.co.uk/lockjaw/comic_sales.html)

Aside from being more lurid and a lot more expensive, a superhero comic today is a lot like one from 20 years ago. I will admit that there is a recent change that may turn out to be very significant and that is the increasing importance of perfect bound volumes over stapled periodicals.

DC in particular has had real problems finding a path that doesn't lead to a steady long-term decline in sales. Even their big events don't seem to help: that dip in 1985 - 1986 is about the time they did Crisis.

As an added bonus, North American comics are even more vulnerable to distribution hijinks now than they were during the Heroes World debacle of the mid-1990s and even more than the American News catastrophe of the 1950s.

Interestingly, this is another example of something parts of the Old World does better than the New (Well, make that the English-speaking parts of the New because I have not read a Lusophone or Hispanophone comic in 30 years and I don't know what they are doing). One form of comics that is doing well in North America are shoujo manga, perfect bound volumes that are aimed at women or more specifically at girls.

One American attempt to emulate shoujo manga picked the girl-friendly line name "Minx" and then hired a mostly male line-up of authors to write the comics.

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