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SF Forever

I have little idea what the science fiction of the eighties will be like—as we live through, it will seem to be very much like the science fiction of the year just before—but I have a pretty good grasp of the somber nineties. Here is how it will be: mass-market science fiction will edge toward fantasy. Fully 75 percent of novels published under the label will be what we would have defined five years ago as fantastic; some of these books will do extraordinarily well and others will not but there will be little to choose qualitatively. The books that will do well simply will have larger print orders and publicity, which may in certain cases go to television or movie theaters. Series books or novels set against a common background will predominate and writers will (with one another's consent and cooperation) use one another's backgrounds freely. Some series will originate with publishers who will farm them out to various writers and pay flat fees, hold the copyrights. "Hard" or technologically rigorous work will occupy the same small corner of the market that "literary" science fiction does now.

"Literary" science fiction and many backlists will be in the hands of the specialty publishers whose present-day precursors will in the nineties be as influential as medium-sized paperback firms are now. The specialty publishers will range from one-person operations not unreminiscent of the Gnome or Shasta of the fifties to large and well-staffed organizations that will be subdivisions of conglomerate divisions; the arm for "serious" literature. These specialty publishers in the aggregate will be responsible for hundreds of books a year—the major publishers, amongst them, will do only forty or fifty—and sales will range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. All of the larger specialties will have experimented with trade and mass-market paperbacks and will now and then do well enough to bring a title to the attention of the majors, who will do a big edition.

The audience for written science fiction—a hard base of half a million with another two or three million who can be brought in for an occasional title—will remain stubbornly, inflexibly unchanged. This constant will be the barrier against which the specialists will time and again collide and which will cause the weaker publishers to fail since the audience will, once again, be unable to expand with expanded titles.

There will be about as much work of quality as always but none of it will come from the mass-market publishers.

The magazines and the science fiction short story will have little role in the market. The few magazines will serialize some mass-market novels and give some new writers a marginal audience for their first attempts. These two or three magazines will all be owned by the same conglomerate, will be under the same editorship, and will pay approximately the word rates which prevailed in the nineteen-fifties.

 

—1980: New Jersey

 

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