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OtherRealms Issue 22 Part 14
Electronic OtherRealms #22
Fall, 1988
Part 14
Copyright 1988
by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written permission from Chuq
Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced
only in its entirety and only if all copyrights, author credits and
this notice, including the return addresses remain intact.
No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way
without the express permission of the author.
Your Turn
Letters to OtherRealms, Part 2
Andrew Porter
I just got the new issue of OtherRealms. I'm flattered that, once
again, people are wondering how to get the Hugo award award from rotten
old SF Chronicle. Except years ago, it was evil old Algol, the Starship.
Actually, I won a Hugo once, in 1974, when Algol tied with The Alien Critic.
I'm also flattered that you think SFC has a vast circulation, right up
there with Locus. And that making an arbitrary break at 7,500 will
easily take care of both SFC and Locus in separating the men from the
boys (to use an old and sexist expression). The current circulation of
SFC is about 4,500. The circulation of Locus is somewhere around 8,000.
Also, I don't make a living from SFC. I have other income from other sources.
I'm not unhappy: I like what I'm doing. But SFC does not pay me a
living wage, does not have a vast circulation, and has never won a
Hugo. So I don't see why I should "withdraw from the running" as Kevin
Anderson suggests. Withdraw from what? Charles N. Brown will probably
never withdraw from the running, until he has to buy a bigger house to
hold all his Hugos.
[In case it wasn't obvious from my comments last issue, I'm
categorically against withdrawing a publication from
competition because it dominates the category. That cheapens
the category and doesn't solve the problem.
While I'll admit that the 7,500 number was chosen primarily to
move Locus to the professional category where I think it
properly belongs, I don't feel there was any such intent with
SFC. I did, however, overestimate the SFC readership -- based
on the 4,500 number it definitely would belong in the proposed
small-press category, and I'd have no complaints with that.I do
wonder, however, how the number in your letter can be
reconciled with the remark in the September Aboriginal SF, in
which Charles Ryan states: "Andy edits SF Chronicle, a direct,
but smaller, competitor of Locus, though Andy [Porter] says he
will soon surpass Locus in circulation." -- it seems to me
these statements are mutually exclusive.
Rather than trying to resolve problems caused by arbitrary
boundaries with new arbitrary boundaries, perhaps it might be
better to take a hint from the costumers, who promote
contestants to a higher class after winning major competitions.
If a publication wins a category in, say, two out of five years
(or some other boundary that people decide is reasonable) they
get moved to the next category. Still not a perfect solution,
frankly, but I don't believe one exists. -- chuq
Kevin Anderson responds: Andy Porter seems to have
misunderstood my intent about the Best Semi-Pro Hugo. What I
have objected to is not the idea of "Best Publication Called
Locus" Award, but an objection to what a Best Semi-Pro Magazine
Award should be.
I have spent many years working with the semiprofessional
fiction magazines. I think the small press fiction magazines
have brought a resurgence of vitality to the field by providing
an open door to new types of fiction, stories that are too
graphic, too unusual, too experimental, too hard-to- categorize
for the mass-market magazines. I was under the impression that
this was what the Award was originally designed for...and if
I'm wrong, then it should be that way.
But that will never be the case. Locus and SFC are the
newsmagazines of the science fiction field. Everybody
interested in SF awards and Hugo voting reads one or the other
or both. Everybody. When such publications are on the ballot
against other magazines that don't have such broad-based
support, the semipro fiction magazines don't have an athiest's
chance in Georgia. I don't think that's fair. I think the
category is drawn wrong. How can SFC compete against Whispers?
It's apples and oranges. The criteria for a good newsmagazine
are enormously different from the criteria for a good fiction
magazine. What if, for instance, Locus and SFC were competing
year after year against Asimov's and F&SF for the "Best
Magazine" award? They'd never win...it's not fair -- but that's
the same situation as putting semipro fiction magazines up
against the newsmagazines.
I'm not at all knocking SFC or Locus. I personally think it's
poor form for Locus to keep yawning and accepting Hugos year
after year -- Charlie Brown has proved his point and should let
some of the other worthy magazines get noticed -- but that's
his decision. Nobody else should make it for him. I'm actually
rather surprised that the voters don't get tired of voting for
Locus year after year. Maybe it's just that Locus is the most
accessible of the semipros and nobody bothers to check out the
other contenders... I don't think it's an issue of 7,500 vs
4,500 circulations -- I think it's a question of fiction vs
non-fiction. The newsmagazines are useful (perhaps even
essential) to people working in the SF field; fiction magazines
are literature/entertainment. It's like comparing a screwdriver
with the Mona Lisa and giving an award for the "Best"
one...that depends if you're trying to study art or build a
bird house.]
Ben Bova
I read with great interest de Lint's review of Communion, by Whitley
Streiber. I know that at least one New York publisher refused to
publish the book as non-fiction, and I -- like de Lint -- keep asking
myself if Streiber really believes what he's written to be anything
other than a neatly crafted piece of malarkey.
I've been reading and listening to UFO stories for more than forty
years now, and I have yet to see a single piece of evidence to support
any of them. When I was running Omni magazine we actively tracked down
a number of stories, and always found that there was no evidence. Faked
photos, yes, plenty of those. False interpretations of photos, too --
such as the "UFO lights" seen by Gemini astronauts that turned out to
be, on the next frame in the film roll, the lights of an Agena spacecraft.
We also ran into a number of people who honestly believed that they had
seen UFOs, but could offer nothing more than their unsubstantiated word.
If we are being visited by aliens, they must be the greatest neatness
freaks of the galaxy. For four decades they've been bumping into little
old ladies on deserted highways, without leaving so much as a
fingernail clipping or a frayed shoelace. Compare this with the
littered messes we left on the Moon at our Apollo landing sites!
My personal opinion is that Streiber is writing science fiction here,
but he's smart enough to market it as non-fiction and garner a large
enough audience that doesn't know enough to ask inconvenient questions
such as: "Where's the beef?"
[Personally, I think the greatest indictment of the non-fiction
status of Communion is that Streiber has published a sequel....
-- chuq]
Katherine Kerr
Since most authors write reviewers only when they're feeling mad and
nasty, I thought I'd try to start a new trend and thank you for sending
along the latest OtherRealms with your very kind review of Darkspell.
Last year you also sent along an equally kind review of Daggerspell,
but at that time my life was too hectic to write to anybody -- so
here's retroactive thanks.
I wanted to let you know, too, that I'm in complete agreement about the
Generic Celtic Fantasy Trilogies. Unfortunately, they do sell, even the
sloppy, lazy ones where the Celtic names are only so much cheap window
dressing. Quite recently a small group of fantasy writers (all women
only by coincidence) including myself, Judy Tarr, Susan Shwartz and
Lillian Stewart Carl, have banded together to try to do something about
raising the standards of fantasy writing in general. Our first effort,
a reply to Greg Benford's infuriating attack on fantasy, will appear on
the stands shortly in Amazing magazine. Our second will appear in the
Spring issue -- probably -- and will be an attempt to define what good
fantasy is as opposed to the GCFT's and that other drag on the genre,
the "S&M Quest."
I'd like to say that I set out consciously and rationally to write a
better CFT, but actually the Deverry books are more the result of an
unconscious compulsion than anything. You might find the story of how
they were written both amusing and instructive: I started to write a
novella, a version of the Loddlaen's War incident in Book 1, and the
damn thing just kept getting longer and longer. I would wake up in the
middle of the night and write 20 pages or so of an entirely new past
life section, fall back into bed, and then wake at dawn to spend all
day scribbling on the main story. I could hear voices in my head,
telling the story just one step ahead of my madly typing fingers --
Nevyn's voice, mostly. Never once did I have any plan, merely a blind
faith that all the pieces would add up eventually.
Finally, after two years of writing, they did. At that point, I could
revise and fill out the story as rationally as any writer ever can.
(Not much.) The story still plays tricks on me, though. What I thought
was going to be the third and final volume has just split itself in
two. I had 1100 pages, and my editor didn't want me to cut anything,
and so there we bloody well were. The first half, The Bristling Wood,
will be out in the Spring of 1989. I wince as I confess that Wood will
end on something of a cliff-hanger, but I haven't played any games with
the reader. Although it ends with a main character in danger, you'll
know exactly what his situation is and how he might possibly be rescued.
Perhaps it's this inner drive (from the land of the Jungian
Archetypes?) that keeps Deverry from being just another GCFT; I don't
know how other writers start their trilogies, so I can't really say.
One thing I do know, however, is rather than using a Celtic culture for
some extraneous glamour, I've concerned myself with certain problems
deeply rooted in the Celtic character itself. For example, why are we
all so obsessed with vengeance, why do Celtic men hit first and regret
later, why do we all enjoy martyring ourselves, and finally, why do we
all drink so damn much when we don't handle it very well??? Said
problems have appeared in my very modern family and life from the time
I was a kid, so they are very real to me, even if I've set them in my
own version of Tolkienland. In a sense, then, this is an intrinsically
Celtic book, and the exotic elements are the Eastern philosophy and
most of the magic, which is of course based on the Jewish Kabbalah.
Have you heard this joke? What's Celtic Alzheimer's Disease? It's when
you forget everything but the people who've wronged you.
So anyway, think of me with pity when you remember that I didn't set
out to write a trilogy at all.
Richard Lupoff
Many thanks for sending me the summer issue of OtherRealms. This magazine
has been impressive from the start, and since I hadn't seen an issue
for a while, this newest is all the more impressive. Somehow it carries
me back to my own days in fandom, when it was all the fashion to be
"faanish" and silly and fun-loving (which I have no quarrel with, but....)
The "but" is that some of us felt that we'd like to publish a magazine
that was actually about something, and that something might even be
science fiction! A lot of people thought that was a nice idea. (The
magazine we wound up publishing was Xero, the contents of which
eventually evolved into at least four books that I know of, and chunks
of which still turn up in print now and then, even after 25+ years.)
But, you know, we also took a certain amount of flack. There were
people who really resented us actually publishing a magazine that
wasn't filled with a lot of chirpy and amusing chit-chat, but that
instead contained things like articles and book-reviews. Even more
interesting, to me, was that we were even more bitterly attacked by
some people who thought we were much too frivolous, publishing stuff
about science fiction instead of delivering political diatribes on the
issues of the day.
No way you'll ever please everybody. Just set your compass, follow your
star, and those who like what you're doing will follow you. Let the
rest go their own way.
Anyway, I want to thank you and Dan'l for the nice little piece about
Space War Blues. I guess it would be nice to see it back in print...my
association with Dell was not a happy one, but Dell has been taken over
by Bantam, and I've been very happy, so far, with them. (They just did
a science fiction novel of mine, will bring out a mystery early in
1989, and have another of each on contract, which I guess will come out
in 1990.) so maybe Bantam would bring it back.
You may wonder why I was so disgusted with Space War Blues and why it
is a painful memory for me, to this day. First came my problems with
Harlan, the fact that the book was written (for the most part) in 1966
and not published until 1978. One reviewer commented, in '78, that he
thought Space War Blues was one of the best SF novels of the 60's, and
he wondered why it wasn't published until nearly the end of the 70's.
Hah! Wanna see my scars?
But my grievances against Harlan were long ago, and I have long since
declared, not a forgiveness, but a moratorium with regard to those grievances.
But once Harlan was out of the way, Dell proceeded to botch the
project. They kept talking about doing a hardcover edition, and
procrastinating on it, until it was too late to do it. That's why the
book was a paperback original. I don't think it's generally known that
there was another subplot in the book -- in the manuscript -- that was
dropped at the request of my then-editor at Dell, Jim Frenkel. He felt
that it was too cynical and pessimistic.
I recall vividly the phone call from Jim, in which he asked me if he
could simply delete the manuscript sections involved (they were not
extensive). I told him, Sure, go ahead. He seemed astonished, and
implied that he'd expected to have to fight with me over the issue, and
might have been willing to give in if I'd insisted.
But I was so disgusted with the whole project by then, that all I
wanted to do was get the book published and out of my hair. That is why
the book is so cheerful and bright. Dell bought it out with a
brilliant George Barr cover (and poster). I learned later than Dell
hated the Barr cover and would have scrapped it, but they'd already
paid him for it and were too cheap to buy another.
Space War Blues sold out its first 75,000 copies in three weeks.
Frenkel told me they were going back to press for another 25,000
copies. I was delighted, and asked him when. He said, as soon as he
could get them to.
Well, in typical Dell fashion, it took them four months to get the
second printing out. By then all the excitement over Space War Blues
had died down. The audience had turned its attention to the next hot
item to come along (or the one after that, or the one after that).
Consequently, the second Dell printing died the dead. And they never
understood why!
Dell also came close to scuttling the Gregg hardcover edition of the
book. Gregg was a library-and-university oriented publisher. They did
small editions of their books, and they paid a uniform, flat fee for
the rights to do so.
When they made their standard offer to Dell for hardcover rights, the
Dell subsidiary rights department knew exactly what was going on, but
they felt they had to get Gregg to up their offer, even if only by a
few dollars, as a matter of principle. They couldn't just take the
money they were offered. Gregg was adamant about not increasing the
offer, on the grounds that they paid a standard amount for every book
in their line, and if they started haggling over this one book, they
would be in deep trouble.
Dell and Gregg were only $50 apart on the price, but Gregg refused to
come up and Dell refused to come down and there it sat. For weeks.
Maybe months. Finally, I told them I would personally come up with the
extra $50, out of my pocket, just to make the deal work. Apparently
that shamed them into reaching an agreement (I never knew exactly what
it was) because the next thing I knew they had signed. And I didn't
have to pay the money. Fortunately, because I didn't have $50 at that
point, thanks to the grand success my publishers had made of my books.
I do wish to point out that my problem with Dell was not at the
editorial level. I had a number of fine editors at Dell, including
Frenkel. The problems lay elsewhere in the company. Anyway, if Bantam
wanted to bring the book back, that would be okay with me. If the
missing sections are still in the files at Dell, I'd like them to be
restored in any new editions. If they're not there, maybe I could turn
up copies somewhere.
[It's funny how little things change. I've been lambasted by
some for being 'too good' or 'not fannish enough' or any of a
number of variations of 'I don't like it, so it's bad.' I've
been kicked off at least one mailing list for not being
politically correct.
But those people exist in the real world, and I don't let it
bother me that they exist in fandom as well -- in fact, they're
rarer in fandom, from what I can see. I publish OtherRealms
because I want to read something like OtherRealms. Tossing out
all the good things that are happening because a few don't
agree with them is silly. I try to do what I'm good at, and
avoid what I'm not good at, and hope the audience appreciates it.
The rest, rather than trying to get me to remake OtherRealms in
their image, are welcome to publish their own zine. If the
vision is good, they'll attract an audience. -- chuq]
A.C. Clarke
Fernando Gouvea asked why nobody noticed Arslan when it was first
published 11 years ago. I did, and I sent it straight to Stanley
Kubrick. It would make quite a movie.
David M. Shea
Are the ratings in OtherRealms too generous? OtherRealms #20 contained
eighty-five rated reviews of books. Another eleven reviews were not
rated; it would be presumptuous to attempt to interpret the reviewers'
remarks in rating terms. I'm also ignoring "plus" and "minus" qualifiers.
The ratings, on the whole, were rather generous. Ten books received the
highest rating of [*****], and no fewer than twenty-four books received
a generous [****]. Exactly forty percent of books reviewed in this
issue were rated above average. How this correlated with Sturgeon's Law
must be left to the reader's discretion. Another twenty-four books were
considered worthy of [***]. Seventeen books were judged as [**]; a mere
eight were disregarded with only [*]; and only one received the
ultimate ignominy of getting no stars at all.
Closer analysis may reveal some interesting trends. Of the ten books
which received [*****], three were reissues of older books with
established reputations (MacAvoy's Tea With The Black Dragon, Daniel
Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, and Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside). One
other received a highly qualified rating: Fred Bals judged Richard
Kadrey's Metrophage to be [*****] "for cyberpunk fans" but only [*]
"for all others." Not surprisingly, most of the remaining [*****]'s
went to established names: LeGuin, Koontz, McCaffrey, Cherryh.
Chuq Von Rospach, contributing editor's Charles de Lint and Alan
Wexelblat were responsible for forty-two of the eighty-five rated
reviews, nearly half. Less obviously, these three gentlemen among them
contributed fifty-nine percent (twenty of thirty-four) of the highly
favorable [****] and [*****] reviews. Before you leap to a hasty
conclusion, note that other factors should be considered. Twenty-one of
the books they reviewed were hardcovers, and if a generalization may be
permitted, books published originally in hardcover tend to possess
higher quality, or at least marketability. In addition, Wexelblat, de
Lint and Von Rospach receive a review copies; and it seems a safe
speculation that editors would choose to send books in which they have
some confidence. It is also the editor's policy to favor positive
reviews. On the other hand, perhaps they just hit a lucky streak.
Books covered in the "Pico Reviews" section fared less well. This
portion comprised forty-four reviews by ten persons. Again, most of the
material came from a limited number of sources: Von Rospach, Fred Bals,
and Danny Low provided sixty-four percent (twenty-eight of forty-four).
Ten of the books were other than mass market paperbacks, and that
includes several "graphic novels." Only two [*****] ratings were given
in this section; one of these was the aforementioned qualified rating
given to Metrophage. Seven [****] ratings were awarded here, and one of
those was a reprint (Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials) and two
others were G/N's. Do books published as original mass market
paperbacks get less respect, or are they just worse books? Perhaps both
suggestions contain an element of truth.
The question arises of how appropriate it may be to attempt to reduce
to numerical terms what is inherently a non-numerical experience. The
essential subjectivity of ratings can clearly be demonstrated from the
evidence. For example, Fred Bals felt "duty bound" to report his
inability to finish Glen Cook's Sweet Silver Blues, yet still gave it a
[*]. Danny Low belabored Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Gets
Drafted for, among other flaws, "philosophizing at the expense of the
story," a "cartoonish level of unreality," and "stereotypical
characterization"; yet he still gave the book [**]. Conversely, Low
found Christopher Rowley's The Vang to be "an excellent action SF story
with superb characterization," but rated it no better than [***].
Michael D. Weaver's Mercedes Nights was reviewed three times and was
rated [**], [***], and [****] (by Bals, Low, and de Lint respectively).
Is this information meaningful to the reader? It might be argued that
any rating, however subjective, is better than no rating at all. It is
unlikely that a reader would run out and buy all the [*****] books
sight unseen. Reason would suggest the prudent course: spending time
with OtherRealms, preferably over two or three issues, analyzing the
styles and preferences of individual reviewers and comparing them with
one's own taste. Intelligent interaction by the reader is the best
means to make OtherRealms a useful resource.
[Dave's final paragraph says it all. There is no objective
scale in reviewing. The best you can do (and all I try for) is
to set up some basic parameters that people can use. A [***] by
me isn't the same thing as a [***] by Fred, and isn't really
intended to be. The only thing you can rely on is that a [***]
by me is better than a [**]. The ratings exist so that everyone
works from in the same basic framework. Without it, one
reviewer would rate from 1-5, another 1- 10, another 0-4, and
we'd end up with one person reviewing A-F. With a standardized
scale, you know that Fred thinks it's an above- average book,
even though his interpretation of above-average differs from
mine. It's not objective, but it's better than total chaos. As
to other things that skew ratings, I don't read books that look
like losers, and after doing OtherRealms for almost three
years, I'm getting pretty good at guessing. By the time I read
the blurbs, the publicity that comes with the review copies,
look at the cover and skim the book, I've got a pretty good
idea whether the book is worth reading. If I do start a book
but don't finish it, I don't (with rare exceptions) review it.
My belief is that no publicity is worse than bad publicity.
Since OtherRealms never has enough room for everything that I'd
like to publish, choices need to be made. My preference is to
point towards something worth noting rather than away from
something worth avoiding, all things being equal.
When you have 3,500 or 4,000 words and 45 books on your review
list, you have to make cuts. So you talk about the things you
think are most deserving. The things that are merely deserving
lose out. I wish I could publish 80 or 90 pages an issue.
That's what it would take to publish what I'd like to print
each issue. That's still not even coming close to covering the
entire field, either. I don't think that's even possible these
days. -- chuq]
We Also Heard From Gene Wolfe, Gordon Linzner, Susan Shwartz, Mike
Resnick, Lois McMaster Bujold, Cathy Howard, Marge Simon, Bill Davis,
Betsy Mitchell, Sheryl Birkhead, David Gerrold, Paula Matuszek, Jeff
Copeland, Erik Naggum and John Wenn.
----
End of Part 14
