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OtherRealms Issue 24 Part 01
Electronic OtherRealms #24
Spring, 1989
Part 1 of 10
Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
OtherRealms may not be reproduced without permission from Chuq Von Rospach.
Permission is given to electronically distribute this
issue only if all copyrights, author credits and return
addresses remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used
without permission of the author.
Table of Contents
Part 1
Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach
Part 2
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint
Fantasy in the Mainstream
The Fiction of Italo Calvino
Chuck Koebel
Part 3
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Behind the Scenes: A Look at Paradise
Mike Resnick
Part 4
Past Imagining
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Stuff Received
Part 5
Words of Wizdom
Chuq Von Rospach
Part 6
The Contrapunk Manifesto
Bruce Bethke
The Agony Column
Rick Kleffel
Part 7
No Prisoners!
Laurie Sefton
Part 8
Lots and Lots of Reviews -- Part 1
Lots and Lots of Readers
Part 9
Lots and Lots of Reviews -- Part 2
Lots and Lots of Readers
Part 10
Your Turn -- Letters
Masthead: Submission, Subscription and Publication info.The Fine Print
Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach
Changes, always Changes
Lots and lots of changes this issue! All of them, I believe, positive.
Since we last spoke, I've left Sun Microsystems for a new job at
Apple. This changes the e-mail addresses for submissions and letters.
I am now chuq@apple.com, as well as CHUQ on AppleLink. The other
networks ("CHUQ" on Delphi and "73317,635" on CompuServe) don't
change. Unfortunately, the archive server for back-issues I maintained
on USENET has been turned off, and it won't return for the foreseeable
future. Except for some back-issues available on Delphi, this means
that you won't be able to get older issues electronically any more.
At Apple, I'm working with both MacOS and A/UX. So I'm still hacking
Unix, but I can start seriously learning how to program the Macintosh
like I'd wanted to for a long time. I also have access to lots of nifty
hardware now, too.
Other changes: Laurie's left Amdahl for NeXT. Her new address is
Laurie_Sefton@NeXT.COM. Her accounts ("LSEFTON" on Delphi and
"74010,3542 on CompuServe) don't change.
Working for competitors is interesting, since we sometimes can't talk
about the things we're working on. This is fairly common in the Silicon
Valley, and we find it helps us focus our evenings on our outside
interests. I don't know how the people who only have computers in
common survive. Also, Alan Wexelblat has left MCC and is now working
for Texas Instruments. Because the job search and new position have
eaten up all his time, he's decided to take a break from the column
this issue.
Additions to the fold
I want to acknowledge two additions to the masthead. Lawrence
Watt-Evans joins us as a contributing editor. He's the author of
numerous books, including The Wizard and the War Machine, With a Single
Spell and The Misenchanted Sword. I'm happy to be reprinting some of
his pieces from his "Rayguns, Elves and Skin-Tight Suits" column in
Comics Buyer's Guide.
I've also added Dean R. Lambe to the masthead as contributor. He is
co-author of The Odysseus Solution and one of the most incisive and
interesting reviewers I've been lucky enough to snag. Dean's been
writing for me for a while, but I felt he deserved some extra
recognition for the caliber of reviews he's been writing. Both of these
writers are strong additions to OtherRealms and I'm glad to have them
on board.
Layout changes
There were many changes to OtherRealms last issue. The main change, of
course, was the smaller typeface. While OtherRealms is down to 32
pages, I only lost about 15% of the text. That's a lot less damage than
I'd expected, and the switch to the new typeface seems to be a success.
I don't think the new typeface is quite as casual as the old one, but
it doesn't seem to impact readability, which was my main concern. I've
done some more minor tweaks this issue to increase the white space a
little, which should improve readability a little more.
Also, I've switched my headline typeface from Univers to Helvetica
because of a technical problem (read 'bug') in the printer driver
involving downloadable fonts. Since Helvetica is always in the printer,
I don't run into the problem. Hopefully this will be resolved soon, but
until it is I have to limit the number of downloadable fonts I use. Sigh.
I've also made two significant layout changes. I've combined the
regular reviews and Pico Reviews into a single large review section.
The makes layout easier and also removes an artificial barrier between
Pico reviews and 'real' ones. I'm looking for a good name for this
section, since 'Pico Reviews' doesn't apply anymore. Suggestions are
welcome, and if I adopt your suggestion I'll give you a one-year subscription.
I also restructured the Stuff Received section. After talking to many
of you, it was clear that breaking the section down by publisher was
the wrong format. Starting this issue, I'm now breaking books down into
major categories: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Other. After
that, everything is being sorted by author, which should make finding
your favorite writer's much easier.
Reader's Survey
After the last issue, I released a reader's survey to the USENET
readers of OtherRealms. I ended up with 153 responses. It would have
been higher except my E-mail account disappeared for a couple of weeks
when Sun opted to give me a paid vacation between jobs rather than
having me work out my tenure. For the people who tried to respond and
got their mail bounced, my apologies -- I left Sun on three days notice
and a few loose ends didn't get tied up cleanly.
Survey responses were returned from ten different countries: The U.S.,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Sweden, Norway,
Finland and the Netherlands. I also know that the electronic
OtherRealms reaches both Japan and West Germany, although neither are
represented in the survey.
One thing that the survey allows me to do is estimate my electronic
readership. It's difficult to get accurate numbers on the networks --
depending on how you count the readership ranges from 1,500 to 9,000.
By looking at sections of the network where I do know the readership
size and seeing how many responses come from those areas, I can guess
on the size of the entire readership. One area of about 200 people had
three responses (1.5% return) and another of 150 addresses had 2
responses (1.4% response). If we assume a 1% response from the entire
network, this puts the readership at 15,000. A 2% return puts the
readership at 7,500. Based on this, I'm willing to say that
OtherRealms' electronic readership is around 10,000 on the
Internet/USENET network. This doesn't include the printed edition
(275-300 copies) or other networks that OtherRealms goes to. As a
sanity check, SF-Lovers, which is an unstructured mailing list on the
same networks, has between 25,000 and 35,000 readers at last count, so
the the numbers I'm seeing aren't outrageous. Not bad for a fanzine.
On to the survey itself. I was amazed at the ingenuity of the answers --
even on the yes/no questions. Not only did people go into long
essays, some went so far as to rewrite the questions to represent what
they thought I ought to have asked. That's an interesting aspect of
doing things electronically and it made tabulating some of the surveys
an interesting exercise. When I was given a range of numbers I took a
number in the middle of the range .
The first questions looked at buying habits. 103 (67%) of you buy
hardcover books at least occasionally. 150 of you (98+%) buy paperbacks.
Yes, three people did say they bought hardcovers and not paperbacks.
Those people who buy hardcovers purchase, on average, 14 per year, or
about 1.1 a month. The range of responses went from 1 or 2 a year to
four a month. Paperback readers purchase an average of 5.9 paperbacks a
month, or 70 books a year. The most voracious readers in the survey
averaged about 30 books a month. What do you read? 146 of you (95%)
read SF. 120 (78%) read Fantasy and 43 (28%) read Horror. For other
reading, the numbers were: 70 (45%) mainstream, 64 (41%) mystery, 56
(36%) thriller, 12 (7%) western, 7 (4%) romance. A few people wrote in
and asked me to define mainstream -- half of you read it, whatever it is.
The next category looked at the genre magazines you read. Of the
professional magazines, the numbers are: 43 (28%) Isaac Asimov's SF
Magazine; 40 (26%) Analog; 32 (20%) Fantasy & Science Fiction; 28 (18%)
Omni; 12 (7%) Amazing; 7 (4%) Aboriginal SF; 5 (3%) Twilight Zone.
There are couple of interesting twists in these numbers. While Analog
has significantly more subscribers than anyone else (except Omni, which
is really a fringe magazine with a large audience), IASFM is more
widely read by OtherRealms readers. Both Amazing and Aboriginal placed
better than they should have, while Twilight Zone, which has since
died, placed much worse. Overall, there's a larger percentage of
magazine readers in the OtherRealms population than in the general
reading public.
The responses for the semi-pro and smaller magazines were as follows:
17 (11%) Locus; 6 (3%) SF Chron; 5 (3%) Weird Tales; 2 (1%) New York
Review of SF; 1 (0.5%) SF Eye. Nobody would admit to reading either
Thrust or Extrapolation. I didn't cover fanzines this time, and few
people volunteered any. The only real surprise here for me was the big
difference between Locus and SF Chron. SF Chron is the smaller of the
two, but that can't explain the difference in the survey. There is a
strong bias towards Locus in my readership somewhere, and I don't know
why. Weird Tales places well out of proportion with the size of its
readership base.
On to OtherRealms itself. I asked everyone to rate each regular feature
on a scale of 1 [strongly dislike] to five [strongly like]. People who
left a field blank weren't included in the ratings for that field, so
these numbers are the average for those people who rated each item:
4.25 Pico & Short reviews, 3.95 Behind the Scenes, 3.90 Scattered Gold
(Charles de Lint), 3.84 Words of Wizdom (Chuq Von Rospach), 3.74 Creme
de la Creme (Alan Wexelblat), 3.72 Editor's Notebook, 3.67 Much
Rejoicing (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes), 3.57 No Prisoners! (Laurie Sefton),
3.46 Letter column, 3.27 Stuff Received, 3.10 Agony Column. (Rick
Kleffel). Since Laurie only covers Fantasy, some of the readers who
don't read Fantasy rated her column down. The same went for non-horror
readers and Rick's column. When you take the average for Laurie's
column only from those people who read Fantasy, the number changes to
3.63. When you do the same for horror readers and Rick, the number
changes to 3.50. And, just as a control, I did the same thing with the
other columns and none of them changed by more than about three
one-hundredths of a point, so I think it's fair to use the higher
numbers for both of the specialty columns.
Basically, rating OtherRealms serves as a sanity check for me. I better
know what people think of the magazine or I'm not going to keep my
readers happy. All of the regular features got good scores. Every
reader has their preferences in OtherRealms, but there isn't anything
in the magazine that is generally disliked, which means that my mix of
material is right. Every feature and column got at least one 5 rating
and at least one 1, which I expected. The only real surprise for me was
that the Stuff Received column rated as high as it did. While a number
of people rated it low, many more let me know they found it was very useful.
The next area was future priorities. I asked people to rate both
current features and proposed features to get some feeling about what
people were interested in seeing in OtherRealms. The current features
got rated almost exactly the same as in the previous section, which, in
retrospect, shouldn't be a surprise. The items people were interested
in were, in order of interest, interviews, a review index, industry
news, industry futures (books to come, etc.), reviewing classics,
features on publishers, short fiction reviews, convention reports,
covering mass-media and convention listings.
The top two items, interviews and a review index, far outstripped the
rest as far as number of people requesting them and how strongly they
wanted it. I was considering bringing back interviews, and I'll
definitely return them in an issue or two. The index is something I've
planned on doing for a long time, but never have time to do. I'll try
again, but no guarantees.
Most of the other items are things that other publications are already
doing quite well, and rather than duplicate them, I think you should
read the other magazine. Both Locus and SF Chronicle have strong
industry sections, book futures, major convention reports and
exhaustive convention listings. Fanzines like File 770 and Lan's
Lantern print convention reports. Mass-media fans have a wide range of
publications -- starting with SF Chronicle and Locus and going to
Starlog. I'm not a big mass-media fan and watch very little television,
so this simply isn't something I'm interested in. Locus has a column
covering short fiction. So does Comics Buyer's Guide. The last attempt
to cover short fiction, Short Form, has died. OtherRealms won't cover
short fiction for one reason: I just am not interested enough to want
to support a column on it, and there isn't enough interest in the
readership base to convince me to do it anyway. People interested in
short fiction should read Locus. If anything more comprehensive comes
along, I'll let you know.
As far as features on publishers go, I'll see what I can do. I had a
query about doing a series of in-depth interviews of book-editors. I
may also try to find someone on the east coast willing to go and write
short features on various publishing houses and how books get
published. Nothing's final yet, but there are some interesting
possibilities. Finally, reviews of classic books. I like the idea. If
people want to write 500-1000 word reviews of classics, I'll be happy
to include as many as I can handle and flag them as classic reviews in
some way. Classics shouldn't be forgotten but in the rush to cover new
material, it's hard to remember that. When I talk to people on the nets
and at conventions, I'm always amazed at how many haven't read the
classic in the field -- usually because nobody has told them what they
are. This is a good way to help rectify that.
The final section of the survey was open comments. I want to thank you
for filling them out, some at great length.
The most common question was "Why Horror?" Horror is a genre that's
closely related to Fantasy. I feel strongly that Fantasy readers that
refuse to venture into Horror occasionally are limiting themselves. You
don't need to read Clive Barker and the Splatterpunks to read Horror.
I'm willing to bet that there are very few Fantasy readers that
wouldn't enjoy Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain and Olivia books.
When I get tired of those surgary-sweet unicorns and pointy-eared
obnoxious elves, a couple of horror books are a great way of putting
everything back in sync. I'm waiting for someone to write a book where
all those cutsey Fantasy archetypes get horribly munched up and chomped
in wonderfully gruesome ways.
Another common question was "Why isn't OtherRealms bigger (or more
often)?" -- the answer is that I have only so much time for
OtherRealms. Other things, like sleep, get in the way. The only way I
could make OtherRealms either bigger or more frequent would be to make
it less structured and more informal. All that would do is turn
OtherRealms into another SF-Lovers mailing list, and I don't see any
real purpose in duplicating what is already happening.
A number of people asked me to distribute OtherRealms in PostScript
format, so that people with compatible printers could print out a copy
that looks like the printed version. I won't do this for a number of
reasons. For one thing, the PostScript needed to generate OtherRealms
is huge. What is 250,000 to 300,000 bytes of text becomes between 1.5
and 2 megabytes. Distributing that much data electronically isn't
practical. OtherRealms also uses typefaces that aren't standard in
PostScript printers -- ITC Garamond. Unless you have this font, the
output would be exceptionally ugly. I would still have to publish the
straight text as well for everyone without a compatible printer. None
of the art is handled electronically -- it is all laid out and pasted
in manually. Making the fully formatted version of OtherRealms
available electronically isn't practical.
Here are the winners of the free subscriptions for turning in surveys.
They are: Kevin Routley (routley@tle.dec.com), J.J. Sager (cbdkcl!jjs),
Joe Herman (dzoey@terminus.umd.edu), Mike Monte (monts@quicksilver.sun.com),
Per Westerlund (perw@holtec.se, Sweden) and Matthijs Peters
(bagron@cs.vu.nl, Netherlands). Thanks to everyone for taking the time
to respond.
Updates on Previous Issues
In issue #22, I ripped into Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine as
a classic case of why Desktop Publishing is a danger in a novice's
hands. A few people wrote in complaining that I was too tough on it,
but considering how many problems there were, I don't think so. The
good news, however, is that issue #2 and #3 are now out, and the
magazine is improved. The fiction is improved, the layout is better and
the production values are up. According to Locus, starting with issue
#4, George Scithers will be taking over production and printing and
Bradley will just do the editing. All of this is very good news for the
Fantasy market, and based on the second issue, I'm dropping my warning --
in fact, I'm subscribing.
Also, last issue I was very negative about the semi-prozine Thrust,
which I feel died a long time ago, but hasn't noticed. While
OtherRealms was at the printers, the latest issue of Thrust (issue #32)
arrived, and I have to say it's the best issue I've seen in two years.
Significantly improved over other months, and with many fewer typos as
well. Whether this is an anomaly or a trend I don't know, but it was
heartening to see a magazine I have given up for lost show at least a
glimmer of what it could be again. Time will tell.
Unfortunately, that's all the good news I have. Two magazines I've
mentioned recently have folded. Twilight Zone, the only mass-market
horror magazine around, has announced it's departure. Argos, a digest-
sized fantasy fiction magazine that I really liked, has also closed its
doors after three issues. As popular as fantasy and horror is in book
form, it seems that packaging shorter versions of these is still an
uphill battle.
Back issues
I've had a number of requests recently for back issues of OtherRealms.
Many of the issues are out of print, but if people want back issues,
they are available for the cover price. The following are available at
$2.50 each: April, 1987 (#14); May, 1987 (#15); June, 1987 (#16); July,
1987 (#17); Winter, 1987 (#19); Spring, 1988 (#20). The following
issues are available for $2.85 each: Summer, 1988 (#21); Fall, 1988
(#22); Winter, 1989 (#23). Some of these are in rather limited supply,
and when they're gone, I'll have an empty closet.
Until next time!
------ End ------
