Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (53 page)

At its best, science fiction, and fantasy too, is a literature of revolution.
The core purpose, of course, of any work of fabulism, whether science fiction or fantasy, is the questioning of established things. SF takes this principle to extremes, and it is not only with its talk of outer space, alien monsters, and furry-toed hobbits that it seems to avoid the present, the real, the status quo. Most such improbabilities are mere window dressing. The best science fiction and fantasy of the last century, from Wells to Tolkien, from Heinlein to Herbert and LeGuin, from Haldeman to Russ and Delany, has been profoundly about social change, much more so than about the ostensible adventures of any of their characters. In its unreal way, SF is the most political of literatures. By the same token, in the most real of countries, such as China, and the former Soviet Union, the dictatorships of South America, science fiction and fantasy have been modes of expression that have consistently escaped censorship. Whether called magic realism or fairy tale, these genres provide a freedom to say what must be said. Even here in the West, few popular novels have so often shaped the mood of their time as Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five
, Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
, Frank Herbert’s
Dune
, or LeGuin’s
Left Hand of Darkness
. Since the advent of paperbacks, mass culture has embraced an outpouring of societally aware imaginings from every source, but as a category SF and fantasy stood out.

Yet, as I have said, the ideal is revolutionary in a way that adheres neither to the left
nor
the right of the political spectrum, but the practice is often boringly predictable. Strangely enough, I think authors are more often conservative, in the sense of pulling their punches, than the editors sometimes are. Granted the writers are probably furnishing what they think or know we editors will publish: they have to; they need to make a living. For their part, in the process of earning their own living, most editors I know find time and courage to at least occasionally back a dark and unpopular horse. But then, an editor’s living isn’t measured out by the book.

And of course, making a living—a good living, we hope—built of our labor and passion is the goal of writers and editors both. I can’t speak for all SF editors, of course (though almost all without exception are my friends), but I think that in addition to
making
a living we all have a sense of living on the edge.

In one sense that edge is a function of the otherness that seems to earmark SF as something different. I don’t have to describe the difference. Everyone in and out of publishing seems to understand just how SF and fantasy stand apart without quite being able to put it into words, except perhaps to make a joke of it. And that last, sadly, might be at the core of SF’s difference. It
is
a big joke, all the jollier for protestations of seriousness. Just synopsizing the plots of even famous SF and fantasy novels is an exercise in absurdity; funnier still to do it before a group of cynical sales reps. But in a classic
Catch-22, true levity is reserved for anything that holds itself apart, and SF holds itself apart from a mainstream world that laughs at it. In my experience SF is different because of an assumption that you have to be a little weird to
get
it. In publishing terms that means that the SF editor is very much on his own, pursuing his career among colleagues who would never think to admit ignorance of politics or literature or popular culture but who freely admit of SF that they “just don’t get it. After all, it’s pretty silly stuff on the whole. Right?”

Apart as they are, SF editors do not work in the vacuum of Space. They work in big offices because only the very biggest companies have the luxury of specialization that a science-fiction department entails. But no large organization commands in every department—sales, promotion, publicity, fulfillment, copywriting, advertising, etc.—the specialized skills needed to reach the SF reader. It makes sense that all this should be coordinated by the SF editor, and often out of dire expediency it is. The SF editor, no matter his or her job title, has learned to function not only as an editor but also as a publisher when need arises. That means that the SF editor at most major publishing houses, usually at an early age, takes on responsibilities that otherwise might be years in coming. At twenty-two, the age I was when I negotiated my first six-figure deal, my authors were two, three, or even four times my age; my colleagues were toughened veterans of the publishing wars. And I was in seventh heaven, because of all the freedoms that SF allows its editors, the greatest is the opportunity to immerse oneself in publishing, to get involved and to learn. This may be the reason there are a disproportionate number of former SF editors who run publishing houses today: Lou Aronica at Bantam, Malcolm Edwards at Grafton/HarperCollins UK, Elaine Koster at NAL, Nanscy Neiman at Warner—the list is impressive.

For the science-fiction editor, responsibility has its attractions and its repulsions. The appeal of that responsibility has much to do with the management of small, discrete publishing entities within larger organizations. What is less attractive has to do with coping with a heightened sense of the conflicting demands of commerce and art. My guess is that the SF editor is called upon more than most of his colleagues to juggle the two; the object is to keep them both in the air at once.

For all these reasons, science fiction is in many ways a place between oppositions. It is a place where publishing seems warily to bridge commerce and literature, entertainment and education, science and fantasy, and the marketing strategies of direct and wholesale sales, independent and chain sales, specialty and mass-market books. These are the issues that will form the curricula of twenty-first-century publishing. The landscape I share with my colleagues by no means follows a straight and narrow trail, and we all
approach our jobs from many viewpoints. To begin with, the label “science fiction” itself …

There is little that is particular to
science
in what the SF editor does. Actually, the science-fiction editor of most major publishing houses is also responsible for what many might think the opposite of “scientific” fiction, that is, fantasy. Indeed, except for the distinction on the spine and the (slightly) differentiated covers, science fiction and fantasy are indistinguishable publishing genres.

The distinction between what
can
be, as SF is often described, and what
can’t
be, as fantasy often is, diminishes materially when viewed against the undifferentiating reality of what merely
is
—i.e., the rest of everything
else
written. By that I mean fiction pure and simple according to the criteria that distinguish between “mainstream” (best-seller and also literary fiction) and genre. But science fiction is not “pure and simple,” according to its critics and not a few of its fans. The former complain that SF offers something less; the latter claim something more. Who is right? The truth, as every editor knows, is that it is the individual book and author that delivers; not the genre, not the jacket promises, not the whole rigamarole of concept (high or not), message, or hype. Above all else, not the publisher’s label. What is pure and simple, in the last analysis, is that the truth is in the writing.

The best books I edit
should
be read by what is generally called a mainstream audience. It would shake them up and wouldn’t hurt my bottom line either. But the fact of the matter is that those readers are generally inattentive in a way that bookish readers are not. That is, they aren’t adventurous in their reading, they don’t compulsively look to broaden their reading experience, they don’t
work
at it.

Science fiction’s readers are bookish in the sense that they
do
work at it. Sadly, few of them do so to the point of puncturing the comforting bubble of their favorite genre, SF or fantasy, but within their chosen world they are all a publisher could ever ask for. They read compulsively, and experiment with new authors, and trade books among themselves, and follow their favorite authors to the ends of the galaxies and back. These are the reasons publishers have learned to love them.

The P and L (profit and loss statement) is very simple: SF attracts publishers because, as an author-driven genre, it commands a high percentage of initial sale (sell-through) and substantial backlist sales. The SF editor relies in fact on comparatively modest initial sales with a high degree of marketing efficiency. For example, a typical mass-market midlist work of fiction may sell perhaps only 50 percent of copies advanced—a truly shocking figure, but average nonetheless. But the astute SF editor might manage a 70 percent sell-through. All else being equal, the margin of profitability to the corporate bottom line should be accordingly high.

While the best books are good enough to be read by anybody, not all books should be. Books that don’t deliver, or don’t deliver completely, are routinely published. What, anyone might ask, does the SF editor see in the trash that we all acknowledge is sometimes published? The answer is, as any editor might answer, a combination of optimism, stupidity, honest mistake, and in the SF arena something further—a devotion to something sometimes called “the novel of ideas.” No other genre seems to think such an unlikely conjunction could yield a book, much less a commercial one. SF does—to its credit, and to its loss.

That is because fiction is not necessarily what SF is about, at least not wholly and not in the sense that academics or any well-schooled reader recognizes fiction. The SF writer, to a degree unknown in other popular literature, is judged against a criterion that categorizes SF as a literature of ideas. In most instances, of course, it is anything but, yet there are still plenty of writers, novels, and what pass as genre classics that offer little
but
an Idea with a capital
I
, while relegating character, plot, and style to far more subordinate roles. To go further, the border between fiction and polemic can be hairline thin and is notoriously treacherous, but no one disputes the fact that SF, under the guise of entertainment, often offers a message as well. SF is the only genre I know where authors are remembered, blurbed, and praised for their predictions, even the invention of spacecraft and satellites, nuclear piles and solar sails.

Yes, science fiction likes to think it has pioneered an edge for itself between popular literature and the real thing, with a lot of prediction to boot. And in some authentic ways it has. (Here at last, incidentally, is a point where fantasy strays from parallel pursuits, since fantasy, unlike SF, seems to turn inward as a genre, unheeding of uncomfortable realities.) And yet, the literature of the future is very much the literature of the past, unforgiving of invention and stylistic effrontery. David Hartwell, in the previous edition of this volume, wrote very interestingly of the historical reasons for this. Suffice to say that for the working science-fiction editor, commercial imperatives scorn avant-garde invention on the page but reward tales of invention in the old-fashioned Thomas Edison sense. Within certain corporate strictures, editors in this genre are almost given something rare in publishing, freedom to publish what they like. What they like and what sells are sometimes hard to reconcile, but that is the essence of the job. Sometimes the balance is drawn in one direction, sometimes the other; but most editors I know strive to strike a balance, however unwieldly. For better or worse, I believe that this affords the writer his or her greatest chance to experiment with plot, theme, character, and idea in a publishing climate that has otherwise all but abolished experiment, at least of the trial-and-error sort.

…

In one sense it seems to me that every book I publish is an experiment and that the whole apparatus of the publishing process—and quite an apparatus it is—is dedicated to making sense (and cents) of what is really a completely intuitive process: the selection and effective marketing of a pile of manuscript. My day-to-day, workaday life argues against this, spent as it is in meetings ranging from editorial to cover conferences, promotion, paging and pricing, sales, and postmortems of past titles. All of this would be intolerable if it achieved nothing but hours spent in a chair, but in fact quite a lot seems to get accomplished; enough so that the collaborative process of publishing seems to me to be the most vigorous and exciting business on earth. The results of our deliberations (i.e., the books we publish) still smack of trial and error, of a guess hazarded at whim, but we publish books in great number and corporately live or die by the attention, importance, and sales they achieve; and corporately, publishing seems to flourish. Personally, it rewards.

When not at a meeting table, editors spend most of their time on the telephone with authors, agents, and “contacts” in high and low places. The popular image of editors comfortably ensconced in overheated offices and overstuffed armchairs reading the day away is completely foreign to my experience and may never have had any reality at all.

If it ever had, it referred to a pre-World War II world of low-volume hardcover houses like Charles Scribner’s Sons, Alfred A. Knopf, E. P. Dutton, or G. P. Putnam’s Sons. It did not refer to the mammoth mass-market paperback publishers that dominate publishing today and virtually define the SF publishing arena. I am constantly amazed by the new authors (and science fiction authors at that) who assume, aggressively in some instances, that time has not moved on, that the prewar era is still in force.

Today publishing is anything but high-tech, but it is changed. As I said above, science fiction has found its haven in the paperback houses, publishing entities that specialize in volume (expressed as both distribution and numbers of titles). According to
Locus
more than 3,000 SF and fantasy titles are scheduled to be published in 1993 in the United States alone. The top five SF publishing houses (numerically by number of titles) will publish more than 800 original science-fiction and fantasy novels, or an average of 160 books apiece. Not all those books will originate in SF departments, but many will. And most of those departments will be pressed to give each book the attention it deserves, or even more to the point, the attention its author
thinks
it deserves.