I'm just going for the extra credit here.

Wrong:
"Science fiction is intrinsically interesting."

Right:
"Science fiction is intrinsically interesting to me."

I don't see how anything is intrinsically interesting, but then I find almost 600,000 hits for the phrase on Google.

Shit, sex, and anything else that has four hundred curse words describing it in the english language is probably the only things I would feel safe in calling "intrinsically interesting."

I know: it was so dull I could not get far enough to read that phrase.

I know we are all a bit tired of discussions of what's wrong with modern SF, but Berman isn't writing a rant/screed/manifesto here, she's basically just talking out loud to friends in her livejournal about something that's on her mind. I think she's taking a thoughtful approach to the question, and I find it interesting (though that's apparently not a quality intrinsic to the prose). Please let's save the petty snark for where it's actually deserved.

PS. Dave, I realise your post wasn't really snarky. Just want to nip any escalating bitchfest in the bud. Having one of those weeks when I'm sick of the internet.

Sorry. I'm in a mood to be touchy about anyone taking their personal reading preferences and projecting them onto "all those people no longer reading the magazines". I haven't regularly enjoyed the pulps since I was a teenage boy, either, but I don't think that's because the pulps have changed, I think it's because I'm not a teenage boy any more.

[P.S. The use of "either" is kinda rhetorical, there, obviously.]

Don't you find it strange that so much interest and popularity surround your books, which are far from easy? How do you explain that?

"In the book industry there is a category of people who don't understand much: publishers. They think that everybody wants to read easy books. That's untrue, or else authors like Thomas Mann would have never enjoyed any popularity. Some people want to read easy books, other people want to read hard books. I was lucky enough to find a publisher who accepted my first book even though it belonged to the latter group."

-- Umberto Eco

Yeah, I'm going to jump on Karen's boat and say that post wasn't totally egregious. Flog me for saying this if you must, but there's plenty of "new" SFF out there that's full of many "flowering" words that sit there and wilt. It annoys the living piss out of me. I want to shake the authors and say "words are great! why are you wasting the greatness of those words!" I don't agree with Berman's Bester extremism (I think Bester is ultimately a little silly. Sorry kids) but I do think one of the virtues of genre is that so many stories are built in, you can, if you chose, do very very much with very very little.

At the same point, have these people read Sturgeon? Have they read Zelazny (later, i know, but still)? That shit is crazy! Word crazy! It was not all Bester and clipped precision, friends.

And the Voluntary State? Exciting! Really exciting! And WORD CRAZY!

I'm done now.

Re: Update.

Boo! I was robbed!

Gloats in Jon's direction.

However will I spend my points?

I dunno. I guess I don't really buy (or perhaps understand) Berman's premise. Wordiness does not equal sophistication, and sophistication does not equal bad storytelling. "[T]hree paragraphs' description of the protagonist's breakfast with his mother when that doesn't add any dramatic tension or move the plot forward" has nothing to do with sophistication. It's bad storytelling, but even that is not the same as a bad story. Some writers aren't as concerned with telling a story as they are with creating mood or sketching character, and there are markets for that, though they are mostly outside the genre.

Meghan is right that some people don't so much bleed their words as gush them, and this is a problem. (Although her dismissal of Bester is painful. OK, some of the short fiction is a bit silly, but the novels?) I do tend to get impatient with long descriptive paragraphs where the story gets lost. But at twelve I was reading and re-reading Tolkien, and that man loved to describe things. I kept on reading because I loved the story.

Berman's argument sounds a bit like one I've heard levelled at contemporary comics--the idea that they are no longer written for or accessible to kids, because everyone wanted so badly to follow Miller and Moore into moody postmodernism. This might be true--Marvel's Ultimate titles are something of an attempt to correct and capitalize upon this--but it doesn't mean kids don't appreciate sophisticated stories, either. Pick up the best-selling YA books and tell me there isn't sophisticated storytelling there. Dr. Justine and her spouse may have something to say about that.

So, perhaps the average fourteen-year-old--male or female--will not pick up F&SF or Asimov's and be enthralled. (Some will be, though.) So what? Plenty of them probably don't read much in the first place, and some may be reading material that's actually more sophisticated, that's targeted towards them. Anyone feel like starting up a YA SF mag?

I haven't subscribed to F&SF in a few years, because I felt like GVG was trying too hard to please everyone, and most of the stories were stuff I didn't care to read. But yesterday I got a mailing from them, and I'm going to send it back and subscribe again because I don't want the magazine to go away and I would hate for Gordon to feel like he threw a lot of money away on the mailings. I don't know that it will make a difference in the long run, but I don't think that targeting teenagers is going to save the magazines either. Just sayin'.

Another counter-argument: what about Analog? The prose "is crisp, ironic, sets a hook," and has "fast-paced storytelling." It's "easy" to read, has lots of old-timey wonder, even the odd rocket, and yet aren't Analog's subscriptions plummeting at the same rate as the others?

I have one more question: how do new readers find out about these magazines? Readers, not writers. When do you come across these magazines in your day-to-day teenage life? (What about if you exclude the internet?)

Man, I would've loved to have known about Asimov's as a teenager... but somehow I didn't.

Okay, so I have only read The Demolished Man, and right after I read it I thought to myself, "well, that was kind of cool." The telepath stuff was great, the language play was good -- but not crazy sophisticated. I honestly felt too shortcuted, to the extent of feeling cheated. And the end WAS silly. My favorite basic writing advice is don't end a story with a character dying or insane, and I take it to heart.

I like his work, but when I recommend it to people it's as much as a cultural artifact and as a book. "This book is off its rocker, it's crazy. But not as crazy as Dick." I have a weird journey through SF history. Its "golden age" in my mind would be something like Ursula Le Guin in the 70's or cyberpunk, not, you know, Asimov. I find Asimov fascinating but bizarre. But guess what little Meghan's mother handed her? Le Guin. And guess when little Meghan was a kid? The 80's and 90's. Right.

I really don't buy that teenagers are the desired audience for these magazines. If you're a scifi teenager, you're married to the internet. You think it's weird to buy magazines. I may very well have loved F&SF at 15, but I was really into anime at that time and instead read a loooottt of fan fiction far, far, far worse and awful than anything even in their slush. My younger sister read YA books. You know who buys literary magazines? 20-40 year olds who think they are hip. I know this is a kind of ridiculous suggestion to make in a sci-fi world, but maybe the magazines should consider getting a little hip. Or realizing what their target audience actually is. All those people who put McSweeney's Thrilling Tales into multiple printings would be a good start. They are geeks. They're just in the closet. Put a retro superhero on the cover, coax a story out of Lethem, see what happens.

Or if you wanted those teenagers, slip in a serialized manga, put a weird-ass photoshoped chick w/ bat wings on the cover, and get Justine's stuff in there. And market yourself as much to women/girls as to men.

You know who buys literary magazines? 20-40 year olds who think they are hip. I know this is a kind of ridiculous suggestion to make in a sci-fi world, but maybe the magazines should consider getting a little hip.

This is actually a good point. Everybody's favorite recipe for saving the genre from extinction is to hook the readers when they're young. If someone isn't steeped SF by the time they're 18, the common wisdom goes, they won't ever read the stuff.

This begs the question: what is in or missing from actually-existing SF that makes it so unpalatable to adult readers who aren't already familiar/nostalgic for the genre? It certainly cannot be the wordiness/sophistication Berman decries -- the millions of people buying HOUSE OF LEAVES and THE LOVELY BONES are the potential audience of "sophisticated" genre fiction.

After making my post, though, I was wandering around Borders (I do this. It's a ritual. And I found MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS! So now I'm up 1 beautiful book, and down the worth of one tank of gas.) and I picked up F&SF. And I realized, if F&SF were to be hip, it wouldn't be F&SF. It certainly couldn't call itself Fantasy and Science Fiction if it were hip. It'd have to go by F&SF, at the least. Not all its current stories would have a home in hip F&SF , and sometimes that would be all right, but sometimes not. There's good work in F&SF that Fence would want nothing to do with, right? Maybe if only one of the big mags were hip... and then the other two stayed hokey, everyone could be happy and the good stuff would all have homes. But that's not practical.

Though really. If we could just have nicer covers... (cue flashback to ubiquitious convention panel on STATE OF THE MAGAZINES)

This is actually a good point. Everybody's favorite recipe for saving the genre from extinction is to hook the readers when they're young. If someone isn't steeped SF by the time they're 18, the common wisdom goes, they won't ever read the stuff.

Does the definition of "someone who's steeped in SF" include all the comic-book nerds and anime geeks, all the millions of guys dragging their dates to Star Wars, my crazy officemate who speaks Klingon, or the Buffyite hordes? I take it from Meghan that it does? Or are people who compulsively put Star Wars novels on best-selling lists too intrinsically un-hip to get it? Because there's literally millions of them, and if you tapped even a fraction of them they could easily keep, say, short fiction alive. And short fiction is your gateway drug.

Seriously. I don't think the problem is hip vs. un-hip, easy vs. hard content -- I think most of these people don't even know that there are genre magazines. What's the mechanism for some Star-Wars-novel-reading Buffy fan to even encounter them? The cover art can't kick in until they see it, and I'm thinking the mechanism for getting the word out is broken. Out of order. Kaputski!

Actually, many of the Star Wars/Star Trek/etc tie-in readers have little interest in non tie-in material. Ditto video game players, manga readers (not that manga necessarily translates to SF at all), etc. All that was the previous can't miss recipe for success that ended up missing.

Also, why would short fiction be the "gateway drug"? Across all genres, it is less popular than novel-length fiction.

Yeah, I have to agree with Nick. Short fiction is the hard stuff; novels, these days, are the gateway drug.

But I think Jackie's on to something anyway, the gateway-drug metaphor notwithstanding. If you're looking to expand the readership for science fiction, you have to start by looking for people who aren't currently reading it but who might be interested, right? Isn't that kind of a Queen of Obvious statement? Sure, most people who read Star Wars novels aren't going to jump to reading non-SW genre novels, but if you're looking for new readers, I think you've got better odds with the anime fans than you do with the Zadie Smith fans. Sure, I might be wrong, but it seems to make sense.

Sure, most people who read Star Wars novels aren't going to jump to reading non-SW genre novels, but if you're looking for new readers, I think you've got better odds with the anime fans than you do with the Zadie Smith fans. Sure, I might be wrong, but it seems to make sense.

Well, here's a link to the cover of Interzone #194: http://blindside.net/smallpress/read/Absolutes/Interzone/cover194.jpg

To anime, or not to anime? In any case, we are trying to attract a younger audience, but you simply have to see the disappointed cries of a lot of the older readership to believe it.

And to point out a very obvious dichotomy: in his Year's Best SF of this year Gardner Dozois cries out against the 'new' Interzone
(haven't seen it yet: Andy received a copy, and he told me), thinks it's a mess, while -- oh irony -- he begins his summary, as usual, with reports of the ever-dwindling circulations for sf fiction magazines. Then he criticises us for using cover imagery and design that just might be a little bit fashionable and therefore might even appeal to a younger, ie new, audience.

Of course, the design for F&SF, Asimov's, and Analog hasn't changed for years and years, and if past experience is any guide will remain unchaged for the foreseeable future.

Of course, I don't know if what we are doing is right, but at least we're trying. Most of the rest just seem to be waiting for miracles...

Yeah, I have to agree with Nick. Short fiction is the hard stuff; novels, these days, are the gateway drug.

See, that's how it works for me: I read Elizabeth Bear on Scifiction, I read a very favorable review of Hammered, I go out and I buy Hammered.

How's the mechanism supposed to work, then? Somebody reads Star Wars and Harry Potter and David Eddings until they saturate, but they keep wandering back to the SF/F section of the bookstore, they see a "Best of" anthology, and they wonder "who are these people?" They then look for more of those authors, and they end up with subscriptions to Asimov's and Interzone and F&SF? Is that it, is that how it's supposed to work?

Actually, many of the Star Wars/Star Trek/etc tie-in readers have little interest in non tie-in material. Ditto video game players, manga readers (not that manga necessarily translates to SF at all), etc.

I must respectfully dissent. You only need a fraction of these "tie-in" readers to come in, and a lot of them are sub-genre cross-dressers. For example, I am or have been a hard-core Star Wars novel-reading, anime-watching, role-playing Buffy fan, and I have even been known to *cough!* swing both ways and read the occasional *cough!* Star Trek novel. Similarly, my friend J. is a fanfic-reading Star Trekker, and yet she and the Klingon-speaking officemate have spent a much larger portion of the last month discussing "Revenge of the Sith" than I have. I suspect that these are people who would respond favorably if cargo trucks full of SF literary mags were to happen to overturn and dump F&SF all over their front lawns. They would run around with armloads of them, giggling.

Assuming that's not going to happen, what's the mechanism for hooking them? I think I can tell you how it isn't going to happen: they aren't going to walk into the SF/F section of a Borders or a Barnes and Noble, bump into a rack of SF literary mags and decide to go with the impulse purchase. They aren't going to bump into a rack of F&SF and Asimov's at the comics store, either, or the gaming store, or the anime store. No impulse purchases, no new subscriptions.

It's pretty tough to find SF literary magazines even if you do know what you're looking for -- sometimes they're in the "literary" perdiodicals, sometimes near the "gaming and SF" periodicals, sometimes near the "comics." Last time I was in the Borders they'd stopped carrying them, and B&N had them tucked away with the science mags under a big "Men's Interests" sign. "Men's Interests"? Ooof. See this is where Meghan's point about marketing to women comes in: I've taken three (3!) quantum mechanics courses, and that sign was almost enough to drive me away from the Scientific American and the Asimov's.

Well Jackie, because you're here and talking with other writers and all that ... your personal experience likely doesn't count. Mine doesn't either. If everyone, or even a significant fraction of people, were like you or I, we'd be golden. But they ain't, so we're not.

We actually don't have to guess or try or do any of that stuff as far as the connection between tie-in fiction and "original" SF/F/H. We actually know the answer: basically about 10% of Star Wars readers will eventually migrate over to the work of a specific author who wrote a Star Wars novel they read. For other tie-ins, it's less. There are folks writing for Star Trek and Buffy who can essentially only sell their Star Trek/Buffy books -- otherwise it's small press city for them (Ray Garton comes immediately to mind.)

Heck, in its prior-to-last incarnation, Amazing Stories tried to hook readers by offering licensed tie-in short stories; it went over like a lead balloon.

We already know what the problem is: people don't read short stories anymore.

It has nothing to do with science fiction, or tie-ins, or "complexity" or anything like that.

People don't read short stories anymore.

They don't read literary short stories.
They don't read mystery short stories.
They don't read romance short stories.
They don't read Western short stories.
They don't read "men's adventure" short stories.
They don't read "true confessions" short stories.
They don't read horror short stories.

Further, they don't read short story magazines, they don't read the fiction features in general-interest magazines, they don't read collections, and they don't read anthologies. This is true all across the board, across every genre, and in every format. Journals in the literary marketplace are often backed by universities or eccentric millionaires; debut collections are loss leaders designed to guarantee that a publisher gets some hot new MFA grad's first novel; anthologies continue to be published because they're cheap to do, especially as Tekno Books essentially does 'em in bulk; in magazines, the fiction feature is the first to go because all the evidence mags have point to fiction being the least-read item in the feature well (Atlantic Monthly is only the latest mag to discontinue its fiction feature); and that's that.

Complicating this was the implosion of the magazine distro system a decade ago.

There essentially isn't a solution to "saving our short fiction", not anymore than there is a solution to the fact that jazz records sell in the five digits instead of the seven digits, and not anymore than there is a way to get people to disconnect cable, put up rabbit ears, and go back to watching their crackling old local UHF stations.

The migration towards novels, and now, toward post-novel forms (video games, interactive entertainments, whatever) has been constant and obvious to most publishing industry observers for fifty years now. There is almost nothing to do, except ... get the few people who read short stories to read YOUR short stories. So if something like McSweeney's breaks the waves for a bit, it's worth noting what they managed to tap into. If lots of people start watching anime, well, that's a qualitatively different experience that reading a short story, and it's not going to lead to an expansion of the marketplace, not anymore than Star Wars or Buffy or Freddy and Jason or Star Trek or Batman or the Internet or anything else in the past thirty years has.

But don't take my word for it. Get some magazines, give 'em to your Klingon-spouting and fanfic writing pals, then ask them three months later if they subscribed, or even if they read all the stories in the copies you gave 'em.

The results may SHOCK you! They may even shock me, but I suspect not.

No, of course they wouldn't read all of them. I don't read all of them: I graze. And after three (3!) years of grazing, I'm only now working up to subscribing.

So I just made a recon run to the B&N, and now they've got Asimov's and F&SF over with the literary mags. Borders really has stopped carrying them completely... in fact they've stopped carrying practically everything except Ellery Queen. So that's one place in all of metro Tucson that I know of with literary SF mags, excepting one used bookstore with a periodicals section.

Can we admit that there's an exposure problem? And they're still over there in the boring literary section... is it possible that they'd get a bit more exposure on a rack in the section containing the appropriate genre? Is it possible that could increase the 10% migration rate to, say, 15%?

And you're completely correct, my experience doesn't carry over. Let's see, I started reading short fiction because: 1.) Susan attended my wedding, 2.) my husband mentioned "Susan's got some internet thing she's into," 3.) I found out about SH, 4.) I found out about Scifiction, 5.) I noticed the anthologies, and 6.) now, three (3!) years after the wedding I'm considering subscribing to Asimov's.

My point is, I didn't even know the stuff was out there until I stumbled onto Strange Horizons. I think we can agree that if prozine editors attending weddings is the primary mechanism for long-time genre fans taking an interest in short fiction -- skip that, noticing that there's genre short fiction -- then, yeah, the literary mags are hosed.

Hmm, a corollary might be, what was different about the late 1980's? (Besides people don't read short fiction these days, yeah, yeah, I got it, I got it...!) How did the magazines attract their readership leading up to their peak years?

The peak years for those short fiction magazines were actually several decades ago. Then television happened.

As far as the difference between now and the 1980s, where things were a bit better? The big difference was the magazine distribution network was still intact and competitive, rather than still reeling as it is today from a collective madness that made everyone decide to play King of the Mountain.

How do you solve the distribution problem, which incidentally hit magazines of all sorts and the mass market paperback sector too? Well, find angel investors worth $20,000,000 and open some warehouses and start distributing magazines to Wal-Marts and shit.

And then you'll find that, since you owe some people twenty million bucks, you don't have all the time you thought you would for your penny-ante accounts, of which every single fiction magazine you handle is one. So they'll end up where they end up in a few stores, returns will continue to be very high (because people don't read short stories) and you'll concentrate on selling slicks that teach women how to lose weight and men which cars to buy. Like everybody else.

The problem with the problem, as it were, is that most people don't get the problem. Changing the types of stories published, dropping digests for other formats, introducing better cover art, telling all your friends to buy the magazine, or making sure your neighbor's kids get Asimov's in their Halloween treat basket, these are all marginal micro answers to an issue that goes far beyond the genre. You're not going to see a short fiction magazine of any sort sell six-digits in the US anymore. Ever. That time is over. Also over: inviting a gentleman caller over to your parlor to view stereoscopes while your spinster aunt chaperones, taffy pulls, and Home Economics majors.

Eh, I got nothing. Okay, Mr. Mamatas, you win!

^No.

I'm standing up for the taffy pulls. This far and no farther...

I hope you have $20,000,000 to back up those confectionary claims!

... what is in or missing from actually-existing SF that makes it so unpalatable to adult readers who aren't already familiar/nostalgic for the genre?

Don't many of those adult readers simply see two key features as markers of Science Fiction -- the (im)plausible scientific speculation of Hard SF and the Romantic adventure plot structures of Juvenile SF? That seems to me, to be honest, not entirely unfair, given the codification of the fantastic genres during the Golden Age, where the boundaries between Hard SF and YA were quite happily fuzzed both by writers and by fans. Forrest Ackermann's "Sci-Fi" label is pretty much a big rubber stamp for those kind of stories, which the genre is still full of. Call it Trad SF. Trad, bad and kinda sad. Fantasy has its similarly juvenile elements, and I'd say that's what turns people off of these genres. They hear the words Science Fiction or Fantasy and think of computer geekery and wish-fulfillment, or D&D and wish-fulfillment. In both cases, I think the geekery elements are mainly turn-offs because they're seen as warning signals of the same social maladjustment that underlies the wish-fulfillment.

If people don't come into the genre from that juvenile cross-over so much it's a pity, but in the age of television and computer games, I just don't see Trad SF/F providing a feeding mechanism for literary SF/F the way it used to. Forget the stereotypical fanbase of overgrown adolescents in black t-shirts with chrome-effect lettering on them, dragon skulls and whatnot. How much is that fanbase aging? How much is it dwindling? Do we really need or even want to replace that readership with more of the same? Because frankly I think the indie hipsters would be more interested. I don't wanna diss the hardcore here but that Trad SF/F is like Heavy Metal. I may have grown up on it, may still love some of it for that familiarity/nostalgia factor, but, man, the cool stuff is happening in indie music now, in indie movies... and in indie fiction -- McSweeney's, Chabon, Lethem, Danielewski, the list goes on, and I'd say that list includes a fuckload of literary SF/F -- which is a damn sight more like a David Lynch movie than a Schwarzenegger flick.

From the popularity of the Coen Bros, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and so on (hell, look at Steve Buscemi's entire career), there's an audience out there that seems to like pomo referentiality, surreal imagery, experimental forms, even pulp tropes when they're being fucked with in a cool and groovy way. From what's going on in indie music now, it sounds like as many folk come into it from New Wave, Punk and even Disco as from Heavy Metal. Likewise there's plenty who don't have a background in Trad SF/F, but have eclectic literary influences -- Hunter S. Thompson, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, William Blake -- who seem like prime targets for modern literary SF/F. Kerouac meets Cthulhu, you say? Peachy!

So the question is, at what point does marketing your indie fiction as "literary SF" become like marketing some post-rock, crazy-ass indie band a la Sonic Youth as "high-brow Heavy Metal", a counter-productive way to try and tap into your audience when the real core of it is 20-40 year old indie hipsters? It's a crazy logic, surely. Slap your band-members in mullets and spandex and hope the more intelligent metalheads will pick up the word on the street and buy it. Stick a dragon or a spaceship on the cover and hope the more intelligent fans will pick up the word on the street and buy it. I'd be real curious to see if an SF magazine which jettisoned that baggage could be targeted more successfully at the crowd who shop in a store like Fopp, which specialises in all things indie -- music, movies and books -- selling Orwell alongside Burgess alongside Salinger and so on.

A couple things:

1. Good discussion; I hope to use some of this material in the "magazines are dead" panel at WorldCon. Thanks, all!

2. This is not a useful data point, merely an observation I found interesting: in my local semi-independent micro-chain bookstore the other night, I saw copies of Analog on prominent display on the front counter, right next to all the tchotchkes and impulse purchases. On the one hand, I wanted to thank them for putting a digest magazine on such prominent display; on the other hand, I wanted to say "Why Analog?" But I suppose this is the heart of Silicon Valley and Analog may be the best choice. What I really should've done is asked how it was selling. But again: this isn't a statistically valid piece of data.

3. Jetse, I don't think Gardner was all that negative about IZ overall. Here's an abbreviated version of what he wrote:

"The new Interzone is trying for a slicker, more contemporary look.... The first TTA issue ... was something of a mess, with interior design and layout [problems], but this problem has been straightened out to some extent in subsequent issues. I didn't like the first two TTA covers, which struck me as murky and bland, generic cyberpunk, but the cover of the most recent issue ... is probably a lot more effective in 'popping' from the newsstand. Andy Cox is to be congratulated for saving this grand old lady, ... but I hope that he doesn't entirely lose the old Interzone regulars.... The magazine was a little weaker than usual this year, but there was good stuff in both the final Pringle issues and the new Cox issues...."

4. If I take away nothing else from this discussion, I will take away Meghan's excellent comment that "one of the virtues of genre is that so many stories are built in, you can, if you chose, do very very much with very very little." Very well put.