"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 15th Annual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

business (a system that, if it had been in place back then, would have insured that you'd never have heard
of writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Frank Herbert, all of whom built a following
slowly over a number of years) to the alarming tendency of some publishers to think that they can assure
"sure sales" by publishing nothing but media tie-in novels (apparently realizing that just publishing media
novels is not a sure enough sure-thing, some publishers have now progressed to publishing media tie-in
novels by media celebrities.) What's next? How about media tie-in novels by famous serial killers? I can
see it now: Star Trek Bloodbath, by Charles Manson-but science fiction also has a lot of vitality and
staying power, and, for all its problems, it's far from down for the count yet.
As I've said here before, even if a deeper recession is ahead (and I'm not at all sure that it is), I find it
unlikely that any recession will be capable of reducing SF to pre-1974 levels of readership or sales,
unless it's a recession so big that most of the publishing industry at large collapses with it. And as Gordon
Van Gelder recently said, in an editorial in The Magazine of Fantasy 6 Science Fiction, commenting on a
critic's lament that there's nothing but crap to be found on the shelves in the SF sections of bookstores:
"Back in 1960, he wouldn't have been so distressed by the SF section of the story because it didn't exist
back then. Remember please that SF specialty shops like A Change of Hobbit in L.A. and The SF Shop
in New York were founded in the 1970s because SF could be so hard to find ... Personally, I think
there's more good SF getting published nowadays than most people have time to read, there are plenty
of interesting new writers coming into the field, and lots of the field's veterans are producing top-flight
work. So what's this talk about SF dying?" I also wholeheartedly agree with Warren Lapine, who, in an
editorial in the Spring 1998 issue of Absolute Magnitude, said: "It's time that everyone in Science Fiction
got off their collective asses and stopped whining about the future. Are you worried about magazines?
Then subscribe to a couple of them. Are you worried about books? Then buy a few of them." I was in an
on-line real-time conference a couple of weeks ago, talking-typing?-to a woman who said that she was
extremely worried that all of the science fiction magazines were going to die, and who then went on to
add that she goes down to Borders bookstore every month, faithfully reads all the science fiction
magazines while having coffee and croissants, and then puts them all back on the shelf and leaves the
store! And I thought to myself in amazement, Lady, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Next time, skip the croissants, take out your wallet, and actually buy the goddamned magazines before
you read them! Similarly, don't wait for that novel you've been wanting to read to hit the used-book
store, buy it now, while the royalties will not only do the author some good, but will actually help to keep
the entire mechanism of the science fiction publishing industry in operation.
Of course, none of this may be enough. Gordon and Warren and I may all be whistling past the
graveyard. Only time will tell.
But my own prediction is that science fiction as a viable genre will survive at least well into the next
century-and perhaps for considerably longer than that.
It was another bad year in the magazine market, although some of the turbulence caused by the
recent chaos in the domestic distribution network-when bigger distributors abruptly swallowed up the
small independent distributors-has quieted a bit, with things settling down (for the moment, at least) to
somewhere closer to a rest state. The print magazines that survived the storm are working on adopting
various bailing strategies to deal with the water they shipped (adjusting their "draw," for instance-sending
fewer issues to newsstands that habitually sell less, so that fewer issues overall need to be printed and
distributed in order to sell one issue, increasing the magazine's efficiency, and thereby lowering costs, and
so increasing profitability), and nervously eyeing the new storm clouds-in the form of new hikes in paper
costs coming up next year.
To move from the world of overheated metaphor to the world of cold figures, all the science fiction
magazines suffered further drops in their circulation figures in 1997. About the only cheerful thing that can
be said about this fact is that it was not as precipitous a drop as had been registered the year before,
when the distribution network problems really began to bite deep, and that a few of the magazines are
actually beginning to creep up again, although minusculely, in newsstand sales. Still, Asimov's Science
Fiction, Analog Science Fiction 6 Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy 6, Science Fiction, and Science Fiction