On Dec 11, 2013, at 10:13 AM, Barry Ruck <[email protected]> wrote:
> It is strange as I love SF, and still see some amateur writers putting it > out. So just when did the market change ? Any ideas ? It's started in the 1980s. Phil Farmer's Gods of Riverworld didn't rise to the numbers of the early titles. The Dayworld series didn't rise to that level. Frank Herbert died in '86. Robert Heinlein died in '88. Asimov in '92. So the real heavy hitters in terms of bestsellers left us. Kim Stanley Robinson and William Gibson wrote very successful works and hit lists, but they didn't have the longevity. More over, licensed works (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) were pushing midlist authors out of the big houses into Baen, Ace, DAW, etc. At the same time fantasy was rising quickly. Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson were already rising when I joined in and for a while the three of us were ripping up the best seller lists. Jim Rigney (Robert Jordan) was doing Conan novels and in 1990 published the first Wheel of Time and he joined in. By the time George R. R. Martin left TV after 9 years and returned to prose writing with A Game of Thrones, Robert Salvatori, Tracy Hickman, Margaret Weis, and a dozen others had become very popular. So, the growth in fantasy arrived in sync with the decline in science fiction in the marketplace. Part of the problem is that real life science made a lot of science fiction less "wow." You read E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark or Lensmen stuff and it's "quaint" because most of the science in it is just wrong based on what we know how. It's fun, like reading old H. Ridder Hagarrd stuff about "darkest Africa," but it's just wrong. When someone wrote about 2013 back in the 1960s you start giggling when they have a character looking for a "telephone booth," or reference any dozen other things that were extrapolations from their contemporaneous world. More, a lot of the SF space is still Star Trek, Star Wars, and other licenses. Lastly, the midlist is a memory. My backlist is the midlist. So is the backlist of every other really successful author, leaving little room. Sure, Baen, DAW, TOR, Ace, etc. still publish, but the number of titles compared to the "golden age" is slim, and few receive much notice. Fantasy on the other hand, is where SF was in the 1960s/70s, when Farmer, Herbert, Heinline, Asimove, etc. regularly put titles on the bestseller lists. Will it come back? I have no idea. Best, R.E.F.
