Archive for Science Fiction

| July 19, 2011
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Buying Books in the 1970s

a fondly remembered early purchase from Burdine's Department Store

I’ve been thinking a lot about changes in the world of books. My recent post, “The Death of Science Fiction, 1960 and Today,” talks about the current turmoil in the publishing and bookselling industry (i.e.: the liquidation of Borders), the transmogrification of the distribution system for books, and how the ebook original currently has much the same profile as the paperback original did back in 1960, when Earl Kemp published his memorable monograph, Who Killed Science Fiction?

All the cogitating has me looking back wistfully at my earliest book buying experiences, when I was just a young ‘un. My formative reading years, my own personal Golden Age of Science Fiction, pretty much extended from 1971, when I was seven, to 1982, the year I graduated high school. These were years when the paperback original was the undisputed king of science fiction prose formats, but well before the book superstores, the Barnes and Nobles and Borders and Books-a-Millions, had proliferated. I grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, not then a hot spot for independent bookstores (although there were a few around, particularly in more bohemian neighborhoods like Coconut Grove).

So where did I buy my books? (I bought many, many of them.) I’d like to take a little journey down Memory Lane, if only to educate my three young boys on their father’s early years.

(Me: Yeah, boys, when your daddy was a kid, I used to buy my paperback books at an itty-bitty newsstand that was twenty-five miles from my house, and I had to walk uphill through driving snow both ways–

Asher: But Daddy, didn’t you grow up in Miami?

Me: Uh, yeah. . . well, when I was a kid, I used to buy my paperback books at an itty-bitty newsstand twenty-five miles from my house, and I had to walk through hurricane-force WINDS both ways. . .)

Burdine’s Department Store: Burdine’s was one of four anchoring department stores at the 163rd Street Shopping Center in North Miami Beach (the other three were Richard’s, Jordan Marsh, and J.C. Penny). Burdine’s was the fanciest of the four, sort of our local Macy’s; it had a nice restaurant on the top floor, a linen-napkin kinda place, where my Grandmother Irene used to take me for special lunches. Back in them old days of the 1970s, upscale department stores had many more departments than just men’s clothing, women’s clothing, children’s clothing, home furnishings, and electronics. Some, like Burdine’s, had a books department. I don’t remember their department carrying any hardback books; or, if they did, it was only very few. What they did have was five or six rows of long, long metal racks of mass market paperbacks (referred to as pocket books, back then). They carried quite a few science fiction paperbacks, UFO and occult-related paperbacks, and true crime books.

I spent many pleasant interludes reading the back covers of paperbacks there while my mother or grandmother shopped in other departments. I remember as a ten year-old being pleasantly mystified by the cover illustrations and back cover descriptions on the Carlos Castaneda books, The Teachings of Don Juan, etc. These were labeled Non-fiction. Were the stories true? Were sorcerers real? My favorite Burdine’s purchase was the collection Science Fiction Terror Tales, edited by Groff Conklin, which I probably begged my dad to buy for me in 1970 or 1971 (it was published in 1969). The story I gravitated to most strongly was “Nightmare Brother” by Alan E. Nourse (reprinted from the February, 1953 issue of Astounding). But what really hooked me was the cover illustration: an injured hand clawing the book’s cover, a hand with a single, staring eyeball protruding from its back and trailing broken cyborg wires. Hard to top that when you’re seven years old.

Some Cigar Shop on Biscayne Boulevard: I can’t recall the name of this place. It was located on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami, in the same shopping strip as the very popular Pumperniks Delicatessen (a favorite of the great Robert Sheckley’s, whenever he was in the area). The cigar shop was small and narrow. When you walked in, the right side of the store was taken up with glass counters and cabinets displaying a multitude of colorful cigar boxes. The left side of the store was given over to wall racks of paperback books. My father used to take me in there. The one book I remember him buying for me there was a significant one — my first collection of Ray Bradbury stories, A Medicine for Melancholy. I needed a book to take with me on the bus going from North Miami Beach down U.S. 1 to Sea Camp in the upper Keys. I was in fifth grade; this was my first sleep-away camp experience (and I got stung by jellyfish). I picked the book because the montage of images on its cover featured a little Brontosaurus. Reading the book on the bus trip led me to fall in love with Ray Bradbury, who became my “entry drug” to SF and fantasy short fiction.

hot stuff for an 11 year-old; and an enduring classic

Worldwide News and Books: This place was a treasure trove. It was a huge newsstand in a modest strip of shops on 163rd Street in North Miami Beach, near N.E. 16th Avenue, within reasonable bicycling distance from my house. Aside from newspapers from all over the nation and many other countries, they also carried a gigantic stock of paperbacks, with an excellent selection of science fiction. I first encountered a new type of book there, trade paperbacks. At the time, I didn’t know that’s what they were called; I thought of them as “big paperbacks.” Some of the most exciting and enticing trade paperbacks I mooned over included Michael Ashley’s History of the Science Fiction Magazines series (volume one covered 1926-1935 and volume two covered 1936-1945; he’s now up to 1970) and Charles Platt’s marvelous and eye-opening SF:Rediscovery series, which introduced me to many classic works I otherwise would have overlooked. Foremost among these was Robert Silverberg’s magisterial Nightwings. I may have first picked it up because of the very pretty and very naked winged lady on the cover (I believe I was eleven at the time and so may be excused for my prurient interest). But I reread it again and again because it was a masterpiece of imagination and characterization. It remains one of my favorite novels (and I still have my original copy, lovely pastel boobies and all).

The Arts and Sciences Bookstore: This was a stuffy place. Both stuffy because its aisles were narrow, dim, dusty, and claustrophobia-inducing, and because it took its name very seriously. One of north Dade County’s only independent, full service bookstores, it was located on 125th Street, a modest storefront in the middle of North Miami’s original shopping district. I recall that most of their stock was scholarly; they didn’t have much popular fiction. I think popular fiction may have given the owner hives. What they did have, however, was literary criticism, and their stock occasionally included the odd volume on science fiction. I’m pretty sure I bought my copy of James Gunn’s Alternate Worlds: the Illustrated History of Science Fiction here. I’m positive I found my treasured copy of The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton, edited by Clifton’s biggest fan, Barry N. Malzberg (along with Martin H. Greenberg), here.

More to come tomorrow, including A&M Comics and Books, Starship Enterprises, the Walden’s Books at the 163rd Street Shopping Center, and my first, unrequited love!

continue to part two

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , , , ,
| July 18, 2011
4 comments

The Death of Science Fiction, 1960 and Today

Chicken Little

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading through the more than seventy questionnaire responses that make up the bulk of Earl Kemp’s 1960 fan publication, Who Killed Science Fiction? In the wake of the 1958 implosion of the American News Company, then the primary distribution source for magazines, and the dramatic and severe contraction in science fiction magazines that quickly followed (part of a general contraction in the publication of fiction magazines of all types), Kemp drew up a simple questionnaire comprising five questions:

1) Do you feel that magazine science fiction is dead?

2) Do you feel that any single person, action, incident, etc., is responsible for the present situation?

3) What can we do to correct it?

4) Should we look to the original paperback as a point of salvation?

5) What additional remarks, pertinent to the study, would you like to contribute?

Kemp mailed his questionnaires to 108 authors, editors, publishers, and fans who were prominent in the science fiction field, essentially the entire professional and semi-professional community. He received 71 responses back, an impressive percentage. Marty Halpern, in his blog More Red Ink, has written a fine account of Kemp’s efforts and shares some of the highlights from the materials Kemp received. The Compleat and Unexpurgated Who Killed Science Fiction?, including follow-on materials collected in the decades following the work’s original publication in 1960, is available as a free download and is also newly available in hard copy from Merry Blacksmith Press. Whoever is interested in the history of popular fiction publishing, the current evolution of and turmoil in publishing, science fiction writers talking shop and speaking their minds, or jumping into the world of professional fiction writing or publishing should pick up a copy, both for the surprisingly candid and oftentimes catty views on display and for the invaluable historical perspective the book provides.

Between the birth of Amazing Stories in March of 1926 and the late 1950s demise of the American News Company, science fiction had been primarily a magazine field. All of the seminal short fiction and nearly all of the important novels had originally been published in pulp magazines or digest-sized magazines such as Astounding Stories, Galaxy, Fantastic Stories, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Having their previously serialized novels republished in hardback or, following WW2, mass market paperback brought in a little side income for writers such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and A. E. van Vogt. They, and several dozen less well-known writers, earned the bulk of their writing incomes from magazine sales. Science fiction experienced one of its periodic booms in 1953, and the number of monthly or bimonthly magazines published in the field mushroomed from about a dozen to more than sixty. Suddenly, writers who were capable of being both prolific and at least moderately competent (such as the very young Robert Silverberg) were able to make a handsome living writing science fiction for the magazines. But when the magazine field contracted following 1958 and the numbers of monthly and bimonthly titles fell to a little more than half a dozen, many writers pulled out of science fiction entirely or (like Asimov and Alfred Bester) opted to devote the bulk of their energies to other, ancillary careers. A few, like Silverberg, took an extended hiatus from writing science fiction; Silverberg himself would not return to the field for another five years.

The gloom in the science fiction community circa 1960 is palpable in the pages of Who Killed Science Fiction? The majority of respondents to Kemp’s questionnaire did not expect the magazine field to ever rebound. Opinions varied widely on primary culprits — the editors and publishers blamed the disruption of the distribution system, the fans tended to blame a perceived recycling of science fictional ideas in the stories and novels, and the writers blasted some editors for editorial rigidity, some fellow writers for churning out crap, some readers for only buying the same old crap, and Sputnik, the latter being blamed for shifting readers’ interest in space travel from the pages of the science fiction magazines to the pages of the newspapers.

Perhaps most relevant to current publishing trends and events, respondents were also divided on whether the burgeoning field of paperback originals would prove to be the salvation of written science fiction. Some saw paperback originals as a ray of light, primarily due to their ability to stay on shelves and spinner racks longer than the few weeks afforded magazines. But many felt that paperback originals could never effectively replace what had been lost with the death of so many magazines. They felt that the editors who controlled the content of paperback originals had little familiarity with the science fiction field, certainly much, much less than the longstanding magazine editors, and that they generally tended to publish dreck, generic adventure fiction disguised as science fiction by the addition of a few spaceships and green, tentacled aliens. The sense of condescension expressed by a few of the responding writers and editors towards the producers of paperback originals is visceral and, in retrospect, a little stunning. Some expressed fears that whatever economic promise paperback originals seemed to offer would be squandered by the then-current flood of low quality books, which would drive off readers and permanently sully the (already low) reputation of science fiction.

Paperback originals were the insurgent, disruptive publishing technology of 1960, just as ebooks are today’s. The collapse of the American News Company and its piecemeal, inadequate replacement by a patchwork quilt of local and regional magazine distributors has its modern counterpart in the Borders Books bankruptcy, the massive contraction that has occurred in the numbers of independent bookstores, and the looming Armageddon that many professionals in traditional publishing fear will soon devastate their industry, a technological and economic counterpoint to the recent dismal fate of the recording industry.

What has been the bread-and-butter for most professional writers of popular fiction since 1960? Paperback originals. What publishing platform is currently undergoing the quickest and most severe shrinkage in sales? Mass market paperbacks. (Hardbacks and trade paperbacks are either declining much more gradually or are maintaining their sales levels.) The format which represented the swift, clever mammals eating the eggs of the lumbering dinosaurs in 1960 is now itself the endangered dinosaur, sliding into extinction.

Ebooks are now about where paperback originals were in 1960. Many professional writers and observers of the industry throw up their hands in horror and moan, “Ebooks will be the death of fiction! They are a flood of dreck! There’s no quality control, no gatekeepers! The hordes of the bad will drive out the few that are worthwhile!” Yet ebooks, including some ebook originals, are on an opposite sales trajectory from that of mass market paperbacks.

If I have to make a prediction, it is that new ranks of gatekeepers will arise, critics and reviewers, some amateur, some paid, who will help us sort the wheat from the chaff. It’s already happening. An exponentially increasing “tyranny of choice” will call forth a solution, and I don’t believe the solution will be a widespread turning away from the pleasure of reading a good book. I believe a wider range of stories and novels will be made available to readers, and many writers who have found themselves walled off from traditional publishing by less-than-stellar sales records will take advantage of new avenues through which to reach those readers.

I’ll close with what I hope is a comforting thought in the midst of the present chaos. Who Killed Science Fiction? appeared in 1960. By 1965, five years later, science fiction had embarked upon one of the biggest booms and most creatively fertile periods in its history.

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Fun links of the day:

J. G. Ballard’s house in Shepperton is for sale; fan club wants to buy it

Most ubiquitious artist in America pees on Winnie the Pooh statue in Disneyland

Category: Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: , , ,
| July 14, 2011
2 comments

George Alec Effinger’s Thousand Deaths


I’ve posted the Afterword I wrote for the third Golden Gryphon Press collection of George Alec Effinger’s short fiction, A Thousand Deaths. The essay is a reflection on how George’s favorite of his novels, The Wolves of Memory (included in the collection), ended up being a foretelling of the grinding events of the final decade of his sadly shortened life.

Marty Halpern, the last editor George worked with prior to George’s death in April, 2002, was the driving force behind bringing the best of George’s short fiction back into print. Marty (who also happens to be the best editor I’ve ever worked with — he edited The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501 for me at Tachyon Publications) posted a terrific three part essay on his blog, More Red Ink, describing his role in the publication of the three GAE collections at Golden Gryphon. Here’s Part One, regarding Budayeen Nights; Part Two, regarding George Alec Effinger Live! from Planet Earth; and Part Three, regarding A Thousand Deaths. All three Golden Gryphon collections featured gorgeous wrap-around covers by my favorite artist, John Picacio.

By the way, Marty is available for freelance work, either line editing or book doctoring. The man has the eyes of an eagle and is persnickety in all the best ways. If you need an editor, I couldn’t recommend a better one.

Several years before I wrote the Afterword for A Thousand Deaths, I wrote a rambling and much more personal version of my friendship with George Alec Effinger and how I did what I could to help him during the last few years of his life. I published the piece on my first website from 2003-2006 (after which said website went defunct). That piece, “Remembering George Alec Effinger,” can be found here, courtesy of the Internet Way-Back Machine.

Category: Big Easy, Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: , , ,
| July 13, 2011
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New Upcoming Project Pages Added

images of Krampus, bad luck spirit

I’ve updated my Upcoming Projects page, adding more information on three novels I hope will see print or pixel in the not so distant future — Fire on Iron, The Bad Luck Spirits’ Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and Ghostlands. I found a gorgeous, haunting image of the Washington Monument partially obscured by snow to illustrate my capsule summary of Ghostlands. Take a look!

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Science Fiction | Tags: , ,
| July 8, 2011
5 comments

Farewell to the Space Age As We Knew It


_________________________________________________________________________

It’s over.

With the final launch of the last of the space shuttles today, we are witnessing the end of “NASA Classic,” manned missions into space aboard vehicles designed and built by the government-space-industrial complex. An age that began in 1960, four years before I was born, is coming to a close.

That’s not to say that Americans will never again travel into space, or that they will only do so as passengers on rockets built by other nations. But whenever Americans eventually return to space, it will be thanks to a mode of development and procurement far different from the top-down, heavily bureaucratic, NASA-centric model we’ve been familiar with up till now.

It’s odd for me to think that the last moon voyage is as historically distant to my boys as the final years of the Herbert Hoover Administration were to me when I was their age. They haven’t yet thought to ask me why we stopped going to the moon; not even Levi, my oldest, who has shown a strong interest in astronomy and the planets. Whenever they get around to asking, I suppose I’ll answer, “We stopped going because we’d done it already. We brought back our moon rocks. Just like the shirt says — ‘My parents went to the moon, and all I got was these dumb rocks and bragging rights to beating the Soviet Union.'”

I’ll tell them we’ll go back to the moon when we have a real reason to go back. Meaning, whenever someone figures out how to make money from going there and doing things there.

In the meantime, we have J. G. Ballard and Barry N. Malzberg to read.

Younger SF fans may not realize this (nor particularly care), but there was a time when both those authors were regarded by many “traditional” SF readers, those who venerated Campbell’s Astounding and Heinlein and Van Vogt, as heretics, traitors to the true faith of science fiction. Because they didn’t believe the hype of the Space Age. Because they, unlike most of their peers, predicted it would be a transitory phase, that the public and the sponsoring governments would grow bored of it, and that it would ultimately prove to be far more expensive than we were willing to pay, given the limited goals set forth. They also anticipated that organizational and personal pathologies would be among the factors to grind the Space Age to a halt.

Ballard, great fan of the Surrealists, left us painterly images of the ruins of the Space Age, stories set in a Cape Kennedy as abandoned and desolate as Chernobyl. Gary Westfahl has a perceptive essay on this.

Ballard, unfortunately, did not live long enough to watch the final Space Shuttle flight lift off today. Barry Malzberg, however, is still very much with us. His trio of early 1970s novels on the collapse of the space program, Beyond Apollo, The Falling Astronauts, and Revelations, focused on how the intersections of the bureaucratic rigidities of NASA, the psychological vulnerabilities of the astronauts, and the unforeseen terrors of the extraterrestrial environment would lead to personal and organizational disaster and decay. Barry’s biggest “I-told-you-so” moment came in 2007, when NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak drove cross country wearing a diaper and packing a BB gun to assault her rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut. If Hollywood ever makes a bio pic based on Lisa Marie Nowak’s story, Barry should get an acknowledgement in the credits.

Barry, in observance of the day, I raise a glass of Tang in your honor!

Category: Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
| July 6, 2011
Comments Off on New Essay Added to Articles Page

New Essay Added to Articles Page

I’ve posted a new essay, A New Hope, A Different Tack, to the Articles Page. It’s a bit of “where I’ve been” mixed with some “where I am now” and a dash of “where I hope to be soon.” I hope you enjoy it.

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: , , , , ,
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