These days, a hit film usually scores over $50 million at the box office its first week, and it's not unusual for it to have as much as a fifty percent dropoff in the following weeks. In other words, hit films are almost never created via word-of-mouth anymore. Either the studio and reviewers have created enough buzz about a film before opening day to drive insane crowds into the theaters, or the film flops.

Says Scalzi:

What Star Wars could do that Speed Racer and other movies today generally can't is just keep running. From its first limited release on Memorial Day weekend, 1977, Star Wars stayed in movie theaters for nearly an entire year, and for that year, experienced very small drop-offs in business from weekend to weekend: Between ten and twenty percent each weekend. Compare this to last year's Transformers, which made $300 million in six weeks — and experienced 40 to 50 percent dropoffs in attendance each week. In both their eras, Star Wars and Transformers are state-of-the-art blockbusters, in terms of how they made their money — it's just that the state of the art evolved.

$20 Million Now, $20 Million Then [AMC]

Doctorow started the conversation by telling fans that the reason they're not finding his new book, Little Brother is because they're looking in the wrong place:

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section.

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

I have a friend with access to BookScan, which tracks book sales through stores and retail outlets, who at my request checked the aggregate bestseller list sales of adult fantasy and science fiction against the sale of YA fantasy and SF. Without mentioning specific numbers or titles, my friend says that last week, the top 50 YA SF/F bestsellers outsold the top 100 adult SF/F bestsellers (adult SF and F are separate lists) by two to one. So 50 YA titles are selling twice as much as 100 adult SF/F titles. The bestselling YA fantasy book last week (not a Harry Potter book) outsold the bestselling adult fantasy book by nearly four to one; the bestselling YA science fiction title sold three copies for every two copies of the chart-topping adult SF title. And as a final kick in the teeth, YA SF/F is amply represented at top of the general bestselling charts of YA book sales, whereas adult SF/F struggles to get onto the general bestselling adult fiction charts at all.

Young adult sections in bookstore — a parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness [Boing-Boing]
Why YA [Scalzi.com]

David Drake says that the genre of military SF contracted in the late 1990s, due to too many "opportunists" jumping into the genre, and the downsizing of the U.S. military.

I freely admit to being one of those who opportunistically jumped into the genre: I wrote Old Man's War in no small part because I walked into a bookstore in late 2000, saw lots of milSF (including books by what I called the "Three Davids" — Drake, Feintuch and Weber), and said "well, I guess I'll try writing that, then." But since OMW wasn't published until 2005, I can't be blamed for anything that happened before then. Not my fault, dude.

Do you think that the genre has rebounded since then?

My impression at the moment is that military science fiction is doing fine; the sales of the sub-genre are brisk relative to most other SF sub-genres, especially if you expand "milSF" to include the Halo series of books, which are pretty much outselling everything else in SF at the moment (give or take a Star Wars tie-in). We're all still getting our clocks cleaned by fantasy, but that's par for the course these days. But in SF, milSF is chugging along fine.

Is the audience for books like Old Man's War the same as the people who were reading Drake's books in the early 90s?

I'm sure there's overlap; from what we know of OMW's audience it contains a fairly wide spectrum of readers. I'm pretty sure I and David Drake (then and now) share some readers.

Now, if we grant that the Halo books qualify as milSF (which I think we should), I doubt that there's much overlap there at all, since in the early 90s the people who are reading the Halo books today were, like, five. What Drake and other milSF folks can hope for in that case is that the readers of the Halo books do a little stretching and try other books of a milSF bent (i.e., "Hey, this doesn't have Master Chief in it, but it still might be cool.")

There was a boom in military SF in the early 90s, which ended up harming the genre, Drake writes on his website. Military SF

had been so hot a genre that quite a number of opportunists had gotten into it despite their lack of knowledge of the military and/or skill at writing. I'd seen this coming (the downsizing of the US military had by itself removed millions of potential readers from barracks where they had a great deal of time on their hands), but I couldn't get anybody to listen to me.

Meanwhile, the military SF genre seems to have gained a new lease on life with John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy, and Richard Morgan's Broken Angels, a sequel to Altered Carbon about a space war. The Military SciFi site lists a bunch of new and forthcoming military SF books, including John C. Wright's Null-A Continuum, the anthology Warfear, Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet: Courageous and Starfist by David Sherman and the awesomely named Dan Cragg.

I wrote to David Drake to ask him if he thought military SF had bounced back, and here's what he said:

Yes, Military SF has rebounded, though it's also being confused with the rebound in space opera. Quite a lot of what's being called Military SF today—including my RCN (Leary/Mundy) series—is really space opera, in my opinion.

There was always a lot of space opera around, but media tie-ins filled that niche until the collapse of the Star Trek franchise. There's now room for Honor Harrington, Miles Vorkosigan, et al; and these series tend to be lumped in with Military SF.

But the US is also at war, and it's not politically correct nowadays to hate soldiers the way it was in the '70s when I started writing the Hammer series.

Some of what's appearing is patriotic and indeed triumphalist, the sort of thing that was a staple of Astounding under John W Campbell. That doesn't happen to be what I write (or ever wrote); but there's room for me too.

Mostly now I'm writing space opera and fantasy, though. That's not due to a change in the market so much as me having gotten my head a little straighter since I wrote Redliners. I'm now able to write what I want to write rather than feeling a compulsion to do harsher work.

The bad places are still there in my head — The Darkness is one of my most recent stories and one of my bleakest — but I'm not forced to look at them all the time.

The difference is intent: a focus on adventure rather than a focus on the military. There's an enormous amount of warfare in both the Skylark series (by Smith) and the Cities in Flight series (by Blish), but those are space operas. Whereas Starship Troopers (Heinlein) and Dorsai! (Dickson) are military SF. In my parlance.

The Old Man's War trilogy isn't becoming a tetralogy, insists Scalzi. Zoe's Tale, coming in August, is a stand-alone book featuring Zoe, the daughter of the trilogy's hero. In the OMW universe, habitable planets are rare and we have to fight aliens for them. You have to be over 75 to join the Colonial Defense Force and join the brutal, bloody conflict in space. No clue whether the story jumps ahead to Zoe's 75th birthday.

The third book in the OMW trilogy, The Last Colony, comes out in paperback around the same time as the hardcover Zoe's Tale. John Perry is living on a colony world with his wife Jane and his teenage daughter Zoe, when he and Jane are asked to govern a new colony called Roanoke.

Also coming soon in paperback: a new, updated version of Agent To The Stars, Scalzi's first (and maybe silliest) novel, about aliens who want a Hollywood agent. You can still read the original "shareware" version of Agent here. (Yes, Scalzi's a scab.)

In early 2009, Scalzi aims to put out The High Castle, a sequel to The Android's Dream with another Dickian title. The first novel followed Harry Creek, a State Department alien-wrangler who has to deliver the last genetically engineered "electric blue sheep" to an alien ceremony and avert an intergalactic war. No details on Castle, except that its first chapter is just as crazy as Dream's. So expect more chapter-long fart jokes, maybe.

Coming at some point later, but maybe still in 2009, are Untitled 2008 John Scalzi Novel, an untitled fantasy novella, and a short novella for an anthology called Godlike Machines.

Scalzi also has two nonfiction books coming out in 2008: A new edition of his astronomy book The Rough Guide To The Universe, and a collection of his online columns, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded.

Zoe's Tale cover art from Irene Gallo. [Whatever]

were still around as late as the mid-third millenium BC; they were hanging with the Sumerians and the Egyptians (or, well, could have). All those fossils? Laid down by Noah's Flood, my friends.

Just look at the way the museum painstakingly includes all the evidence of continental drift. It turns out the continents moved really quickly while they were underwater during Noah's flood. The science is painstakingly accurate except for the timetable. That is, there really was a supercontinent named Rodinia, which preceded Pangea and may have been the first global supercontinent. But it was 800,000 years ago, not a few thousand. (And it turns out Rodinia wasn't the birthplace of Godzilla's arch-enemy Rodan. Scalzi just made that up.)

Your Creation Museum Report [Whatever]
Flickr photoset, with surreal dioramas.