It makes sense that we'd end up talking about sci-fi magazines during Bookvortex week; after all, sci-fi pulps and magazines are responsible for publishing the first published works by writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, as well as early work by Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, so it'd pretty hard to imagine science fiction without them. But, as Warren Ellis, amongst others, has pointed out, the magazines' audiences are shrinking, and their impact blunted. Instead of just surrendering to the inevitability of the death of print, though, we thought we'd offer some possible ways for the magazines to survive for a little while longer, at least...

Sell Out (1)
If Marvel Comics can manage to become the subject of a $4 billion buyout, then I can't help but feel that sf magazines have done something wrong to be facing extinction. But what is that something? It might be the lack of repeatable franchise characters; one-off stories don't necessarily scream "multi-movie possibilities" to lazy producers looking for the next Spider-Man or Batman, after all. But maybe the fault is that sf magazines aren't doing the screaming themselves. Superhero comics have ensured their immediate future by, whether intentionally or accidentally, turning themselves into idea farms for other media. Why can't SF magazines do the same thing? They may not own the IP of everything they publish, but they own the venue: Couldn't magazines survive by becoming, essentially, agents and talent scouts for television and movies as much as publishing venues in their own right?

Go Highbrow Fetish Object
Where is the science fiction McSweeneys? A magazine that changes format and size with each new issue so that every edition is constantly an event for more than just its content? Maybe that would be too much for some longtime collectors, but by making each issue more of a standalone book instead of "just another" edition, there's potential for luring in new readers, even if it's just on novelty value alone. And, let's face it: Shouldn't a science fiction magazine of all things try and look new and unexpected as often as possible?

Sell Out (2)
Saying something like "Finding alternate revenue streams" sounds a little too much like I know what I'm talking about, but let's ignore that for a second and ask: Why can't magazines like Asimov's and Analog leverage their brand into merchandise based on, for example, the amazing cover art from years gone by, and use that to fund the magazine? Why don't we see Interzone licensing its name to Syfy for some Twilight Zone-esque anthology (Or, getting back to comics for a second, a comic book version of the magazine and/or adaptations of some of the most famous stories in the magazine's history)? Are the magazines' histories really worth so little?

Embrace The Mainstream
Maybe this is just my experience and bias talking, but it seems to me that sci-fi literature - and especially sci-fi magazines - are content to stay within their existing niche market, head down and hope for the best. There's no advertising (Considering the likely cost, understandable), and seemingly no outreach to anyone who's not already aware of the existence of the magazines. Considering the mainstream success of SF movies or TV shows like FlashForward and Fringe (Both of which offer more esoteric science fiction ideas than, say, Heroes or V), this seems more than a little frustrating. Am I missing various online efforts to entice people to read The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction, or is there really no attempt being made to get the word out?

Celebrity Endorsement
Four words: Megan Fox's Astounding Stories.
Like that wouldn't raise readership. Sadly.

Nathan Wiseman-Trowse, Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at the University of Northampton, is currently soliciting papers for the conference "Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore." In his call for papers, Wiseman-Trowse asserts that academic explorations of Moore's works have thus far been fragmentary, and that the conference will be the first academic event dedicated to discussing Moore's literary and cultural contributions. Topics he is looking to cover include:

* Comic revisionism and the graphic novel
* Comics and literature
* The political philosophy of Moore's canon
* Moore's relationship to the mainstream comic industry
* Adaptations of Moore's work to screen and other media
* Psychogeography and place in Moore's work
* Magick and spirituality
* Site-specific events
* Pornography and erotica in Moore's work
* Fandom and reception
* The underground press
* Collaborations and networks
* Music and musical collaborations
* Intertextuality and referentiality

If you've got an insight on Moore you're dying to share, submit an abstract of 300 words or less to Nathan Wiseman-Trowse by December 4th. The conference itself will be held at the University of Northampton on May 28th and 29th, 2010.

Call for Papers: Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore [via Forbidden Planet]

The Washington Post reported on the recent 2009 Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference, where sci-fi authors like Greg Bear and Catherine Asaro discussed their ideas in front of security experts:

The cost to taxpayers is minimal. The writers call this "science fiction in the national interest," and they consult pro bono. They've been exploring the future, and "we owe it to mankind to come back and report what we've found," said writer Arlan Andrews, who also is an engineer with the Navy in Corpus Christi, Tex.

Andrews founded an organization of sci-fi writers to offer imaginative services in return for travel expenses only. Called Sigma, the group has about 40 writers. Over the years, members have addressed meetings organized by the Department of Energy, the Army, Air Force, NATO and other agencies they care not to name. At first, "to pass the Beltway giggle-factor test," Andrews recruited only sci-fi writers who had conventional science or engineering chops on their résumés. Now about a third of the writers have PhDs.

The benefit of talking to the SF authors, according to the attendees? Their fresh take on situations:

"We're stuck in a paradigm of databases," [Chief information officer for Homeland Security's Office of Operations Coordination & Planning, Harry] McDavid said later. "How do we jump out of our infrastructure and start conceptualizing those threats? That's very cool." ...The department can't point to a gadget on the drawing board that was inspired by one of the novelists. But Rolf Dietrich, Homeland Security's deputy director of research, says the writers help managers think more broadly about projects, especially about potential reactions and unintended consequences. "They have a different way of looking at things," Dietrich said.

I have to admit loving the idea of using SF authors to shape US government policy. Well, as long as they don't include Orson Scott Card in any future policy discussions, of course.

U.S. Mission for Sci-Fi Writers: Imagine That [Washington Post]

The Los Angeles Times has an interview with Silverberg, which talks about his stature as the oldest of the writers associated with the New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s. Both the article's writer, Scott Timberg, and writer/critic Jonathan Lethem, attest to the awesomeness of Silverberg's 1972 magnum opus Dying Inside:

In truth, it feels more like Philip Roth: The narrator, David Selig, is the sort of angst-ridden Jewish man Alexander Portnoy might have known. Selig is smart enough to peddle term papers to lazy Columbia students, and he spends his free time drinking with a roommate, reading the thoughts of pretty women, and trying to repair his tattered relationship with his sister.

"Dying Inside" never found a wide audience, but it's been hailed by those who know it. Michael Chabon has called it "one of those rare novels that manages to be at once dazzling and tender." The book, which the New York Times once called "the perfect science fiction novel for people who don't like science fiction," was reissued last month by Tor.

Part of what makes Dying Inside so brilliant, says the Times, is that David Selig's telepathic power starts to fade as he gets older, changing from a radio station that never turns off to a "Joycean stream of consciousness." And this fading gift serves, says Lethem, as "an intimate allegory of the artist's quandary."

The article is worth checking out, for Silverberg's thoughts on his "love-hate relationship with science fiction." And what killed the "quixotic literary experiment" of the New Wave: the popularity of Star Wars. [L.A. Times]

Both authors were clearly fans of one another's work; the format was something akin to a very digressive chat show with Matt Fraction hosting, feeding in questions and moving things along. Chabon energetically defended and riffed on the idea of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who could break out the deepest geek shibboleths at need, talked about encounters with Stan Lee and Will Eisner, and generally paid homage to the culture that had energized a lot of his work.

If there was a narrative line to the appearance, it was the tale of Chabon's gradual coming-out as a genre fiction fan and author. He painted a vivid picture of a lit/nerd's progress. He was born in 1963, and grew up during a Lee/Kirby hegemony, immersed in genre fiction of all kinds - Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, Moorcock, Leiber (if I judge Gentlemen of the Road's influences correctly). In the days pre-internet, even pre-VHS, fans of pulpy genre work had a lonelier watch to keep, turning out for only the rare face-to-face moments at screenings and conventions.

When he tried to bring this material to the MFA fiction program at U. C. Irvine, he was frozen out - it was still the age of Carver, of brief, lapidary studies of broken marriages. He made a breakout debut with Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but the material that had such a hold on his imagination and sense of identity only gradually made its way back into his fiction - comic book allusions in Wonder Boys, where he pushed some of his genre passion onto a fictional alter ego, a Lovecraftian author name August Van Zorn (who at one point was purported to have written a collection entitled The Abominations of Plunkettsburg). Then the early slipstream of Werewolves in Their Youth, then the full-on comics fest of Kavalier and Klay, which at the time seemed like a dead-end project. He credits comics fans as the early adopters of the work that helped turn it into a success.

This narrative was framed within a larger story of a kind of nerd cultural insurgency by which the literary and artistic worlds are gradually being made safe for geekdom. Since 2000, we've seen Lethem's Fortress of Solitude followed, Susannah Clarke, Kelly Link, and so many new slipstream authors we're at a point where it's hard to count them all. As staple SF magazines like Asimov's Science Fiction lost prominence, McSweeney's took on their role in a high-art guise. Chabon edited McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, where he deliberately mixed genre authors and literary fiction writers.

He also described the backlash his fantasy novel Summerland received, and pointed out that on the other side of the coin, a high-art author like Cormac McCarthy can write Westerns and post-apocalyptic SF, but will never get moved over to that side of the bookstore, because "if it's good, it can't be SF."

But if it's a gradual struggle, victory feels inevitable. The hardened boundaries between high and low culture handed down from the early 20th century can't stand forever. As Chabon pointed out, 1963 was a year with a powerful cohort including Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo Del Toro, and Jonathem Lethem is only a year behind. Today, the closeted nerd artists have now infiltrated culture's governing institutions as editors, studio execs, and reviewers. Today, our boundary-annihilating president collects Conan the Barbarian comics.

Image via ToFuGuns.

I used to love books myself, until the fateful day when my father showed up with two knives and two women. “It’s knives and women for you from now on,” he said, giving me one of each. “Books have nothing to teach you. When you were a child, you spake as a child. But now that you’ve become a man, it’s time to put away childish things.”

“Uh, where did you learn that saying?” I asked him.

He turned his girl around. “It was carved on this woman’s back with a knife.”

And I couldn’t argue with that, especially because his knife was a lot bigger than mine. But some of you probably would, because you love contemplating the future of your darling books, and weeping and gnashing your teeth and donning sackcloth over it. Well, I’m here to put your worries to rest with my precognitive powers. And yes, I am serious about just about everything that follows, and once history has proven me correct, you will all have to respect me and James Randi will owe me one million dollars.

All right, so, the problem as I see it—or the alleged problem, anyway—is a combination of the fact that people aren’t reading and that ebooks aren’t catching on.

But I submit to you that neither of these things is true! First, it may indeed be the case (and almost certainly is) that people are consuming more television, movies, and video games than literature. But it is difficult indeed to believe that no one cares about books if you have ever tried to find a place to sit down at your local Barnes & Noble, particularly on a Saturday afternoon. In my experience, lots of people enjoy books, and they all snag the good chairs before I do, no matter how early I get there.

As for ebooks, it’s true that the Kindle and its kin have not become killer apps on the scale of their cousins, the BlackBerry and iPod and even the Nintendo DS. And this is problem a result of the fact that they still cost one million dollars, coupled with the tiresome refrain that book lovers have to join in on every time the subject of ebooks comes up, about how they “just love holding a real, physical object” and “the feel of the pages crinkling between their fingertips” and “you can’t hide nudie pictures in a Kindle as easily” and “it’s harder to start a fire with one, too, despite the name.”

To which I reply that we once said the same thing about CDs and videotapes and the floppy drives in our Macs and horses (“Oooh, daddy, I’ll never ride in a motor-car! I love Chestnut too much! His big, strong flanks, and his soft brown hair, and his sad eyes—I’ll never stop riding Chestnut, daddy! Never!”). And now some people do still use CDs and videotapes and horses and maybe even floppy drives, just as some people will continue to use real books—but they’re in the minority, as I imagine real-book users will eventually be, too.

And I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be the Kindle that does it, although I think it’s undeniably serving a purpose by pushing e-reader technology forward. More likely—barring some Singularity-type development that frees us from having to use any kind of physical artifact at all—is that as we continue to move rapidly toward portable computing, we’re going to see increasing convergence between BlackBerries and iPods and DSes and Kindles, so that whatever the brand of the device you’re carrying, it serves as your phone, your email client, your media player, your gaming device, and your e-reader.

A consequence of this, and of the present collapse we’re seeing of our old-media institutions—in particular, print journalism—is that someone is going to finally find a profitable way to deliver quality writing over the Internet.

It’s been almost taken for granted for the last fifteen years, since the Internet took off, that you can’t make substantial money off of online writing because there’s too much out there available for free. But I am pretty sure all that “free” content has actually been provided on the backs of still-functioning old-media businesses—e.g., the AP and Reuters are still around to provide the news you read for free on Google because they’re still selling subscriptions to newspapers.

Once those newspapers can’t afford those subscriptions, though, what happens to the AP and that news you’re reading for free? Same goes for the blogs you read for free now—the bloggers performing the best independent work are doing so because they’re being paid by print institutions like The Atlantic. The content of a lot of other blogs, like our own dear io9 and the rest of Gawker Media, is in part independent but also largely composed of posts inspired by newspaper and magazine articles. I don’t know the numbers, but while io9’s editors certainly have the ability to act as firsthand newsgatherers, I suspect they don’t have the budget and time to do that.

So what’s going to happen? I can tell you one thing: If old-media businesses can’t provide online content anymore, we’re not going to stop wanting that content. We’re deeply addicted to it now, and that need is not going to be served by funny cat pictures and Cosby Show bloopers alone. Necessity is invention’s mom, and we’re going to invent a way to pay to read things online, on our handheld KindlePods. We won’t have to pay much, either, given the large number of subscribers out there. Would you pay $12 a year for access to all the Gawker Media sites through some kind of encrypted RSS feed? I think you would.

And once that kind of system is in place, we’re only a small step from delivering text in larger blocks—short stories, novels, serialized fiction, etc.—over it, too.

And that, people, is what’s going to happen to your precious books. Before your lifetime is out (unless you have a terminal illness or get hit by a car, in which case I am very sorry), you’ll be buying and reading them digitally. Me, I’ll be buying them with the one million dollars James Randi will owe me for predicting the future so well. I want it delivered in a briefcase, Randi!

(Note: In the meantime, those of you who luuuurve your “real” books should check out commenter Braak’s new novel, which I can personally attest to being a Work of High Quality. And he is absolutely not paying me to say this—nor did he even ask me to—although I will probably make him buy me a beer later, if some of you buy a copy. WHICH YOU SHOULD DO.)

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

Verne's early life was a lot less glamorous than the steampunk fantasies of the 2000 SciFi Channel series The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. Verne had to deal with intense rejection, his failures becoming so frustrating that he once threw his manuscripts on an open flame before they were rescued by his wife. No negative feedback was more devastating than the one administered to his first completed full length novel, the gloomy Paris in the Twentieth Century. William Butcher's 1994 biography recalls Hetzel's letter:

...Hetzel categorically refused the novel, writing that he found nothing good in it: "frankly nothing...a disaster...almost as if by a child...a failure...painful thing, so dead...inferior on nearly every line...mediocre...no real originality...no wit."

The letter went on to say:

"I was not expecting perfection — to repeat, I knew that you were attempting the impossible — but I was hoping for something better. ... In this piece, there is not a single issue concerning the real future that is properly resolved, no critique that hasn’t already been made and remade before. I am surprised at you ... [it is] lacklustre and lifeless."

Five hundred words later, Hetzel had rejected what would become the most successful French novel ever in the United States. Hetzel kept a tight rein over Verne, encouraging him to avoid any novels with sex, any novels with technology, and any novels even set in France!

Originally begun in 1860, the novel certainly isn't Verne's finest work, but it is a far more interesting read now than it may have been at the time. Sure, some of Verne's predictions for the 1960s did end up up off the mark, but he did foresee street taxis, a metro system, information flowing through fax machines, and the electric chair.

Presumed lost, the novel was discovered by Verne's great-grandson in the early 1990s and was translated by preeminent scholar Richard Howard. As an anti-capitalist vision of the future, it might have some resonance today, and you can buy it here.

I first met Gardner twenty-umpty-some years ago at a Philcon. He was sitting in a hallway, surrounded by fans, giving a dramatic reading of Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, in order to demonstrate that sections of it had the same cadence as Longfellow's "Hiawatha." (Go ahead, try it for yourself. Chapter XI: "Stand with me on man's old planet,/gazing north when sky has darkened . . . Here is life or here is dying;/only sin is lack of trying./Grab your picks and grab your shovels;/dig latrines and build your hovels - " And so on.) He was a one-man carnival.

We surveyed the stories tagged "science fiction" in the New Yorker's archive, and the results are below. It's interesting to see the rise and fall of certain authors. Also, some themes seem to hold sway over the years: a high proportion of these science fiction stories are satires or parodies, including two cyberpunk parodies in a row. And there are two stories about insomnia and outsourcing sleep.

The New Yorker only published three science fiction stories prior to 1978, when it started flirting with the genre actively. Its main love object in the beginning? Polish satirist Stanislaw Lem.

Here's our complete history:

1978

The New Yorker goes on its first Stanislaw Lem kick, publishing three of his fictional book reviews within a four-month period. He reviews the non-existent books Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVII an SS novel by Alfred Zellerman; Non Serviam, a weird science book by James Dobb; and two books about how physics proves nothing can ever happen, by Cezar Kouska: De Impossibilitate Vivae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi. (All three reviews appear in the book A Perfect Vacuum.

1980

"Nana Hami Ba Reba" by Garrison Keillor. A satire. In the year 1984, everything in America has gone Metric, including Metric Time and a weird Metric language. The main character, responsible for this transformation, gets expelled from this perfect future and zapped back in time to the 1950s.

1981

Another Stanislaw Lem kick. The New Yorker publishes four of his satirical Ijon Tichy stories within a three-month period: "The Washing Machine Tragedy," "Phools," "Let Us Save The Universe" and "Project Genesis." These stories, collected in Memoirs of a Space Traveler, are more Earth-bound than earlier Tichy stories. They take out-of-control technology to its furthest extreme, including crazy washing machines and mind-controlling computers.

"Snorkeling" by Nicholson Baker. An executive "beats fatigue by employing drones to sleep on his behalf," says the Guardian.

1982

"Spoons In The Basement" by Ursula K. LeGuin. A woman comes across a set of valuable apostle spoons while cleaning her house. She accepts them as a gift from the house. Much later, she discovers a hidden "second basement" in the house, where three unmarried women live, along with an obnoxious middle-aged married couple. She lets the three women stay, but kicks out the married couple. After that, she can't find the spoons, and it seems the house has taken them back.

1984

"Offering" by Stainslaw Lem. The last gasp of the New Yorker's romance with Lem: a fake ad for the Extelopedia, a volume that contains information about the future.

1987

"Plan 10 From Zone R-3" by Polly Frost. A parody of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, despite the title referencing Plan Nine From Outer Space. A weird plague turns everybody in a town into a real-estate agent clutching a Filofax.

1988

"Worlds Of Love" by Jeffrey Shaffer. Satire, sort of. A series of funny personal ads with silly scifi themes, like "Star Warrior" and "Pardon my Polarity."

"Numeromancer" by Michael Caruso. A parody of William Gibson's Neuromancer, in which cyborgs play baseball.

1992

"Cyberprez" by Richard Liebmann-Smith. Another parody of Gibson's Neuromancer, this one touching on the fact that then-President Bush admitted taking tranquilizers.

"Offloading For Mrs. Schwartz" by George Saunders. A man who creates porno-horror holographic "modules" for people to experience grieves for his wife. He steals memories from a woman in a nursing home, then ends up selling his own memories. This story appeared in Tina Brown's first issue as editor, but a previous editor had bought it.

1994

"Several Birds" by David Foster Wallace. A homeless tranny junkie lives in 21st. century Massachusetts. The junkie steals a woman's artificial heart by mistake, gets involved in a Quebec-separatist assassination, kicks drugs, goes through withdrawal and hallucinates. A much different version of this piece appears as part of Infinite Jest, Wallace's mega-novel.

1995

"Paper Lantern" by Stuart Dybek. A researcher is building a time machine, but accidentally burns the lab down by leaving a bunsen burner going. A fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant warns him too late, and he realizes his ex-lover's nude photos are being burned up in that lab fire. (He'd falsely told the ex-lover he destroyed those nude photos already.)

1996

"Warm Dogs" by Paul Theroux. A widespread virus causes infertility in a future dystopia. A couple tries in vain to adopt a child, then winds up buying a mixed-race kid. But then they get nabbed by the police, along with their kid. The couple winds up in a warehouse, blindfolded and surrounded by children who poke them with spears. One child touches the woman and says, "This one is mine." She cries out.

1998

"Tough Girls Don't Dream" by Jeanette Winterson. Later retitled "Disappearance I." Takes place in a futuristic dystopia where sleep has become as much a taboo as kinky sex. But some people are paid to sleep so everyone else can spy on their dreams. (This is the second of the two New Yorker stories about lack of sleep, and outsourcing sleep, the first being Nicholson Baker's from 1981.)

"Sea Oak" by George Saunders. More weird satire. The main character's aunt dies, and comes back from the dead. Then she starts pimping out the main character, encouraging him to show his penis to random women for money.

"The Janitor On Mars" by Martin Amis. In 2049, a robot known as The Janitor On Mars suddenly contacts Earth, because humanity has just passed the point of no return: no matter what we do, we're doomed to extinction, thanks to changes in the environment. The robot relates the rise and fall of Martian civilization, while on Earth, a mentally disabled boy reveals the principal of his school raped him. (I read this story back when it appeared, and it remains my favorite thing ever to appear in the New Yorker.)

And then there's a gap of nearly five years before SF graces the New Yorker again. And it's only one story:

2003

"Jon" by George Saunders. In a weird future, a group of teenagers are trapped in a facility for assessing products, where they view ads and represent the teen demographic. The girls have velcro chastity-guards and everyone's encouraged to masturbate instead of having sex, but one girl, Carolyn, still manages to get pregnant.

Argues Thompson:

There are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I'd read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, "OK. Cool. I see how today's world works." I also started to feel like I'd been reading the same book over and over again.

Here's my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life — eventually you're going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?

You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality — and see what new results you get. Which is precisely what sci-fi does. Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender's Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

SciFi is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing [Wired]

I doubt Randall, who has been published in McSweenys, would characterize herself as an SF poet. Instead, she's preoccupied with space and science because it's part of the cultural imaginary around her and therefore she inevitably reflects that her verse. One of my favorite poems in A Day in Boyland is called "The Boring Conference Dinner," and it's a great example of how SF comes up in the middle of poems that aren't themselves focused on SF-ish subjects.

The poem is about — you guessed it — boring dinners at business conferences full of overly-jovial white guys. In the second section she writes:

Dinner consists of something in a puff pastry. But first there is a soup,

which is always a
GOD-DAMN TOMATO BISQUE

thick, salty,
like the spore of an alien.

A boring alien.

Sometimes sarcastic, sometime full of awe and sadness, Randall's poems are smart, lovely observations for people whose emotional landscapes are populated by imaginary beings no less poignant than real ones.

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