Science Fiction Publishing

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Mike Shupp

In retrospect, the science fiction of the 1960s looks very like what one might expect of science fiction published during that era. By 1950s standards, it was rebellious. Authors as diverse as Robert Heinlein and Philip Jose Farmer chose sex as their subject matter (Farmer was more successful); others touched upon drugs (Frank Herbert) and mysticism (Philip K. Dick). English authors toyed with surrealism and the multiple-viewpoint characterization of John Dos Passos; these fifty-year-old literary techniques became renowned as a "New Wave." Stylistic experimentation coincided frequently with opposition to the Vietnam War and embrace of "alternative life styles." In the 1970s, Vietnam's fall made political argument pointless; authors perceived that the New Wave was on the ebb, wrote their "unprintable" stories for Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions series of anthologies, and moved on to cyperpunk and fast paced militaristic sagas.

Meanwhile, the great American public moved on to horror fiction. Horror, one might think, is an offshoot of fantasy, and might be expected to have the same sort of readership and perhaps the same authors. This has not been the case. To generalize, science fiction fans read fantasy and vice versa and the same authors may write in both genres. Science fiction and fantasy readers, however, are not automatically fans of horror. In any event, they form only a small portion of the readership for horror; most horror readers are uninterested in science fiction and fantasy, and most horror writers are not linked to science fiction. This seems rather strange, since science fiction and fantasy elements are often prominent in horror works (consider Stephen King's The Tommyknockers), but the visceral appeal of the three genres is evidently quite different.

In the 1980s war novels, in the form of near-future "techno-thrillers" by Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, Steven Coontz, and others made a return to publishing prominence. As with horror, despite the apparent overlap with science fiction, high tech military fiction is a separate market. It has proven impenetrable to science fiction authors, even to those who specialize in military science fiction.

During this period, movie science fiction has passed through several phases, from low-budget "B" movies in the 1950s to studio-breaking spectaculars in the 1970s. In this last period, movies did influence the literary science fiction market: part of making these big-budget films profitable involved extramural marketing of all kinds and the book publishers cooperated to the hilt, with novelizations of the scripts, cocktail table volumes showing off The Art of Star Wars, and the like. These in turn have created an audience for novels set in Star Wars settings, semi-facetious non-fiction such as The Physics of Star Trek, autobiographies by some principal actors, and even series of novels by those actors (or with those actors' names on the covers). These spinoffs continued to be profitable into the 1990s, producing a slew of science fiction "readers" who seemed familiar with the literature primarily through movies and television. This is good news for publishers; whether the market for science fiction outside the Star Wars-Star Trek "Universes" has increased is another issue.