The New York Review of Science Fiction

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P. O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570. $4.00 per copy.

Issue #103, March 1997

FEATURES

Rob Latham: The Modern World is an Enormous Fiction: J. G. Ballard and the Millennium: 1

Virginia Wolf: "The Kin-dom of God" in Joan Slonczewski's Novels: 1

REVIEWS

Nicola Griffith's Slow River, reviewed by Stephanie Smith: 6

David Langford's The Silence of the Langford, reviewed by Arthur D. Hlavaty: 7

James Morrow's Blameless in Abaddon, reviewed by Bill Sheehan: 12

James Morrow's Bible Stories for Adults, reviewed by F. Brett Cox: 13

Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, reviewed by Ariel Haméon: 14

Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, edited by John Kessel, Mark L. Van Name, and Richard Butner, reviewed by Gwyneth Jones: 16

Brian Aldiss's Common Clay: 20 Odd Stories, reviewed by William M. Schuyler, Jr.: 17

Peter F. Hamilton's Mindstar Rising and Paul J. McAuley's Fairyland, reviewed by Paul Preuss: 19

Lucy Sussex's The Scarlet Rider, reviewed by Julianne Chatelain: 20

Steven Gould's Wildside, reviewed by Gary Reger: 21

PLUS

Braulio Tavares on an amazing absence (p. 10), Screed (p. 22), and an editorial (p. 24).

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Who Killed Science Fiction?

Back in the early 1960s, after the magazine and paperback distribution system had crashed in 1957, after most of the magazines had gone out of business within a couple of years, after hardcover publishers had cut back on their print runs and some paperback lines cut back or seemingly vanished, a fanzine symposium called "Who Killed Science Fiction?" won the fanzine Hugo Award. It was basically an assembly of letters solicited by the editors in answer to the titular question. It still makes for fascinating reading if you can find a copy.

SF was not, of course, dead as a literature then, but it was suffering economically, in a decline--as it is now. And here at NYRSF we decided that the major difference between then and now is that then, everyone was talking in public about it. Now, we do not find articles in Locus or Tangents or SF Chronicle debating the topic. In fact we hardly find it mentioned, so we decided to be the ones to open it up.

In 1997, sf publishing is in the third year of a steep decline, with fewer books being published in mass market format and fewer issues of professional magazines published. And this year the process looks like it is accelerating. A few years ago, semi-professional markets were redefined as professional (when SFWA dropped the bar from 10,000 circulation to 2,000 to create more professionals, becoming the SF professional and semi-pro Writers of America), but this did not make the field larger. Nor, it seems, did it make anyone in publishing more profitable. And magazines such as Locus, with its monthly statistics on publishing, began in the 1980s to inflate the size of the marketplace and to blur everyone's focus by counting and listing every fantasy, horror, and science fiction-like product carefully to show growth in the category whether the book was published as category or not, and then lumping in all reissues without separating as to category. So no one can really tell how much sf grew in the decade before 1995 since some of that growth is simply adding more things to the count--just like the growth in the number of "professional" writers.

Maybe the field is just trimming off some excess? Or is the excess taking over? There has been a radical change in paperback book distribution--the 220-250 wholesalers in the U.S. as of 1994 are now less than 30 huge ones in 1997, focused nearly exclusively on bestsellers and big names. Brian Stableford recently published an essay in Science-Fiction Studies asserting that the sf book is dying and that television and media tie-ins are the sf of the future, where the real audience is.

Are we all reading a dead or dying literature? We solicit your letters in response.

--David G. Hartwell & the editors