From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Mar 13 2003 - 21:44:04 MST
A brief meditation on reputation, success and innovation:
The year to be a young sf writer full of piss and vinegar was exactly half
a century back, especially if you lived in New York. Or maybe 1952, writing
the stories that appeared in the following magical year. My sense of that
epoch (when I was 8 or 9 in Australia, and my earliest self-published sf
stories were still several years off) is that the wonderful sf of the
mode's first true maturity appeared in a range of tin-pot garish zines of
rather modest circulation, written by men (mostly) who viewed sf writing as
a kind of Zen sport, like posting to rec.arts.sf.science, or a kind of
performance poetry, a delightful display that earned you whuffie or egoboo.
Few expected to make a living at it, even a mean one (but I might be wrong
about that). If this is the mind set of the great early adopters and
innovators, maybe it *can* be recovered in an era of almost cost-free
web-based distribution, even if not, ultimately, by the small presses using
paper and commercial delivery systems.
This sounds horribly like a prescription for fan fiction run amok, but if a
measure of reputation-based editorial filtering emerges (as perhaps it is
starting to), we might find that storing fiction on hard drives or
downloading it furtively on the office printer will become the equivalent
of the garish pulps of the early '50s.
I'm depressed by such a prospect; I was formed by a Zeitgeist that regarded
physical publication in paperback or, better yet, hard covers, with piety
and longing. But what I find depressing about my offerings at
Fictionwise.com, and shortly from eReads, isn't so much that they're not
available for me to put up on the brag shelf or take down and fondle, but
that so few readers have yet adopted this vector. Once true refreshable
e-paper arrives, things might improve for the revival of sf (by contrast
with fat consolatory fantasy n-ologies or Frankenscience thrillers).
Luckily, Greg Egan still seems to sell, and I'd regard him as precisely the
return of James Blish conducted by even harder means.
Which brings me back to whuffie:
To a writer, one truly innovative and interesting aspect of web publication
and distribution is the possibility of instant feedback whuffie-meters like
the votes displayed at amazon.com and F/wise. It's always astonishing to
see the sheer range of reactions to the same text by the purchasing public.
Take a look at the (fairly small number of) votes, and their distribution, at
http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/DamienBroderickeBooks.htm
and then compare with some other award-winning sf writers, such as
http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/BarryNMalzbergeBooks.htm
or
http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/RobertSilverbergeBooks.htm
All over the bloody place. What can be learned from these distributions?
Maybe nothing much beyond Chacon á son gout?
Damien Broderick
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