Well if i was a sci-fi fanatic I’d still remain in denial and point out that more copies of the sci-fi book had been sold than all the rest

So there’s less sci-fi on the shelf but it sells even better than a popular TV tie-in!

Absolutely loved what you said about Terry Goodkind! LOL I will admit, I’m a fan of his, but yes, the man is not in evidence upstairs – re: what he said about what he writes.

“On a serious note, if a book is thick do shops buy less copies of it?”

Unless it’s a Stephen King or Robert Jordan, yes. Erikson’s new book ran into problems because it had a strictly-enforced embargo date on it, but because he’s a fairly low-profile author bookshops weren’t willing to have multiple copies of DUST OF DREAMS clogging up the storeroom shelves for several days and simply ordered the book in for the following week instead. As a result, enormous numbers of MALAZAN fans couldn’t find the book in their local bookstore on release date or for several days afterwards.

I wasn’t there because I was out of the country or I would have been, but from what I heard attendance was considerably down at the annual Xmas British Fantasy Society gathering in London and their were grumblings of things being bad all round. And in this economic climate they undoubtedly are. Just when you thought as a would-be writer things couldn’t get any tougher there are more hoops made to jump through which involve making money for someone somewhere. I made a half-joke elsewhere that, just as now you are constantly hearing that without an agent to take you up you can forget about getting to publication (one set of gate keepers, the effectiveness of which is dependent on their relationship with editors and publishers primarily and not the content they are peddling), there will come the day when the agents won’t consider you unless you have been on some creative writing programme of note. Yet another bottleneck to squeeze our fat would-be author egos through.

The stuff exists there, writers still get their heads down and write. But the people who have an eye for making money out of *anything* colonise it, monopolise it and homogenise it. That Waterstone’s is the only mainstream High Street bookchain remaining has an air of inevitability about it. The net book agreement business clearly has not been good. Like British pubs, independent bookstores are withering on the bough of the once mighty oak.

I went into Border’s along Charing Cross yesterday. A shell of human thought it was. (I did see a one copy of Nights in hardback going for half price, Mark! But you were in good company, Daniel Abraham and the like still had a few copies on the shelves of the virtually non-existent SFF shelf remaining – There were lots of that Goodkind thing elsewhere in no particular section whatsoever, the mighty arms crossed world-chaging Randian sage would no doubt be pleased, purely objectively of course).

Ironically at the end of the bookshelf with SFF on it, it was just labelled ‘Science Fiction’, but there was hardly any of that there.

The only hope for SF or SFF or genre in general is if the writer gets his or her head down and writes the best thing he or she can. While writers who attempt to move with the market aren’t going to keep genre alive, they are going to kill it (conforming and compromising a vision to what sells doesn’t raise the bar, it lowers it). X Factor fiction for all. There are very, very few writers who make a full-time living out of it. Most don’t. It was ever thus, though (unless you go back centuries when early novels were written by quite a lot of men of leisure and of independent means.) But I would argue that the one main way to keep this or that genre alive is not to dumb down, is not to try and appeal to all and sundry in order to sell books. Display some pig-headed intellectual integrity. Clearly, given this thread and Mark’s previous ones and the one on SFF World (which is about ten pages long now and had Elizabeth Moon contribute) there is a market for it. Bow to the flow of homogenisation in thought and written deed and it surely will die.

Mark said elsewhere that it is a lot of factors and that is one of them. What can writers and would-be writers do? Rage, rage against the dying of the light! Don’t make it so f*****g easy for the publishing Simon Cowells.

One thing to do: form author collectives. Like the Write Fantastic of old, the Murder Squad etc. Be proactive in spreading the word. Then engage with each other on platforms and forums, multi-genre (because whether we like it or not we are a categorising species, it’s what we do to define ourselves). Instead of highlighting everything that is supposedly different, highlight what is the same, only in a different milieu, the art of the thing in relation to a given genre’s identifiable substance. (It would be nice to see panels like that at the SFX Weekender, for example.) It will make a difference. A marginal difference maybe, but it will. the genre will die when it dies intellectually first. The publishing Cowells are seeing to that. Rage against the f***rs.

I wonder if anyone has written a historical overview of predictions of the death of the science fiction genre. I’ve been hearing them for an awfully long time.

Ach Mark, it’s nothing new:

Who Killed Science Fiction? won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine in 1961. The Fifties were rife with talk about the death of science fiction, and Earl Kemp’s symposia of so many sf pros and prominent fans summed it all up.