The Business of Science Fiction
at the Verge of the New Millennium
An Interview with Vonda N. McIntyre
by Gloria Glickstein Brame
--Vonda N. McIntyre.
Her recently published novel, STAR WARS: THE CRYSTAL STAR (Bantam Spectra) continues the adventures of George Lucas' Star Wars characters Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Han Solo, and Chewbacca. THE STARFARERS SERIES is a quartet of novels narrating the story of alien contact specialist J.D. Sauvage and her colleagues in rebellion aboard the campus starship STARFARER.
McIntyre's other novels include THE EXILE WAITING, THE ENTROPY EFFECT, SUPERLUMINAL, and BARBARY. THE EXILE WAITING was nominated for the Nebula; excerpts from SUPERLUMINAL, "Aztecs," and "Transit" received Hugo and Nebula nominations. With Susan Janice Anderson, she edited AURORA: BEYOND EQUALITY, an anthology of humanist science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., A.R. Sheldon, Marge Piercy, and others.
In this interview, she shares her opinions on the business of publishing at the verge of the new millennium--from writing novels, to screenwriting in Hollywood, to pungent observations about the future impact of electronic publishing on the world of letters. Along the way, she talks about what it's like to write "Star Trek" books and how it feels to be an official homework assignment in student textbooks.
So fasten your seatbelts: it's going to be a cosmic ride.
GGB: What do you think are some of the biggest differences between today's market for new work and the market when you were starting out in the early 1970s?
VNM: When I first started out, the field was much more open to new submissions. An editor got a great deal of ego boosting, and some bragging rights, for publishing a hot new writer's first story. You don't hear so much bragging these days, though new writers sell first stories all the time.
Sometimes I wonder if magazine editors can't afford to risk even 2000 words on something weird or strange or unique or offensive. I have some sympathy for their plight: the circulation of the sf magazines has been going down for years. A dozen "I hated Story X and I'm never reading your magazine again!" cancellations per month would eventually make a significant difference in the survival of a magazine. On the other hand, the certainty of sameness in a magazine's stories can cause a similar attrition.
The identification of a book with its publisher is less obvious, so somebody who hated a book that Great Big SF Novels Publishing Company put out probably wouldn't decide never to buy another GBSFNPC novel. I'd estimate that half the stories I've ever written have been bounced at least once with the comment, "I really like this story, but it's too much for my readers." An editor once apologized to me for turning down a story on these grounds, and said he wished he'd published it. But that didn't stop him from turning down the next story I sent him! It gets demoralizing to be told, "I sure wish you'd sent me a story just like the last one you published" especially when you did submit that last story, and the editor bounced it.
GGB: So are editors market-driven in their selection of work? VNM: I haven't worked as an editor in a long time, and I've never worked as a novel editor, so this response is highly opinionated and mostly second-hand. But I think that novel editors have a complex constellation of forces working on them. Many who, ten years ago, had the authority to buy a manuscript on their own recognizance now have to get committee approval, and committees are notorious for producing conservative decisions. There are a lot fewer publishers than when I got started in this business, and more and more you see sf market reports containing the phrase "no unsolicited submissions."
I think most editors in science fiction are delighted to discover a new talent. Whether they get enough time and scope to develop the new talent is another question.
GGB: The economics of print publishing are generally gloomy.
VNM: Publishing is traditionally a business with fairly low profit margins. And science fiction has traditionally been a business where the money came from keeping the midlist in print and selling it steadily over a long time. Novels that won the Hugo or the Nebula stayed in print. This is changing, which is a shame, because I doubt sf can expand its audience to the huge numbers of mainstream bestsellers.
A typical advance for an sf first novel these days is the same dollar amount as I sold my first novel for back in 1974: $3500. But in 1974, you could live above the poverty line for a year on $3500. Not now.
Something I've discovered recently that troubles me considerably is that while publishers appear to be publishing first and second novels, in fact many of those first and second novels turn out to be third or fifth or seventh novels by experienced writers who've fallen afoul of a sales slump. I've heard of a few writers who have chosen on their own to re-start their careers under pseudonyms.
I've also heard--and this troubles me even more--of writers who have been told by their publishers, "Your first and second novels didn't do very well here, look at the sales figures." The sales slump is usually explained as a function of the chain stores, which are said to order only as many copies of a writer's current book as they sold of the writer's previous book. Since the sell- through of the average novel is about 50%, this is a prescription for disaster.
Once the writer revives from the shock of the sales figures, the publisher then says, "We'll publish your third novel, out of the goodness of our hearts. But you have to change your name and we'll publish it as a first novel. And, oh, by the way, you have to accept a first novel advance for it."
My theory is that publishers have a lot of rack space to fill up, and they have to fill it up with something new every month. This way they can fill it with novels by experienced writers but only pay an average first novel advance. The theory might be wrong, but it's consistent with a lot of the ways sf novels are bought, sold, stripped, and put out of print far more rapidly than in the past.
GGB: Do you think that, over time, sf writers will be forced to rely on no- or low-pay semi-pro markets?
VNM: I suppose it could happen, in which case none of us will ever be able to give up our day jobs. This will be a problem for me, considering that I've never _had_ a day job.
There is a larger number of semi-pro markets these days, compared to 1970 when my first story came out. It's a lot easier to publish a decent-looking magazine with the help of computers and desk-top publishing.
GGB: Do you see any changes in the types of writers who are emerging now?
VNM: For twenty-five years, the average age of students in writing workshops such as Clarion West has advanced along with the average age of baby boomers. Some observers in the field believe this means young people aren't interested in reading or writing sf anymore. I don't think that's true; I do think the sheer numbers of my generation swamp the generation coming along behind us.
It does trouble me to see a smaller percentage of younger people in the field. There's something to be said for the seasoning of experience, and something else to be said for the audacity of youth. Some of the students I see in workshops are relentlessly "professional," at a stage in their careers when they should be experimenting.
GGB: What do you mean by "relentlessly professional"?
VNM: A lot of writers in writing workshops are people who have always wanted to write or who have always been curious to know if they could write, successful in first careers and perhaps thinking of beginning a new one. I think this is where the relentless professionalism comes in. They know what they want and they think they know how to go about getting it.
It's hard to tell them that they mostly aren't at a stage where they're ready to be relentlessly professional. There have certainly been people who have decided they were going to write a story and sell it to Playboy -- and who succeeded right off the bat. But in the main, setting out to write a story for a particular market is likely to put the story into the 80% of slush pile stories that aren't _bad_ --but aren't _good_, either. So while some new writers are more interested in the business of writing than in the art and craft, more interested in word-count than idea-count or character, plot, and style -- that usually doesn't get them very far. Most of the new writers I remember from workshops who ground out two or three or four long stories every _week_ have never been heard from again; they didn't hesitate long enough to think about and use what they were supposed to be in the workshop to learn. And it's a shame.
I was in a screenwriting workshop a couple of years ago at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg's outfit, threw us a reception when we arrived. Spielberg said something I think all workshop students should be told. To paraphrase: if you choose to stay in this business, this may be the only time in your careers when you can write whatever you want without worrying about whether it's commercial. And that's what you should do.
GGB: Ironically, poets and literary writers often believe that genre writing is where the big publishing bucks are hiding.
VNM: One of the sad things about poets gazing jealously over the fence and seeing phantom rich writers is that sf writers gaze enviously over the fence and see literary lions, if not downright snobs. I think perhaps we are all ghettoizing each other. Considering that our audiences are so small compared to the population, this is pitiful. An sf novel or a poetry book that sold a million copies of its U.S. edition would be successful beyond the wildest dreams of all but a very few writers. But a million copies means that something under 1% of the adult population bought it. By contrast, a movie that sells only a million tickets is a dead failure.
Within the field of sf and fantasy we do the same thing. For example, those of us who write Star Trek novels, and support our original fiction by doing so, are told we're betraying the field and should do the ethical thing and get real (one gets the definite impression it should be something we hate). Media tie- ins, we're told in mounting tones of hysteria, are ruining the field. Every Star Trek novel sold means one fewer buyer of a novel by Philip K. Dick or Norman Spinrad.
Personally, I don't believe it. One of the reasons for writing, say, a Star Trek novel -- besides the fun of playing in Gene Roddenberry's universe for a while--is that one hopes the readers will also read one's original fiction. One soon realizes that this doesn't happen. Once in a while, I'll run into someone who enjoyed _The Entropy Effect_ or _The Crystal Star_ and who sought out my other work as a result. But it happens a lot less frequently than I'd hoped. Perhaps it's because readers of _The Entropy Effect_ are looking for a different experience than the readers of _Dreamsnake_. Not a better experience, not a worse experience--just a different experience.
I think that if every one of us who has ever written a Star Trek novel were killed (one cannot avoid the suspicion that some of our colleagues wish this would happen tomorrow, if not last week!), and if every tie-in book were magically disappeared or simply banned, it would not make a perceptible difference in the sales curve of the original science fiction of Philip K. Dick or Connie Willis or Norman Spinrad--or Vonda N. McIntyre for that matter.
GGB: What is it like to be a best-selling Star Trek author? Do Trekkies track you down? Do you receive weird requests from fans?
VNM: It really didn't make much difference in my life except that it was fun to do (and beat the heck out of working for Microsoft) and subsidized a number of my original novels. Star Trek fans are, in general, friendly, smart, and less obsessed with the tv show than the average football fan is with their home team.
Once one turned up on my doorstep, rang my doorbell, handed me a bunch of carnations, and said, "I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work."
The myth of weird fan requests is just that, a myth. I find it a whole lot stranger to get requests from non-profit organizations for their charity auctions - not the request itself, but the indication in the request that they aren't trolling for a boring old book, but for something _personal_. I'm never quite sure what it is they're looking for. I leave the speculation as an exercise for the reader.
I do occasionally get letters from students whose teachers have decided it would be a great idea to force kids to write letters to writers. What this is supposed to do for the students is beyond me. For one thing, the teachers seldom bother to find out the addresses of the writers, so the letters go to the publisher, where they can sit on somebody's desk for six months or a year before anybody has time to forward them. And when you _do_ finally get the letter it usually says, "If you don't reply I'll fail this assignment. Please answer the following 50 questions that my teacher assigned me to ask you."
And your heart sinks because the letter is six months old, the kid has failed the assignment (an assignment the kid did not even have a fair chance of passing), and the kid and the teacher and the kid's parents all think you are pond scum because you didn't bother to reply. I can't tell you how many letters I've begun with, "Thanks for your letter of six months ago, which I just got today."
A friend of mine (who won the Newbery a few years back and so is often the subject of the school-assignment letter) once got a letter that said, "I decided to write to you because I have to write to somebody and your book was the least boring one on the list." This is really great for the ego, as you can imagine. What I can't imagine is how it gives the student any fondness for reading or writing.
I once called a teacher to ask why in the world she had made this assignment and what in the world she was expecting. I didn't do a good job of getting information because she got very defensive and after a minute or two screamed, "You don't have to answer the child's letter if you don't want to!" and banged the phone down in my ear. It was very unpleasant.
A couple of education textbooks list this project as a great assignment. I can't imagine what brain-dead textbook writer thought it was a good idea. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy getting letters from readers, adults or kids, who like my books. I answer every piece of mail I get unless it's actively abusive. It's being a school assignment that I have trouble with.
GGB: For those of us who observe ST's popularity with some awe and not a little bewilderment, can you explain why ST has become the incredible pop phenomenon it is?
VNM: I expect it's different for everybody. Gene Roddenberry's universe was great fun to play in, and I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent there. The optimism is a factor a lot of people mention. Spock as perennial outsider is an archetype that a lot of people respond to. As for me, I think the original series had a lot of good stories.
GGB: Has the experience of being famous (notorious?) for your Star Trek books changed anything in your creative life?
VNM: If I'm either famous or notorious, it's news to me. I'm known within the sf community, but within the sf community, everybody knows everybody else. I think writing the Star Trek books loosened up my other work a bit, to good effect. Dick Lupoff, the sf writer and critic, said that _Dreamsnake_ (which is my best-known book) was afflicted with "unrelenting angst," and I think he was right. The STARFARERS books have more humor in them. One character in my new book (THE MOON AND THE SUN), has a wit so dry that you fall off your legs before you realize he's taken you off at the knees.
GGB: If you had to do it all over again...would you?
VNM: Sure. It was fun, despite the occasional horrendous deadline. I wrote WRATH OF KHAN in five weeks; the task included not getting the last ten pages of the screenplay till only a few days before the manuscript was due.
The main downside is that I occasionally have to put up with being insulted by my peers, some of whom think that writers should suffer for their art (though it doesn't appear that those particular critics have done much suffering for their own art).
GGB: Given the enormous profit potential of writing for film, why write books at all?
VNM: For one, the "enormous profit potential" only comes into play if you write a screenplay that somebody buys--that isn't something I've succeeded in doing, whereas publishers will buy my novels. And partly it's because the unemployment rate among screenwriters is about 95%. But the main reason to write books instead of tv or movies is freedom. With a book you can often have maximum freedom. Some would say that once you're established, you can end up with too much freedom--no one dares to edit you. But in any event no one is likely to rip your manuscript from your hands and rewrite your Dustin Hoffman character for Sylvester Stallone.
Film is a collaborative medium. The writer's job is story and dialogue. If you put in all the camera angles, you're doing the director's job. If you put in lush descriptions, you're doing the job of the set designer or the costume designer or the cinematographer.
As a film writer, you're likely to be an employee. Your work can be changed without your consent; you can be fired. You have very little control over your work. The writer is considered "low man on the totem pole." (Did you hear the one about the blond starlet who tried to advance her career by sleeping with the writer?)
I recently read something about totem poles. The figure on the bottom of a real totem pole represents the most important person in the clan: the person who supports all the others, whose strength is the basis of the community. That isn't what the majority culture means by "low man on the totem pole," but it's appropriate as a metaphor for the writer.
GGB: Can you describe some of the differences between writing screenplays and writing novels?
VNM: Screenplays aren't anywhere near as easy to write as most novelists think. They're an outline, a blueprint; they require an exacting craft. There's a reason why producers believe novelists can't write screenplays: by the time a novelist reaches the level at which it's possible to demand the right to do the screenplay of a novel, the novelist's time is so valuable that taking a year off to learn the craft of screenwriting isn't feasible.
I'm not at that point, and I was lucky that I could afford to take a year off to take the screenwriting workshop. (Perhaps it was my mid-life crisis.)
I didn't manage to achieve the plan of getting someone to hire me to write screenplays all winter in Southern California, where I could sit on the patio next to the pool listening to the hummingbirds duke it out for nest sites in _January_. That's too bad. It gets awfully dark awfully early all winter in the Pacific Northwest. On the other hand, I'm probably happiest as a novelist.
GGB: Did your year in Hollywood change your perspective on the writing business?
VNM: It mostly made me realize that I'm probably not cut out to be a screenwriter. I'm a pretty good screenwriter, but I'm not good at the auxiliary requirements such as pitch meetings and deciphering what people in Hollywood mean when they're talking to you. Hollywood is the only business I've ever had any contact with in which, "We'll be in touch with your agent about a deal" translates as, "How do we get this woman out of our office?"
The pitch meetings I went to that I thought went well--and that ended with someone assuring me that they wanted to work with me, loved my work, etc.--turned out to be perfect examples of the Hollywood "No": Hysterical enthusiasm followed by endless silence.
At the border to Hollywood, they give you a charm lesson, and if you fail it, they don't let you in. So everybody in the town talks a good line. 100% of what you hear in Hollywood is bullshit. The trouble is, some people tell you 90% bullshit and some people tell you 110% bullshit. The problem is figuring out who is giving you the 10% that's real and true -- and which 10% it is. (I say this having spent a year in Los Angeles at the screenwriting workshop, and having enjoyed the experience thoroughly.) A young (unproduced) producer once told me that if I were to give him the rights to DREAMSNAKE, he would make me the next George Lucas. The cognitive dissonance involved in this sentence is amazing. ("Give" was the operative word.)
But once in a rare while in Hollywood somebody tells you 0% bullshit, 100% truth. I guess that's true of life and work in general.
GGB: Earlier, you mentioned electronic publishing. Right now, new media seem to be holding the wild cards for the future--both because of desk-top publishing and publishing on the World Wide Web. Do you think electronic publishing will ultimately and permanently alter the publishing industry?
VNM: I'm sure that it will. _How_ it will do so is a tougher question. At the moment, I see electronic publishing as the primordial mammal sneaking into the dinosaur nests to eat the eggs; but it might be the speeding comet that wipes out book publishing with a single blow.
From the point of view of the reader, the only thing that has to happen to make electronic publishing appealing is a couple of jumps of technology. I think that as soon as somebody comes up with a decent screen that doesn't guzzle batteries and that can display a paperback-book-page amount of text, in a package the size of a paperback book, all bets are off. The reader-machine will become a loss-leader, the way cellular telephones are right now: the hardware is trivial; it's the service the companies want you to purchase.
Wouldn't it be great not to have to pick which books to take with you on a trip, because you don't want to carry fifty pounds of books? If you could download them into your reader-machine, the problem would be solved. Not to mention the trees you'd save.
The question for the writer is how to get paid. Some publishers (and a number of periodicals that ought to know better) are getting very grabby with electronic rights. It's important for writers to hold out for a fair share of the revenue those rights might produce.
One thing electronic publishing already has done is blur the line between amateur and professional. You no longer have to pay through the nose to a vanity publisher to publish your own work. (The truth is you never did, but most people didn't know that.) Lots of folks publish their own fiction on the Web.
GGB: I've heard a lot of people adamantly insist that, no matter what happens, readers will always want to have a book in book form--that reading text on a monitor is just not as satisfying.
VNM: I'm sure people said nobody would ever read words on stone tablets or bark cloth or paper because no one would ever want to give up the aesthetic pleasure of listening to Homer recite his own work; I'm sure a lot of people thought paperback books would never succeed because who would give up the sensual pleasure of a real book in a real binding? The "reading off a monitor" objection is from people who aren't thinking about the rapid advances in technology.
I like books myself, though when I dust my old paperbacks I wouldn't mind having them in a form both more compact and less likely to collect dust bunnies. Don't you wish all your reference books were electronic, if only for the search function?
I can think of half a dozen times that I didn't buy a book because some book designer decided it would be peachy-cool to set the text in Helvetica or some other unreadable display type.
One function of an electronic book would let you choose the type face and size of the display. Book designers are flinching at that, and I'm sympathetic to their objections, because a well- designed book is a thing of beauty. But let's face it, how many mass-market paperbacks show any evidence of any design at all? But again, I could be wrong; I often am. After all, McIntyre's First Law (the first thing I tell workshop students when I teach writing workshops) is "Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you could be wrong."
GGB: I don't think these are those circumstances! But, to conclude, could you tell us about your new projects?
VNM: I'm about to start a new novel, and I don't like to talk about unfinished work. But I just completed THE MOON AND THE SUN, which will be out in hardcover from Pocket Books in September 1997. It's different from anything I've ever written before, an alternate history set in the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, at Versailles. It's about why we, today, believe that mermaids, sea people, sirens, never existed, when they obviously did, and maybe still do.
The Crystal Star (Star Wars); Vonda N. McIntyre; Mass Market Paperback; $5.39
Dreamsnake; Vonda N. McIntyre; Mass Market Paperback; $5.39
Enterprise : The First Adventure; Vonda N. McIntyre; Mass Market Paperback; $5.39
Enterprise : The First Adventure (Star Trek/Audio Cassette); Vonda N. McIntyre; Audio Cassette; $8.95
The Entropy Effect; Vonda N. McIntyre; Mass Market Paperback; $4.95
Nautilus; Vonda N. McIntyre; Mass Market Paperback; $5.39
Search for Spock (Star Trek Iii); Vonda N. McIntyre; Mass Market Paperback; $4.95
Star Trek : The Entropy Effect/Audio Cassette; Vonda McIntyre; Audio Cassette; $9.90
Star Trek : The Wrath of Khan; Vonda N. McIntyre; Paperback; $4.95
Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home; Vonda N. McIntyre; Mass Market Paperback; $4.95
ELF is "an international quarterly of significant contemporary literature," which publishes poetry, short fiction, essays, literary book reviews, interviews, photography, humor, and ethnic lore. Gloria is an Advisory Editor.
copyright © 1997 Gloria G. Brame
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