Electronic OtherRealms #24 Spring, 1989 Part 1 of 10 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved OtherRealms may not be reproduced without permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Permission is given to electronically distribute this issue only if all copyrights, author credits and return addresses remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used without permission of the author. Table of Contents Part 1 Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach Part 2 Scattered Gold Charles de Lint Fantasy in the Mainstream The Fiction of Italo Calvino Chuck Koebel Part 3 Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Behind the Scenes: A Look at Paradise Mike Resnick Part 4 Past Imagining Lawrence Watt-Evans Stuff Received Part 5 Words of Wizdom Chuq Von Rospach Part 6 The Contrapunk Manifesto Bruce Bethke The Agony Column Rick Kleffel Part 7 No Prisoners! Laurie Sefton Part 8 Lots and Lots of Reviews -- Part 1 Lots and Lots of Readers Part 9 Lots and Lots of Reviews -- Part 2 Lots and Lots of Readers Part 10 Your Turn -- Letters Masthead: Submission, Subscription and Publication info.The Fine Print Editor's Notebook Chuq Von Rospach Changes, always Changes Lots and lots of changes this issue! All of them, I believe, positive. Since we last spoke, I've left Sun Microsystems for a new job at Apple. This changes the e-mail addresses for submissions and letters. I am now chuq@apple.com, as well as CHUQ on AppleLink. The other networks ("CHUQ" on Delphi and "73317,635" on CompuServe) don't change. Unfortunately, the archive server for back-issues I maintained on USENET has been turned off, and it won't return for the foreseeable future. Except for some back-issues available on Delphi, this means that you won't be able to get older issues electronically any more. At Apple, I'm working with both MacOS and A/UX. So I'm still hacking Unix, but I can start seriously learning how to program the Macintosh like I'd wanted to for a long time. I also have access to lots of nifty hardware now, too. Other changes: Laurie's left Amdahl for NeXT. Her new address is Laurie_Sefton@NeXT.COM. Her accounts ("LSEFTON" on Delphi and "74010,3542 on CompuServe) don't change. Working for competitors is interesting, since we sometimes can't talk about the things we're working on. This is fairly common in the Silicon Valley, and we find it helps us focus our evenings on our outside interests. I don't know how the people who only have computers in common survive. Also, Alan Wexelblat has left MCC and is now working for Texas Instruments. Because the job search and new position have eaten up all his time, he's decided to take a break from the column this issue. Additions to the fold I want to acknowledge two additions to the masthead. Lawrence Watt-Evans joins us as a contributing editor. He's the author of numerous books, including The Wizard and the War Machine, With a Single Spell and The Misenchanted Sword. I'm happy to be reprinting some of his pieces from his "Rayguns, Elves and Skin-Tight Suits" column in Comics Buyer's Guide. I've also added Dean R. Lambe to the masthead as contributor. He is co-author of The Odysseus Solution and one of the most incisive and interesting reviewers I've been lucky enough to snag. Dean's been writing for me for a while, but I felt he deserved some extra recognition for the caliber of reviews he's been writing. Both of these writers are strong additions to OtherRealms and I'm glad to have them on board. Layout changes There were many changes to OtherRealms last issue. The main change, of course, was the smaller typeface. While OtherRealms is down to 32 pages, I only lost about 15% of the text. That's a lot less damage than I'd expected, and the switch to the new typeface seems to be a success. I don't think the new typeface is quite as casual as the old one, but it doesn't seem to impact readability, which was my main concern. I've done some more minor tweaks this issue to increase the white space a little, which should improve readability a little more. Also, I've switched my headline typeface from Univers to Helvetica because of a technical problem (read 'bug') in the printer driver involving downloadable fonts. Since Helvetica is always in the printer, I don't run into the problem. Hopefully this will be resolved soon, but until it is I have to limit the number of downloadable fonts I use. Sigh. I've also made two significant layout changes. I've combined the regular reviews and Pico Reviews into a single large review section. The makes layout easier and also removes an artificial barrier between Pico reviews and 'real' ones. I'm looking for a good name for this section, since 'Pico Reviews' doesn't apply anymore. Suggestions are welcome, and if I adopt your suggestion I'll give you a one-year subscription. I also restructured the Stuff Received section. After talking to many of you, it was clear that breaking the section down by publisher was the wrong format. Starting this issue, I'm now breaking books down into major categories: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Other. After that, everything is being sorted by author, which should make finding your favorite writer's much easier. Reader's Survey After the last issue, I released a reader's survey to the USENET readers of OtherRealms. I ended up with 153 responses. It would have been higher except my E-mail account disappeared for a couple of weeks when Sun opted to give me a paid vacation between jobs rather than having me work out my tenure. For the people who tried to respond and got their mail bounced, my apologies -- I left Sun on three days notice and a few loose ends didn't get tied up cleanly. Survey responses were returned from ten different countries: The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands. I also know that the electronic OtherRealms reaches both Japan and West Germany, although neither are represented in the survey. One thing that the survey allows me to do is estimate my electronic readership. It's difficult to get accurate numbers on the networks -- depending on how you count the readership ranges from 1,500 to 9,000. By looking at sections of the network where I do know the readership size and seeing how many responses come from those areas, I can guess on the size of the entire readership. One area of about 200 people had three responses (1.5% return) and another of 150 addresses had 2 responses (1.4% response). If we assume a 1% response from the entire network, this puts the readership at 15,000. A 2% return puts the readership at 7,500. Based on this, I'm willing to say that OtherRealms' electronic readership is around 10,000 on the Internet/USENET network. This doesn't include the printed edition (275-300 copies) or other networks that OtherRealms goes to. As a sanity check, SF-Lovers, which is an unstructured mailing list on the same networks, has between 25,000 and 35,000 readers at last count, so the the numbers I'm seeing aren't outrageous. Not bad for a fanzine. On to the survey itself. I was amazed at the ingenuity of the answers -- even on the yes/no questions. Not only did people go into long essays, some went so far as to rewrite the questions to represent what they thought I ought to have asked. That's an interesting aspect of doing things electronically and it made tabulating some of the surveys an interesting exercise. When I was given a range of numbers I took a number in the middle of the range . The first questions looked at buying habits. 103 (67%) of you buy hardcover books at least occasionally. 150 of you (98+%) buy paperbacks. Yes, three people did say they bought hardcovers and not paperbacks. Those people who buy hardcovers purchase, on average, 14 per year, or about 1.1 a month. The range of responses went from 1 or 2 a year to four a month. Paperback readers purchase an average of 5.9 paperbacks a month, or 70 books a year. The most voracious readers in the survey averaged about 30 books a month. What do you read? 146 of you (95%) read SF. 120 (78%) read Fantasy and 43 (28%) read Horror. For other reading, the numbers were: 70 (45%) mainstream, 64 (41%) mystery, 56 (36%) thriller, 12 (7%) western, 7 (4%) romance. A few people wrote in and asked me to define mainstream -- half of you read it, whatever it is. The next category looked at the genre magazines you read. Of the professional magazines, the numbers are: 43 (28%) Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine; 40 (26%) Analog; 32 (20%) Fantasy & Science Fiction; 28 (18%) Omni; 12 (7%) Amazing; 7 (4%) Aboriginal SF; 5 (3%) Twilight Zone. There are couple of interesting twists in these numbers. While Analog has significantly more subscribers than anyone else (except Omni, which is really a fringe magazine with a large audience), IASFM is more widely read by OtherRealms readers. Both Amazing and Aboriginal placed better than they should have, while Twilight Zone, which has since died, placed much worse. Overall, there's a larger percentage of magazine readers in the OtherRealms population than in the general reading public. The responses for the semi-pro and smaller magazines were as follows: 17 (11%) Locus; 6 (3%) SF Chron; 5 (3%) Weird Tales; 2 (1%) New York Review of SF; 1 (0.5%) SF Eye. Nobody would admit to reading either Thrust or Extrapolation. I didn't cover fanzines this time, and few people volunteered any. The only real surprise here for me was the big difference between Locus and SF Chron. SF Chron is the smaller of the two, but that can't explain the difference in the survey. There is a strong bias towards Locus in my readership somewhere, and I don't know why. Weird Tales places well out of proportion with the size of its readership base. On to OtherRealms itself. I asked everyone to rate each regular feature on a scale of 1 [strongly dislike] to five [strongly like]. People who left a field blank weren't included in the ratings for that field, so these numbers are the average for those people who rated each item: 4.25 Pico & Short reviews, 3.95 Behind the Scenes, 3.90 Scattered Gold (Charles de Lint), 3.84 Words of Wizdom (Chuq Von Rospach), 3.74 Creme de la Creme (Alan Wexelblat), 3.72 Editor's Notebook, 3.67 Much Rejoicing (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes), 3.57 No Prisoners! (Laurie Sefton), 3.46 Letter column, 3.27 Stuff Received, 3.10 Agony Column. (Rick Kleffel). Since Laurie only covers Fantasy, some of the readers who don't read Fantasy rated her column down. The same went for non-horror readers and Rick's column. When you take the average for Laurie's column only from those people who read Fantasy, the number changes to 3.63. When you do the same for horror readers and Rick, the number changes to 3.50. And, just as a control, I did the same thing with the other columns and none of them changed by more than about three one-hundredths of a point, so I think it's fair to use the higher numbers for both of the specialty columns. Basically, rating OtherRealms serves as a sanity check for me. I better know what people think of the magazine or I'm not going to keep my readers happy. All of the regular features got good scores. Every reader has their preferences in OtherRealms, but there isn't anything in the magazine that is generally disliked, which means that my mix of material is right. Every feature and column got at least one 5 rating and at least one 1, which I expected. The only real surprise for me was that the Stuff Received column rated as high as it did. While a number of people rated it low, many more let me know they found it was very useful. The next area was future priorities. I asked people to rate both current features and proposed features to get some feeling about what people were interested in seeing in OtherRealms. The current features got rated almost exactly the same as in the previous section, which, in retrospect, shouldn't be a surprise. The items people were interested in were, in order of interest, interviews, a review index, industry news, industry futures (books to come, etc.), reviewing classics, features on publishers, short fiction reviews, convention reports, covering mass-media and convention listings. The top two items, interviews and a review index, far outstripped the rest as far as number of people requesting them and how strongly they wanted it. I was considering bringing back interviews, and I'll definitely return them in an issue or two. The index is something I've planned on doing for a long time, but never have time to do. I'll try again, but no guarantees. Most of the other items are things that other publications are already doing quite well, and rather than duplicate them, I think you should read the other magazine. Both Locus and SF Chronicle have strong industry sections, book futures, major convention reports and exhaustive convention listings. Fanzines like File 770 and Lan's Lantern print convention reports. Mass-media fans have a wide range of publications -- starting with SF Chronicle and Locus and going to Starlog. I'm not a big mass-media fan and watch very little television, so this simply isn't something I'm interested in. Locus has a column covering short fiction. So does Comics Buyer's Guide. The last attempt to cover short fiction, Short Form, has died. OtherRealms won't cover short fiction for one reason: I just am not interested enough to want to support a column on it, and there isn't enough interest in the readership base to convince me to do it anyway. People interested in short fiction should read Locus. If anything more comprehensive comes along, I'll let you know. As far as features on publishers go, I'll see what I can do. I had a query about doing a series of in-depth interviews of book-editors. I may also try to find someone on the east coast willing to go and write short features on various publishing houses and how books get published. Nothing's final yet, but there are some interesting possibilities. Finally, reviews of classic books. I like the idea. If people want to write 500-1000 word reviews of classics, I'll be happy to include as many as I can handle and flag them as classic reviews in some way. Classics shouldn't be forgotten but in the rush to cover new material, it's hard to remember that. When I talk to people on the nets and at conventions, I'm always amazed at how many haven't read the classic in the field -- usually because nobody has told them what they are. This is a good way to help rectify that. The final section of the survey was open comments. I want to thank you for filling them out, some at great length. The most common question was "Why Horror?" Horror is a genre that's closely related to Fantasy. I feel strongly that Fantasy readers that refuse to venture into Horror occasionally are limiting themselves. You don't need to read Clive Barker and the Splatterpunks to read Horror. I'm willing to bet that there are very few Fantasy readers that wouldn't enjoy Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain and Olivia books. When I get tired of those surgary-sweet unicorns and pointy-eared obnoxious elves, a couple of horror books are a great way of putting everything back in sync. I'm waiting for someone to write a book where all those cutsey Fantasy archetypes get horribly munched up and chomped in wonderfully gruesome ways. Another common question was "Why isn't OtherRealms bigger (or more often)?" -- the answer is that I have only so much time for OtherRealms. Other things, like sleep, get in the way. The only way I could make OtherRealms either bigger or more frequent would be to make it less structured and more informal. All that would do is turn OtherRealms into another SF-Lovers mailing list, and I don't see any real purpose in duplicating what is already happening. A number of people asked me to distribute OtherRealms in PostScript format, so that people with compatible printers could print out a copy that looks like the printed version. I won't do this for a number of reasons. For one thing, the PostScript needed to generate OtherRealms is huge. What is 250,000 to 300,000 bytes of text becomes between 1.5 and 2 megabytes. Distributing that much data electronically isn't practical. OtherRealms also uses typefaces that aren't standard in PostScript printers -- ITC Garamond. Unless you have this font, the output would be exceptionally ugly. I would still have to publish the straight text as well for everyone without a compatible printer. None of the art is handled electronically -- it is all laid out and pasted in manually. Making the fully formatted version of OtherRealms available electronically isn't practical. Here are the winners of the free subscriptions for turning in surveys. They are: Kevin Routley (routley@tle.dec.com), J.J. Sager (cbdkcl!jjs), Joe Herman (dzoey@terminus.umd.edu), Mike Monte (monts@quicksilver.sun.com), Per Westerlund (perw@holtec.se, Sweden) and Matthijs Peters (bagron@cs.vu.nl, Netherlands). Thanks to everyone for taking the time to respond. Updates on Previous Issues In issue #22, I ripped into Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine as a classic case of why Desktop Publishing is a danger in a novice's hands. A few people wrote in complaining that I was too tough on it, but considering how many problems there were, I don't think so. The good news, however, is that issue #2 and #3 are now out, and the magazine is improved. The fiction is improved, the layout is better and the production values are up. According to Locus, starting with issue #4, George Scithers will be taking over production and printing and Bradley will just do the editing. All of this is very good news for the Fantasy market, and based on the second issue, I'm dropping my warning -- in fact, I'm subscribing. Also, last issue I was very negative about the semi-prozine Thrust, which I feel died a long time ago, but hasn't noticed. While OtherRealms was at the printers, the latest issue of Thrust (issue #32) arrived, and I have to say it's the best issue I've seen in two years. Significantly improved over other months, and with many fewer typos as well. Whether this is an anomaly or a trend I don't know, but it was heartening to see a magazine I have given up for lost show at least a glimmer of what it could be again. Time will tell. Unfortunately, that's all the good news I have. Two magazines I've mentioned recently have folded. Twilight Zone, the only mass-market horror magazine around, has announced it's departure. Argos, a digest- sized fantasy fiction magazine that I really liked, has also closed its doors after three issues. As popular as fantasy and horror is in book form, it seems that packaging shorter versions of these is still an uphill battle. Back issues I've had a number of requests recently for back issues of OtherRealms. Many of the issues are out of print, but if people want back issues, they are available for the cover price. The following are available at $2.50 each: April, 1987 (#14); May, 1987 (#15); June, 1987 (#16); July, 1987 (#17); Winter, 1987 (#19); Spring, 1988 (#20). The following issues are available for $2.85 each: Summer, 1988 (#21); Fall, 1988 (#22); Winter, 1989 (#23). Some of these are in rather limited supply, and when they're gone, I'll have an empty closet. Until next time! ------ End ------