Electronic OtherRealms #24 Spring, 1989 Part 10 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. Charles C. Ryan Editor, Aboriginal SF Welcome to the real world of publishing. Your cost anxieties are the same ones we face every day... keeping the price in line while keeping up the quality of the product. You probably made the right decision. I'm glad you think Darrell Schweitzer and Janice Eisen are both good solid reviewers for us, but I see you are still referring to us as a "semi- prozine." We've been a prozine since March of 1988 and passed the circulation of Amazing sometime last summer. Our circulation now is about 20,000. We tripled our circulation last year and hope to triple it again this year. Er ... again while I appreciate our listing under magazines received, the sub rates you cited were incorrect. It's $3 per copy, or $14 for 6 issues/1 yr., or $24 for 12 issues/2 yrs. I'd appreciate it if you could clarify this as we'd never get any subscriptions at the higher rate you cited. Thanks. Gary Farber 10 Fairview Ave., #4F New York, NY 10040 I've had some post office trouble. Could you print my current address and tell people that if they've had mail to me returned, please resend it. [[Consider it done. -- chuq]] Brad W. Foster POB 165246 Irving, TX 75016 First of all, some very important bookkeeping here - please note my New Address up top there. Toss out the old street address, I've long moved from there, and please use this new PO Box from now on. Thanks. Sorry to hear about the financial doings of last few months. You bring up a point that I still haven't quite worked out -- that is, the idea that "taking advertising means that OtherRealms becomes responsible to its advertisers instead of its readers" and that since you'd be reviewing books advertisers publish, it would create "a potential conflict of interest". How so? I've seen this line before in other magazines, and it didn't make much sense. If they don't like what you're doing, they are certainly free not to advertise, but then that would put you no worse off than you are now, with no advertising anyway. Right? [[The key phrase is "free to not advertise" -- when you start taking advertising, it starts paying the printing bills. Generally speaking, the cost of a page of advertising should pay for four pages of magazine (more or less). When the advertising disappears, you have 40 pages of magazine and 18 pages of money. Suddenly the magazine's in deep trouble. If the advertising leaves, you can't publish, because the advertising was paying for it. On a normal magazine, subscription money is essentially the overhead and profit -- advertising pays for the printing and postage. It doesn't even *have* to happen. All you really need to do is start worrying about the advertising leaving. "Gee, if I say *this* they may get mad, and if they pull their advertising I lose 12 pages of material. So I'll say it *this* way instead, just to be safe". The reality is, when you take advertising, your loyalty *has* to be to keeping the advertising there, because if the advertising leaves, the publication goes away. The way OtherRealms is structured now, I may get kicked off a review copy list, but I don't depend on those anyway [OtherRealms has been kicked off of one publisher's list three times. It always seems to show up again a few months later, for some reason. It comes down to this: I never want to be in a position where I have to worry about killing or toning down a review to keep a publisher happy. I want my loyalty to be with the reader. I never want people to think I'm pushing a book because there's an ad in the magazine, or avoiding a publisher because there isn't. All that matters is the book, and that's the way I want to keep it. -- chuq]] Jeremy Crampton On David Hartwell. The inevitable problem for someone who takes his position is that he is bound to be accused of elitism or ghettoization. Don't you think that what he is trying to do (separating that from what he is doing) is worthy? If his message is "less crap, more good stuff" who can disagree? Of course, the obvious objection then becomes "well, my good stuff is your crap" or, "why is my opinion inferior to yours?" It is a long-standing problem; on the one hand you don't like such people to denigrate your reading as trivial, and on the other he doesn't like the proliferation of throwaway books. [[[What Hartwell is trying to do *is* worthy. And I support it. Pushing for higher standards and requiring more out of the field and its authors is the only way we'll continue to improve the craft. At the same time, however, there's no way I can support an attitude of "you don't know what's good for you. Here, let me tell you." That was the primary opinion I was arguing with. Let him show me the way towards greatness. Don't, however, remove the alternatives -- there are many of us who *love* reading purely for entertainment, and Hartwell would get rid of most of the fiction that is set up primarily for that. He's forgotten that fiction can be fun. Me, personally, I get headaches when people start shoving Meaning and Messages into my head. If he wanted to show me what was good for me and enlighten me as to why it was good, I'd be up there pushing with him. What he wants to do, though, is force me to only read what he defines as "good" and not give me alternatives. That's called censorship. Even for the best of intents, I can't support that.]]] James Harris My biggest disagreement is your passing statements on the fanzine Thrust. I do not find it boring. The material in Thrust appeals to me. Things like George Alec Effinger writing about his book When Gravity Fails or Kim Stanley Robinson writing about Philip K. Dick, add to my sense of history about SF. Your conflict is between your personal finances and producing the magazine you envision. My conflict: I've only got so much money to spend on magazines, with only so much time to read, and it's time to send you eleven dollars and renew my subscription. You said in the past that $2.85 would cover your cost of sending out one issue. Now that you are half that size, are we paying extra? By the way, what would happen if you only mailed OtherRealms to those people who paid for an issue, or had something published in that particular issue? (I'm just being curious about the business of publishing a fanzine.) I can understand trading with selective fanzines that might interest you - but don't you get a lot of stuff you don't want to read? And is a LOC really that important? [[See my comments in the Notebook on Thrust. The reality was, up until last issue, people were paying $2.85 for a copy of a magazine that cost about $5.00. When OtherRealms was small, I happily ate the difference. Unfortunately, there comes a point where you start choking on your success -- 'donating' a couple of hundred dollars an issue is a lot different than 'donating' a couple of thousand. In reality, I found what seems to be a good compromise. I was able to get OR down to the size it needed to be (costs last issue ran about $2.80 each, but paper prices have continued to spiral. sigh) by reducing page count by about 50% while only removing about 15% of the actual material -- a small chunk from each column, a little more judicious editing and the interviews. In all, that's not as bad as I expected it to be. I've also done a number of other things to get costs down, including drop many of the "quiet" readers from the list. Why trade fanzines? It's a form of contact that I enjoy. The total number of trades I have is reasonably small, especially now after the purge. And yes, occasionally I get a fanzine that I don't care for. And occasionally I get something like Renaissance Fan (which is beautiful and enjoyable to look at even if I don't care about the writing), or YHOS which is guaranteed to make me think. I get fanzines from Australia and England and Sweden and Norway -- which gives me a perspective on the world I wouldn't have, otherwise. Fanzines aren't everyone's cup of tea, but I find them fascinating. That's why I trade fanzines. And are LOCs important? Definitely, for three reasons: LOCs are the things that tell me how I'm doing -- when I screw up, I hear about it; when I do good, people tell me. it's how I decide what material I want to put in OtherRealms and what I don't, because LOCs tell me what the readers want. LOCs are also egoboo. LOCs make me feel good -- even negative LOCs tell me I affected you enough to want to write. They tell me that OtherRealms is being read and appreciated -- and that makes me feel good. Finally, LOCs are an alternate form of subscriptions. If you can't/won't send me the money, I'm giving you an alternative. Spend a chunk of your life and fifty cents, and tell me you care enough about OtherRealms to want to see it again. If you can't afford the $11, buy the stamps and envelopes and paper and take the time to say hi. Subscriptions pay part of the bill. LOCs tell me it's all worthwhile. That's why LOCs are important. Besides, they're fannish! -- chuq]] Elizabeth Moon Thanks for sending me the copies in which Laurie Sefton's reviews of my books appeared. I've been impressed by the overall approach of OtherRealms -- both the quality of individual reviews, and the generally helpful tone. Of course I'm glad that Laurie enjoyed my books -- any writer loves a good review -- but that's more valuable when I can see how selective all your reviewers are. Your concentration on the positive is a definite plus (pun intended.) Your new format is quite readable, although it's too bad you've had to give up some of the columns you'd planned -- I was looking forward to Laurie's comments in biology & other areas of often-mangled science. This has been one of my pet peeves for years -- basic ignorance of fairly low-level biology, medicine, agriculture, etc. It seems incredible that we still find writers who don't know where the lungs in humans are, or what a bruise is (as in one book I read recently: the doctor assured someone that the patient had no bleeding in the brain, just bruising.) [[We hope to revive the science column -- it's more been lack of time than anything else that's kept it from happening (job changes will do that). If we find we can't squeeze it in here, it's also possible it can end up in Dan'l's Optimistic Sturgeon. -- Chuq]] One point to consider in comparing reviewers is their consistency (or, more commonly, lack of it) in dealing with subgenres and different writers. This shows up not only in ignoring or putting down a type of work or a writer, but also in glossing over major problems in books of a "favorite" sort. I am thinking, at the moment, of a reviewer who prefers hard SF, and who recently praised a book which was full of errors of basic science -- the very kind of thing he fulminates against in soft SF or fantasy. If it's bad to mess up on the speed of light, it's just as bad (if not worse) to do it in hard SF. You're certainly right that the reason for reading is pleasure. What the present literati don't understand is that reading for pleasure includes reading complex, intellectual works as well as froth. Thinking is fun, too. That's heresy, of course, but a foundation of science fiction: thinking is fun, and you don't need anyone to explain it to you. An excellent essay on the origins of this whole row is C.S. Lewis' "High and Low Brows", printed in a book called Rehabilitations. He saw this coming decades ago, and described it brilliantly. Basically, what's happened is that "difficult" has become a literary virtue in the eyes of the literary establishment. This justifies their existence as interpreters -- if any intelligent reader can understand it by himself, English faculties are reduced to explaining work old enough to be obscure for that reason alone. They'd rather read the new stuff. So they insist that good writers write for the few who can understand, and then teach the rest (or at least those docile enough to listen.) They insist that good writing demands more from a reader, rather than giving more to him. But I'm with you: good work is not hard, although it may be complex and richly textured. A young or inexperienced reader can follow it well enough -- and as the reader grows in experience, in wisdom, the good work still offers satisfaction. It can be re-read, year after year, without seeming stale. Science fiction and fantasy both offer such reading experiences -- experiences that depend not on a reader's erudition, but on experience and human growth. Some excellent work is nearly inaccessible in adolescence -- one reason schools err in pushing the less narrative classics to young -- but it should not require a college degree for a reader of the right age to appreciate. The challenge for a writer is to create something that entertains at more than one level ... the 15 year old who wants a good adventure story, the other 15 year old who wants a good character to idolize, the college student who is just making the connection between the fantasy he reads and the reality he lives, the middle manager who wants to escape the corporate jungle, the historian who loves created histories and societies (but is critical of them), the elderly lady who has never read a fantasy but will spot a character flaw in a flash, and so on. No one can do it all; no book ever satisfies all readers. But we can try ... and the way to more depth is not by trying to be difficult and obscure, but by digging deeper with the same simple tools. We also heard from: Baird Searles, Susan Shwartz, Donald Franson, David Dunham, Peggy Ransom, Sheryl Birkhead (not Sheila! *blush*) and Ken Meltsner. OtherRealms Science Fiction and Fantasy in Review Issue #24 -- Spring, 1989 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved Editor Chuq Von Rospach Science Editor Laurie Sefton Contributing Editors Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Charles de Lint Rick Kleffel Lawrence Watt-Evans Alan Wexelblat Contributors Dean R. Lambe 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. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author. OtherRealms is published in January, April, July and October by: Chuq Von Rospach 35111-F Newark Blvd. Suite 255 Newark, CA 94560 Usenet: chuq@apple.com AppleLink: CHUQ Delphi: CHUQ CIS: 73317,635 Deadlines Deadlines for all material is the 15th of the month prior to publication. Publication date is the 30th of the month. Next deadline: June 15. Subscriptions A single copy of OtherRealms is $2.85. A one year (4 issue) subscription is $11. OtherRealms is available on a returnable basis to bookstores. Please contact me for details. Complimentary subscriptions are available for arranged trades, at the whim of the editor or "the usual." Submissions OtherRealms is looking for reviews on Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and related non-fiction. We cover book-length material only. Authors are solicited to discuss their books in the Behind the Scenes section. This series allows you to describe the background and research that went into your book and the things that make it special to you. OtherRealms is also interested in a variety of feature material about the field and its authors. Please query all material except reviews. Submissions can be made in either Macintosh or MS-DOS disks, via electronic mail, or the old-fashioned ink-on-paper format. Please include a SASE. Unless otherwise agreed upon, OtherRealms uses first serial rights. Art I'm always looking for good genre-related artwork, from small clip-art pieces to covers. Art will be returned after use if you request it. I request non-exclusive one-time rights to the artwork. Letters OtherRealms solicits your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and about the SF field. Letters will be considered for publications unless otherwise requested. Letters may be edited for space or content (but not context!) as necessary. Addresses will not be published unless you permit it. Is this your last issue? The number on your mailing list is the issue your OtherRealms subscription dies. Negative numbers indicate a complimentatry subscription. If the number is zero, this is the only time you'll see OtherRealms unless you Do Something About It. Book Ratings [*****] One of the best books of the year [****] An above average book [***] A good book. Recommended [**] Flawed. Has its moments [*] Not recommended [] To be avoided ------ End ------