A warm welcome to Bruce Gillespie who is going to guest here at ASif! Q&A this fortnight. I asked Bruce for a brief bio so that I could introduce him and whilst reading it, I realised that I am totally unqualified to do so.
Bruce has been awarded more than twenty Ditmar and William Atheling Awards. In addition, he has been awarded a number of awards by the international SF community, including Fan Guest of Honour at Aussiecon III, the World Convention held in Melbourne in 1999, and the Immediate Past President of the Fan Writers of America in 2005.
He has been a freelance book editor since 1974. He published the first issue of SF Commentary in January 1969 and the next eighteen issues in the following two years. SF Commentary began as a very serious magazine of criticism and reviews of SF literature, but began to loosen up in 1971. Most of the world's top critics and reviewers, such as George Turner, Stanislaw Lem, John Foyster and Brian Aldiss, wrote articles for SF Commentary in the 1970s or appeared in its letter column 'I Must Be Talking to My Friends'. SFC also became Bruce's continuing diary and a magazine of personal journalism. SFC won its first Ditmar Award in 1972, and was first nominated for the Hugo in the same year. Two more Hugo nominations followed, as well as many Ditmar Awards.
In 1975, Bruce became a partner (with Carey Handfield and Rob Gerrand) in Norstrilia Books, the first Australian small press venture devoted to publishing SF-related books. 15 titles appeared before the press folded in 1985.
He began The Metaphysical Review in 1984. TMR reflects all those multiple interests that science fiction fans share apart from their favourite reading matter. Both magazines ran in tandem for some years, but SF Commentary has appeared most often in recent years.
In 2000, Bruce also began an international magazine of SF discussion, Steam Engine Time, in tandem with two English fans. Four issues have appeared, the most recent with a new co-editor, Jan Stinson.
Again, welcome Bruce! I guess I'll start with a somewhat controversial question. In the last year or so there has been much discussion on various blogs and other online outlets about the quality of current Australian specfic. With your experience in the genre, would you say that the current crop of work is noteworthy? What would you say has been the richest period of Australian specfic writing?
Focus on Bruce Gillespie
13 posts • Page 1 of 1
Focus on Bruce Gillespie
by Alisa Krasnostein » Wed May 31, 2006 12:23 pm
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by Gillian » Wed May 31, 2006 3:21 pm
Hi Bruce. I need to say upfront that you are responsible for me explaining to Faye Ringel the relationship between Canberra and Norstrilia.
Right now, though, I'm curious about the relationship between Steam Engine Time and SF Commentary and Australian fiction. Does the critical work inform writers, or is it there primarily to enrich readers' experience of writing?
Right now, though, I'm curious about the relationship between Steam Engine Time and SF Commentary and Australian fiction. Does the critical work inform writers, or is it there primarily to enrich readers' experience of writing?
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by Alisa Krasnostein » Wed May 31, 2006 4:20 pm
Does the critical work inform writers, or is it there primarily to enrich readers' experience of writing?
And I guess do those things have to be mutually exclusive?
- Alisa Krasnostein
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Thanks for the introduction
by Bruce Gillespie » Fri Jun 02, 2006 9:52 am
Hi, Alisa, Gillian and anybody else interested:
Sorry to take so long to take my place on the forum. The mechanics of it all defeated me, as do the mechanics of blogs. Interesting that you say, Alisa, that the quality of SF in Australia has been discussed on the blogs. Only a few years ago, all the discussion between Australian SF writers, editors and readers was on Eidolist, a very lively place for conversation. Since I never see any of the blogs (or rather, I'm not aware of a guidance system for finding the interesting blogs), I'm not sure what other people have said.
If you read Congreve and Marquardt's The Year's Best Australian SF and Fantasy, both volumes, and you would agree that Australian SF is in a very healthy state. Lots of interesting stories and good writers. As I find myself saying in the latest Cosmos (in a review I wrote six months ago): 'Australia is crawling with ambitious science fiction writers and publishers... You won't find better writing in any recent collection of mainstream Australian short stories.'
The trouble is that, economically, Australian SF is in no better state that it was in 1967. I've just been rereading Lee Harding's summary of the state of Australian SF in July 1967, in which he points out that Australia has no professional magazine, and that the only Australian writers earning anything were doing so because of overseas sales. In those days there were no Australian publishers interested in our SF, although in his article 'The Cosmological Eye: The Tyranny of Distance', Lee does appeal directly to Ron Smith, newly arrived from America and newly appointed publisher at Horwitz Books, to give Australian authors a go. Ron's reply? 'I'll have to have sales figures on these before I can make any but tentative plans.'
Forty years later, we still have no professional magazine -- that is, a magazine devoted to SF and fantasy that pays decent rates and sells well on newsstands -- and the only real local publishing we have is for blockbuster fantasy, not science fiction. For SF writers, the situation is exactly the same as it was in 1967: you have to sell your books overseas to earn any money or have any success.
The situation was exactly the same in 1979, when George Turner gave a complete summary of the local situation in SF Commentary: a vast amount of local, small press publishing, but no professional magazine, and no success for anybody (including George himself) unless that author sold overseas.
So we can all be grateful to the small press publishers. There are a lot more of then when Rob Gerrand, Carey Handfield and I started Norstrilia Press in August 1975, and Paul Collins and Rowena Cory started Void Publications/Cory & Collins a few months later. We paid what we could, but nobody was going to raise kids or the rent on the rates we paid for books then, and nobody could now on the proceeds from small press. The Australian SF writers we admire are all those who sell overseas: Margo Lanagan most recently, Greg Egan and Sean McMullen, very successfully, Damien Broderick, who has moved to San Antonio, and Lucy Sussex -- her novel The Scarlet Rider and quite a few of her short stories.
The situation seems to be that we lots of high-quality writer putting their heads over the parapet and hoping somebody will shoot at them, but I have no idea how many are sending out their work regularly to overseas markets. The dangers of doing that remain the same as they were in 1967 -- the need to downplay Australian elements in one's work, the need to homogenise the language, and always the need to keep a sharp eye on what's happening in both book and short story publishing in America and Britain.
Is that too anodyne a reply? Okay, I'll go out on a limb. Margo Lanagan is a better writer than any current Australian 'mainstream' writer, and she deserves all the success she's getting. If Kaaron Warren (The Grinding House) can get noticed by the same people (Charles Brown at Locus, Malcolm Edwards at Gollancz in Britain, Dave Hartwell at Tor in America), she should have a great career. I keep waiting for Lucy Sussex to produce some more novels, because The Scarlet Rider well noticed in America, but nobody's going to publish short story collections unless an author has had some success with novels. I hope that statement is proven wrong, and her collections do sell. Lucy's is probably the most distinctive voice in Austalian SF. It seems that Greg Egan is finally back in action after a lay-off. And our senior Australian writer, Damien Broderick, has just had a new novel out. Adrian Bedford, from Western Australia, is following my advice faithfully: his first two novels have been published in Canada, and well publicised in the American press.
**
I don't know how to answer your question, Alisa, about the richest period in Australian SF. Until about 1990, it was possible to read almost everything that was coming out each year. From 1975 to 1985, there were two small presses, one magazine publishing one story per issue (sorry, I've forgotten its name), and a growing Young Adult market. Remember that Lee Harding won the Australian Children's Award for his YA novel Displaced Person in 1980, the most prestigious award that any Australian SF writer won until Greg Egan picked up a Campbell Award and then a Hugo. After 1985, there was only one small press left, Peter Macnamara's Aphelion, and a bit of overseas publishing. After 1990, with not only the advent of Aurealis and Eidolon but the explosion of small press and the entry of mainstream publishers, it became impossible for me to keep up with what was being published. So my favourite period is from 1975 to 1985, when it looked as if many of our writers were going to burst onto the international scene, but many of the best, such as Philippa Maddern and David Grigg, went on to other things (Pip to a successful academic career, and David to a successful career in computer technology). There was no money then, and for nearly everybody, there ain't much now, but idealism was rife then, and probably still is.
**
However, I think you asked me to be on the forum because I once called myself a critic. Now, I'm not so sure. I still do short reviews, but I haven't done many long critical articles since the 1970s. I still try to do one a year, which I give as a talk to Melbourne's Nova Mob (our monthly SF discussion group, which usually has an attendance of about 30). I've changed my ideas about being a critic. When I started, I tried to get as deep into each individual book as I could, plunging into the flow of the prose. The critics who've lasted, though, such as Stanislaw Lem, John Foyster, Damon Knight, and James Blish, are those who had a magisterial overhead view. In recent years, people such as John Clute, Peter Nicholls and Dave Langford have done this by putting together entire encyclopedias. I don't read as fast as they do. I gave up trying to keep up with the entire field in 1981, and almost gave up reading SF until I decided to concentrate only on my favourite authors and books. This proved liberating. I found that I could work out from the reviews the dozen or so interesting books each year, from which ever country, and read and write about them. However, I'm hard put to make generalisations these days.
So, to finally get around to the question: no, criticism is not for writers, it's for readers. Writers want their backs stroked. It's almost impossible to find a writer who doesn't take offence at analytical criticism, and the best writers sail on anyway. Writers tend to think the world revolves around what they are doing, whereas the best critics extract themselves from the scene altogether, and try to place all writers in some kind of context. Well, that's the ideal. Still, the golden age of Australian SF criticism was from 1966 to 1975, when we began to meet the overseas writers for the first time. Until then, our great critics, such as George Turner and Lee Harding, took aim without mercy or favour at all writers, even our local writers. (Lee Harding has never suffered harsher criticism than at the pen of his best friend John Foyster.) Since then, there has been a progressive increase in currying of favour (a wise commercial move), but Australian criticism and reviewing now seem to be disregarded in Britain, say, where it is very much alive.
But that doesn't mean readers can't take out their knives, and get back into the field of criticism. George Turner always believed that science fiction would only be as good as the critical skills of the people who read it, which is why he aimed his essays and reviews at readers, not writers. The writers did not being kicked in the shins, but the readers did not like George's opinions about their favourite writers. As I say, it's hard to find anybody with a really dispassionate spirit, who can separate the personal from the critical. I'm not sure I do these days, but I still love a good critical article.
**
Which brings me to SF Commentary, The Metaphysical Review and Steam Engine Time. SFC was begun in 1969 to take on the mantel recently dropped by John Bangsund, when he stopped published Australian Science Fiction Review, possibly the best SF critical journal ever published. (Its only real competition was Peter Weston's Speculation in Britain.) The tone was serious critical and pretty fierce, as I had some good writers to draw on. In 1971, thanks to John Foyster in Melbourne and Franz Rottensteiner in Austria, I gained the biggest critic of them all, Poland's Stanislaw Lem. This must have had something to do with being nominated three times for the Hugo, and winning quite a few Ditmar Awards. In 1972, I began to include personal essays as well, so that SF Commentary became my personal diary as well as a critical magazine. The most most popular feature in the magazine was 'I Must Be Talking to My Friends', which combined personal material and a vast letter column.
In the early 80s, I ran out of money altogether (this often happens in my life), shut down SFC for several years, and began a new magazine, The Metaphysical Review, to cover all my interests. Needless to say, this magazine almost never publishes articles about metaphysics. I've had special issues about music, general literature, movies, and a wide range of other material. However, Metaphysical Review has lapsed in recent years because correspondents still want most to discuss their favourite reading matter -- science fiction. I have a huge backlog of fabulous material, and as usual I'm looking for the money to publish it. Meanwhile, everything I've published since 1998 is in electronic form (PDF files) on efanzines.com.
Steam Engine Time? That was the result of a long, convivial dinner after the Hugo ceremony in 1999 at the World Convention held in Melbourne. Paul Kincaid and Maureen Kincaid Speller from Britain were my best friends at the time, because Maureen had allowed me to join her apa (amateur publishing association) Acnestis in 1995. We proposed an international magazine that would simply publish long essays about SF. Great idea, but the mechanics defeated us after No 2, and Maureen seems to have lost interest in SF altogether recently. Fortunately, Jan Stinson from Minnesota came on board as international co-editor, No 4 has appeared, and we have solid plans for No 5. Finances willing, of course.
Sorry to take so long to take my place on the forum. The mechanics of it all defeated me, as do the mechanics of blogs. Interesting that you say, Alisa, that the quality of SF in Australia has been discussed on the blogs. Only a few years ago, all the discussion between Australian SF writers, editors and readers was on Eidolist, a very lively place for conversation. Since I never see any of the blogs (or rather, I'm not aware of a guidance system for finding the interesting blogs), I'm not sure what other people have said.
If you read Congreve and Marquardt's The Year's Best Australian SF and Fantasy, both volumes, and you would agree that Australian SF is in a very healthy state. Lots of interesting stories and good writers. As I find myself saying in the latest Cosmos (in a review I wrote six months ago): 'Australia is crawling with ambitious science fiction writers and publishers... You won't find better writing in any recent collection of mainstream Australian short stories.'
The trouble is that, economically, Australian SF is in no better state that it was in 1967. I've just been rereading Lee Harding's summary of the state of Australian SF in July 1967, in which he points out that Australia has no professional magazine, and that the only Australian writers earning anything were doing so because of overseas sales. In those days there were no Australian publishers interested in our SF, although in his article 'The Cosmological Eye: The Tyranny of Distance', Lee does appeal directly to Ron Smith, newly arrived from America and newly appointed publisher at Horwitz Books, to give Australian authors a go. Ron's reply? 'I'll have to have sales figures on these before I can make any but tentative plans.'
Forty years later, we still have no professional magazine -- that is, a magazine devoted to SF and fantasy that pays decent rates and sells well on newsstands -- and the only real local publishing we have is for blockbuster fantasy, not science fiction. For SF writers, the situation is exactly the same as it was in 1967: you have to sell your books overseas to earn any money or have any success.
The situation was exactly the same in 1979, when George Turner gave a complete summary of the local situation in SF Commentary: a vast amount of local, small press publishing, but no professional magazine, and no success for anybody (including George himself) unless that author sold overseas.
So we can all be grateful to the small press publishers. There are a lot more of then when Rob Gerrand, Carey Handfield and I started Norstrilia Press in August 1975, and Paul Collins and Rowena Cory started Void Publications/Cory & Collins a few months later. We paid what we could, but nobody was going to raise kids or the rent on the rates we paid for books then, and nobody could now on the proceeds from small press. The Australian SF writers we admire are all those who sell overseas: Margo Lanagan most recently, Greg Egan and Sean McMullen, very successfully, Damien Broderick, who has moved to San Antonio, and Lucy Sussex -- her novel The Scarlet Rider and quite a few of her short stories.
The situation seems to be that we lots of high-quality writer putting their heads over the parapet and hoping somebody will shoot at them, but I have no idea how many are sending out their work regularly to overseas markets. The dangers of doing that remain the same as they were in 1967 -- the need to downplay Australian elements in one's work, the need to homogenise the language, and always the need to keep a sharp eye on what's happening in both book and short story publishing in America and Britain.
Is that too anodyne a reply? Okay, I'll go out on a limb. Margo Lanagan is a better writer than any current Australian 'mainstream' writer, and she deserves all the success she's getting. If Kaaron Warren (The Grinding House) can get noticed by the same people (Charles Brown at Locus, Malcolm Edwards at Gollancz in Britain, Dave Hartwell at Tor in America), she should have a great career. I keep waiting for Lucy Sussex to produce some more novels, because The Scarlet Rider well noticed in America, but nobody's going to publish short story collections unless an author has had some success with novels. I hope that statement is proven wrong, and her collections do sell. Lucy's is probably the most distinctive voice in Austalian SF. It seems that Greg Egan is finally back in action after a lay-off. And our senior Australian writer, Damien Broderick, has just had a new novel out. Adrian Bedford, from Western Australia, is following my advice faithfully: his first two novels have been published in Canada, and well publicised in the American press.
**
I don't know how to answer your question, Alisa, about the richest period in Australian SF. Until about 1990, it was possible to read almost everything that was coming out each year. From 1975 to 1985, there were two small presses, one magazine publishing one story per issue (sorry, I've forgotten its name), and a growing Young Adult market. Remember that Lee Harding won the Australian Children's Award for his YA novel Displaced Person in 1980, the most prestigious award that any Australian SF writer won until Greg Egan picked up a Campbell Award and then a Hugo. After 1985, there was only one small press left, Peter Macnamara's Aphelion, and a bit of overseas publishing. After 1990, with not only the advent of Aurealis and Eidolon but the explosion of small press and the entry of mainstream publishers, it became impossible for me to keep up with what was being published. So my favourite period is from 1975 to 1985, when it looked as if many of our writers were going to burst onto the international scene, but many of the best, such as Philippa Maddern and David Grigg, went on to other things (Pip to a successful academic career, and David to a successful career in computer technology). There was no money then, and for nearly everybody, there ain't much now, but idealism was rife then, and probably still is.
**
However, I think you asked me to be on the forum because I once called myself a critic. Now, I'm not so sure. I still do short reviews, but I haven't done many long critical articles since the 1970s. I still try to do one a year, which I give as a talk to Melbourne's Nova Mob (our monthly SF discussion group, which usually has an attendance of about 30). I've changed my ideas about being a critic. When I started, I tried to get as deep into each individual book as I could, plunging into the flow of the prose. The critics who've lasted, though, such as Stanislaw Lem, John Foyster, Damon Knight, and James Blish, are those who had a magisterial overhead view. In recent years, people such as John Clute, Peter Nicholls and Dave Langford have done this by putting together entire encyclopedias. I don't read as fast as they do. I gave up trying to keep up with the entire field in 1981, and almost gave up reading SF until I decided to concentrate only on my favourite authors and books. This proved liberating. I found that I could work out from the reviews the dozen or so interesting books each year, from which ever country, and read and write about them. However, I'm hard put to make generalisations these days.
So, to finally get around to the question: no, criticism is not for writers, it's for readers. Writers want their backs stroked. It's almost impossible to find a writer who doesn't take offence at analytical criticism, and the best writers sail on anyway. Writers tend to think the world revolves around what they are doing, whereas the best critics extract themselves from the scene altogether, and try to place all writers in some kind of context. Well, that's the ideal. Still, the golden age of Australian SF criticism was from 1966 to 1975, when we began to meet the overseas writers for the first time. Until then, our great critics, such as George Turner and Lee Harding, took aim without mercy or favour at all writers, even our local writers. (Lee Harding has never suffered harsher criticism than at the pen of his best friend John Foyster.) Since then, there has been a progressive increase in currying of favour (a wise commercial move), but Australian criticism and reviewing now seem to be disregarded in Britain, say, where it is very much alive.
But that doesn't mean readers can't take out their knives, and get back into the field of criticism. George Turner always believed that science fiction would only be as good as the critical skills of the people who read it, which is why he aimed his essays and reviews at readers, not writers. The writers did not being kicked in the shins, but the readers did not like George's opinions about their favourite writers. As I say, it's hard to find anybody with a really dispassionate spirit, who can separate the personal from the critical. I'm not sure I do these days, but I still love a good critical article.
**
Which brings me to SF Commentary, The Metaphysical Review and Steam Engine Time. SFC was begun in 1969 to take on the mantel recently dropped by John Bangsund, when he stopped published Australian Science Fiction Review, possibly the best SF critical journal ever published. (Its only real competition was Peter Weston's Speculation in Britain.) The tone was serious critical and pretty fierce, as I had some good writers to draw on. In 1971, thanks to John Foyster in Melbourne and Franz Rottensteiner in Austria, I gained the biggest critic of them all, Poland's Stanislaw Lem. This must have had something to do with being nominated three times for the Hugo, and winning quite a few Ditmar Awards. In 1972, I began to include personal essays as well, so that SF Commentary became my personal diary as well as a critical magazine. The most most popular feature in the magazine was 'I Must Be Talking to My Friends', which combined personal material and a vast letter column.
In the early 80s, I ran out of money altogether (this often happens in my life), shut down SFC for several years, and began a new magazine, The Metaphysical Review, to cover all my interests. Needless to say, this magazine almost never publishes articles about metaphysics. I've had special issues about music, general literature, movies, and a wide range of other material. However, Metaphysical Review has lapsed in recent years because correspondents still want most to discuss their favourite reading matter -- science fiction. I have a huge backlog of fabulous material, and as usual I'm looking for the money to publish it. Meanwhile, everything I've published since 1998 is in electronic form (PDF files) on efanzines.com.
Steam Engine Time? That was the result of a long, convivial dinner after the Hugo ceremony in 1999 at the World Convention held in Melbourne. Paul Kincaid and Maureen Kincaid Speller from Britain were my best friends at the time, because Maureen had allowed me to join her apa (amateur publishing association) Acnestis in 1995. We proposed an international magazine that would simply publish long essays about SF. Great idea, but the mechanics defeated us after No 2, and Maureen seems to have lost interest in SF altogether recently. Fortunately, Jan Stinson from Minnesota came on board as international co-editor, No 4 has appeared, and we have solid plans for No 5. Finances willing, of course.
- Bruce Gillespie
by Alisa Krasnostein » Sun Jun 04, 2006 5:02 pm
You mention that there are no publishers overseas interested in our SF - does that mean that Australian SF is different, somehow to that being published elsewhere? If so, how so?
- Alisa Krasnostein
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- Location: Perth, WA
by Gillian » Wed Jun 07, 2006 5:24 pm
Ben - can you give the rest of us some context for that? How do *you* see changes during your time? The reason I ask is because you have been carefuly tallying things up since 1995 in those lists of publications. Was it 1995? Anyhow, the past decade or thereabouts, and it would be really interesting to know if you and Bruce agree.
- Gillian
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- Location: Canberra
by Guest » Wed Jun 07, 2006 5:47 pm
Hi Bruce,
How do you think new technologies have affected fanzines and reviewers? Obviously it's cheaper and easier to make and distributed zines and reviews via the internet, but has this changed things for the better?
What are some of the down sides of the new electronic media, for fanzines, critical work and fandom in general?
How do you think new technologies have affected fanzines and reviewers? Obviously it's cheaper and easier to make and distributed zines and reviews via the internet, but has this changed things for the better?
What are some of the down sides of the new electronic media, for fanzines, critical work and fandom in general?
- Guest
by tansyrr » Wed Jun 07, 2006 5:49 pm
Sorry, that was me!
Read Tansy's mutterings at Velvet Threads: http://www.livejournal.com/users/cassiphone/
- tansyrr
- Posts: 111
- Joined: Mon Jan 02, 2006 8:37 pm
- Location: Hobart, Tasmania
by Alisa Krasnostein » Thu Jun 08, 2006 12:02 pm
Hey Tansy, that's an interesting question - and being that I'm of the MTV generation, I thought I'd jump in and wonder how much the need for immmediateness affects the critical work. The electronic media encourages speed and access and therefore I would think a greater proliferation of work - both of the writing and the reviewing.
I wonder if that decreases the quality and if that is due to greater quantity or shorter production time?
I wonder if that decreases the quality and if that is due to greater quantity or shorter production time?
- Alisa Krasnostein
- Posts: 680
- Joined: Thu Dec 15, 2005 12:04 pm
- Location: Perth, WA
by Guest » Thu Jun 08, 2006 2:22 pm
When I reply here, I blot out the name of the person I'm replying to. Sorry about if my replies sound a bit impersonal. I should have printed out your replies before doing my answers, but forgot to.
Surely I didn't imply that overseas publishers have a prejudice against Australian writers! Quite the opposite -- Australia's reputation seems to be high at the moment. However, overseas publishers are wary of Australian books if they have already been published here, because British publishers in particular want all British Commonwealth rights. A good example is the way UQP published Peter Carey first, and has hung onto him. It would obviously be more lucrative for his British publisher to ship copies of each new novel here -- but they miss out on Australian sales. Overseas publishers would probably prefer that writers send their new books directly to those publishers, then they carve up American and Commonwealth rights.
**
Politics: I can't say I've noticed much change in SF, even over the last 40 years. SF writers tend to favour the American frontier mentality, which puts them on the Right of American politics. Australian writers don't seem much interested in local politics, but maybe I haven't read the right authors. I'll have to rely on other people to put me right on this one.
**
This matter of where and how to publish has me defeated. I would prefer to publish real paper fanzines, of course, if only for the reason that copies will still be available in twenty, forty or sixty years for anybody who wants to read them. I feel that an enterprising hacker will wipe out the world internet archives sometime in the near future, destroying much that is now regarded as solid information.
Also, I find that I get a good response to paper fanzines, and almost no response to the electronic versions, which I place, in PDF format, on efanzines.com. Since the main currency of fanzines is feedback, this makes paper fanzines much more attractive.
The problem with paper fanzines is expense. I make little money, and much less than I did ten years ago. Even so, the cost of publishing goes up continually, and the cost of overseas postage has become terrifying. Publishing fanzines used to be a cheap hobby.
But I realise that people who are much more familiar with computers than I am are using blogs and websites as effective fanzines, and get good response. The trouble with the extent of internet publication is that few people are still talking to each other. Up until the mid 1970s, there was one fandom, with people talking to each other. The big debates ranged across the world, from magazine to magazine. There are still debates on the Yahoo lists, where I correspond. And bloggers talk to each other, although I don't know how this works. To me, publishing on my blog seems like dropping feathers down a well, but obviously people Out There know how to collect feathers.
The internet seems to be a boon to fiction writers, I'll agree, and if I wrote fiction I'd use it the same way. But if I write reviews or long critical pieces, I'd still rather see something solid there, in black and white.
Surely I didn't imply that overseas publishers have a prejudice against Australian writers! Quite the opposite -- Australia's reputation seems to be high at the moment. However, overseas publishers are wary of Australian books if they have already been published here, because British publishers in particular want all British Commonwealth rights. A good example is the way UQP published Peter Carey first, and has hung onto him. It would obviously be more lucrative for his British publisher to ship copies of each new novel here -- but they miss out on Australian sales. Overseas publishers would probably prefer that writers send their new books directly to those publishers, then they carve up American and Commonwealth rights.
**
Politics: I can't say I've noticed much change in SF, even over the last 40 years. SF writers tend to favour the American frontier mentality, which puts them on the Right of American politics. Australian writers don't seem much interested in local politics, but maybe I haven't read the right authors. I'll have to rely on other people to put me right on this one.
**
This matter of where and how to publish has me defeated. I would prefer to publish real paper fanzines, of course, if only for the reason that copies will still be available in twenty, forty or sixty years for anybody who wants to read them. I feel that an enterprising hacker will wipe out the world internet archives sometime in the near future, destroying much that is now regarded as solid information.
Also, I find that I get a good response to paper fanzines, and almost no response to the electronic versions, which I place, in PDF format, on efanzines.com. Since the main currency of fanzines is feedback, this makes paper fanzines much more attractive.
The problem with paper fanzines is expense. I make little money, and much less than I did ten years ago. Even so, the cost of publishing goes up continually, and the cost of overseas postage has become terrifying. Publishing fanzines used to be a cheap hobby.
But I realise that people who are much more familiar with computers than I am are using blogs and websites as effective fanzines, and get good response. The trouble with the extent of internet publication is that few people are still talking to each other. Up until the mid 1970s, there was one fandom, with people talking to each other. The big debates ranged across the world, from magazine to magazine. There are still debates on the Yahoo lists, where I correspond. And bloggers talk to each other, although I don't know how this works. To me, publishing on my blog seems like dropping feathers down a well, but obviously people Out There know how to collect feathers.
The internet seems to be a boon to fiction writers, I'll agree, and if I wrote fiction I'd use it the same way. But if I write reviews or long critical pieces, I'd still rather see something solid there, in black and white.
- Guest
by Alisa Krasnostein » Tue Jun 13, 2006 2:32 pm
Come forward and ask Bruce some questions - today is officially his last day on the forum. I think we can cope with some overflow and timelag.
So ask away!
So ask away!
- Alisa Krasnostein
- Posts: 680
- Joined: Thu Dec 15, 2005 12:04 pm
- Location: Perth, WA
by Alisa Krasnostein » Wed Jun 21, 2006 4:45 pm
If no one has any more questions, I will thank you Bruce for giving us some of your time. It's unfortunate that technology got in the way. Hopefully you will be willing to come back to the forums again some time as I look forward to getting into more discussion with you.
- Alisa Krasnostein
- Posts: 680
- Joined: Thu Dec 15, 2005 12:04 pm
- Location: Perth, WA
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