When Did SFF Get Too Big?

September 27, 2024 1:35 PM

Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when readers stopped being able to keep up with their favorite genres?

Nicoll concludes: "Was there ever really a time when people actually could read the whole field? Or is that just a story older readers tell themselves, with the line between “fully known” and “too big for one person” drawn at the moment the reader became aware how large the SFF field is? I suspect the latter."

posted by cupcakeninja (44 comments total)

To qualify this - there genuinely was a point when I could and did read all the science fiction and fantasy by writers of color that I could find in English. And then up to about 2012 I felt like I was able to keep up with most of the big novels and I tended to have heard of most of the writers and anthologies. After that, nope, I no longer do or can, and I don't try. I think that's good, actually. I definitely read a lot of SFF by writers of color, but at least in my neck of the fandom woods, that's pretty normal. Up through about 2012 or so "make sure that I read and talk about SFF books by writers of color" was a conscious goal and now it is only a goal in the way that "make sure to eat several meals a day" is a conscious goal for me.

Similarly, up until maybe the early 2000s I felt like I had a pretty good sense of the field of queer SFF...and now I can barely even keep up with the books I want to read.

I don't know if SFF as a whole in terms of books published has expanded (I suspect that it has, a bit) but definitely areas of SFF have expanded a lot.

Also, there's just a lot more sources of information than there used to be, partly because we have a well-developed SFnal internet now, partly because of television, etc. Because I'm an old, I remember when you needed to subscribe to the feminist science fiction email list if you really wanted to talk in detail about feminist science fiction online, I remember when there were a handful of blogs, etc. (I also remember when google search would find all that stuff, which did mean that you could see most of what was out there.)

Further, I remember when it was a huge fucking deal to run across an old copy of the first Women of Wonder anthology, and I remember when you'd read a great story by someone in an anthology and then really have to struggle to find any of their other work.

It would have been hard to read all SFF by women, volume-wise, but first you'd have to hear about and find all SFF by women, which was much harder.

Now, as soon as I post this, someone will hop on to say that in the mid-eighties they had a five thousand book collection of all SFF in English by people of color and queer people, and they ran a bookstore that only stocked SFF by women and they had a hundred thousand titles on the shelf and a massive clientele, and it's just my own laziness and naivete that made this seem so hard, because there's always The Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You, but at least in the upper midwest, even the specialist SFF stores (and we have two good ones) didn't have a ton of titles or stock most writers' full catalogues.
posted by Frowner at 2:03 PM on September 27, 2024 [28 favorites]

The headline on the article is really unfortunately clickbaity because I don't think it particularly reflects the tone or the actual question in the piece. I found the history of the growth of the genre fascinating and wouldn't have imagined it was anywhere near that traceable.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:08 PM on September 27, 2024

I feel like when I was a kid I couldn't keep up with individual SFF authors, much less the entire genre. Do you know how many novels Moorcock wrote? Turns out a lot.
posted by phooky at 2:34 PM on September 27, 2024 [12 favorites]

a huge fucking deal to run across an old copy of the first Women of Wonder anthology

One of the titles I really enjoyed connecting with customers, back in my used bookshop work days.
posted by doctornemo at 4:11 PM on September 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

Do you know how many novels Moorcock wrote? Turns out a lot.

Which is the one he dedicated "To my creditors, an endless source of inspiration," or words to that effect?
posted by doctornemo at 4:11 PM on September 27, 2024 [10 favorites]

I do find it hard to read broadly into SF these days. Partly that's because of time, as I work too much and spent a lot of time caring for family.

But it's also because I'm dreading my own death, which makes me increasingly skeptical of sf books. I want to devote remaining years to the best stuff, and feel enraged when I finish or give up on something flimsy, dull, or at best semicompetent.
posted by doctornemo at 4:14 PM on September 27, 2024 [7 favorites]

galaxy brain meme.jpg: just read the same 25 things you like best over and over again until the heat death of the universe
posted by phunniemee at 4:33 PM on September 27, 2024 [6 favorites]

Hmm. My living room has four large book shelves, containing around 1000 sf/f books published between 1950-1990. They belonged to my partner's dad, who died in the 90s. I have read a few here and there, and I want to read more, or read them all. But, realistically that won't happen. Well, the stories in them will still be there in a few decades.
posted by rebent at 4:44 PM on September 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

I think it used to be possible to keep up with major presses, certainly, but the small stuff I mean, there's always gonna be something somebody finds in a closet that had 1500 compies printed and it got reviewed in the Oberlin College newspaper and that was it or whatever. But there's no way one could even imagine doing so today, even if one had all day to do it.

It's wild, and there's a lot of great stuff coming out. It's awesome.

@rebent, check and see if you have Radix by A.A. Attanasio. That's a fun one.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 5:44 PM on September 27, 2024 [3 favorites]

As with music, there is certainly much more fiction published today than ever before, but one wonders (a) how much of it can realistically make its creators any profit, given the scattered audience, (b) how long most creators will/can continue to create in an environment that can't reward them financially for their work, and (c) what allows creators who make no money to stay in the game of satisfying the tiny sliver of the whole audience that pays attention (it's probably mostly wealth from inheritance and/or a spouse).
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:10 PM on September 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

how long most creators will/can continue to create in an environment that can't reward them financially for their work

The essay only covers published works. As someone who just finished writing my own collection of songs for 50/90 that will likely never get published, widely seen, or bought - and who was surrounded by thousands of others doing the same thing for three months - I promise you that creators will never stop. Songwriters will be singing to each other in our basements until the world burns down, and novelists will be doing the same with their readings.

But the business of selling creative works? For that endeavor, I despair of its future.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 6:50 PM on September 27, 2024 [9 favorites]

It's hard enough to keep up with every horror anthology edited by Ellen Datlow.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:29 PM on September 27, 2024 [9 favorites]

This reminds me of an SF novel, can't remember the author, about an alien who trains a human being to become basically physically and mentally perfect, through a regimen that includes becoming an expert on every human field of endeavor. I don't remember if that also included reading all the books, but that would certainly take a while.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:50 PM on September 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

My dad was one of those people who bought and read every science fiction book he could find. He claimed he had everything published up to a certain point, which I was always skeptical of, but seeing the numbers in the article he was probably right. His collection went up to about 1968 and then stopped (maybe because of us kids). Unfortunately, water and rats and time ruined most of those thousands of books. I still have a few hundred of them, either because I read them and liked them, or just liked the cover art.
posted by jabah at 8:15 PM on September 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

I'm very familiar with this question.

I started reading SF in the '60s, made a serious effort to encompass the entire field in the '70s; and I cut back on my hope of keeping up, and cut back to reading ONLY the award-nominated works by the 1990s.

Nicoll quotes del Rey's count that there were 195 new SFF works published in 1972, and Dozois’ estimate that there were about 710 new SFF novels published in 1992.

This is where Sturgeon's law ("Ninety percent of everything is crap") is our friend.

"710" or even "195" books/year may be unrealistic; but 10% of those numbers is a LOT more manageable.

[Even when I was trying to read "everything," I wasn't reading "everything." I NEVER felt any guilt for ignoring, say, the Perry Rhodan books.]
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 9:04 PM on September 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of an SF novel, can't remember the author, about an alien who trains a human being to become basically physically and mentally perfect, through a regimen that includes becoming an expert on every human field of endeavor. I don't remember if that also included reading all the books, but that would certainly take a while.

groundhog day?
posted by Sebmojo at 11:42 PM on September 27, 2024 [3 favorites]

But the business of selling creative works? For that endeavor, I despair of its future.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/308888/revenue-trade-book-publishing/

slow but steady climb over the last ten years.
posted by Sebmojo at 11:45 PM on September 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Another upvote for "Radix", which is suuuper trippy.

I know a bunch of people in SFF criticism, as it's tangential to my academic subfield. What they all say is that the magazines and publishers are so inundated by AI-generated dreck that it's next to impossible to sift through it to get to human-authored material, and still harder to find the gems among that, so there's a big problem with only People Who Know People getting published, worse than it's ever been.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:02 AM on September 28, 2024 [3 favorites]

One of my professors in grad school made the unsubstantiated claim the Voltaire was the last person on earth to have read every book ever published up to that point (with the unstated assumption that the Prof meant in French or maybe western European languages). And I'm a bit too drunk to Google it, but in addition to the blasphemy and the density of the novel, a big part of the reason Moby Dick wasn't popular upon release is that in the few years prior to its release, the number of novels published annually increased by an order of magnitude.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:40 AM on September 28, 2024

This is where Sturgeon's law ("Ninety percent of everything is crap") is our friend.

Yeah, I think this is the issue, along with the fact that curators of the genre have been effectively killed off.

There were some problems with past curators of the genre - they were largely white men, and even though they allowed others into the big SFF rags, or the Hugo’s, they were always looking with an editorial eye skewed by their life experience. We rightfully called that shit out as gatekeeping, and now “a thousand flowers blossomed”. There are so many places to read SFF. But there aren’t any trustworthy gatekeepers anymore.

Right now we are facing a situation where the Hugos are just a political and social football. People are using them to Say Things About The Genre, or support certain writers, and some of those things I even agree with and writers I may like, but it means I can’t reliably just “read all the Hugo winners” and be sure I’m reading brilliance.

So it’s really hampered me from reading new SFF. Who has the money to waste it on sorting through the crap anymore?
posted by corb at 9:34 AM on September 28, 2024 [2 favorites]

I grew up reading these genres and I’m not sure why keeping up with everything is a desirable goal unless you are a book reviewer or judge. I devoured a ton of whatever the library had and was hungry for more, but as the most ocd/ asd little nerd ever I wasn’t trying to read them all.

These days I have one rule (sorry, authors), which is to never read any series that isn’t complete. I see such cool books in the bookstore by all sorts of up and coming authors . Such attractive covers and neat ideas! Then I see it:

A Dream of Vampire Mermaids
(Book One of the Mystic Seas Decalogy)

FUCK OFF NO IT ISN’T
posted by caviar2d2 at 12:09 PM on September 28, 2024 [4 favorites]

Yeah, for a solid 20 years the Dozois anthology (including picking at the other work of the people he anthologized) and the Hugo and Nebula nominee list made me feel like that I was likely optimizing the very limited time I had to read SF ... but no more. None of the other Year's Best anthologies satisfy and the award nominees often have tepid reviews and are unimpressive if and when read.
posted by MattD at 12:29 PM on September 28, 2024 [2 favorites]

When did ninjas get so many?
posted by y2karl at 12:59 PM on September 28, 2024 [2 favorites]

It looks like a bunch of us showed up around 2006-2011, with maybe 2/3 of the total showing up pre-2010. That's just the public data, though--we were here from the beginning, standing very still.
posted by cupcakeninja at 1:17 PM on September 28, 2024 [3 favorites]

One of my professors in grad school made the unsubstantiated claim the Voltaire was the last person on earth to have read every book ever published up to that point (with the unstated assumption that the Prof meant in French or maybe western European languages).

One of my undergrad professors made the same claim about Milton, with the same unstated assumptions. It must be a thing that professors say about the icon in their particular field.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:35 PM on September 28, 2024

jabah, I'm so sorry to hear about the fate of that collection.
posted by doctornemo at 6:24 PM on September 28, 2024

One of my professors in grad school made the unsubstantiated claim the Voltaire was the last person on earth to have read every book ever published up to that point

There's some good research into how folks from 1500-1800 complained that they had too much to read.
posted by doctornemo at 6:26 PM on September 28, 2024 [2 favorites]

Right now we are facing a situation where the Hugos are just a political and social football. People are using them to Say Things About The Genre, or support certain writers, and some of those things I even agree with and writers I may like, but it means I can’t reliably just “read all the Hugo winners” and be sure I’m reading brilliance.

lol, "right now."

I have a theory that the Golden Age of the Hugos is always a couple of decades in the past, no matter what year it is when the person making statements about the current degenerate state of the award says such a thing. Spoiler: The Hugos (and, really, any other award where there is a voting population with real or perceived "skin in the game" with regard to what they're voting on) has always been a political and social football, where votes have been used to say things about the genre, or to support certain winners, etc. The idea that Hugo-voting fandom has ever been "pure" is as much as a fantasy as any piece of fiction that has won the award. Likewise the idea that every Hugo winner before [enter year here] has laden with brilliance. Shit, the generally-agreed-upon Worst Best Novel Hugo Winner was the second one that ever won.

With that said, and again, just like any other significant award, the folks nominating for the Hugo may have personal biases and interests, but they also tend to nominate the work at the top of their personal biases and interests. Which means ("Sad Puppies"-era bullshit excepted) that when the finalist lists come out, a) the work tends to be better-than-average, sometimes significantly, b) actually a pretty decent snapshot of the current state of (traditionally-published) science fiction and fantasy. It works (especially in tandem with other genre awards, like the Nebula, Clarke and Locus) as a good starting point for the state of the industry.

And with that said, in the category of Best Novel, at least, the idea that recent Hugo winners (let's say, from 2014 onward) don't represent brilliance is, shall we say, questionable. This set of winners include Ancillary Justice, The Three Body Problem, Network Effect and The Calculating Stars, not to mention NK Jemisin absolutely genre-redefining Broken Earth trilogy, which is easily the most important work in the genre this century (Arkady Martine, TK Kingfisher and Emily Tesh's work are pretty damn fine too). Which is to say that if you all you did was read the novel Hugo winners for the last decade, you would have absolutely gotten the best of the genre in that era.
posted by jscalzi at 6:41 PM on September 28, 2024 [11 favorites]

with that said, in the category of Best Novel, at least, the idea that recent Hugo winners (let's say, from 2014 onward) don't represent brilliance is, shall we say, questionable

I should clarify: I'm not talking simply about Hugo winners; I do think the voters tend to largely sort things out among the nominees they are given and can read the books of relatively fairly. But I'm looking at the nominees for representations of the field.

So like - in 1959, you wouldn't just be reading A Case of Conscience, by Blish, you'd also be reading Poul Anderson and Heinlein, and Budrys' excellent "Who?" and Sheckey's Immortality, Inc. Each of these novels are excellent and also showcase wildly different themes. If you obtain those books as a 'starter pack', you'd be in a good place to have some great books and to branch off.

the folks nominating for the Hugo may have personal biases and interests, but they also tend to nominate the work at the top of their personal biases and interests

I agree with you here, but I don't think that the work at the top of their personal biases is necessarily always the work at the top of the field. For example: in 2024, four out of six nominated novels have gender identity or politics as a central point (Leckie, Tesh, Wells, and Chakraborty). These may be the best books of the year about gender identity and politics, which god knows those of us in the US at least all have real-world reasons to be upset about. While Leckie is actually at the top of the field, are we really saying that the others are better writers than for example Connie Willis or even Kate Elliott, who also had Hugo-eligible works that year?

You do make some fair points that through combining the award lists you can sort of approach a decent list - if you take the Hugo and the Nebula, Clarke, and Locus you will likely have at least a good starting place. I think honestly the Hugos are kind of particularly borked right now as a result of the Sad Puppy nonsense - I am betting that people will be voting to spite the Sad/Rabid Puppies long after Larry Correia and Vox Day are both dead, though to be fair the backlash nominations seems to have been diminishing in the last few years.

There's also probably some economic factors at play - because of the broadening of the field and the increased prices of books due to publishers no longer being able to write off their back catalog and pulping them all, people haven't generally read everything before voting. In 1959, looking at some covers, a paperback would cost about 0.35$. Inflation should make that 3.79$, but instead I just pulled up a paperback price of 17-18$ for each of the books on the nominee list. Leckie's book only provided an excerpt in the voter packet, for example, though I think her novel was probably the best - I wonder how much of her loss was attributable to that fact.
posted by corb at 9:00 PM on September 28, 2024

I kind of agree with corb, actually, at least that the Hugo nominees in the past few years have been ideologically pretty samey and often working a lot of the same aesthetic concerns, and that this is more true now than it was between The Time I Became Aware of the Hugos and the Sad Puppies, although maybe it has also been like this at times in the past.

But it's like the Oscars, right? I really never think, "oh, I have very snob taste in film, I can't wait to see what incredibly subtle works of filmic genius win Oscars this year". It's not that good movies don't win Oscars, but they're all pretty mainstream because the Oscars are about mass audience. The Hugos are about the books that everyone reads and thinks good, and so more niche books or even just less mass-appeal books aren't going to win Hugos.

But the real problem is just that there are so many good books being published. Even books I don't like much or think really Hugo-worthy are still written at a very high standard. I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid and what strikes me about the now is that while there's a huge amount of fairly same-y genre slush of the kind I used to read as a kid, there's a much higher absolute number of books that are really unique and memorable. When I was younger, even into my twenties, I'd often go to the science fiction bookstore and browse and have trouble really finding books that had it, that stand-alone quality where you knew that you'd remember the book as a unique read, not just as one among many space adventures. Now, up to a point this is subjective, but surely as I age I should be getting more bored, more seen-it-all, less excited about the genre as tropes and approaches repeat?

I do think that as the audience for science fiction has diversified, publishers have become more willing to publish more unique books, thus attracting new readers and creating a kind of virtuous circle. And I say this as someone who just flat out loathes some of the extremely popular books of the past ten years. (Not the Jemisin; I won't name-check books I hate, but I don't want anyone to think I'd disparage the Broken Earth books. I will say that whenever people decide to stop being so goddamn cutesie-poo I will cheer and cheer.)

Back in the day, most of the SFF I liked was unpopular and hard to find. My very favorites were all unpopular and hard to find. Last year The Saint of Bright Doors, a novel that might literally have been custom-written for me, by a writer I'd long admired, won a Nebula. Nothing I like ever wins a Nebula. It has unsettled my sense of self, because I have long thought of myself as someone who only likes nerd/snob books that everyone hates and thinks annoying. Only an SFF field that is extremely developed and complex could possibly generate the right kind of publishing and readership where a critical mass of people would access The Saint of Bright Doors and have enough readerly chops and interest for it to be an award-winner.

I guess what I'm saying is that I am sometimes a bit bored by some of the Hugo winners, but it's more of a spoiled for choice boredom than anything else.

Diverse sources of reviews and following specific presses are my answers. I know that if I read Strange Horizons, Asking The Wrong Questions and Black Gate, and if I keep up with Small Beer and Aqueduct, I'll always have something good on my list.
posted by Frowner at 9:46 PM on September 28, 2024 [6 favorites]

FWIW I doubt Voltaire even read all the SFF books that had been published in French then. It wasn't long after his death that Le Cabinet des fées collected 41 earlier volumes of literary fairy tales and French stories inspired by the 1001 Nights that would have been available to him. And I don't think it included several satirical fantasies by Laurent Bordelon or SFF adventures by Simon Tyssot de Patot or the voyages to the moon and the sun by Cyrano de Bergerac or Lamekis by Charles de Fieux Chevalier de Mouhy, etc., etc. There's a bunch more works that probably weren't all in Le Cabinet des fées, I guess starting with the Lais of Marie de France and other lais féeriques, but I'm on a phone where it's hard to check them all. Anyway, a person technically could have read all this, which is probably the point of the anecdote, but I guess I'm saying several things: the amount of SFF available to a late 18th C. reader was surprising, even if Voltaire read it then or SFF author Brian Stableford read it recently; the amount of general fiction was mind-boggling (how long would it take just to read a few heavy hitters like d'Urfé, Sorel, and de Scudéry?); and it's fine not being able to keep up. The idea that you could is probably tied up in an imagined community--the "field"--symbolized through collective representations like awards and year's best anthologies but not realities to do with barriers to discovery, genre policing, and limits to human attention. Like, I once downloaded ISFDB's MySQL tables to look at what they had year by year for the 18th and 19th C, and it sure wasn't everything. If they're not capturing it all, I wonder who ever has.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:36 PM on September 28, 2024 [3 favorites]

corb, I've found that Fantasy-Faction - Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Discussion is a facebook group that mostly does recommendations and figuring out forgotten titles.

Not that they're read everything, either, but if you tell them what you like, there's a chance they'll recommend something else you'd like.

As for me, I was keeping up with the new sff I liked at least moderately that was available in paperback until sometime in the 80s, and then I got swamped. I could also do some rereading and some older sff.

I liked the old world where people had pretty much read the same books because it made conversation easier.

There was an earlier time when people could read all the published fiction. I don't think "when was the last time one person could read it all?" is exactly the right question, because if conversation is important, I want to know "When was the last time reasonably enthusiastic people could read it all?"

I believe there was an earlier time (the 40s? the 50s?) when it was possible to read all the professally published fiction, and all the fan-writing. I think the fan-writing was mostly humorous personal essays, not fiction.

These days, there might people with that sort of comprehensive knowledge of some fairly narrow niche, but it wouldn't be as wide a variety of material.

As for me, it's hard to say what I'm going to like, partly because there are some very popular authors who I don't click with, and partly because I like being surprised. How can I say what I want when I can't describe it?

Two recent faves: _Titanium Noir_ by Nick Harkaway-- nightmare mystery with no supernatiural elements, just unlikely science, and _The Melancholy of UnTold History_by Minsoo Kang-- consequences of a quarrel between demigods which leads to them meddling in history and entangles a modern historian who discovered that a city in the historical record was faked.

And I'll put in a nice word for _The Heads of Cerberus_(1919) by Francis Harding. This is from before SFF was divided into fantasy and science fiction. It wanders between fantasy, science fiction, and political satire.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:08 AM on September 29, 2024 [3 favorites]

I think honestly the Hugos are kind of particularly borked right now as a result of the Sad Puppy nonsense - I am betting that people will be voting to spite the Sad/Rabid Puppies long after Larry Correia and Vox Day are both dead, though to be fair the backlash nominations seems to have been diminishing in the last few years.

I can state with near 100% confidence that almost no one voting for Hugos at the moment gives an actual squirt in a trash can what either of those two think about anything, nor have they since both slunk away from their debacle most of a decade ago. What may be true is that when those two (with help) hijacked the Hugo award process, many thousands of others came in to counteract their nonsense. When the Sad Puppy nonsense waned, nearly all of the Puppy contingent of voters flounced... but many of those who came in to counteract them stayed, and have become a persistent part of the nominating/voting pool. They then naturally nominated and voted for the things they liked reading. That's not spite; that's merely following their own inclinations.

In 2024, four out of six nominated novels have gender identity or politics as a central point

With respect, I read all of the nominees; may I suggest that this is a fairly limited reading of the width and breadth of the plots and textual concerns of the nominees. One might equally accurately say the 2024 nominees included a fantastical swashbuckling adventure; a scathing look at how war demands the diminishment of one's humanity; an assassin's tale about whether destiny can be rewritten; a space opera about identity and what it means to be "human"; an epic fantasy with demons and dynasties; and a comedic contemporary story about supervillainy. That's a pretty diverse field of work, from a cohort of writers likewise diverse in gender, nationality, and phase of their career.

Conversely, one could say of the 1959 finalists that four of out of six of them were basically space operas of some flavor or another -- not a lot of actual thematic diversity there, not mention they were all written by American men. What I'm saying is framing is important here.

While Leckie is actually at the top of the field, are we really saying that the others are better writers than for example Connie Willis or even Kate Elliott, who also had Hugo-eligible works that year?

What defines "top of the field" and what defines "better"? You and I do not disagree that Leckie is a very excellent writer whose works deserve examination and praise (check out who the blurb is from on the cover of Translation State). But one could very easily argue that Martha Wells is the actual current "top of the field," if award nominations and wins, and critical praise (not to mention sales) are useful metrics to go by. Wells is nominated for awards so often these days that she has (graciously) taken to declining some of those nominations. Likewise, Vajra Chandrasekera's book was awarded the Nebula for Best Novel this year, the Nebula given by SFWA, so this is an award given to a writer by other writers. One could argue that win places him, for the moment, at the top of his field, at least according to his peers. And so on.

Save for things like the SFWA Grandmaster Award (which I will note Connie Willis has), awards are not about a lifetime of achievement, they are a snapshot of what is in the conversation among the voters of the various awards in that year. In any year there are a limited number of award slots available; inevitably many great books, and very fine authors, find themselves outside the finalist list. Aside from the quality of the work itself, factors for consideration can be things like: What's selling? What's made a critical splash? Who are the authors with momentum in the field? Who is "due" an award? Who already has enough awards that giving them more just means their mantle is that much more crowded? Where is the Worldcon, which is in a different city every year, located this time?

All these factors were factors since the beginning of the Hugo Award; there's not been a year since the award was created where you could not create a creditable alternate finalist list of work that didn't make the cut, for whatever reason. This does not mean the finalists are not worthy of the award; they usually are. It means that the field generally has work of excellent quality, which is a very good thing indeed.
posted by jscalzi at 7:49 AM on September 29, 2024 [7 favorites]

It looks like a bunch of us showed up around 2006-2011...

And upon closer examination, you appear to be the senior active ninja from the unobstrusive looks of it.
posted by y2karl at 11:06 AM on September 29, 2024 [1 favorite]

I have not read all the responses yet, but growing up in a town of 613 in Central Nebraska, with the closest retail center being about 25K, in the 70's and 80's, you could only read what you could find. And what you could find were on paperback racks in various retail locations. Even the Waldenbooks in the regional mall could only display so many books.

You could find out about others from reviews in SF mags and such, but there was no way of knowing what was actually available. the internet, and internet stores with seemingly unlimited stocking space, was like a personal epiphany. there was a period of about 6 years or so where I didn't buy many new books because I could finally buy all the older books that had been on my search list.
posted by jkosmicki at 12:12 PM on September 29, 2024 [3 favorites]

Really appreciate the comments here. A lot of serious epistemological and ontological takes about the field and ways of knowing it and what's the best of it. I read Reactor semi-regularly, but this article really got me thinking, and I'm glad it led to some good conversation.

As a librarian, I regularly look at reference books, lists, etc. to get an overview of a field, but my SFF reading has often been less systematic over the years, and lately I've been trying to remedy that. Sometimes that means I'm having wonderful experiences, other times it means I'm reading books that are notable for (as jscalzi put it) reflecting what's in conversation, when I've read other books that came out just a tad later. Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight was my first McCaffrey, just the other day, an award-winner for the novellas that wound up stitched into the book, and it was both delightful and entirely familiar, for all the effects it presumably had on--as well as reflecting--what was then in conversation. Which is a roundabout way of saying it's interesting to think about knowing SFF's interests and topics better, as a valid way of "knowing SFF," even if I rarely manage to read the biggest 5-10 books in a given year.
posted by cupcakeninja at 1:12 PM on September 29, 2024 [1 favorite]

It's kind of neat to see this all happen again even on the internet, but in new niches. Like, if you tried really hard, you might be able to keep up with all the LitRPG in r/LitRPG, but I'd guess a significant percentage of SFF readers who'd enjoy it are still learning the genre exists. Similarly, for WomenInTranslationMonth, I found like 80 SFF titles and 45 horror titles since 2020, so you could probably keep up--if you could find them all. The SF in translation blog had some, the Warwick Prize long lists had some, the Publisher's Weekly Translation DB had some, Locus had some, etc., etc.--but anyone who thinks they are tracking all of them is simply wrong--all of them are missing significant titles even though they're following a similar small niche. I think this was probably also true for the title counts James Nicoll cites from Boucher, del Rey, and Dozois, in spite of how well connected they all were.
posted by Wobbuffet at 1:25 PM on September 29, 2024 [2 favorites]

Poking around at those two examples a little more, I see r/LitRPG has monthly tables of new releases with over 50 entries per month, so it's a relatively new SFF subgenre with a couple of hubs (Reddit, Royal Road, ...?) that you could maybe skim enough to know what's out there but probably not read very thoroughly. And WomenInTranslationMonth is a cross-platform sort of 'hashtag community' following what I'd estimate as 300+ titles per year with 7-10% overlap with SFF (depending on how much horror you'd accept)--a much smaller number to follow but a more difficult one to access, since a chunk of those are small press and/or UK titles you often can't get via Kindle or even Amazon.

Based on those examples and James Nicoll's discussion of the quote from C. L. Barrett, my guess is that if a genre is big enough to have a recognizable community trying to follow it, it's usually already too big and/or complicated for one person to follow it: like, that's probably about the point where 'Books Georg' has too much to read, and the community's activity would seem to stand in for thorough coverage even if a bunch of titles were being overlooked, losing out to an initial bad review, not actually accessible, not reaching their ideal audiences within the community, and so on.
posted by Wobbuffet at 3:34 PM on September 29, 2024 [1 favorite]

if conversation is important, I want to know "When was the last time reasonably enthusiastic people could read it all?"

So coming back to this conversation, I think there's actually a few things going on as a result of the "spoiled for choice"/"title proliferation" problem, and I think you've correctly identified that one of the issues in that conversation between enthusiasts is a relevant and important issue, because it's not just 'what can I read' but 'what can everyone read'.

I'm definitely Reasonably Enthusiastic Books Georg - I read 1-2 books a day. In years past, I could keep up with my habit pretty easily between borrowing books from the library, trading books with friends, buying used books, and buying 20-40 new books a year - usually stuff I had a strong sense would be good in advance. But a number of factors means that simply doesn't work as well.

The Thor Power decision had a significant impact on the industry: see Kevin O'Donnell's excellent post explaining how there's both less back inventory and also smaller, shorter new runs. When fixed costs can't be spread over the length of the print run, the publisher has to increase the prices of books (while not increasing author royalties) to account for it. That means I - and friends- can't afford to buy as many new books.

A combination of price increases and other factors is also hitting libraries - whereas my local library used to have a couple shelves devoted to SFF, now it has very few genre shelves at all (everything is relegated to 'Fiction') and half the shelves are empty. (cupcakeninja, as a librarian I would love to hear your thoughts on this if you have any ideas which is more likely a cause.) That makes me use the library significantly less - while I recognize I can request a book that I want, there's no "browsability", which means I would basically have to go to a bookstore if I wanted to browse genre books to figure out what I want to read - and bookstores are also designed for less browsing these days anyway. At the last bookstore I went to, I didn't see a single chair, whereas that used to be more common.

Add all that together and the social lure of discussing books together is largely gone. I can't remember the last time I talked to a friend about a book I was reading, because I can no longer assume that they've read the book, and there aren't really agreed upon "must read" books anymore, so asking if someone's read something seems untoward.

Aside from the quality of the work itself, factors for consideration can be things like: What's selling? What's made a critical splash? Who are the authors with momentum in the field? Who is "due" an award? Who already has enough awards that giving them more just means their mantle is that much more crowded?

This is fair, as is your commentary about the anti-Puppy voters who remained having motivations more in line with natural inclination. Honestly, I think more than anything, I find myself frustrated with the current state of how things are and am probably reaching for solutions. I miss the time when I could go to a SFF con and strike up a conversation with any attendee and we would be reasonably likely to have read at least a few books in common and could discuss them animatedly. Outside of a Worldcon where we all have a duty to read at least some of the same books, that doesn't feel the case anymore. And it feels harder to bring people in - my partner, for example, who loves SF but is less prolific, is hesitant to attend cons because he feels he will have nothing in common with anyone. I don't really know what the solution for that is, or if there even is one.
posted by corb at 9:57 AM on September 30, 2024 [1 favorite]

The browsability problem is true facts. There are fewer books on the shelves. It's harder to just go to the library to find something to read and it's very hard to go to the library to look for a particular book. I grant you, libraries can't keep every book on the shelf - I might want to read a terrific novel from 1985, but the library can't just keep it on the shelf for forty years for the three people who are interested. But it does feel like there's just so much presentism, especially when I see the tasteful, unintimidating half-empty shelves filled with books published no earlier than 2018. Surely there's room for a few more old novels if the book budget is down!

I did used to volunteer with a librarian who was very, very into keeping shelves half-empty because it encouraged timid readers - full shelves were overwhelming, it was hard to find things, etc. Curation was the future, the library couldn't just hold onto a bunch of old books, etc. And I admit that if I were dictator, I would need a stern advisor to keep me from just holding onto everything and building ever larger libraries. And yet!

The back-catalog problem is also a problem. I hadn't really thought of it this way, because I'd had these conversations with my librarian acquaintance, but obviously if print runs are short and tiny now, then bookstores can't do much back-stocking even if they would like to and have the space.

I'd been trying to get my book collection down for portability's sake, but these past couple of years I've really gone back to buying paper copies, because it feels like it's going to be a lot harder to get books the longer this goes on.
posted by Frowner at 11:03 AM on September 30, 2024 [2 favorites]

corb, there may be a few things going on, depending on what's going on at your library, or with their funding stream. Note that I am an academic librarian who specializes in the humanities, but I do a lot of leisure reading outreach and am in close contact with a bunch of public librarians, with whom I talk about this stuff regularly.

My general suggestion: it is often less fun to browse a catalogue than to look through shelves, but the multiplication of book formats (audio; ebook; print) means that you will usually not see the library's full collection if you only look in person. And also, as you no doubt know, sometimes to find a given SFF work in print, depending on the library, you might have to check the Fiction section; a SFF section; a YA/Children's section; a "lease book" (e.g.) section; or other subcollections.

* Price increases may be a thing, yes. As you may know, libraries often pay significantly more for books than retail, depending on format -- print, audio, ebook, other -- and on platform -- hoopla, Libby, etc. Balancing out how many copies of which books to buy in which formats sometimes does mean individual print copies of some titles may be less commonly found on the shelf. Patron requests/demands/daily emails about getting Book X in Format Y can be intense. Also, the pandemic well and truly screwed up production schedules for a while, and rising paper and printing costs have had an effect. Here's the 2022 LJ report on public library budgets that includes some info that might interest you.

* National economic biz definitely trickles down to individual libraries' and library systems' budgets. I live in an area with several different public library systems in a fairly small space, and each has significantly different budgets, collection development strategies, and (sometimes) goals for their collections. Sometimes the library budget gets cut--for general economic reasons, to say nothing of censorious agitators--and that can radically curtail what a given library can offer. Is your library committed to keeping hold queues a certain length? Or is it committed to diversity of titles at the expense of quick access?

* Whether a library's collection is genrefied depends on a number of things, up to and including philosophies of service and collection development. There are ups to having a "SFF section" in a library, but (in my humble opinion) there are significant downs, as well. Some authors write in multiple genres, and deciding where to stick which of their books can be confusing to patrons, as well as create various cataloging issues. On the flip side, "literary fiction" is increasingly partaking of SFF & other genre elements, such that parsing which genre a book may be has gotten to be harder than it once was. There are, of course, also various cultural factors that come into play -- snobbishness of genre people or literary people, or the eternal question of whether it's useful or discriminatory (or usefully discriminatory) to have sections in your library like "Urban Fiction," "Women's Fiction," or "Black Interest." Sometimes patrons really want those designations, simply as a matter of finding what they want.

* To the question of "empty shelves," yes that's a thing. In some cases it's because libraries run out of space and have to weed. In other cases, individual branches in a system may have focus collections, or various logistical concerns (floods; mold; whatever) can mean a swath of books are gone and hard to replace. In other cases, libraries adopt metrics for retention of individual books like "has been checked out in the last 24 months." That can result in, say, Heart of Darkness or Pawn of Prophecy or Conan the Buccaneer being discarded to keep the collection fresh and useful. Some people like this approach, and some don't, but it does have the aid-to-browsing effect that Frowner mentioned. That can also be, theoretically, a discovery problem--no one's reading Famous 1960s Sci Fi Guy because... all of his books have been weeded, and they aren't in print anymore.

(What's that, you say? Weeded books should go to deserving homes? That's been covered here in various threads, but "it's complicated." Some libraries offer discards to other libraries or orgs; some libraries put them in book sales; some libraries are compelled by state or local law to destroy weeded books.)

Whew. That's a lot. Anyway, that's a swing at a few things that I thought might be of interest. (Also! You know what makes books hard to retain in a library? Bad bindings/huge books that fall apart after 10 checkouts.)
posted by cupcakeninja at 1:51 PM on September 30, 2024 [1 favorite]

I miss the time when I could go to a SFF con and strike up a conversation with any attendee and we would be reasonably likely to have read at least a few books in common and could discuss them animatedly.

This surprises me, because even though I barely read any contemporary SF, I feel like I can name a bunch of recent books and authors where I would've expected any well-read fan to know at least a few of them: N. K. Jemisin, Liu Cixin, Becky Chambers, Sarah J. Maas, Ann Leckie, Murderbot, Piranesi, The Goblin Emperor, Too Like the Lightning, A Memory Called Empire, The Saint of Bright Doors, James S. A. Corey, Adrian Tchaikovsky, not to mention newer work from longer-established folks like Scalzi, Stross, Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson....

Not questioning your experience here! I just had the impression that there were still a bunch of novels that "everyone" reads, even though the field as a whole has gotten so big.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 1:57 PM on September 30, 2024 [1 favorite]

(To clarify - I don't find empty shelves to aid browsing! I find that they make it harder! "Browsing" a case of half-full shelves of recent popular hardbacks is hardly browsing at all, since I'm not going to be surprised or delighted by anything I see. I might as well just go to the airport bookstore.)
posted by Frowner at 2:09 PM on September 30, 2024 [1 favorite]

Outside of a Worldcon where we all have a duty to read at least some of the same books, that doesn't feel the case anymore. And it feels harder to bring people in - my partner, for example, who loves SF but is less prolific, is hesitant to attend cons because he feels he will have nothing in common with anyone

FWIW like three or four weeks before Glasgow 2024, they announced 6000+ members, but there were 2189 votes for Best Novel. That's about what I'd have guessed from past experience--like 1/3 participation--but overall participation was even better because there were 3813 final ballots. Either way, the duty to read is pretty modest--I'd really just say a key attraction where skipping it is fine.

Worldcon in particular has enough on offer that it's also fun for SF fans who haven't invested much in SF recently: some events, e.g. readings, are about generating interest; some are just entertaining, more like performances or 'two friends in conversation'; and some aren't strictly SF at all, more like talks or workshops on random things SF fans might like. If one were near me, I'd have been delighted to submit a thing I ran at a much smaller con on "Collaborative Fantasy Games from 1551 to 1903" where we played some parlor games no one would have prior experience with. I mean, it's guaranteed not to be that, but a lot really is that random.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:23 PM on October 1, 2024