Aeon Two by Aeon

Author:Aeon [Aeon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magazine, _noisfdb
Publisher: Scorpius Digital Publishing
Published: 2005-02-01T06:00:00+00:00

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Nonfiction

Genre is Dead, Long Live Genre

Genre is in a parlous state, at least with respect to the short fiction markets. Ask anyone. Over in the world of romance, the striking and well-funded Arabella just folded. Back here in speculative fiction, Amazing is toast, yet again. Respected smaller outlets have been going the way of all flesh, from the lamented Spectrum simply disappearing, to the implosion of 3SF a year or so ago, to the loss of Challenging Destiny's print edition. And the list goes on, bloody and ugly as it is.

Or maybe not.

The death of genre has been predicted about as often as the death of traditional values. Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle said, "Teenagers today are out of control, they eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers." The same complaints about traditional values are bandied about today, two and half millennia later, in the headlines, on conservative blogs, and on talk shows. A mere 300 years or so after Aristotle, Cicero said, "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." Yet somehow traditional values are still around to be considered in decline.

This tendency to view the current state of things as degraded and collapsing is called declinism. It's been in vogue since the days of Classical Greece, and possibly as long ago as when Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk. Declinism is the flip side of the Myth of the Golden Age, that pervasive belief, at least in Western Culture, that things used to be better.

If only we could get the Good Old Days back, tomorrow wouldn't be as bad as it seems.

And strangely enough, even here in genre, we talk about the Golden Age and Silver Age of fiction, as if the field had been in a steady decline ever since. Are these the Dark Ages? Do we camp amid the ruins of Roman architecture and pelt each other with shattered roof tiles?

Hardly.

Pessimistic observers have always complained about the death of genre. Optimists have always claimed it ain't so. The lessons of history notwithstanding, there are solid reasons for optimism today, in the current marketplace, among the current generation of writers, editors, and publishers.

Why?

Consider this: over 30,000 books are published each year in the United States. The major New York houses publish almost 300 new genre novels a year, along with anthologies, the odd collection, backlist, and reprint inventory. Small press produces at least that many titles again and probably quite a few more. The major short fiction markets publish roughly 350-400 stories per year, and again, small press quite a few more.

Is the Death of the Midlist real? Certainly. What about the consolidation of the major publishing lines? Absolutely. So is the collapse of the magazine market, a problem that was real when the Saturday Evening Post folded back around the time I was born.

But the market keeps experimenting. Web sites, .

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