Robert J. Sawyer is the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell Memorial, Heinlein, Hal Clement, Skylark, Aurora, and Seiun Award-winning author of twenty-three bestselling science-fiction novels, including the trilogy of Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids, which won Canada’s Aurora Award for the Best Work of the Decade. Rob holds two honorary doctorates and is a Member of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Canadian government. Find him online at sfwriter.com.

Decoherence

by Robert J. Sawyer

MAY THE FORBES BE WITH YOU

My friend and fellow Torontonian Karl Schroeder, one of our best authors of hard science fiction, has just published his first new book in four years, The Million, with Tor. Pay attention to these words as we go along: hard SF, four years, Tor. Karl’s book is dedicated to his daughter Paige (and yes, I enjoyed shocking him just after Paige was born by pointing out, “You’re a writer, and you’ve named your daughter a homonym for page?”). The dedication reads, “Not everything’s a dystopia,” doubtless a reference to the fact that the kind of books Paige’s father writes are thin on the ground these days.

And yet on June 19, 2018, no less an august bastion of business than Forbes magazine posted an article on its website entitled “Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Sales Have Doubled Since 2010.” Hallelujah, right? Not so fast.

The source for the Forbes piece was a forty-five slide PowerPoint presentation by the pseudonymous “Data Guy” at the 2018 Nebula Awards conference hosted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; you can see the slides at authorearnings.com/sfwa2018/. The title of his presentation was We’re Going to Need a Bigger Ship: Uncloaking the Missing Half of the SF&F Market. He claims “SF&F book sales by traditional publishers have become the minority.”

True, but there’s some photon decoupling: way down in his deck he suddenly starts talking about “Science Fiction E-book Unit Sales by Subgenre”—that is, fantasy has magically gone poof (as, well, only fantasy can).

In descending sales order, here are the subgenres (by retailer title categorization): Military; Adventure; Post-Apocalyptic; Dystopian (hi, Paige!); Space Opera; First Contact; Alien Invasion; Galactic Engineering; Galactic Empire; Hard Science Fiction; Colonization; Cyberpunk; Space Exploration; Time Travel; Exploration; TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptations; Metaphysical & Visionary; Steampunk; Alternative History; Classics; Anthologies & Short Stores; Alternate History; Anthologies; LGBT; Humorous; and Short Stories.

Set aside the fact that a lot of his smaller categories should have been consolidated—Alternative History and Alternate History are the same thing, for instance. But even if he’d cleaned up the data, they’d still be tiny.

But his first, second, and fifth categories—Military, Adventure, and Space Opera—are very similar, and his second two, Post-Apocalyptic and Dystopian, are likewise kin. Consolidate each of those already giant groups and they become behemoths, far, far outselling everything else (but still with the first combined category beating the second).

One could argue that some of the other categories might be rolled into hard science fiction too, but that’s a tougher judgment call. Hard science fiction—at least as Karl Schroeder and I practice it—follows in the footsteps of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Gregory Benford. It’s firmly grounded in real science, its predictions are reasonable extrapolations, and it requires lots and lots of research, conceptualization, and hard work to write. As I noted up front, Karl’s The Million is his first new book in four years; this sort of book takes time.

Another Toronto resident, Peter Watts, also a hard-SF writer, just put out his first book in four years as well, a novella called The Freeze-Frame Revolution from small-press Tachyon (his novels are from—wait for it—Tor). And my own next novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative, won’t be out until 2020, which will also be a gap of four years for me.

Robert Charles Wilson is yet another hard-SF writer who lives in Toronto (yes, it’s something in the water). Bob’s been doing a new novel every two or three years, always for Tor, making him seem positively bionic compared with the rest of us.

(For those who ignore the extra effort that goes into creating true hard SF and declare its practitioners should just write faster, I’m reminded of the time when an author known for his prolificacy declared, “I can understand writers who only do one book a year; what I can’t understand is what they do with the other nine months.” My wife had the perfect rejoinder: “Polish their awards.”)

Actually, Data Guy does look at fantasy separately later in his slide deck. The top category there, Paranormal & Urban, clocks in at north of 11,000,000 unit sales in his data period of May 2017–April 2018. Even combining Military, Adventure, and Space Opera into one yields only around 9,500,000 units as I read his graphs, and hard SF is downright tiny at 1,500,000 or so.

Near the end of the deck there’s a slide that lists “SF sub-genres where traditional publishers underperform” and, despite Baen’s historical dominance in this space, lo and behold, his top over-all sales category, Military, is also number one here, with just eleven percent coming from traditional publishers.

So, yeah, there’s a huge explosion in self-publishing (which was Data Guy’s main point), but it’s in precisely the kind of book that is easiest to write, a category dominated by fast-paced tales and endless series. The only categories in which traditional publishers account for more than half the sales are the exact one you’d guess: classics (because self-publishing of e-books, of course, hasn’t been around long enough to have any acknowledged classics yet), and the tie-in category of “TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptations,” because those have to be authorized, and traditional publishers preferentially get the licenses.

So, yeah, rah, rah, rah for the fact that independent entrepreneurial authors are doing so well. But not much RAH, RAH, RAH (an old Heinlein joke) for the hard-SF field. Among traditional publishers, only Tor seems to service that category with any great regularity, and although there’s a sizable number of self-published books that the authors have chosen to categorize as “Hard SF,” very little of it has struck me as any good, and most of it is nowhere near as ambitious as the works by Schroeder, Watts, or Wilson.

Still, if you’d like a recommendation of a good independently published hard-SF book, try Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale by Leonid Korogodski. But note it’s been eight years since this, Korogodski’s most-recent book—I fully expect him to move to Toronto soon.