From boingboing.net (where else?): ‘Giant, hippie-hating, cannibalistic squids attack SF Bay Area’
Granted, it is dated April 1st, and writer Xeni Jardin immediately admits that “Oh, alright, I made up the hippie-hating part”, but the rest is apparently true and rather scary.
Squidsquatch. A new interview (almost) every day. A single question. The subject one day becomes interviewer the next.
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Rob Hood: Margo, you have been a decade-long “overnight” success — a success reflected in the fact that you have been nominated and have won an amazing, and international, raft of awards. Lately there seems to have been much argument about awards and their value. In the light of all your award wins, what is your attitude to awards as such and the controversies that have ranged about them? Are they useful?
Margo Lanagan: Awards are pretty much the executive-washroom key of the writing life. They’re the colourful, glorious compensation you get for not having a social life at work every day as most people do. Just the possibility, when you hand in your book, that there will be this series of surprise announcements and emails, and possibly dinners, speeches and ego-fondling to follow them up, is cheering. Cheering the way buying a lottery ticket is cheering, the way, I imagine, sitting around a roulette wheel with all the chips in place on the table, and the glam gown and the right cocktail at your elbow would be cheering. (Or maybe I just need a cocktail right now.)
When I started out writing I thought winning awards was the pinnacle of achievement; that you had ‘made it’ if you won particular awards - if you’d moved up through the ranking of less-to-more meaningful awards, less-to-more famous ones (’You’re nominated for a Hugo? Wow, even I’ve heard of that one!’ said my non-genre-literate acquaintances). I was prepared for a long slow slog, which is good, because it has been, but actually, I was expecting a much longer one. I didn’t entertain the thought of winning the World Fantasy Award, for example, so to suddenly have two of them on my mantelpiece (and those awards really know how to look at you) kinda knocked me for six. All of a sudden I was much more visible; all of a sudden I’d so far exceeded my own expectations that I had to shuffle all my thinking around, about this writing lark and what I was really after. I couldn’t use awards as a measure any more, because pretty much the only one beyond World Fantasy, to my mind, was the Nobel, and that’s just getting silly.
And I think if nothing else this is a useful thing for awards to do - they serve writers in forcing them, either by tantalising them or rewarding them - to compare and contrast their own values with the values of the awarding organisations and judging panels.
But of course, we’re not talking about their being useful to winners so much as useful to the book buying/reading public. And my feeling about them there is that they’re pretty much hit and miss, the way those bronze/silver/gold medals on wine labels are. There are as many people who’ll avoid gold-medalled books as will choose them over unmedalled ones, though possibly this goes more for literary medals than genre ones. You’ve got to know your awards to be able to use the medal system properly; you have to know what the medals signify, but also you have to have experience, you know, throwing a few ‘Great Reads’ across the room, or falling asleep over a few CBCA winners (did I say that?) or whatever; you’ve got to know which awards you personally take seriously.
And that’s probably the crux of the matter. It’s entirely subjective, is the thing. You might always like the wine that this committee chooses at the Wongillybong Show; you will always find someone who’ll sneer at you for that, but who cares? It’s your palate; send whatever you like across it. I don’t see the point, especially if you’re not a super-fast reader, of ploughing through the Miles Franklin winner every year just because it’s the Miles Franklin winner - you know, if it is a matter of ploughing. If it’s something you were attracted to anyway, jump right in.
But then, I’m beginning to rebel against duty-reading of any kind these days. I think I should stop fruitlessly trying to keep up with genre and YA publishing; it just can’t be done. I think I should read the way I drink - which will appall some people. Right price (meaning a price that indicates it won’t actually choke you)? Label that doesn’t make me wince? Style that’s given me pleasure in the past? And if I think I’ll finish the bottle, it’s a goer. And a few gold stickers doesn’t hurt, either.
Margo Lanagan collects acclaim the way a magnet collects iron filings. She describes her writing as “speculative fiction and fiction for young adults and junior readers,” but plenty of adult readers will testify to the power of her stories to shake your emotions. A big, fat fantasy novel, Tender Morsels, will be published in Australia by Allen & Unwin in 2008. Margo’s blog is Among Amid While.
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We resume after a brief hiatus for Conflux…
Chris Lawson: Rob, I may be over-simplifying, but it seems to me that witches are mediaeval, werewolves are late feudal, vampires are Victorian, and apocalyptic flesh-eating zombies are late 20th century consumerist. What new monsters are in store for this coming century?
Rob Hood: I’m not sure about the classification of werewolves as late feudal; the metaphor doesn’t really work for me. Moreover, though werewolves appear in medieval and later literature, they’re not really the werewolf as we’ve come to know it, and the first significant werewolf fiction, Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1933), is set in 19th Century France. Hammer translated it into a semi-feudal Spanish setting in 1961 — but it was the film The Wolf Man (1941), along with the earlier Werewolf of London (1935), that established much of the currently perceived lore. The Wolf Man, The Curse of the Werewolf and later films tend to exhibit a strong sexual undercurrent — releasing the Beast in Man, as it were (essentially a thematic import from cinematic versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). I guess you could argue that The Wolf Man engages in the same sort of social dialogue as undertaken by Curse of the Werewolf director Terence Fisher, examining the tensions that arise between the New World and the Old and the rise of the middle class. Social class plays a big part in these, as it does in Fisher’s Dracula and Frankenstein sequences.
Likewise, zombies. To understand the current approach to the living dead, we have to essentially ignore its folkloric origins and go straight to modern fictional sources – though “outsider” or racial conflict still plays a big part. But just as the prevalent view of vampires was “created” by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula, despite earlier literary examples and despite its occurrence in folktales and in a wide variety of cultural beliefs, the zombie has moved away from its origins. The modern zombie — viewed as a walking corpse with cannibalistic tendencies — was “created” by George Romero in his Night of the Living Dead and the subsequent films in his quadrilogy, and elaborated by endless imitators. The zombie film depicts the apocalyptic triumph of an unnatural death state, along with a graphic contempt for the flesh displayed via dismemberment and the excess of gore that has become its defining characteristic. Certainly in Romero’s zombie films, however, there is a strong social commentary, one that changes in response to the concerns of each of the decades that produced the films. Consumerism plays its biggest part in Dawn of the Dead (1978). Beyond that, however, I would see the zombie as being about consumerism in the sense that it depicts a sort of non-spiritual materialism — an abandonment of spirit in favour of the flesh. Clive Barker once described the modern zombie as immortality without religious belief. The zombie subgenre also contains a concern that is prevalent in modern horror generally: a fear of viral contagion. Vampires have a viral aspect, but it tends to be played down in favour of other themes. In zombies the fear of an unstoppable plague has achieved some sort of apotheosis. Films such as 28 Days Later, which use the zombie tropes but do not feature the living dead as such, are all about uncontrolled infection.
To get closer to addressing the base question, however, we have to go further than the living dead. It seems to me, despite the contemporary upsurge in zombie films, that there are two other iconic monsters vying for rule of monsterdom in the post-millennial period. One is the serial killer, a real-life phenomenon that has been thoroughly mythologised on film and in literature over the years. As a monster, the serial killer/slasher goes back many decades — in its modern form, probably to the later films of Bava and then to Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), which fuelled the main escalation in slasher films, even if the tropes appeared earlier. The 1990s were full of them. Now we’re seeing resurgence in the form of both remakes and originals. Silence of the Lambs and Thomas Harris’ subsequent Hannibal Lecter novels and films introduced a level of malevolent intelligence into an image of “the serial killer” that had previously been merely physical and rather mindless. Now we have a whole slew of high profile “killers” that range from Hannibal Lecter through to the mutant cannibals of the The Hills Have Eyes remake, the clownish maniacs of Rob Zombie’s films and the sadistic torture pornographers of Saw and Hostel. Apparently they’re everywhere. It will be interesting to see how politically motivated fearmongering in regards to terrorists affects this “monster in our midst”. At the moment, however, despite its box-office ubiquity I don’t feel that the serial killer/slasher is capturing our time with any great originality. Most of the films feel like earlier exploitation films with high-tech upgrades.
The other iconic “monster” is the ghost. Ghosts of all persuasions have undergone a massive renaissance, producing not only significant books, but more films than all the others combined — not to mention TV series such as Medium, Supernatural and — the best of the lot — the UK series Afterlife. Central to the upsurge in major ghost films has been the influence of Asian, and specifically Japanese, horror. When Ring (1998) hit the scene it re-energised horror films generally, and dragged them into the mainstream box-office in a way we hadn’t seen for a long while. Ju-on: the Grudge and its many progeny followed, and brought with them successful ghost films from Hong Kong, Thailand and Korea — the Hollywood remakes inevitably followed. Somewhere in the early inspirational mix, though, there was The Sixth Sense (1999) with its “I see dead people” plotline. The enormous and unexpected success of that film worldwide was as influential as the Ring cycle. These films arguably created an aesthetic than is still functioning, despite signs of stagnation, and has led to the rule of the ghost. And that aesthetic is quite different from that of ghost films of previous eras.
What does it represent? Well, in its Asian form it brought zombiesque viral fears into the ghost story, without that subgenre’s visceral contempt for the flesh. Traditionally ghosts were very limited in their influence, usually seeking revenge on specific guilty individuals or the progeny of those who had brought about their deaths or otherwise wronged them. Either that, or their spheres of influence were localised, restricted to the environment in which they had lived or died (the classic haunted house scenario). There were instances of a wider vengeance, however, especially over time, as well as hints of the possibility of a viral “spread”, as in the conclusion of Stephen Volk’s TV drama Ghostwatch (1992), which had the sort of effect on its audience last seen in Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds (1938).
The ghost story is also classically about the persistence of the influence of past events. Metaphorically the subgenre explores guilt and the knowledge that the past lingers as an influence we have to deal with – one we may not be able to deal with. The current ghost film has taken this one step further in that in stories such as that of Sadako and The Grudge the vengeance unleashed by past sins is frighteningly indiscriminate. Not only the guilty suffer, but the dire consequences extend to society in general. More widely the prevalence of vengeful spectral women and children in Asian films reflects a feeling that socially we are at a crossroads. In these films, the traditional social (specifically family) structure has broken down and yet lingers on in an inability to find a new way to heal the psychic trauma of the breakdown. Likewise films such as the apocalyptic Kairo (the original Japanese version of Pulse) reflect the alienation caused by urban life and technological advancement. It is here that the most iconic of the ghost films have found a voice for our times.
Of course, the popularity of ghost films also reflects current conflicted attitudes to traditional matters of life, death and the “Eternal Truths”. TV shows such as The Ghost Whisperer perpetually assure the viewer than death is not the end. Ghost films generally offer this re-assurance, of course, but more commonly it is hard to find solace in the knowledge, as the afterlife proves to be as conflicted as life and more often offers hellish vengeance and demonic confrontation as an eternal truth. In Medium the conduit of ghostly communications might have found a legalistic niche as well as a structure of support via the family and the DA’s Office, but in Afterlife seeing the dead only leads to pain, alienation and emotional dysfunction. Not very comforting.
Beyond these monsters, it is hard to predict what stand-ins for our terror might lie in store for the future. Issues of global environmental destruction suggest obvious possibilities (there is evidence of an increasing trend to re-invent the giant monster, for example), with a strong dose of GM paranoia and a plunge into virtual escapism via digital media and cyberspace offering even more possibilities. The ghost has embraced the latter concern with open arms, but I can’t help feeling there is some other monstrous metaphor lurking just over the horizon, waiting to claw its way out of the darkness into the bright light of fiction.
As an aside, being asked this question is interesting insofar as I explore this very issue – from a different perspective – in my story “Flesh and Bone”, which has just appeared in Daikaiju! 3: Giant Monsters vs the World. There I take the premise that Godzilla was given reality as a metaphor for nuclear fear and try to envisage a whole series of giant monsters that encapsulate each period of major technological advancement. The final monster to appear is … well, you’ll have to read the story to find out.
Rob Hood has over 100 published stories to his name and is a regular on awards shortlists and reprint anthologies. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of horror tropes and is as highly respected for his writing about horror and science fiction as he is for his actual fiction. Rob is co-editor of the cult anthology Daikaiju! Giant Monster Tales and its unstoppable spawn. He works as a professional graphics designer at the University of Wollongong and lives with three cats, Pazuzu, Smersh, and Sparks. While he is a recurrent contributor at Talking Squid, he is considered to be a potential liability by his fellow conspirators as he lists his favourite food as “seafood — prawns, fish, scallops,…” and <gasp!> … “squid”! Crunchy greens do nothing to mitigate this crime against teuthida! We’re watching, Rob. Always watching. Rob’s website is roberthood.net.
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Mitch: You have recently up and moved with the family from one end of the country to the other. Has the sea change affected your writing in any way, either in how you write, or what you write about? In any way has the change in latitude changed your attitude?
Chris Lawson: Actually, I moved only halfway up the east coast from Melbourne. People tend to forget how big Queensland is. Despite moving 1800 km north, I am still closer to Melbourne than the northern tip of the country. To put it another way, if you were to take a map of Australia and fold it along the southern Queensland border, the tip at Cape York would go past the bottom of Tasmania and well into the Southern Ocean. And I still live an hour and half from Australia’s third largest city, so it’s not been an enormous upheaval culturally.
Having said that, Melbourne is a remarkable city that I miss a lot. The first time I flew back to Melbourne from our new digs, as I was waiting in line to disembark the plane, a young man ahead of me stepped out of the plane into the open air, threw his arms wide, and shouted “Melbourne! Thank God!” I had to look around to make sure I hadn’t accidentally wandered onto a film set. It was one of those things you expect in a movie about New York or Paris. I understood exactly why he was so pleased to be back home. It’s not just nostalgia or homesickness. There really is something special about the culture in Melbourne. It is possibly the only major melting-pot city in the world that has almost entirely avoided ethnic violence, even between the large Serbian and Croatian communities during the NATO intervention years. In fact, the only serious ethnic strife that Melbourne ever experienced was back in the 1880s gold rushes when the Chinese were none too popular with the English settlers.
There are many things I miss, especially the SF community there and the easy availability of great cons and Slow Glass Books. But the move has been much for the better overall and there are many compensations. We now live in one of the most beautiful parts of Australia, only seven minutes from a great surf beach, and the climate is such that there are almost never any days where you don’t want to go outside. Most importantly, my wife’s health has improved considerably this last year.
Has it affected my writing? Not that I’m aware. Apart from research purposes, there is no need for me to travel to any particular place for my stories, and even then I can get away with fudging it most of the time (almost all of my stories are set in places I’ve never been). On the other hand, the move did absorb much energy, and then there was getting into a new workplace, and starting to teach at the University of Queensland. All this has taken a big bite out of my available mental effort. It’s not so much the latitude as the lassitude. But things are improving. I’ve disappointed myself by missing some deadlines and submission opportunities recently, but there is some stuff brewing that I hope to decant soon.
Chris Lawson is a doctor, teacher, and writer. He is one of the few living Australian writers to have a district named after him. Unfortunately, that district is Wonglepong.
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Deb Biancotti: Mitch, you’re an archetypal renaissance man, with credits in publishing and performance art, a career in layout and design, and a history in the complementary arts of wrestling and competitive dance. Also, you’re very tall. My question is: did you eat all your greens as a child?
Mitch: Now, can I clarify this? Are you asking, ‘As a child, did I eat all of my greens?’ Or ‘Did I eat all my greens as a child?’
Because in relation to the former, the answer would be NO, as I didn’t stop eating vegetables as soon as I reached adulthood. I, in fact, have taken to eating more vegetables the older I get. And when I say more, I mean more in volume and more in variety.
The answer to the latter is again NO for I was quite a fussy eater as a child and did not like anything that wasn’t snack food or dessert. I would blatantly refuse to eat vegetables. It was a battle of wills between my mother and myself. I would be at the table refusing to eat and Mum would be saying that if I didn’t eat the vegies I would have to go without. Let’s just say that Mum’s maternal instinct for not letting her child starve always kicked in well before I ever broke.
Either way, it’s safe to say that only a few ‘greens’ passed my lips in the tender days of my childhood. How that relates to my being ‘very tall’, as you pointed out, is marginal: for out of me and 2 of my cousins (of similar age to myself), I probably ate more greens than they ever did and yet I am the shortest of the 3. In fact, out of my sister and all my cousins, the more vegetables that were eaten, the shorter the person is. Maybe there’s something in that which should be investigated.
So, as to your enquiry about the amount of vegetables eaten in my youth in relation to my height, I think it’s a lot more to do with ‘genes’ instead of ‘greens’
I hope that answers your question sufficiently.
Mitch is perhaps the only person ever to have been forced into the literary establishment by his friends demanding that he edit an anthology. Since that fateful day, the Mitch? books have become the longest-running anthology series in Australian genre history. Mitch does have a surname, but in most situations it is entirely superfluous. Also, he is very tall.
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Martin Livings: Deb, you’ve been talking a lot about the supposed “death” of both the novel and the genre itself while at the same time you’re working on a speculative fiction novel. Are we really hearing death knells? Is there any point in writing within a dying form?
Deborah Biancotti: Ha! Yeah, it’s kinda perverse to write an SF novel, eh? Crazy.
Oh, I don’t know, death knells, pshaw! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could proclaim the death of the death knell? Wonder we can hear each other speak over all the dying and knelling that’s going on.
Sometimes I think the only way to understand something’s alive is to hear somebody proclaim it dead. It’s like Barney in The Simpsons, spread-eagled under a beer tap. ‘Argh, my heart’s stopped!’ he cries. Then a second later, ‘Naaaaahhh, there it goes!’ And he keeps on drinking.
See, that’s what death knells are. They’re those moments where you stop to reflect & recalculate before you go right on doing whatever it is you were doing before they told you what you’re doing is done.
I mean, ok, genres & forms attract more or less audience over time. And though they may be transformed by that, I don’t think they stop. Hell, they’re still making black & white films nowadays. They’re making musicals & westerns — I’ve no doubt someone, somewhere is even contemplating making a silent film. Railing against the dying of the light, apparently, those freaks. God luv ‘em.
The novel’s not dying. Genre’s not dying. They may be changing – and so they should. Stasis is creative death, & all that (see, that’s where the real death is, in sameness & repetition & repetition — & repetition). I don’t think we need to be afraid of change in form or format when we could let the challenge and potential panic of a new thing invigorate us.
It’s the same for the arts as it is for philosophy, or science, or engineering, or academia. Something new’s going to slap you in the side of the head & you can either fall over wailing or adjust your stance.
And the thing about the format of the novel, or the form of the genre, is that if you take even a cursory look back through their histories you’ll find that from the beginning people have been pushing the boundaries, changing and remaking them. And yet, they refuse to die, right?
Henry Fielding’s JOSEPH ADAMS is a very early novel that, if it was published today, you’d swear was a mildly post-modern experiment. Of course, being such an early example of ‘the novel’, it really was an experiment. But what novel isn’t? An experiment in the chemical reaction between this reader and that writing, this idea and that style, this narrative and that era. It says something about the flexibility of the concept, or the paucity of the label, that there’s so much room for interpretation of the ‘novel’. And the digital age is challenging that all over again. Mark Danielewski credits the unique structure of his novel, HOUSE OF LEAVES, to his education in cinema. Think of the potential that kind of cross-pollination brings!
Same for genre. Magical realism, mundane SF, cinematic brainless/big-budget blockbusters, interstitial arts, gothic fright, quest trilogies, end-of-the-world cautionary tales, supernatural stories of moral rectitude. Hell, Shakespeare told ghost stories. Oscar Wilde, Orson Welles, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe. Margaret Atwood. Cormac McCarthy. Can’t help themselves.
We’ve told each other genre stories since we were first able to talk. The only way we’re going to stop is if we’re all, you know … dead.
Deborah Biancotti seems incapable of writing a story that doesn’t win an award, a shortlisting, or an honorable mention. She lives in Sydney and hates sports, which is barely forgivable, and works for the government, which is not. Her website is deborahbiancotti.net and her LiveJournal is here.
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Robin Pen: Martin, you recently spent a year in another country on a grant to be a writer. Can you describe the process by which you obtained the grant and tell us a bit of your experiences there and how you feel now about having had that opportunity?
Martin Livings: The whole of 2006 is a bit of a blur made up of stuff that I never really expected to happen. There’s not much to tell about how I got the Australia Council grant; I applied for it and received it. I had some excellent advice on completing the application from people who had both worked on the council and received the grant previously. Probably the biggest help was Brendan Duffy, a past recipient of the same grant I was applying for, the New Work (Emerging Writers) grant. He sent me a copy of his application, and gave me the single best piece of advice there was - to go for it and ask for the maximum amount available, rather than playing it safe and asking for less. I followed his advice, used his application as a basic template to write my own, and sent it off. I never expected to get it, to be perfectly honest; it was more for gaining experience in writing applications for things like this, though of course I HOPED I’d get the grant. I’m still not entirely sure why I got it, what I did or said that convinced the council that I was worth pouring money into, but I’ll be eternally grateful to them for the opportunities the grant afforded me.
The trip to London itself was going to happen either way, but thanks to the grant I didn’t need to work while I was over there, which gave me my first real taste of the life of a full-time writer. And, frankly, it didn’t suit me that well. I got bored and lonely, especially being so far away from my family and friends and comfort zone. I had my partner, of course, but she was at work earning the bread, while I stayed home and avoided writing wherever possible! But one huge plus of having the grant was the impetus to actually produce something. Without it, I kind of suspect I might have just spent my days watching UK daytime television, walking the streets of Camden Town, and generally having a bang-up jolly wizard time, eh what? But having that money - and the expectations that came with it - really forced me to knuckle down and write a book. It was great having that hanging over me, it gave me the motivation I desperately needed!
My actual experiences in the UK are still clarifying at this point, even months after returning; it’s like a glass of water drawn from the Thames, all cloudy and murky, but give me time and the silt will settle and I’ll be able to make some sense out of it. But I can already feel that it’s changed me, if not my writing. Mark Twain once wrote that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness”, and he wasn’t wrong. Until this trip, the longest I’d ever been overseas was a fortnight, so although I’d vacationed, I’d never really TRAVELLED. It wasn’t even my idea to do this trip; it was something my partner had wanted to do for many years, and I went along for the ride. I’m very glad I did so, though, and I think EVERYONE should do something like this, not just writers wanting to boost their creative juices. It’s telling that George W. Bush had rarely been abroad until he became President; in fact, at the time of his inauguration, he supposedly didn’t even have a valid passport. It’s this international experience that is so essential to accepting other people, other cultures and races, as equal to our own, as the SAME as our own, rather than as some demonised faceless Other. I suspect my experiences in the UK and Europe will be informing not just my writing, but my whole philosophical outlook for the rest of my life. And now, having just bought a house here in Perth, I’m already starting to think about where our next big adventure could be!
Martin Livings is the author of Carnies, a novel that has the rare distinction of being nominated for awards in both horror (Aurealis and Ditmar awards) and crime fiction (Ned Kelly Awards). Martin believes his “second greatest achievement was writing a computer game review to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody.” He still wonders why it never made it to print. Martin’s website is martinlivings.com.
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Stephen Dedman: How serious a menace is video piracy, in the form of internet downloads, to the movie industry? Is it damaging the viability of cinemas, or is it just a scapegoat for other influences (distributors taking nearly all of the revenue; home theatres with movies legitimately going to DVD or Pay-TV within months or even simultaneously; movies being judged to be not worth the price of the cinema ticket, etc.). What do you foresee the industry trying to do to deal with this problem - and how much longer is the farce of DVD region-coding (even on movies older than I am) likely to last?
Robin Pen: DVD region-coding was originally to control the importing of a title on DVD where cinema release of that film was potentially affected by it. But, it got caught up in the political process of world market deals and it all went pear shaped. Now it’s just a mess that slow processes may clean up eventually while those canny enough to buy a non-region player can quite ignore.
Video piracy does mean loss of revenue, but the loss is not nearly as big as they cry about. Why? Because a good proportion of those buying pirate goods were likely not to purchase that product if only available by legitimate but more expensive means. And, the number of people who download or purchase a Bali rip-off who would’ve spent money to see it legit, if that was the only recourse, are still fewer than those making up the growing numbers of cinema goers and DVD buyers. Sure, it is reasonable to accept that in this culture someone would not be willing to spend money to check a TV show out for the first time and thus will download it to see what their friends or the advertisements are on about. But more often than not, if they felt it is worthy of a second and third viewing they will purchase it to re-experience it with notably superior visual and sound quality and in more comfortable surroundings. The industry is making more money, not less. Big commercial cinema is doing fine and is more profitable than ever when put in conjunction with merchandising and DVD sales.
But where downloading hurts the most is in free-to-air and pay-TV markets. People cannot wait for the next episode of a series download the lot and watch it on their home computers. It’s one of the reasons a show capable of a cult following, usually a science fiction themed program, will all too often end up playing the second half of its first season close to midnight (however, it does have more to do with once you have a loyal market for Buffy or Battlestar Galactica then your ratings will not waver too much regardless of when you put it on). So now the TV networks won’t pay as much as they would have in the past for a hot new series as they can still make good revenue on sport or lazy after work repeats of The Simpsons. But that’s okay as the production companies are still making better profits as DVD sales have generously replaced that lost revenue (and it’s not mush of a loss, if any). And there is argument that the enthusiasm to purchase DVDs of a series was generated by the downloading of episodes. The market is changing but the same money is there and this has been an evolving process throughout all entertainment technologies. It’s always been about adapting to changing markets.
It is true however that Chinese pirate DVDs and downloading have had an influence on rental markets, but from what I hear the rental industry more looks at the longtime nature of the business and operate accordingly. Besides, the pirate market is less of a problem now than in the past and not because of those mandatory anti-piracy spots which are paid for by those like individual DVD rental/retail and cinema businesses who are not pirating. Of interest, there was a notable increase in rental after the Bali bombings as more people changed where they take their holidays. But also the novelty of cheap pirate DVDs is waning steadily as more and more people are finding the poor quality (shaky hand-held in a cinema of bobbing heads or discs with excessive drop out or the packaging is so dodgy that putting it on display in the DVD collection makes one look cheap and tacky) and the frequency of dirty tricks (mislabeling excess discs knowing the purchaser will be in another country before discovering it has some other movie on it) is making those with decent incomes feel spending the money for quality and surety is worth it. It is the same with how the VHS market resulted in more people going to the cinemas cause it worked effectively as a promotion for the cinematic and group sharing experience.
Yes, a new movie has a shorter life span in the fast lane but that has more to do with more product than ever fighting for pole positions. Plus, when in the past people who enjoyed a film in the cinema enough to rent it are now buying it instead. Thus video rental has slipped but is replaced by DVD retail in much the same way that repeat viewing in the cinema (seeing Star Wars over and over) was replaced by people renting or buying a VHS tape. Business is not losing money but seeing it come from different departments. If none of this was the case you would not be seeing the wider range of product in cinemas and on retail shelves made with more expensive production values.
The industry’s push on piracy and downloads is because marketing feels more money is out there to be made, but what losses can be estimated from illegitimate business hasn’t set the industry back any. No one in Hollywood need go without their Lamborghini. But outside of Hollywood, piracy has hurt smaller markets and even destroyed the hopes of film makers. It’s one of the reasons there isn’t a flourishing Turkish film industry. But the desire for world movies is growing and giving hope to more and more film industries in struggling countries. And though festivals and foreign language television networks and the greater demand for DVD variety are a major reason for their growth, the internet culture with downloading and Youtube are also an integral part for the awareness of potential new markets. Bollywood, anime and other Asian cinema may not be as successful as they are today without first being a part of a subculture that could only access this product by illegitimate means.
Robin Pen’s career path as a screenwriter was cut short by being too good, too young (Actual True Story [TM]). He subsequently turned his love of movies into one of the most distinctive voices in cinema criticism. Robin is both a hopeless fan of genre cinema, a man who can appreciate blundering, graceless films provided they have a bit of spirit, and a trenchant critic of lazy, cynical filmmaking. His recent criticism has been marked by the appearance of Hampton and Francher, two characters who represent each side of Robin’s viewing personality, and often takes the form of Robin listening in as his two friends argue the toss about a movie. Many of Robin’s earlier essays and reviews have been collected in the cult book The Secret Life of Rubber-Suit Monsters.
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Jonathan Strahan: Your first story was published in 1977, thirty years ago. You’ve had short fiction, collections, and novels published here in Australia, in the US, and elsewhere. Given all of your experience, what do you think it takes for a writer to build a career? Has science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing changed a lot during your career? And, how does that affect someone starting out today?
Stephen Dedman: Firstly, this depends on your definition of a career. If you mean ‘a living’, then he or she needs to be able to write something that people will want to read, and that at least one publisher will believe that enough people will want to read to make it viable - and to get it to said publisher at the right time. If he/she has no independent income, he/she also needs to do this at a rate that will keep himself/herself alive between cheques - the larger the cheques, of course, the longer he/she can take to write the next thing. There’s a formula I use: E = mc%. E is for ‘Earnings’; m is the minimum number of words you can write every day (alternatively, M=1,000, which is my usual quota); c is the cents per word you get, on average, for the work you sell; % is the percentage of work you sell. If you can fill in all those variables and come up with a living wage, fantastic. If not, don’t quit your day job.
Of course, that’s about as helpful as the Monty Python sketch where they taught you how to play the flute: “You blow there and move your fingers up and down here.†And it comes more from my experience as a bookseller who writes, rather than a writer whose books sell (I wish they did sell well enough that I didn’t have to do anything but write, but they haven’t).
If, however, by ‘career’ you mean continuing to write and publish professionally or semi-professionally over 30 years, then all I can recommend is that you write what you would want to read; write as much as you can as well as you can, and as Hemingway said, some days you may write better than you can. I’d advise against trying to deliberately write crap just because you think that some people will buy it: you might succeed, but I suspect you’ll be facing even more competition than if you were trying to write purely for the pleasure.
Has science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing changed a lot during your career? And, how does that affect someone starting out today?
Yes. Fantasy publishing has certainly increased, and that’s in number of titles, not just the number of words. Science fiction… I don’t have figures to hand, but while Australian publishers seem to have pretty much given up on it in favour of fantasy, US and British publishers haven’t. Horror has always been a bit player, except of course for Stephen King and a few others.
I’ve been doing this for long enough that I regard the situation with local market and short fiction markets as being rather like Melbourne weather: if you don’t like it, then wait a little while and it will change. When I started writing, there were no paying markets for sf in Australia. They flourished briefly in the mid-80s, then there was two years of nothing again, then Aurealis and Eidolon appeared… Some of the best paying short fiction markets have disappeared since I started, and until Cosmos appeared, no 21st century Australian sf market paid even as well as Aphelion had done 20 years before: most still don’t.
Obviously, the more short story markets there are, then the easier it is for writers to break into the field - especially if most of them pay so poorly that the professionals don’t bother submitting to them. Of course, it’s possible we may go through another slump like that at the end of the 80s, and it may last even longer… OTOH, webzines will probably continue to publish some fiction, though whether they will pay, or attract readers, remains to be seen. But I’m not going to try to predict the future. What do you think I am, a science fiction writer?
Addendum: I just received this Dorothy Parker quote from Writer’s Lifeline: “If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.” She said it better than I could, and said it first, but no great surprise there.
Stephen Dedman is best known for his subtle emotional horror stories, but he has published in a broad range of genres to widespread acclaim, currently co-edits Borderlands, and has served on professional committees and judging panels. He has an employment history that is even more baroque than usual for a writer, including being “an experimental subject and a used dinosaur parts salesman” and currently sells books at Fantastic Planet in Perth. He describes himself as “author of four novels, a non-fiction book and more than 100 short stories, plus reviews, role-playing games, stageplays, essays and editorials. Most of the fiction I’ve written has been speculative, fantastic, or just plain weird, but I’ve also written thrillers, erotica, and westerns. Sometimes all at the same time.” Here is Stephen’s LiveJournal.
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Sean Williams: For years now, people have been predicting that biotech will sweep over SF as the hottest fad. Seems to me, though, that the New Space Opera just keeps on keeping on, with biotech tagging along for the ride in the form of increased lifespans and other items on the post-human wishlist. What’s your take on the future of science fiction (and/or fantasy)? What trends have you seen that might be lurking ahead? Most importantly: are we space opera writers going to be out of a job any time soon?
Jonathan Strahan: Space opera writers are never going to be out of job. The audience for science fiction has grown to the extent that there are enough readers who self-identify with a kind of fiction that they can support the writers who create it.
What has changed is the idea that science fiction is truly in dialogue with itself. What I think is happening is that the centre failed to hold, science itself became too complicated and much less amenable to the simple engineering solutions of Golden Age SF, and there is so much new science fiction being published today that writers can’t read even the major works. That means that a writer today can publish a major cutting edge work and it could have almost no influence on the field because no *writers* read it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a new thing. The days of someone writing a book, everyone reading it, and a bunch of people writing work in response to it are essentially gone.
As to what the trends are: well, the new space opera (the old space opera with a nifty new paint job) will continue to be the traditional heart of science fiction - there’s simply no escaping that adventures with rocketships are the pure quill. However, I think Geoff Ryman’s mundane SF will gain a little more notoriety, while singularity-based SF may be on the wane. Surprisingly maybe, I think the whole steampunk/zeppelin thing may be the next major trend after all. It’s fun, it’s full of cool engineering stuff that guys like. It’s sort of like the fun of Golden Age SF without having to deal with all that annoying real science. I think over the next couple years we might see quite a few steampunk books and stories. As to biotech - didn’t we already do that? <g>
Jonathan Strahan is one of the most respected editors in the genre. He co-founded and co-edited Eidolon, arguably the most impressive small press magazine in sf history. He worked as assistant editor at Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, for which he still acts as Reviews Editor from the other side of the world. In recent years Jonathan has edited and published a string of acclaimed anthologies and collections and has another ten in the pipeline to 2009. Everything Jonathan publishes is of outstanding quality, from single-author collections to massive anthologies and annual Best-Of wranglings. His blog is Notes from Coode Street.