IGMS Issue 18 (17 page)

The shelves at Dark Carnival, the science fiction bookstore near my home, are covered with images of future wars and space operas and other strictly low-end or entry-level science fiction. Most of it is inspired by TV shows or big screen productions. What we like to think of as mature science fiction is strictly alien to readers who think
Han Solo Meets Lieutenant Uhura
is great literature.

Seeing things more broadly, the whole publishing industry -- in fact, the whole media world -- is in the midst of a revolution. You can sit on a commuter train and watch a movie on your smartphone, you can download music or videos on your desktop or laptop or your Dick Tracy Wrist Radio. An author can turn a raw manuscript into a professional-looking pdf and email it to a POD publisher and have finished copies of his book in a few days.

Electronic readers have been kicking around for at least twenty years but after a long struggle to establish a place for themselves, they have finally caught on. Instead of loading your suitcase with a dozen fat volumes before you head to the airport you can load 'em onto your Kindle or iPad or some other reader and you're ready for that big business meeting in Chicago or the beach chair under the palm tree in St. Thomas.

What's next? Where will all this lead?

It's easier than ever to get published, thanks to POD. And harder than ever to make a living at it!

SCHWEITZER:
I wonder what you make of the entry about you in
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
(Clute and Nichols) which seems to suggest you've done all these pastiches and never found your true voice. Do you feel any sense of frustrated ambition? Or is it that when you borrow tropes from Edgar Rice Burroughs or whomever this is more in the form of a metafictional commentary? We have, after all, Ed Gorman's testimony that you write unique "Lupoffs" in whatever genre you venture into.

LUPOFF:
Ed Gorman said that in his introduction to my collection of mystery stories,
Killer's Dozen.
I was very pleased with Gorman's insight, and in fact a number of readers and critics have been making the same point lately. About time, sez me!

It's true that I've written a certain amount of parody and pastiche, much of it collected in
The Compleat Ova Hamlet.
This is done usually as homage to writers whom I admire and whose works I enjoy -- Fritz Leiber, J.G. Ballard, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, Rex Stout, Jules Verne. There's even a website that insists that "Jack Kerouac" is a pseudonym of mine, or maybe that Richard Lupoff is a pseudonym of Kerouac's. Some fun!

But in fact this amounts to just a small fraction of my total writing. With all due respect to Messrs. Clute and Nichols, I know damned well that I've found my voice. Somehow they haven't heard it, which I regret, but that's not my problem, it's theirs.

Anyone who thinks I'm an elusive writer who hides behind masks of others can find the real me easily enough. Read
Marblehead,
a massive mainstream novel that I wrote in 1976. It got entangled in a snarl of publishers, editors, and agents, disappeared for thirty years, then resurfaced in 2006. One of those new POD-oriented micropublishers, Ramble House, finally brought it out and it got rave reviews everywhere from
Locus
to
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
even thought it isn't science fiction at all and isn't really a detective novel.

If you want to read a "real" Lupoff science fiction novel, pick up a copy of
Sacred Locomotive Flies
or
Sun's End
or
Galaxy's End
. Those latter two were intended as the opening and middle volumes of a science fiction trilogy. The first of them was a big success -- multiple mass paperback printings, great reviews -- but the second was packaged so horrendously that when I saw an advance proof of the cover I pleaded with my editor to have the book redesigned. I warned her that, as planned, it was going to die the death.

She refused, and the book flopped, and my punishment for being right was the cancellation of my contract for the third volume!

One more suggestion: read my mystery novels about Hobart Lindsey and Marvia Plum --
The Comic Book Killer
or
The Emerald Cat Killer
or any of the six novels that came between those.

If you can't figure out who I am by the time you've read those books you'd better demand a refund from the Famous Detectives School.

SCHWEITZER:
I am sure that the Frederick Turner book would
not
be possible from a major publisher today, and was only possible then because a dedicated and idealistic editor pushed for it, and very possibly pulled the wool over his boss's eyes a little bit. These things do happen. I was astonished to see Greer Ilene Gilman's
Moonwise
published by a major publisher, for example. It happens because somebody believes that the book is more important than just the next sales report. Possibly nowadays, with sales tracked by computers and the buyers for the big bookstore chains being all-powerful, this sort of thing is going to happen less and less often. What can this result in but the impoverishment of the field, and of the culture generally?

LUPOFF:
You raise a pretty dismal prospect, and I'm afraid you're right. But I wouldn't give in to total despair. There are still dedicated editors in the business and one would hope that the next time a
Double Shadow
or a
Moonwise
comes along, one of those editors will decide to take a chance on it, and will not only publish the book but will get behind it and -- pardon my crass terminology -- support the product. Alternately, an editor might use some commercially-oriented space operas or future war novels or teenage vampire or zombie stories to subsidize a piece of real literature.

Incidentally, to the best of my knowledge
A Double Shadow
did die the death, alas, and I've never heard peep from its author since that splendid book was published. But
Moonwise
won all sorts of prizes and I hope this means we'll see more books from Ms. Gilman.

SCHWEITZER:
Or, to really rub it in, consider the following eccentric (but masterful) writers: Avram Davidson, R.A. Lafferty, David Lindsay, Clark Ashton Smith, Austin Tappan Wright, and David R. Bunch. If these writers were new, starting out now, do you think any of them would be able to have careers?

LUPOFF:
That depends on how you define the word "career." I'm sure they could all get published today. Well, maybe not Wright, simply because
Islandia
is such a huge book. They might have to go to small presses but they could certainly get published. But could they make a living?

Darrell, remember that there was a time when I was a starry-eyed fan whose fondest ambition was to become a professional science fiction writer. The same is probably true of you. Let's pause to tug thoughtfully at our long white beards and wipe away a nostalgic tear.

Okay, back to the issue at hand.

Time was, seriously, when the idea of anyone's being a real, full-time, professional science fiction writer was quite beyond the pale. You can pick up old copies of
Imagination
or
Thrilling Wonder Stories
and read author biographies in them, and they all contain sentences like, "When not writing science fiction, Herman MacGruder earns his living as a sanitation engineer for the City of Detroit."

I invented ol' Herman there, but consider: H. Beam Piper was a track walker for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Hal Clement was a high school science teacher. Isaac Asimov was a college chemistry professor. Clifford Simak was a newspaper editor. Rog Phillips was a night watchman. Bertram Chandler was a steamboat captain. James Blish was a public relations flack. Fletcher Pratt was a respected military historian. Eric Vinicoff was (presumably, still is) a federal bureaucrat. Elizabeth A. Lynn is both a tax preparer and a martial arts instructor. With a little research we could extend that list indefinitely.

Somewhere along the way -- I think it would be in the late 1960s or '70s -- science fiction started to hit the big time. I suspect that it was the film
2001: A Space Odyssey
that was largely responsible for this. Prices started rising and almost overnight it became possible to earn a living writing science fiction. But that seems to have been a bubble, and like the housing boom of the 1980s, it has burst and left a lot of people sitting in the wreckage of their careers, wondering what went wrong. It's tragic, but you pick up the pieces and move on, there's nothing else you can do.

And of course there are a few of us who are still making a living from science fiction. Maybe they're really that much better than everyone else, or maybe they're just lucky, or -- well, it's not for me to say. But for the overwhelming majority of science fiction writers, it's back to the future all over again. You either have a day job doing -- well, just about anything! -- or spread your writing across multiple genres -- science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, thrillers, you name it.

SCHWEITZER:
You're involved with editing a small press yourself. Could you say something about that? You mention that small, POD presses make it possible to get anything into print rather easily. Yes, but has anyone solved the promotion problem? If there is no promotion, and no one knows to seek out these books, how are they to reach more than a few dozen readers?

LUPOFF:
A few years ago I came across an odd little book by Harry Stephen Keeler published by a little press called Ramble House. I was so taken with the book that I sent a note to the publisher, a man named Fender Tucker. One thing led to another and Ramble House wound up publishing my novel
Marblehead,
which became a bestseller by the very modest standards of the small press world.

Eventually I did a little volunteer editing for Ramble House, and Fender was so pleased with my work that he asked me to take on an imprint of my own. That was an offer I couldn't refuse. I asked Pat to partner with me on it, and after a search for a name for the imprint we settled on Surinam Turtle Press -- in honor of a creature whose ugliness is rivaled only by its laziness.

Unfortunately we don't have any budget with which to buy properties, so we've had to rely on a good many excellent but forgotten works by authors like Gelett Burgess. When Burgess is remembered at all it's for his light poetry and children's books -- he created the famous limerick about the purple cow -- but in fact he was a first-rate novelist and his books hold up remarkably well after a century. We've done seven or eight of his books, and every one has real merit.

I've also been able to issue or reissue a number of books, either through Surinam Turtle Press or its parent company, Ramble House, that might otherwise languish. For instance, Jim Harmon was a rising young science fiction writer of the 1960s who contributed short stories to many of the magazines of the era. He was also one of my mentors, a brilliant teacher of fiction technique.

But early on he switched gears and became a distinguished cultural historian. But he'd left behind an unpublished science fiction novel,
The Contested Earth.
I was delighted to publish that book. There was Fox B. Holden, a '40s and '50s pulp writer whose one novel,
The Time Armada,
was serialized in
Imagination
but never had a book edition. I was able to secure rights from surviving members of the Holden family and we published the book through Surinam Turtle Press.

There was Mack Reynolds' very first novel,
The Case of the Little Green Men.
This book is a wonderful romp through the fan community circa 1950, leading up to a murder at a science fiction convention. Thanks to Mack's old friend Earl Kemp and Mack's son, I was able to get rights to issue this book, which had been out of print for almost sixty years. And there was
Sideslip,
a fine little science fiction -- hardboiled hybrid by Ted White and Dave Van Arnam. I got rights to this book from Ted and from Dave's widow, and we reissued it.

Then there's Jon L. Breen, regular book reviewer for
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
No way I could persuade Jon to write a book for me, for no advance. But he was willing to compile a volume of his past essays and reviews that we published as
A Shot Rang Out.
It's a marvelous book.

I do wish I had the budget and the staff and the know-how that it would take to get these books onto the shelves of a thousand bookstores and into the hands of a million readers. We're making some progress in that direction, getting into some retail stores, distributing through on-line book dealers and getting listed on sites like Amazon.com and B&N.com, but we've barely scratched the surface and it is a very tough job.

SCHWEITZER:
So, what are
you
writing these days? Are you still able to get anything out from the major publishers?

LUPOFF:
My most recent books have all been collections and they've all been from small companies:
Visions
(from Mythos Books),
Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix
(from Crippen & Landru), and
Killer's Dozen
(from Wildside Press).

My next book -- it may be on sale by the time this interview sees pixels, it's already listed for sale on several websites -- will be back to the big publishers. It's a mystery novel,
The Emerald Cat Killer,
from St. Martin's Press.

Beyond that I've got enough projects lined up to keep me busy for many months, if not years.
Rookie Blues
-- a cop novel that's about 80% complete, that I put aside a long time ago and want seriously to get back to . . .
Villaggio Sogno,
a fantasy novel based on a short story that I wrote for a Mike Ashley anthology . . .
Beneath the Karst,
an adventure novel with vaguely Lovecraftian overtones . . .
Transtemporal!,
the long-delayed wrap-up of a trilogy including
Circumpolar!
and
Countersolar!
. . . and
Dreams,
the concluding volume of my three-decker including
Terrors
and
Visions
.