"...the aggregate amount I paid out as an editor to everybody, over a period of thirty years from 1939 to 1969, as editor of Astounding Stories and Super Science Stories, as editor of the Star series of original anthologies for Ballantine, as editor of more than a dozen reprint anthologies over that period and finally as editor of Galaxy, If, Worlds of Tomorrow and others for nearly a decade -- the total of checks, for all of them put together, to every contributor, is probably about [a] quarter of a million." -- Frederik Pohl, 1979.

A significant and compelling statement indeed. Clearly, the science fiction short story market is no place to plan a future. Write such stories as a hobby, if you like, but do not expect to earn a living here, decent or otherwise.

So, first lesson -- There is NO SUCH THING as a paying market for SF short stories. I mean by "paying" a market that will pay a writer enough to allow him or her to quit his or her day job and write full time. Books may be different in this regard, but from all I have read, they offer only a few such niches. I suspect that for all but a handful of SF writers, they are not exactly a road to riches, if you go through the standard SF publishing route.

The Internet (which Malzberg's book predates -- I know, I know, the precursor to the cultural phenom known as the Internet existed prior to the early 1980s, but it just wasn't a mass medium then, was it?) may someday spawn an actual paying market for short stories, or make of well-written SF novels a road to riches. We shall see. It shows no sign of doing so to date, in fact, it seems to be moving the value of all the kinds of text that appears within it towards zero, whereas SF short stories have been penny-a-word stuff for DECADES.

But of course, YOU are special. YOUR writing will rapidly be recognized as being worthy of standing right alongside of the best writers in SF. Editors will vie to pay top dollar for YOUR work. YOU won't have to spend time in the slush piles, will you? If this is what YOU think, read THIS.

Malzberg was an editor of two bottom-tier SF magazines -- Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories -- for a period of six months in 1968. He reports that his salary during that period started at $100 a month and ended at $150 -- perhaps a living wage in 1968, but from what I have read of SF publishers, I doubt it.

He also reports that despite being a bottom-tier market in terms of both pay and prestige, he regularly received manuscripts from the writers who dominated the field at the time -- people like R. A Lafferty and Fritz Leiber, as well as then lesser lights like Dean Koontz.

Malzberg says that he received 100 manuscripts a week back in 1968, which means 400 manuscripts a month. Of those, 60 manuscripts were as good as or better than what was being published in his and his competitors' magazines, by any standards he could come up with. Which means he was rejecting 40 top-quality stories every month, because he could only buy 15-20 stories a month.

Got the picture? Even if your story was as good as anything the top pros were writing in 1968, you only had a one in three chance of getting published. Do you think things have gotten better or worse now?

Malzberg points out -- quite accurately -- that you could do better in almost any other field than SF, including a glorious career as a tempo typist.

He's right, in a sense, but his view of the situation is skewed by his personal biases. I have a more hopeful, and I think, more accurate, viewpoint.

If I were addressing a young person who wanted to seek a career as an SF writer, I believe I'd say something like this:

Go ahead and write SF. There is no way you can be prevented from doing so, now or ever, if that is what you really want to do. But I think you are cutting yourself off from a lot of interesting and rewarding possibilities if you persist in being so narrow-minded about what careers can make you happy.

The fact is that SF is a barren, stony field that many have labored in to no avail, so much so that ekeing out enough from it to keep body and soul together is a notable achievement. Malzberg and others believe that trying to make a career out of SF killed two of the field's leading writers outright -- and he may well be right about that.

There are many, many other fields which, if you bring any significant fraction of the energy and intelligence you are willing to devote to SF writing, will reward you much more richly in terms of money, recognition and a feeling of personal accomplishment than SF ever would.

If you are a talented writer, you should ask, "What can I really do with my abilities -- what's the BROADEST interpretation of what I can do?" instead of narrowing things down intolerably by saying, "My only goal in life is to become a full-time SF writer."

When Malzberg points out that you could do as well financially by becoming a temp typist as you could by writing SF full-time (provided you are good enough to sell ANYTHING) he is creating a false dichotomy of sorts. He perhaps means only to show how easily one can match the meager material rewards to be gained by a career in SF. But the implication is also that there is SF writing and everything else -- that temp typist=President of the U.S.=research scientist=janitor-whatever, when compared to being an SF writer.

I should know -- I felt exactly that way when I was young. But as a character in MacCrumb's "Zombies Of The Gene Pool" says, "I grew up." I learned that there were a lot of things beside writing SF that I enjoyed doing, and that they were almost all more rewarding financially than writing SF, and some of them as personally rewarding.

I don't mean to suggest that SF fans give up hope of finding expression for their SF dreams. Au contraire. I share those dreams as much as anyone, but I think there is more than one way to skin a dream.

Copyright © 1997, Pat Powers

Next week's columnist is Jack Chalker.