On The Net
Worldwide Editors
by James Patrick Kelly
editing
Editors have a tough job. They act as gatekeepers, but there are no set rules. Instead they rely on their knowledge of the field, their feel for the readership, their sense of what makes a story, and their intuition. The best of them serve both their readers and writers. I’ve asked three of these dedicated and often underpaid professionals from around the world to shed light on what they do and why they do it. Jonathan Strahan is an editor, anthologist, and book reviewer from Australia. He cofounded Eidolon: The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy and currently acquires and edits for Reactor and Tor.com Publishing. Francesco Verso, an Italian novelist and editor, is cofounder and Editor-in-Chief at Future Fiction, an international publishing house that has published authors from fourteen languages and more than forty countries. Sara Chen is the director of the Science Fiction World’s Editorial Department and a winner of China’s Galaxy Award for Best Editor. SFW, founded in 1979, is the most influential and professional SF publishing house in China; Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem was first published there.
What was your background and why did you want to become an SF editor?
Jonathan: I was a reader and a fan. It hadn’t crossed my mind to become an editor, but I attended a convention where they were encouraging people to publish fanzines. Some friends and I took up the challenge with Eidolon, which took Journal Wired, SF Eye, and Interzone as its inspirations.
Sara: I was a journalist for six years but I wanted to do something that would last. I wanted to become an editor and put my name on books so I looked for a publishing house in Chengdu. Science Fiction World is there. It was established in 1979 and has a huge audience in China. There is no sci-fi publisher to compare it to. But before I came to work there, I actually hadn’t read much science fiction.
Francesco: I studied Environmental Economics and worked for around eight years at IBM as an IT specialist. In 2007, my second novel, e-Doll, won the Urania Mondadori Award, the most important Italian SF award for unpublished works. This started my career as a full time writer (or at least the illusion of such a career), as in reality it’s impossible to survive just by writing in Italy. So I opened a small press called Future Fiction to earn a bit more by publishing other people. All the science fiction bookstores I was going to were (and still are) dominated by a single voice, the voice of U.S./UK authors. I wanted a different approach, so I invested a lot of time, energy, and a little money on translating the best science fiction authors in the world.
What do you know (or suspect) about your audience in terms of demographics? Is the overall audience for science fiction getting older?
Sara: We find that most sci-fi fans in China are male, maybe 80 percent, and the average age is twenty, maybe younger. They like stories with science and world building and plot.
Jonathan: Almost nothing, factually. My feeling is that the overall audience for short fiction is waning and that the audience for print magazines is skewing older. That said, I edit for Reactor, and they are a much younger audience. I do think it’s a tough time for some kinds of science fiction. There’s still great work being done, you just need to look farther afield.
Francesco: My audience is not as old because I don’t make books for a specific category of readers. I called my series Future Fiction because it addresses the most pressing and relevant issues of our time and doesn’t indulge in a sort of escapism, nor does it follow any commercial trend. So if I am to use a Gaussian curve to represent the distribution of our readers, I would say that women (and a bit less men) of around thirty-five to forty-five years old represent our peak.
When you are choosing stories, what is the balance between storytelling skill versus a fresh examination of science fiction themes and ideas? Do you tend to favor one over the other?
Francesco: That’s not an easy question. A good story has both elements, so it’s about finding the right mix of engagement and execution. In general I am more inclined to prefer a new idea or interpretation of an SF topic to a well-crafted story I’ve read many times before. After all, I consider SF a narrative of provocative ideas more than a literary genre. In other words, plot and themes rule (a bit) over character and words.
Jonathan: With the exception of one or two think-tank projects, the only criterion is storytelling skill. Do I get lost in the story? Do I forget I’m reading for work? If that happens then I’m sold. I do like fresh examinations of themes, and I think that’s important for SF, but it’s secondary.
Sara: The first thing I want to see is a story with characters and a plot that has a beginning and an end. Some writers depend too much on their literary skills. Readers can be attracted to those skills, but storytelling is more important. It is what lasts. In English you say “science” and “fiction,” but that is only two words. In Chinese we have three words for these stories, “science,” “fantasy,” and “fiction,” but the fiction is the base. Then you show your concepts and your imagination that has created a new world with its own background.
How do you strike a balance between giving your readers what they want and guiding them to try new things?
Jonathan: I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about what my readers want, which might sound awful. But I find if I focus on interesting ideas and creating the most engaging books I can, then reader satisfaction takes care of itself.
Francesco: That’s simple, I don’t know what they want. I have given Future Fiction a very clear identity, so it’s the other way around. I am offering a cultural product. I am working hard to explore topics that I consider relevant and fresh. If I do a good job, they’ll appreciate my selection. So far, we’ve won many awards for the uniqueness of our books, and I’ve brought to our readers topics that were more or less unknown before Future Fiction published them, like contemporary Chinese Science Fiction, Solarpunk, Climate Change, African Science Fiction, Indian Science Fiction, and Arab Science Fiction.
Sara: Our readers love stories, that is first. And they want them set in a society that has never occurred to them. Golden Age science fiction is still very popular in China. But we have been promoting a new concept of science fiction in China, a more speculative fiction that includes the soft sciences and imagining different societies. Stories do not always have to be adventures. We have tried communicating with readers by inviting our writers to write stories prompted from keywords. We publish them without names in the magazine and readers vote for the ones they like the best. I named this feature “Writer Who.” The editors do not always agree with the vote, so we say that the task for us is not only to face the market, but we also hope to lead both writers and readers. We don’t need writers to follow American or European science fiction, but we need to find our own way to the best Chinese science fiction, generation by generation.
Can you read SF stories purely for pleasure or does your editorial work lead you to be more of an analytical critic?
Jonathan: I absolutely can, to a point. I can read anything—especially maybe things I’m rereading—for pleasure. I don’t try to analyze what I’m reading, beyond what I think any reader does. However, if I hit something that pulls me up and makes me question things (the language, the reality of the world—whatever), then I am thrown into editing mode and I’m lost to the work as a reader.
Sara: I can’t enjoy sci-fi as a normal reader, although I do like to read my favorites. But I tend to judge whether the concept is good, whether it’s creative or not, whether the story works. I read too many unedited stories! For entertainment I like to relax with stories and movies that others have already worked on.
Francesco: Sometimes my pleasure comes from the analysis. Following the consequences of a thought provoking premise can be great fun, so I don’t separate the two aspects. I think dichotomies can be false problems.
Who is the science fiction writer from your country who most influenced your editorial tastes? From the world?
Sara: My first job at SFW was to edit a book about The Three Body Problem. The author was a fan, totally enthusiastic, lots of passion, and he had some ideas about the plot and characters. We had long discussions. I read that book much more than most readers. My copy was full of marks. But Liu Cixin’s book was so important to Chinese science fiction. I also edited short stories and novels by Philip K. Dick. Valis. The Divine Invasion. I hadn’t known about him before and I thought wow, this is one of the greatest science fiction writers in history. He inspired not only writers but movie directors. He had the courage to write about experiences that were totally different from ordinary people.
Jonathan: Greg Egan. And Robert Heinlein. I read Egan at a time when stories like “Learning to Be Me” just blew my mind, and Heinlein I read when I was seven or eight, and imprinted completely. His work is something I read toward and then away from. And then so many others: Howard Waldrop, Stan Robinson. Lucius Shepard.
Francesco: I have to thank a couple of people for inspiring my work. First of all Daniele Brolli, a very talented writer, editor, and translator that contributed to the spreading of cyberpunk in Italy through many translated and published stories in magazines and anthologies, a true cultural intermediary of the last thirty years. And then Lavie Tidhar, whose World Science Fiction blog shaped my ideas of going out into the wide world of untranslated science fiction to continue what he’s started. Being a friend of Lavie today is like a dream come true for me.
exit
Because translation costs are so daunting, we in the Anglosphere sometimes forget that science fiction is a vibrant international phenomenon. But in the future the best stories will be those that embrace both the diversity of writers’ ambitions and readers’ tastes. I believe today’s editors are up to the task of finding those stories and showcasing them to our wide, wide world.