The Cassutt Files
The Five Percent Factor

Last month, I attended the annual Nebula Awards weekend of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in Tempe, Ariz., where I was pleased to see old friends ... and to witness honors given to Joe Haldeman, Kelly Link, Carol Emshwiller and Joss Whedon for individual works, and to Harlan Ellison and William Nolan for their careers.

I was also left depressed, shaken and otherwise unhappy by conversations with editors, agents and publishers about the state of sci-fi publishing, which could all be compared unfavorably to selecting music for the Titanic's orchestra after the ship had hit the berg. Apparently sci-fi books now account for around 5 percent of the fiction sold in the United States, roughly the same percentage they did in my youth.

In the same couple of weeks, NBC canceled Surface, its entry in the Lost generation of sci-fi series, followed days later by a more surprising death sentence for Invasion.

Genres wear out. The conditions that made them attractive to readers change ... just as average mean global temperatures might force those with oceanfront property to consider moves to higher ground.

Is sci-fi going the way of the western?

An American idle

This isn't a new question, of course. In my 30 years around the sci-fi field, the thing I remember most is writers complaining about dying markets. There was a brief period of optimism, post-Star Wars, and another flurry of hope in the late 1980s, after Gibson's breakthrough with Neuromancer—a non-series novel by someone other than a writer famed in the 1950s. But mostly it's been doom and gloom.

Sci-fi's history with network television has been equally grim. Star Trek, after all, was 40 years ago—and we all know how successful it was on NBC.

Syndicated television proved to be a real home for sci-fi for over a decade, beginning with Next Generation and continuing through various Roddenberry-derived titles and others until that market faded, too.

There is our own SCI FI Channel, of course, and there remain the intriguing sci-fi-flavored shows on other outlets, from The 4400 to Lost.

Lost aside, do they make up more than 5 percent of the viewing audience? A back-of-the-envelope calculation says no.

Well, are we surprised? Don't we sci-fi readers and viewers pride ourselves on being just a bit smarter and more perceptive than the mass of average viewers speed-dialing votes for Taylor Hicks?

Years ago, upon hearing the sci-fi field described as a "ghetto," Larry Niven turned the idea on its head, in itself a cool bit of sci-fi conceptualization: No, it's more like a country club, a self-selected elite who know and see things that the general public don't.

This is fun—but it doesn't help if you're the producers of Threshold, Surface or Invasion. You don't want a country club audience ... you want to be as popular as Starbucks.

And you're not because you can't get beyond that 5 percent factor.

Winner and still champion

The counterargument is that sci-fi does indeed appeal to a mass audience. Ten of the top 20 all-time box-office champs are sci-fi. Look at the game world. Et cetera.

Well, let's examine that list of box-office champs—it would include multiple episodes of Star Wars, from the original to Return of the Jedi, as well as Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith ... E.T. and Jurassic Park ... Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 ... all three Lords of the Rings ... Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ... and Independence Day.

What are we to make of this apparent discrepancy? Well, it may be that movies make it easier to appreciate sci-fi: You don't have to take that mental leap, creating a new world in your head ... it's on the screen already.

Then why didn't that help the victims of network television? Maybe they weren't SF enough—all three alien invasion stories took place in the here and now. (The most successful SF show of the past few seasons, Battlestar Galactica, most definitely takes place in a sci-fi world, complete with spaceships and robots, although very humanoid sexy robots ... not that there's anything wrong with it.)

Maybe there's another reason. Movie box office is heavily weighted toward younger audiences, who appreciate sci-fi in higher percentages.

And, let's face it, a good half of the sci-fi pics on the list are actually fantasy.

I don't want to recap the whole tiresome history of the definition of science fiction. In its purest state, however, a sci-fi story takes place in a world-other-than-our own that possesses surface plausibility (women will outnumber men, the Bomb will wipe out 99 percent of the human race, people will travel to the stars in ships the size of Vermont at speeds beyond that of light).

A fantasy story takes place in a world that never existed or adds an implausible element (ghosts, powers bestowed by the bite of a radioactive spider) to the world we live in now.

Or so the argument goes. It isn't too difficult to pick it apart.

Sci-fi still has legs

In fact, these exercises in taxonomy mean nothing in the marketplace. The audience will decide what is sci-fi and what is fantasy, and accordingly purchase—or in the case of sci-fi-as-published-or-promoted, not.

Which suggests to me that publishers and editors and even writers are defining the genre too narrowly, and publishing it poorly.

Not all of them. English publishers seem to have sparked a renaissance of sorts in pure sci-fi, with authors like Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley and others. The United Kingdom's Orbit books just announced last week that it is opening an office in New York and will aim for the American market, too.

One night at the Nebulas, a group of us were talking about Lost (not the stories nominated for the awards, you'll note) and whether it qualified as sci-fi. I cited the magnificent two-hour pilot, with the crash and the mysterious happenings ... and got sneered at. I was told that all of the events in the pilot could have had rational, non-sci-fi explanations, a point I had to accept.

"Fine," I said. "But we all agree that Lost feels like a sci-fi series." No argument there. I turned to the biggest skeptic. "At what point after the two-hour pilot did you decide that?"

"When Locke got up and walked! Then it became sci-fi!"

Or fantasy. Which shows how useless the labels are.

And why it's too early to live by the 5 percent factor and await the death of sci-fi.