Editorial
The Future May Force Us Back to Basics

When the future of reading arrives, where do you think you'll be confronting it? Here on the Web, with words built of pixels? In books and magazines still made of paper and ink? Or will the two forms manage to coexist?

I first commented here in Science Fiction Weekly back in 2001 on the ongoing evolution of how and where we digest writing. It's a constant conversation that the publishing world has been having with itself, and the most interesting recent installment in that debate comes from Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg, courtesy of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

The talented tag team just went back and forth on the subject in the pages of the Winter 2007 SFWA Bulletin, which presented the latest chapter in their popular "Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues." It's a feature tackling issues important to the science-fiction field that's been running in that magazine for almost a decade. Resnick has not only won five Hugo Awards, but once all the other honors are counted, he has actually won more awards for short fiction than any other living writer. Malzberg was the first winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and a former editor at Amazing and Fantastic. He also worked for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency for decades. With careers like those, attention must be paid to their opinions on this media migration.

Resnick makes a good case for the coming primacy of the electronic world when he shares that "I've made more money on royalties just from reprints from Fictionwise than I made from advances and royalties combined from the 13 novels I sold to Signet in the 1980s." On the other hand, Malzberg explains some of the social reticence that may occur in accepting the new model when he points out that "I certainly can see that electronic model as a kind of subsidiary right, as a spin-off, an 'electronic' edition of the new Danielle Steel bestseller in the same category as an audiobook, but I don't see it constituting publication at the site of origination."

Reading time may be running out

In alternating passages, they touch on all of the financial and social aspects of the changeover from dead trees to dancing electrons, including the last decade's overhyping of e-publishing as an economic savior, the falling circulations of the traditional print magazines and the general impossibility of holding back the future. Resnick noted the awards that electronic stories and their editors have won, and the potential income to be made from that slice of the field. Malzberg explained how ironic it was that they were announcing the death of conventional text in a conventional text medium.

I enjoyed the banter between them, and found myself managing to agree with both of them. But as I considered the column, I found that something was missing. It occurred to me that in sticking to the real-world nuts and bolts of this publishing metamorphosis, they were being far too reasonable and rational, which meant that an aspect of the issue had gone unaddressed. Optimism caused them to overlook an important piece of science-fictional speculation necessary to any discussion of the future of publishing. I just realized that I've been guilty of that omission myself, so please don't think I'm blaming Resnick or Malzberg for any sin I haven't already committed.

But—how can you predict the future of publishing and have nothing to say about the aftereffects of a possible nuclear war?

It's just not struck me (call me naive) that those of us who are pessimistic about the kind of future waiting for us out there (and even those of us who aren't) must consider that an atomic apocalypse could be right around the corner. After all, in January of this year, the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved ahead the hands of its famed Doomsday Clock—which since 1947 has been measuring how close the world is to the nuclear brink—from seven minutes to midnight to five minutes to midnight.

Whether you think such an event might occur this decade, this century or this millennium, you should ask the next question, which is—how will we be able to read electronic stories once there's no electricity? We won't be able to read e-books on our computers by candlelight. A disaster of that magnitude might take us back to the basics of paper and ink. In fact, we may arrive at a time when it will be as if anything that had existed only in electronic form—such as this editorial—never existed at all.

Even if you believe that the likelihood of such a disruption is infinitesimally small, it would be wise to prepare for a future in which paper could turn out to be the most permanent publishing medium after all.