ordon Van Gelder entered the science fiction field early in life--while he was still in high school, he sold a story to an anthology edited by Terry Carr. In 1988, a few months after graduating from college, he became an editorial assistant at St. Martin's Press and eventually rose to the position of senior editor. In 1997, while still at St. Martin's, he began editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which had been in existence as one of SF's top markets for over half a century. In October of last year, he left St. Martin’s and purchased F&SF from its longtime publisher, Ed Ferman. Science Fiction Weekly spoke with Van Gelder recently about this momentous shift in the world of SF magazine publishing.
Last year, the circulation for all science fiction and fantasy magazines declined. Why did you choose to leave the book industry and purchase F&SF now?
Van Gelder: There are about 18 different answers to this. Basically, I'd been feeling frustrated by the book industry, and St. Martin’s especially. These days, there are so few book publishers willing to take chances on an offbeat book. When I compared my two jobs at St. Martin’s and F&SF, I realized that I was enjoying editing the magazine so much more than I was enjoying editing the books and working at St. Martin's.
At the same time, the publisher of F&SF, Ed Ferman, had been trying to figure out what to do about the magazine, especially once his daughter decided she wasn't interested in running it. He spoke with me and some other people about taking it over. I spent some time going over the numbers before deciding. I wanted to continue editing the magazine, and buying it was the best way to ensure that I could do so.
It's true that the magazine industry is not doing well right now. As far as I can tell, all magazines, even non-genre magazines, have taken a hit in the past couple of years. There was a time when magazines seemed to be falling like dominoes. Remember George? I think a lot of the magazine failures are due to the Internet, and how easy it is to access information online. But when I bought F&SF, I was ignorant enough of some elements of the magazine industry that these failures didn't worry me. Which elements exactly? Well, I'm still trying to figure that out. I've got a lot to learn.
I’ve also had to unlearn a lot from 12 years of book publishing. Book publishing and magazine publishing should have more in common than they do. Except for the fact that they work with the written word, the two types of publishing are completely different.
What is your role at F&SF now? Are you going to make any staff changes?
Van Gelder: I knew running the magazine was going to be a big job, but of course I didn't really understand how big until I was in the middle of it. Right now, I'm the publisher and the editor of F&SF, and most of the mailroom, too.
Last year, the magazine's circulation was just under 30,000. I'd like to increase that eventually, but my game plan for the next year is not to change anything. I think I need a year to figure out how to run this thing.
The staff of the magazine now includes two assistant publishers (including my wife), and an editorial assistant who works for me a few days a week. The magazine has always been run primarily by free-lance work, and that's going to continue. Luckily, we're keeping the same printer and distributors as before. The magazine has always had a rock-solid infrastructure. I never would have considered buying it otherwise. I can't imagine how hard it would be to start up a magazine cold these days.
Are you going to make any editorial changes in the type of fiction you publish?
Van Gelder: I've been pretty happy with the content of F&SF for the last two years, so I'm not going to change it much. But I'm sure it will continue to evolve. Strangely enough, the magazine’s going to contain more novellas this year than it did last year. I'm sure people will say, "Oh, that's because Gordon's in charge now." In fact, I think that every single one of those novellas was acquired while Ed was still publisher.
But I will probably continue to buy more novellas in the future. Since I was a book editor for so long, I'm used to stories that are longer, stories that you have room to walk around in. Gardner [Dozois, editor of Asimov's SF] and I have had a running disagreement about this for years. We'll both read a book, and Gardner will say, "That was a pretty good novel, but it should have been shorter." I'll tell him, "Yes, I liked the book too, but I would have asked them to expand it." That difference comes from spending most of your time reading short stories in magazines versus reading books. There's still enough of the book editor in me to believe that an author can occasionally include a tangent in a story that may not advance the plot of the story but is just interesting to read. Then again, I may not find any novellas over the next six months that I like enough to publish in F&SF.
I'm looking for fiction that knocks me out. I can't analyze what I want to publish any more than that. There's a quote from Mark Twain about humor--he says that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog: you can analyze humor for all you're worth, but at the end all you're left with is a dead frog.
With your new, expanded role at F&SF, do you think that your famous seven-day responses to submissions will now come more slowly?
Van Gelder: Some of my responses have already taken longer. Then again, it's been three months now since I bought the magazine, and I'm doing a pretty good job of staying on top of submissions. This is the one area of the magazine that I feel most comfortable running. It's the reason I bought the magazine, and I don't want to lose my grasp on it.
I don't read every story to the end, though I do look at them all. There’s a saying: "You don't have to eat the whole apple to know that it's rotten." It's an awful saying, but it's true. My primary job, after all, is to evaluate a manuscript for publication. Anything I can do beyond that, such as pointing the writer in this direction or that, is above and beyond my purpose.
John Campbell was legendary for developing long correspondences with writers and throwing out ideas for their stories. I'm just not built that way. Every time I've thrown out an idea, it hasn't worked. Campbell always said that he wanted to give the same idea out to six different writers and see if he got six different stories back. He claimed he would publish them all. I’d like to go back and read some of those Analogs from the '50s and see if those stories were interesting. It seems like the idea would get very tired.
Do you want F&SF to have a larger online presence?
Van Gelder: Right now, definitely not. For one thing, most of the dot-coms seem to have become dot-bombs. We’re in the middle of a rebellion against the Internet. That will last for another couple of months, and then people will settle down and the Internet will become just another tool.
But I've never wanted to put the main focus of F&SF on the Internet. As far as I can tell, people don't want to read fiction online. The content that tends to work online seems to be visually oriented, with a lot of animation, or purely factual, like SF Weekly. People want to curl up with a good story; they don't seem to want to curl up around a computer.
A friend of mine, who’s worked in magazines since the '60s and '70s, says all her friends are going out of their minds because their editors want everything factoid length, Internet length. The editors evidently feel that the reader’s attention span is gone after 500 words. I feel that most short stories--those under 500 words--are often clever ideas but not fully developed stories. They can be ingenious, but there’s really no room for characterization. And fiction is about story; if there’s no room to develop the story, then there's no real impact.
I feel that we have a tremendous need for stories, and I don't think the Internet is going to change the way we tell stories. So the Internet doesn’t scare me too much.
It's 2001. What trends in fiction did you see in the year 2000, and how do you think they're going to change next year?
Van Gelder: I can't really think of any trends I noticed in 2000. It just seemed like situation normal to me. I have noticed more horror in the submission pile lately, horror with something important to say. I’ve always thought that horror and mysteries have a see-saw relationship, and that mysteries currently have peaked. I think horror is starting to come back up. This is just my judgment call on the zeitgeist. Of course, I've already bought two-thirds of the stories I'll be running in 2001, so I could just give a list of trends and then miraculously be right, at least as far as F&SF goes!
I never approach the fiction I publish with an agenda. I have some horror for this year that I like a lot, but I also have some science fiction that I like a lot.
Where do you think short fiction will fit in the fiction market over the next couple of years?
Van Gelder: I do see people continuing to read short fiction. Charlie Brown, the editor of Locus, says he's discovered that the people in science fiction who read short fiction don't tend to read novels, and vice versa. I've seen that borne out in editing F&SF. I've had people complain that I have too many book reviews in F&SF. They say that they barely have time to read the short fiction in the magazine, let alone a full novel.
The trend in the last 50 years has been away from short stories and toward longer stories. It seems like the people who are willing to commit the time to read any story are more willing to read a long story. But short fiction is still around, and it's still good. It may not have the same commercial ability to sell as novels, however.
Have you edited many short story anthologies? What's the market for them like right now?
Van Gelder: I've co-edited the Best from F&SF anthology with Ed Ferman, which contained stories reprinted from the magazine. The market for reprint anthologies is fairly steady right now. And anthologies of original (or mostly original) stories? I forget how many I edited at St. Martin's--there was Ellen Datlow's Off Limits and a couple of others, but not all that many. I’ve found the market for original anthologies to be tough, especially in hardcover.
Are you going to miss editing books?
Van Gelder: Oh yes. In fact, Kate Wilhelm told me, "I'll bet you'll miss it." She's one of the few people who has mastered both the novel and the short story, and she says that working on a short story is completely different from working on a novel. Editing the two can be just as different. I've noticed that I'm still reading novels during my leisure time. And I'll find myself saying to myself, "Hey, I would have included something else," or "I would not have done that."
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