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The Future of The Field
Maybe it’s my age. Maybe that’s why I’ve recently taken refuge in the history of science fiction. Or maybe it’s just the realization that I’m now one of the old-timers. I can actually remember meeting or knowing many of the legends of the field, now gone. And I have been in this field for a long time, even though it seems like a nanosecond to me.
Some of this is the rapidity of change. Readers of The Grantville Gazette appreciate history, and know that sometimes lives, institutions, countries, and everything else can change in the blink of an eye. If you look at a world map from five years ago, it’s different than a world map from fifty years ago, and different from a world map from five hundred years ago. And let’s not even talk about how those maps were made.
Some of the reasons I’m reading about the past, though, is the breadth of time. When you’re a kid, adults say, “Wow, you’ve grown up so fast,” and you think, “Fast? Are you kidding? This day is already a year long.”
But as an adult you realize that time really does speed up, and all of the other time periods live in your head as real, not imagined places. (Which probably explains why time travel books are so popular.)
I got hit with the breadth of time-again-in May. I stood on a stage in Hollywood, California, at the annual Writers of the Future award ceremony, and read my lines off the TelePrompTer: Twenty-five years ago, I . . .
Twenty-five years ago, I was twenty-five. So the entire length of my time on this Earth has doubled since that day, twenty-five years ago, when I went to the very first Writers of the Future workshop. The workshop was so new that it wasn’t even called a Writers of the Future workshop, although it was sponsored by WoTF. The workshop was an experiment, something that-if it failed-might not be repeated ever again.
I hadn’t won an award from Writers of the Future, which was a brand-new competition-and a somewhat controversial one at that. I was chosen to go because winners had flaked out or couldn’t afford the time and money to attend.
Algis Budrys had called me seven days before the workshop started and said, “I’m inviting you to a free workshop taught by myself, Fred Pohl, Gene Wolfe, and Jack Williamson in Taos, New Mexico. It starts one week from today, and you have to pay for everything. Hotel, food, plane tickets. But the workshop is free.”
I jumped at the opportunity. Fortunately, I had a thousand dollars saved up. It was my first and last on the apartment I was going to rent due to my impending divorce, but hey, what’s more important? A workshop? Or fees for an apartment?
I figured I would never have the chance again, and I was right. I never did win Writers of the Future, despite entering at least a dozen times, but I got more out of that workshop than anyone else ever did. I met my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, and we’ve been together ever since.
Now our relationship and all the things that have come from it, from our own writing to Pulphouse Publishing to our various editing stints (mine at The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, Dean’s at Pocket Books) to the workshops we’ve taught for the last ten years, have become part of Writers of the Future lore. In May, many people at Authors Services, who sponsor the current workshop, mentioned my meeting Dean at the very first workshop as if discussing a fairy tale come to life.
That was strange for me. But what was stranger was the realization that this controversial contest that many new writers wouldn’t enter when it started twenty-seven years ago has become a venerable proving ground for new writers in the modern era.
Writers who win Writers of the Future really are writers of the future. The past winners have had multiple book contracts. Many of these winners are New York Times bestsellers or win other awards. Writers-and Illustrators-of the Future winners have gone on to win everything from awards in the sf field to Oscars and National Book Awards.
I realized a lot of this while watching the ceremony, listening to the young writers accept awards that mean a great deal to them-and to writing and publishing in general. To these writers, the contest is what it was envisioned to be: a validation of their talent and a send-off into the world of publishing. The controversy is long gone-and remembered only by those of us who have been in the field for decades.
These writers and illustrators truly are the future of the field, if they can navigate the changes ahead.
And those changes are vast.
I noted that as well, as I listened to my fellow professionals give advice at the workshop proper. In the past, we all gave the same advice on how to have a career in publishing. Oh, the details might have differed-publish short stories first or stick to novels only; go after awards or don’t bother with awards-but the principles we all espoused were the same.
And now they aren’t. Half of us told the new writers to learn about e-publishing; the other half thought e-publishing was a fad. A few of us said that getting an agent is a treacherous and perhaps unnecessary thing in the modern era; the rest believed that writers can’t survive without agents.
The only thing we long-term pros could agree on was this: the industry is changing and only those people who know business will survive the change. The rest will fall by the wayside.