George R.R Martin Speeches

WHY I’M HERE TODAY, OR, SECRETS OF MY BLACK PAST

Guest of Honour Speech
Delivered at Electracon
June 23, 1984

"I’m pleased to be here today as your Guest of Honour at Electracon, and I wanted to thank the committee for bringing me in, and all of you for making the weekend so pleasant. I must admit that, a long time ago when I was starting in this writing game, I never dreamed that someday it would bring me to Kearney, Nebraska — possibly I never dreamed it because I’d never heard of Kearney, Nebraska. But you must remember that I was born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, and my knowledge of American cities was mostly limited to nearby towns with names like Hoboken, Secaucus, Paramis, Hohokus, and Perth Amboy, plus those places that had major league baseball franchises, preferably in the National League. I don’t think Kearney has ever had a major league baseball franchise, but if you did, it was surely in the American League, which doesn’t really count.

Kearney, Nebraska is a long way from Bayonne, New Jersey, especially if one travels by way of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Dubuque, Iowa, Chicago, and other spots in between. When I was reflecting on that, it occurred to me that I might tell you a bit about how I came to make that trip. And I’m not talking about Frontier Airlines.

The reason I’m here today, of course, is my writing. I am, to be sure, dashing as all get out, witty, charming, a snappy dresser, kind to my mother, and a lot of fun at a party. I even know all the words to the theme song from My Mother, the Car. Nonetheless, were I not also a writer, I doubt that even these impressive credentials would have been sufficient to tempt you to bring me in for the weekend. Among us writers, it has become traditional to say things like, “I was born with a typewriter in my hand,” or “I can’t imagine not writing,” and therefore suggest that the life and career we’ve wound up living was, in fact, the one we were destined to live. There’s nothing like hindsight to give a glow of inevitability to the directions our lives have taken. But I don’t buy it, not for a moment. There’s nothing inevitable about life, at least not about my life.

So how the hell did a longshoreman’s kid from Bayonne wind up talking to a bunch of Nebraska SF fans, eh?

Well, Robert A. Heinlein had a lot to do with it. The reason I started writing SF was because, years earlier, I had started reading SF, and that was all because of a book called Have Space Suit, Will Travel that a friend of my mother’s gave me for Christmas one year. It was a hardcover, a real trade hardcover, a “juvenile” of course, but it didn’t seem very juvenile to me. And it was great stuff, fabulous stuff. Kip and PeeWee, the maltshop and the flying saucer, beginning with the Skyway Soap slogan contest and ending with Earth on trial before the Three Galaxies. “So, take away our sun! We’ll make another, or die trying. To die trying is the proudest human thing.” I was hooked. Of course I was hooked. How could I not be hooked? My voracious reading of SF started right then, and never stopped.

Now, the very next Christmas, the woman who’d given me Have Space Suit, Will Travelgave me another nice hardbound juvenile novel. It was about a shepherd. If the order of those gifts had been reversed, I wonder, would sheep have replaced spacesuits in the center of my daydreams? If so, I’d certainly never have become a writer. The market for sheep stories just isn’t what it used to be, not even in Australia.

Years later, there was the business of the chain letter.

That one came about because of the funny books, y’see. Heinlein made me a devoted SF reader, of course, and in the years that followed I read lots more Heinlein, discovered Andre Norton, the Tom Corbett series, Eric Frank Russell, Doc Smith, and the Science Fiction Book Club. And Ace Doubles. Ah, yes — I positively devoured Ace Doubles. Two novels for 35 cents, that was hard to beat, even if they were really novellas, and one of them always seemed to be by Robert Moore Williams or Ray Cummings or somebody like that.

But long before that Christmas when Kip’s spacesuit and the Mother Thing parked under my tree, I had been an eager reader of comic books, and my new affair with the likes of Roger Manning and Dane Thorson and Blackie Duquesne (which name I invariably pronounced as Blackie DOO QUEZ NEE), did not make me love Superman, Batman, and the Challengers of the Unknown any less. Oh, I do recall a brief episode around the time I was in sixth grade when I decided I was too old and too mature for comic books and gave all my Supermans away. Fortunately, this aberration only lasted six months or so, and I started buying comics again just in time to snatch up the first issues of Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, thereby fortuitously providing for my retirement, though I’d hardly have guessed it at the time. So much did I love the FF that, around the time I was starting high school, I wrote a letter to the magazine, and got it published. It was a balanced, insightful, intelligent letter, as I recall, very perceptive and analytical — the main thrust of my argument was that Shakespeare had better move on over now that Stan Lee had arrived on the scene. Ahem.

Well, anyway, that was how I broke into professional print, in a manner of speaking, but having that letter published had a couple of odd consequences. One day soon thereafter I was watching the “Demon with a Glass Hand” episode of Outer Limits when I got a long distance phone call from Louisiana, which was rather extraordinary, since nobody in our family lived in Louisiana or knew anybody in Louisiana. Nobody in our family knew anybody in Jersey City, for that matter.

Turned out the guy calling had read my letter in Fantastic Four and gotten my number from information. He just wanted to talk about comic books. He said he was twenty years old and fabulously wealthy and he called up people all the time like this. He was so rich that at one point, when it came out that my family didn’t have a car, he offered to buy one and send it to me. It was a generous offer, but I was only thirteen and didn’t drive anyway, so I declined. We talked about the Fantastic Four for a couple of hours, long distance. To this day, I have no idea how “Demon with a Glass Hand” ends. My Louisiana friend continued to phone two or three times a week, for perhaps a month, to chat about comics and offer to give me automobiles. Then he stopped phoning.

The next person I heard from was an investigator with Ma Bell. Alas, my mystery caller wasn’t rich after all. Nor was he twenty. He was around thirteen too, and lived with his grandfather, and had amused himself for a month by phoning me and dozens of other people like me all over the US, giving an assortment of assumed names. It was a lot of fun until his grandfather unexpectedly received a phone bill for something like $37,000.

That was my first contact with fandom, in a way. Oddly enough, it was also the last time any fan has offered to buy me a car. Next time, I’m going to take it. I’m older now, and I know you should never look a gift car in the mouth, unless it’s a Ford. If any of you would like to uphold this fannish tradition of offering me free automobiles, my top choice would be a classic Mercedes Benz 300 SL gullwing from the 50s, but I’m not fussy, I’ll settle for a Ferrari.

But I’ve digressed. Those phone calls were one thing that came of being published in the Fantastic Four letter column. The other thing that came of it, which proved to have more lasting consequences, was a chain letter. I’d never gotten one before, so I was sure impressed. Here was this list of names, you see, and it said that if I sent away a quarter to the name at the top of the list, and recopied the letter, removed the top name and added mine at the bottom, then sent out four copies to friends, in a few weeks I’d get $64 in quarters. Well, hey, that sounded great. Sixty-four dollars was all the money there was in the universe, after all; it would buy me 533 comic books or 182 Ace Doubles, with change left over. I had a lot more faith in that $64 than I ever had in the car my phone friend kept offering me, so I sent off my quarter and waited.

Well, I never got any quarters, damn it.

But a funny thing happened.

It just so happened that the guy at the top of the list, the one who got my quarter, published a comic fanzine — a fanzine that was priced, coincidentally, at twenty-five cents. Now, all I sent him was a quarter in an envelope, scotched taped to a 3×5 index card; no letter, no nothing. Having probably long since forgotten about the chain letter, he sent me a copy of his fanzine. It was dittoed, like almost all comic fanzines in those vanished prehistoric days when the only photocopy machines that existed sat in libraries and gave you white writing on black paper. The art was crude and so was the writing, actually, but it was full of people talking about funny books, and accomplishing this without having to run up $37,000 phone bills. And in it were a bunch of reviews of other fanzines.

Welllllll . . . that was how an innocent high school student got sucked into the voracious maw of comic fandom.

And it was during those high school years as a comics fan that I really began the process of turning into a writer.

Oh, to be sure, like most people who turn out to be writers, I’d written all my life. As I related a few years ago in another GOH speech, my first, never-to-be-completed magnum opus was the fictional history of a glorious imaginary kingdom, an epic full of swordplay, dynastic intrigue, oppression, revolution, wars, betrayal, and valor most high, the principals of which were my pet turtles, who lived in a toy castle on my desk. You might say I began with a tale of shells and sorcery.

I even had a very short-lived professional career at one point, writing monster stories for the others kids in the projects where I lived. I was way ahead of my time, in a sense; I began with a series, long before they became fashionable. I block-printed the stories on pages ripped from one of those school tablets with the funny black and white covers, the kind where you started filling in the white areas on the cover in September, so they were all black and blue by June. They paid me by the page. The first story was a page long, and I got a penny, the second was two pages for two cents, and so on. Since most of the other kids in the projects didn’t read all that well, a free dramatic reading was part of the deal. I must say, I was a great reader, especially noted for my werewolf howls, a talent I lost for years until howling along with “Wolf Boy” in a Santa Fe bar. Well, I had worked my way up to a nickel, and visions of vast riches beckoned me onward, until one of my regular customers started having nightmares, and his mother came to my mother, and that was that for the child pro. Perhaps if I’d written stories about sheep instead of wolves . . . sigh.

Anyway, I did continue to write all through those years in Bayonne, but I seldom completed anything, and I never showed any of my stuff to anybody. Writing stories was just something I did to amuse myself. Like keeping a journal. Like playing an endless solitary RISK game where every army had a commanding general and I annotated the results of every battle. Like building an entire fleet of paper airplanes and carefully documenting the performance of each in order to arrive at an optimal design. Like breaking into the neighborhood haunted house with a couple of friends . . . except, no, it wasn’t like that last, because it was an essentially solitary act, more like masturbation, or reading my sister’s confession magazines when nobody else was at home in the hopes that I’d learn some more about sex. The stories I wrote then were games, in a sense, a private amusement that I worked on until I got bored with them, after which I moved on to something else. I never really thought other people would want to read the stuff I was writing.

And then came the chain letter, the sticky quarter, the fanzine. The fanzine, and the other fanzines that followed it, fascinated me. The contents were composed in roughly equal parts of articles about Golden Age characters, most of whom had passed from the four-color scene before I was born, and amateur super hero fiction. The articles . . . well, they were okay. The fiction, especially in the first few fanzines I got . . . hooboy. The fiction was awful.

I remember one writer in particular. He had a story, a superhero yarn related in prose, which in those days comic fans called a “text story.” It was about four typewritten pages long, and had thirteen superheroes and a horde of villains too. Lots of action, no plot, and not a line of dialogue. The writer obviously didn’t know what dialogue was. He’d write lines like, “The Purple Squid told Doctor Wormface to surrender, but Doctor Wormface wouldn’t surrender, so they punched each other.” Now, this writer may have been bad, but he was certainly willing to learn. When various fans wrote in, explaining about dialogue and suggesting that he might want to use some, he immediately took their comments to heart. His next story was all dialogue, sort of like a play without stage directions.

The truth has to be told; this man was my inspiration. Not Tolkien, not Heinlein, not Andre Norton or Eric Frank Russell or Stan Lee or any of the writers I loved. They could never have inspired me to write. But this guy, he was being published! It was after reading his stuff that I first uttered those magic words, the words every would-be writer must utter, sooner or later: “Even I can do better than that.”

I owned an ancient manual typewriter that I’d found up in my aunt’s attic one day. I’d fooled around on it enough to become a real one-finger wonder. Of course, the ribbon was so faded you could hardly read it, but I made up for that by pounding the keys so hard that the letters were deeply graven into the paper. The little top inner parts of the “e” and the inside of the “o” always fell right out, but you can’t expect perfection, right? Reading the pages I produced in this fashion was quite an eyestrain, no doubt, but I guarantee that once blindness had set in, feeling the letters with your fingertips would be no problem at all.

Anyway, I sat down and I invented a superhero — just one, I figured that was smarter than introducing thirteen at once the way my role model did — and I began to write. The second hardest thing to do was to actually finish a story, which I’d seldom managed before. The hardest thing was to work up the courage to send it out. Eventually I managed both though. And the story was accepted, and published, and people even wrote in and said how good it was. I mean, I blew them away — dialogue and narration in the same story, what an innovation!

I wrote more stories.

They got published. They got praised. I did still more. I stayed in comics fandom all through high school. In some ways, it was the only thing that kept me sane in high school. Eventually I got beyond the dittoed fanzines where I started, with their fading purple print, and into the class of that subfandom, the photo-offset fanzines like Star Studded Comics. One year I even won an award for Best Fan Fiction. I know now that awards for Best Fan Fiction are like awards for Best Dwarf Basketball Player, but I was a high school kid and it meant something to me, even though I never did get the trophy I was promised. I did get something more important. I got confidence. I got criticism. I got experience.

I got better.

By the time I hit college, I was corresponding with people like Howard Waldrop, who had started at Star Studded Comics just about the same time I did, and I was moving beyond superhero text stories into horror and sword and sorcery. Still bad, but better. One thing led to another. Somehow I had begun thinking of myself as a writer, or at least as someone who would always write a little on the side, whatever career I might ultimately pursue. To keep my hand in, I not only took all the creative writing courses I could, but I even tried to write fiction for courses where it had no business whatsoever. Once, in sophomore year, I talked my prof in Scandinavian history into letting me write a piece of historical fiction instead of a term paper. Not only did he go for it, and give me an A, but he liked the story so well he sent it out for me to a professional magazine called American Scandanavian Review. They didn’t buy it, alas, but they sent a nice letter, and thus I collected my first professional rejection slip. It hardly hurt at all, so the following year, when I wrote a batch of short stories for a creative writing class, I took to sending them out myself, and collecting my own rejections.

I got a few. One of the stories, an SF piece called “The Hero,” vanished for a year, lost in the mail when I sent it to Fred Pohl at Galaxy not realizing that Fred had left and the magazine had been sold. When I found out, I retyped it and sent it to the new editor, and it got lost there too. Months and months passed, I graduated college and went home to Bayonne for the summer before beginning my year of graduate study. Bayonne is pretty close to New York; I decided, instead of wasting time, to phone and inquire. I must say, the woman I spoke to was not very friendly. When I said I wanted to ask about a manuscript that had been there for a long time, she said, “We can’t possibly keep track of all the stories we reject.” But when I told her the name of the story, there was a brief pause. “Wait a minute,” she said. “We bought that story.” A golden moment. Of course, it turned out my check was lost in the mail. They’d sent it to the college address I was no longer at, and by the time it got forwarded to my summer address in Bayonne, I was back at school at another address, so it had to be sent on again. But I finally got it. Ninety-four bucks.

The chain letter had promised me sixty-four. I’d come out thirty bucks ahead, though it took a lot longer than I ever would have guessed when I mailed off that quarter.

That was the summer of 1970, my first sale. “The Hero” ran in the February 1971 issue of Galaxy. I made my second sale to Ted White and Fantastic in the spring of 1971. Oddly enough, that story too had been sent off just as the magazine was changing addresses, lost for a year, retyped, and resubmitted. It wasn’t until my third sale that I realized it was possible to sell a story without first losing it in the mail. My first SF convention was just about the same time, and more sales and more cons have followed in the years since, until, finally, here I am.

Inevitable? I can’t believe it.

If I’d never gotten that Heinlein book, would I even have read SF? Would I have read at all, for that matter?

If not for that chain letter, would I ever have seen a fanzine? The right kind, that is, a bad one? At just the right time? Comics fandom was important to me. It gave me a place to publish, a place to be bad. My stories there got the criticism I needed to improve, but also the encouragement I needed to continue. The kind of stuff I was writing as an eighth- and ninth-grader was not even remotely good enough to find a home in the worst SF crudzine; nor could it possibly be published in comics fanzines as they exist today, for that matter. Those fanzines were part of a crude infant fandom, three-quarters of whose fans were high-schoolers. They’ll never come again. Had they not existed for me, though, I really wonder where my life might have lead. I learned more about writing from doing it than I ever did from high school English classes, or college comp classes either.

There were, of course, other turning points. In 1971, for example, I emerged from college with a bright shiny master’s degree in journalism, piled high with honors, and still couldn’t get a real job in my chosen profession. If I had, I might be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times even now, though more likely I’d be a disgruntled rewrite man on the Jersey Journal. But it didn’t happen that way.

I had just made my second sale and attended my first con; I was able to find only part-time summer work in Bayonne, so I drove myself to write. That summer I wrote a story every two weeks, the best stuff I’d ever done, including “With Morning Comes Mistfall” and “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” and by the time I signed up for VISTA that fall, my ultimate course was pretty well set. I might work other jobs to keep bread on the table. I did, in fact: public relations, chess tournament director, college instructor. But mostly I was a writer, ultimately I was a writer, deep down inside that was the important thing.

Inevitable? Nah. No way.

It’s a long way from Bayonne, New Jersey to Kearney, Nebraska, as I said. But you know something?

I’m glad I came." 

http://www.georgerrmartin.com/about-george/speeches/why-im-here-today-or-secrets-of-my-black-past : 11/12/17

EDITORS: THE WRITER’S NATURAL ENEMY

Guest of Honor Speech
Delivered at Coastcon II
Biloxi, Mississippi
March 10, 1979

"Today I’d like to say a few words about a writer’s natural enemy: editors.

Editors are one of the three most important things in the world, judging from the conversations one overhears in the SFWA suite at any large convention. For some reason, fans always seem to have very weird ideas about what writers talk about when they get together. The more naive neofans often entertain the belief that writers talk about writing — about their own work, or the state of the art in science fiction, or literature in general, or what their colleagues are doing, or fine points about style and plot and characterization. Actually, I’ve never heard any writers talk about any of these things — except in the formal confines of a workshop, or when cornered by a rabid neofan at a convention. I’ve known many writers who would walk a mile to avoid a conversation about writing.

Naturally the more sophisticated fans the ones who have been around fandom long enough, who have known and loved a writer or two, and maybe even been lucky enough to be permitted to buy a writer a drink — you know how selective writers are about who they’ll allow to buy drinks for them — those fans know that writers never talk about writing. But they have their own misconception. Fans are a very eclectic group, a little bit interested in anything. Wander around the next con you go to and eavesdrop on some of the conversations — the variety will amaze you. Fans talk about about music, all kinds of music, from classical to country. They talk about politics, and world affairs, and contemporary crises and controversies. They talk about sports, not just the football-baseball-basketball trinity so beloved of mundanes, but also more esoteric pastimes like hot-air ballooning and scuba diving and spelunking. They talk about books. Every once in a while they even talk about science fiction books. They talk about science, about black holes and nuclear fusion and the future of warfare and the cybernetic revolution. They talk about fandom, of course, and they plot and politick and gossip, and it’s all great fun. These same fans talk to their writer friends about all these things, too, and the writer frequently gives a good imitation of a person holding up his end of the conversation, and even feigns a certain amount of interest. And that’s how the fannish misconception arises that writers are as intelligent and aware and eclectic as fans.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It is only when one penetrates into the sanctum sanctorum of SFWA suites, and sees writers as they really are when there are no fans or readers around to impress, that you comprehend our true natures.

Left to their own devices, writers talk about only three things; the three most important things in the world.

They talk about money, they talk about sex, and they talk about editors.

Money and sex are things that most writers want and never get enough of. Editors are things that most writers don’t want and get all too much of. I’ve often heard writers ask other writers why there have to be editors in the world.

As it happens, I know the answer. If there were no editors in the world, writers would be very happy. They would frolic and play, and publish every word they wrote and they would have lots of money and lots of sex, since they would-be very famous and very charming having never experienced rejection. Their egos would fill up the world, their books would be everywhere, and they would mate furiously and produce lots of little writers, who would no doubt write lots of little books. This would never do. It would unbalance the ecology. So editors were put into the world to keep down the writer population, you see. Editors crush fledgling writers in their nest with heavy rejection slips, and they clip the wings of more experienced writers and tell them in which direction to fly — usually the wrong direction — and generally bruise their egos often enough so writers grow bitter and disillusioned and turn to drink. You all know what alcoholics writers are, and it’s all because of editors. If it weren’t for editors, writers would never drink. Watch the next time you’re at a convention. The minute an editor meets a writer, he will offer to buy him a drink on his expense account. Sometimes he will even buy him a meal. It’s a sinister ploy. Writers soon become dependent on those editorial expense accounts, and then the editor will back off and threaten to deny the writer those drinks and those meals, and the writer will do, anything to get back in the editor’s good graces. Anything. It’s a disgusting spectacle.

Also, this is one way editors keep down the population of writers. A fat, drunken writer is a supremely revolting creature, and seldom gets any sex, so there is no possibility of the world filling up with little writers.

Editors not only interfere with a writer’s sex life, but they also like to deny him money. Oh, they give a writer a little bit of money every now and then, but that’s only for the sake of appearances. They know better than to give the writers too much. A writer who gets a lot of money soon begins to feel secure and happy, and may even begin to raise a family, and editors don’t want that. You can test this yourself, if you’ve written a story or two. It’s always easy to find a editor who will buy you lunch when you travel to New York. But try calling one up and asking for a six-figure advance. Even a small six-figure advance . . .

Editors are difficult.

I actually can’t be too hard on editors. Sometimes I’m an editor myself. Only in a very minor way, though — I edit my NEW VOICES series of original anthologies for Jove. Two volumes are out, a third was just delivered and will be forthcoming some time in late 1979 or early 1980. The NEW VOICES volumes feature stories by the finalists for the John W. Campbell Award, voted annually by the fans for the best new writer in the field. I arranged it that way deliberately. Not being very experienced as an editor, I figured I could only prey on the youngest and most naive writers. I’m learning, though. Already I’ve rejected several stories, and I’ve forced some of my contributors to do rewrites, and I’ve sat on their manuscripts for months at a time and ignored their query letters. I’ve even learned how to owe them money and make endless excuses about it. You ought to hear me apologize and justify. I’ll make a good editor yet.

Or at least a tolerable one. I must admit that there is simply too much of the writer in me to descend to the real depths of which editors are capable. I’ve edited three volumes of NEW VOICES, and I hope to edit more, but I’m proud to say that I’ve never bought any of my contributors a drink.

Believe it or not, I do have some serious things to say about editors.

Not that all that went before was frivolous. Some of it was quite true. Writers do indeed talk about only three things, the three I’ve named. And editors can indeed be a source of frustration and anguish in a writer’s life. In most cases, that is not due to any active malice on the part of the editor. Often as not, the real villain of the piece is the publisher, but editors are the hatchet men, out there on the front line, and they are the ones who are forced to deliver the bad news and bear the accompanying karmic weight. Editors also are the source of most rejections, and writers hate rejections. Often, when rejecting manuscripts, editors say foolish things. This is not, I think, because all editors are fools. Only some editors are fools, though all of them say foolish things, much more often and much more foolishly than do writers, or plumbers, or insurance salesman. It’s a part of the job.

From time to time, I write reviews. Now, I read a lot of books. I review only a few of them. The ones I review are the ones about which I think I have something intelligent to say. The rest — well, some of them I like, and some of them I don’t, and often as not I’m not sure why. If you pressed me about one, I might give you an answer, but as like as not it would be foolish.

That’s the situation a good editor is in. A bad editor never looks like a moron, since he or she can just send back everything with form rejection slips, and thus pose as a font of wisdom. But a good editor often feels a compulsion to say something when rejecting a manuscript by a professional writer. Say enough somethings and sooner or later they’ll come back to haunt you.

I remember back when I was first starting to sell stories regularly, there was an editor in the field named Robert Hoskins. He was the editor of Lancer Books, who have since gone bankrupt, and of the INFINITY series of original anthologies, now defunct, and for a period I kept sending him stories in an effort to break into INFINITY. I did so for reasons that now escape me. I think it was because a young writer I knew had sold something to INFINITY, and I liked to think of myself as a better writer than this other fellow, so I thought it would be easy to sell to Hoskins. There were lots of markets around that had much more prestige than INFINITY, and paid better too, but I wanted quick sales. That’s the way writers think. Is it any wonder editors can keep our ranks thin?

Anyway, I sent Hoskins this story called “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” which I thought was the best thing I had written up to then. He sent it back, and said, “Sorry — I’ve been there before. Many times.” That story went on to sell to ANALOG, and it became a cover story, and has been anthologized several times. But Hoskins didn’t like it.

So I sent him another story, quickly, and that one came back too. He liked it even less, called it a “travelog.” So I had to sell that one to ANALOG too, for something like twice what Hoskins would have paid me. It went on to become a Hugo and Nebula finalist, and almost won both, and it’s been reprinted so many times since that I have trouble keeping up with it. The title was “With Morning Comes Mistfall.”

Of course, at the time I didn’t know any of this was going to happen. All I knew was that this Hoskins fellow had rejected the two best stories I had ever written. I decided to change tactics; I sent him what I felt was one of my weaker stories, a piece called “Dark, Dark Was the Tunnels.” It almost worked. He wrote back and told me that if were editing a monthly magazine, he would buy my story. As a “space filler.” It so happened that I knew that he was not editing a monthly magazine. He knew it too, and he reminded me that INFINITY was an anthology, and my story was not good enough for that, since he had no space that wanted filling.

(As a footnote, I might mention that posterity confirmed my assessment of “Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels.” While “Mistfall” and “Loneliness” sold to ANALOG, it sold only to VERTEX, and has never been reprinted, except in German. Does that count?)

By this time, editor Hoskins was well on his way to ruining my health and disposition. He hadn’t sent me any money, and I was getting precious little sex. I became determined to sell to him. I sent him another story. It came back with a form rejection slip. I sent him yet another. It returned with a short, polite note that said it was “eloquent,” but not a story.

Finally I sent him a novelette I had written called “Night of the Vampyres.” That was my John Brunner story; set in 1987, in a United States on the verge of revolution, rife with racial and political hatreds, plots and counterplots, polarizing as the Weimar Republic had in the Thirties and about to enter a new Dark Age. I thought that was a very heavy story.

Hoskins returned it almost sadly, with a long letter. He said it was a “simplistic switch” on a “perfect formula Western,” and likened my hero to a drifter and my manipulative Nixonian president to a cattle rustler. “You have a facile way with words,” he said in summation. “As yet, you haven’t convinced me that your words will strike sparks with readers.” He mulled over the missing ingredient in my work, and finally suggested that I try writing Gothics.

I never sold to INFINITY.

I never wrote Gothics either, disregarding what may have perfectly ,good advice. Who knows, had I done otherwise today I might be Georgette Martin, beloved of Harlequin readers from coast to coast.

I do have a serious message about editors, really I do. But before I get into that, I can’t resist one last editorial joke.

Roger Elwood.

Seriously now, editors are important people.

They do say a lot of foolish things. So do we all. They make some wonderful grand mistakes. So do we all. There are many bad editors, who seem to understand little or nothing about the genre in which they purport to be working. There are far more bad writers, but I’m not going to pursue that point. I’ll talk about bad editors and leave it to the editors to discuss bad writers.

Editors can be bad for a variety of reasons.

The worst are those who don’t care; time-servers in huge publishing conglomorates, more often than not, they have little knowledge and less affection for SF. They would just as soon edit mysteries, or gardening books, or porn; it’s all a job to them. They buy books and publish them, or they reject books, but they do not get involved. It can be said that this type of editor has a virtue — he changes nothing, does not seek to interfere, never distorts a writer’s vision or gets between author and audience. This admirable restraint, however, has its roots not in any kind of respect for the writer and his work, but rather in a kind of indifference towards creator and reader both. Fortunately, such editors are rare.

Much more common is the species of editor equipped with all too much enthusiasm, and all too little knowledge. This type has a lot of heart, and no sense. The best of them are full of nonsensical suggestions that distort everything the writer was trying to do, but they have the good grace of allowing the author to talk them out of it. The worst of them insist. Or — horror of horrors — make the changes without bothering to inform the writer.

Then there are the editors who suffer from Maxwell Perkins’ syndrome. Perkins was a genius. Alas, the editorial legions who march in his footsteps lack his mental firepower. They carry only a firm determination to “work on” every book they publish, whether it needs it or not, and to transform it into great literature. This is particularly difficult when they must edit the latest Gonad the Barbarian epic.

In SF, we also have their opposite numbers; the genre editors who have been working in the field for forty years, doing things their way, and who are bound and determined that these new writers will do things that way too. There are nine-and-twenty ways of constructing tribal lays, but only Doc Smith’s is right. These editors also expect writers to be perfectly happy with minuscule little advances. After all, they got the same size advance back in 1949, and they were delighted with it. As for all the money being paid by other publishers, they don’t know what they’re doing and it’s going to bust soon and there was a boom in the early 50s too, or didn’t you know?

Yes, there are a lot of ways for editors to go wrong.

Fortunately, a surprising number of them go right. It never ceases to amaze me. What is a good editor like? A good editor offers you decent advances, and goes to bat with his publisher to make sure your book gets promoted, and returns your phone calls, and answers your letters. A good editor does work with his writers on their books. But only if the books need work. A good editor tries to figure out what the writer was trying to do, and helps him or her do it better, rather than trying to change the book into something else entirely. A good editor doesn’t insist, or make changes without permission. Ultimately a writer lives or dies by his words, and he must always have the last word if his work is to retain its integrity.

There are a lot of good editors in science fiction. I wish they could get more recognition, and that’s the point of this whole thing.

There are three kinds of editors in science fiction.

The magazine editors have a tough job, but an important one.

The magazines aren’t as central as they used to be, but they are still the place the new talent comes from. The magazine editors have to find and develop that talent, fill out a magazine month after month, give it a distinctive lively personality — they do a lot. But at least they get some recognition for it. We know who the magazine editors are: they get nominated year after year for the “Best Editor” Hugo. Fair enough, except that sometimes it seems they all get nominated, good and bad and indifferent.

Then there are the anthology editors. Frankly, they aren’t as important as the magazine editors. They find some new talent of their own, to be sure. But very little, compared to the magazine editors. After all, they buy only a relative handful of stories, and they work almost at leisure, piecing together one or two “issues” a year instead of six or twelve. For a while it looked as though anthologies were going to displace magazines, but that was an illusion. It was the anthologies that vanished. Look around you. Anthology editors get some recognition. Terry Carr, one of the very best of them, is a perennial Hugo contender. Robert Silverberg has also been nominated, and I’m sure Harlan Ellison will make the ballot as soon as the world gets it hands on TYE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS. The bad anthology editors never did get nominated, though, and that pleases, me.

Lastly, we have the book editors.

They are the invisible people, and that’s a dreadfully ironic situation, because they are the most important editors of all. Once it was the age of the magazine, but that age is past now. The dawn of the age of the anthology was just a false glow on the horizon. This is the age of the paperback book. New writers today serve an apprenticeship in short fiction, and move on to novels. They go from the magazines and anthologies to books, and they seldom go back. It is time we recognized the fact.

The editors at today’s big paperback publishing houses Avon, Bantam, Dell, Berkley, DAW, Del Rey, Pocket Books, and so on are the most influential people in SF today. It is they who can choose to pay five- or six-figure advances, or to pay nothing at all. They decide which titles get promotion, and how much. They build their lines as carefully as magazine editors tend their periodicals. They can give a writer a huge advance, and thereby hope for a masterpiece. They can give security instead of freedom, with multiple book contracts, and encourage regular production. They can also insure hackwork and slipshod craftsmanship by keeping writers in indentured servitude, paying them peanuts, and making them write and write and write.

A single major paperback editor buys more words of fiction in a year than all the magazine editors combined. When one of them quits, or moves, or is fired, the shock waves spread throughout the genre, touch every active author — and ultimately every reader as well. They help to determine what I will write, and what you will read.

They choose which backlist classics to reissue, and which are to go out of print, and thereby determine what science fiction WAS. They choose what titles will be published and pushed and promoted, and thereby determine what science fiction IS. And they will determine what science fiction will be.

And the fans and readers don’t even know their names.

We should.

Today, the minute a writer who has published three or four stories shows up at a con, there are six people shoving microphones in his direction, asking for an interview. That’s fine, but no one ever interviews our invisible paperback editors, whose views are oh-so-crucial. I recognize the exceptions. The Del Reys have been interviewed, as has Don Wollheim. But what about the others? Our hypothetical young writer will be invited to be a Guest of Honor at a con after his first book or two. That’s fine too, that’s wonderful. But those paperback editors publish several books a month, and no one ever asks them to stand up and pontificate about where they think SF is going. Maybe we’re afraid they might really know. With us writers, there’s small danger of that.

Then there’s the awards. Several years back, the old “Best Magazine” Hugo was abolished in favor of a Hugo for “Best Editor.” The idea was to make those who edit anthologies and books eligible as well as the magazine editors. A good idea in theory, but it hasn’t worked. The magazine editors have dominated the competition, a few anthology editors have competed but none have won, and — in the life of the award — only one paperback editor has ever even appeared on the ballot. That was Donald A. Wollheim of DAW, whose initials are on every DAW book (no wonder he has more visibility than the others). And even he has been nominated only once.

Clearly, there’s something wrong. Either we need two categories, one for magazines and one for books, or the voters have to start utilizing the “Best Editor” Hugo in the way it was intended, instead of simply nominating the same people year after year, as if they were the only editors in the field.

The problem is one of visibility and identity. We know the magazine editors; the anthology editors get their names printed on the covers and the title page. But the paperback editors — except for Don Wollheim and the Del Reys, whose names have become their trademarks — are ciphers. Still, the problem is not insurmountable. A little thought and a little investigation, and one discovers interesting things.

Have you noticed that Ace is doing massive reissues from its backlist, that they’ve started a paperback magazine, that they’re initiating a new fantasy line? Do you approve? The reason is an editor named Jim Baen.

Have you wondered why a relatively small publisher like Berkely publishes so much good science fiction? David G. Hartwell was the editor there for years and years, and he changed a minor house into one of the most important publishers in SF. This fall he moved to Pocket Books, and it was a major coup, as if Galaxy had hired away John Campbell in the 50s. The Berkely books you know — and love, or hate; it doesn’t matter — were his books.

Do you like the stuff Pocket Books published this year, or the year before? My novel, DYING OF TIM LIGHT? Ben Bova’s COLONY? Kate Wilhelm’s novels, TIM CLEWISTON TEST and WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG? Marta Randall’s JOURNEY? Those were all bought by a woman named Adele Leone, who has since become a literary agent. This will be her last year of eligibility for the “Best Editor” Hugo.

Do you like Dell’s wraparound covers, the new kinds of packaging they’ve been doing, the major books they’ve been buying and issuing, the “Binary Stars” revival of the old Ace Double Novel concept? That’s all the doing of a fellow named Jim Frenkel, who has restored Dell to respectability. His immediate predecessor called the stuff “sci-fi.”

And there’s Bantam which is what it is because of Fred Pohl and now Sydney Weinberg. And Nancy Neiman at Avon. And Lester and Judy-Lynn Del Rey, of course, and Donald A. Wollheim, and more.

The point is not which one you choose to nominate or vote for. You and I might differ there. I have my own choices for Best Editor. The point is that you remember that they exist, as a class, when it comes time to fill out that all important Hugo nomination form.

Writers, don’t get enough money. Neither, oddly enough, do editors. I was shocked when I found out how little some of these terribly important people are paid.

Writers don’t get enough sex. If any of you want to rectify that, see me after the speech. I speak with less certainty about editors, but I’ve heard one or two of them complain on that score as well.

But writers do get one thing. Recognition, lots of it. Bylines and honors and awards. Our editors get none of that. Maybe that’s why they are such a cranky bunch, always making our lives wretched.

C’mon people, let us give them the recognition they deserve.

That way, maybe, they’ll leave the money and sex for us."

http://www.georgerrmartin.com/about-george/speeches/editors-the-writers-natural-enemy : 11/12/17