Abstract

Science fiction is popular in Australia. Yet very little science fiction is published in Australia. This essay establishes and examines the paradoxical truth of these two statements. Australian interest in science fiction is shown by reviewing local bookshops, authors, literary events and fan culture. The lack of Australian-published science fiction is shown by examining accounts of local publishing, sampling what is stocked in bookshops and surveying the output of publishing houses. The reasons for this lack are literary snobbishness, the success of the related genre of fantasy, and the importation of foreign-published science fiction.

Keywords

• Australia
• Book publishing
• Science fiction
• Fantasy
• Social forces
• Importation
• Territorial copyright
• Melbourne bookshops
• Allen and Unwin
• Hachette Australia
• HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Pan Macmillan Australia
• Penguin Books Australia
• Random House Australia
• Small press

Introduction

I have been a fan of science fiction for as long as I can remember. One nice thing about being a fan of this particular genre is that I know I can walk into any library or bookshop in Australia and expect to find something to read. However, as a fan and an Australian, I’m all too aware that the something I find to read will most likely be published in America or Britain. Now that I am beginning a career in publishing, I thought it would be good to take a closer look at the situation. Is it true that science fiction is popular in Australia? Is it true that very little science fiction is published in Australia? And if, as I suspect, the answer to both these questions is a paradoxical ‘yes’, then why is this so? And does Australian-published science fiction have a future?

Science Fiction and Fantasy, a Definition

In order to establish the popularity of science fiction, science fiction must first be defined. Broadly, science fiction extrapolates from our current understanding of the world to generate its stories. It is usually set in the future and features fictional advanced technology. Much has been written about the overdetermined and contested parameters of science fiction. Books which may be considered science fiction are found in bookshops on a variety of shelves with different labels: books such as Uglies by Scott Westerfeld in the ‘Young Adult’ section, or Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam in the ‘Fiction’ section. The main presence of science fiction is on shelves that are labelled ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy’. Science fiction and fantasy share an interest in the unreal, with fantasy usually being set in a medieval past and featuring magic. They have long been shelved together and tend to share readers, authors and publishing houses. They may be distinguished by their covers, which might include an explicit label or familiar visual tropes, such as spaceships for science fiction or dragons for fantasy.

A Survey of Major Melbourne Bookshops

Bookselling is a commercial proposition, so the number of titles on shelves shows the popularity of different genres. A profitable bookshop would employ their time, space and money in only stocking a large number of titles that were expected to sell through. Therefore, to ascertain the popularity of science fiction I performed a survey of science fiction titles in major Melbourne bookshops. The central business district of Melbourne has four major bookshops: Angus and Robertson (Bourke St), Borders (Melbourne Central), Dymocks (234 Collins St) and Reader’s Feast (Midtown Plaza). They are each a different kind of shop: the first two are chain stores owned by REDgroup Retail, though Borders was only bought from its American owners in June 2008; Dymocks is a franchise store; Reader’s Feast is an independent bookshop. These bookshops serve a large population of workers, tourists and shoppers. I expected this demographic pressure to make proportions of their stock representative of an average bookshop for average readers. One factor that might increase the proportion of science fiction in these bookshops is their proximity to two specialist science fiction and fantasy bookshops: Minotaur, and Of Science And Swords. If this increase makes it seem that science fiction is more popular than it might be, I can only note that the existence of the speciality shops is itself proof towards the popularity of science fiction.

My survey was confined to the science fiction and fantasy section of each bookshop, because this provided the greatest number of titles shelved in a single location, with the least controversy in identifying a book’s genre. A manual audit of books was performed. I counted unique titles rather than the total number of books, but there were typically one to three copies of each title. I counted both science fiction and fantasy, to give an indication, first, of their combined presence in the bookshops, and second, of their relative proportions. Where the genre of the book was not obvious, it was later discovered on the internet by performing a Google search for its title and author, then looking for genre markers on websites such as those of the author, the publishing house and Amazon. As another indicator of popularity, staff at each store reported that their stock turns over quickly. It is for this reason that the date of each audit has been given.

As can be seen in Table 1, a large number of science fiction titles were stocked in each of these bookshops, indicating that the genre is popular in Melbourne.

The Popularity of Science Fiction

Interest in science fiction comes not only from the general reader, but also from Australian authors, critics and governments. Over the years, the Literature Board of the Australia Council has awarded six fellowships to Damien Broderick. Steven Amsterdam won the Age Book of the Year Award for his post-apocalyptic debut novel, Things We Didn’t See Coming. David Ireland won that award and his third Miles Franklin Award for A Woman of the Future, which depicts a teenage girl growing up in the near future. One of our most prominent authors, Peter Carey, started his career with short stories that were reprinted in science fiction anthologies, and his novel The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith makes use of science fiction trope and technique in creating the countries of Efica and Voorstand. And another Miles Franklin Award–winner, George Turner, has gone on to become one of the country’s most important science fiction authors.

The success of science fiction with authors, readers and critics has resulted in its presence at literary events. The 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival was a particularly significant event as it invited a long list of guests associated with science fiction. This included an academic who had written on the genre (Justine Larbalestier), an artist with science fiction roots (Shaun Tan), young adult authors (Kerry Greenwood, Scott Westerfeld), mainstream authors who had written science fiction (Steven Amsterdam, Max Barry, Peter Goldsworthy) and science fiction and fantasy authors (Jack Dann, Margo Lanagan, China Mievelle). There were many sessions with a science fiction focus, including ‘Creating New Worlds’ and ‘The Future of Fiction’. Literary journal Overland, supported by the City of Melbourne 2009 Arts Grants Program, took the opportunity to launch issue 196, which featured fiction by Dann and Lanagan, joined by Andrew Morgan and Lucy Sussex.

The promotion and discussion of science fiction doesn’t only take place in the mainstream arena. Australia has always had a vigorous science fiction fandom, gathering in science fiction and fantasy clubs around the country and hosting its own regular events. In 1975, the Melbourne Science Fiction Club obtained money from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and successfully hosted the 33rd Annual World Science Fiction Convention, only the fourth to be held outside of North America. Since then three more have been hosted, in 1985, in 1999, and the latest being in this year. The Australian science fiction community also gives two sets of awards: the Ditmar Awards, voted for by the members of the annual Australian National Science Fiction Convention since 1969; and the Aurealis Awards, adjudicated by a panel of judges since 1995. News of conventions, awards and other science fiction occurrences relevant to Australians has been published in The Australian Science Fiction Bullsheet, a free electronic newsletter, for 16 years now. And for the last 5 years, authors, editors and publishers with weblogs have, on a voluntary round-robin basis, hosted the Australian Speculative Fiction Carnival, collecting and posting relevant links to other weblogs.

This paints a picture of thriving interest in science fiction in Australia. There are many books for sale in shops, authors appear at both literary and genre festivals, fan clubs exist around the country, and the genre both influences and is influenced by great authors. But although science fiction is an object of interest, this cultural currency has not been cashed by publishers.

Lack of Interest in Publishing

This lack of interest is evident in that little has been written about either the presence or the absence of science fiction publishing in Australia. There is scant use even of the words ‘science fiction’ in accounts of the industry. Of such books, Making Books is a good example. It mentions science fiction three times: in an essay that names science fiction with other genres in a negative definition of literature; in a case study of Penguin’s publishing for children, where it is stated that Penguin enlisted science fiction authors like Richard Harland to write for them; and in an essay on crime fiction publishing, the crime fiction specialist market is compared to that of science fiction and fantasy [4, p. 236–238, 293, 311].

Even when Australian science fiction is written about, there is no attention paid to how it is published. The New Diversity does have a chapter on ‘speculative fiction’ which includes several pages on science fiction written by Australians [7]. Twenty books are named, sixteen of which were published in Australia: one at the University of Queensland Press, eleven at small presses and four at publishing houses of reasonable size. All of the small presses named had ceased publication by the time that The New Diversity was written: a fact that was probably overlooked by its authors due to their literary rather than publishing focus*. Of the four larger publishing houses, Angus and Robertson and Hale and Iremonger have subsequently ceased publication, while Hyland House and Penguin don’t currently have any science fiction titles in print.

The few specialist accounts of Australian science fiction have a similar blind spot for the means of production. The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy again focuses on authors and does not have any entries for publishing houses [5]. This is particularly strange for two reasons. First, it squeezes in mention of significant small presses, like Void, into the entries of their publishers, who conveniently are also authors. Second, it does have entries for other topics like awards, fandom and bookshops.

Published in Australia

To meaningfully identify Australian-published science fiction in bookshops, a distinction must be made between the ways a book may be published. ‘Published in Australia’ is usually understood to mean a book was commissioned, edited and produced by an Australian company. But this might not be the case for a book that features the logo of an Australian publishing house on its spine. The latter kind of book may instead have been commissioned, edited and produced by a foreign company for their own market. The rights to such books are acquired by an Australian company that will produce an edition suitable for the Australian market, which might have been minimally edited to reflect local spelling and idioms. The Australian publishing house pays an advance and royalties which are split between the foreign publishing house and the author. The providence of a book can be identified on its copyright page. It is books that are commissioned, edited and produced in Australia that provide more profit to their publishing houses and employ more people locally. These Australian-originated books are therefore most important to the local industry and will be the focus when discussing books published in Australia.

I found few Australian-originated titles on bookshop shelves. When surveyed, Reader’s Feast had just two titles: the anthology of The Best Australian Science Fiction Writing, edited by Rob Gerrand, published in 2004 by small press Black Inc; and the novel Being of the Field, by Traci Harding, published in 2009 by Voyager. Dymocks had only one title: the novel Killswitch, by Joel Shepherd, published in 2004 by Voyager. Borders and Angus and Robertson had none.

To confirm that the survey of bookshops accurately reflects what is currently being published, I performed a survey of large publishing houses. The five largest general book publishing houses in Australia are Hachette Livre, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Penguin and Random House; they are all owned by international conglomerates. The largest Australian-owned publishing house is Allen and Unwin. I contacted these six publishing houses for information and examined their websites.

On the Allen and Unwin website, a user may browse by subject for ‘Fantasy and Science Fiction’: this returns 33 results, but only one is science fiction and this is a foreign edition merely distributed by Allen and Unwin† [1].

Hachette Livre established their Orbit science fiction and fantasy imprint in 2007. On the Hachette Livre Australia website, a user may obtain an Excel spreadsheet containing a list of all Hachette stock available to booksellers [8]. This has 691 Orbit titles, but these are all titles that originated overseas, along with 764 titles from the Gollancz imprint. Science fiction and fantasy titles that are originated and published in Australia are found under ‘Fiction’, but this currently consists of only fantasy titles.

HarperCollins established their science fiction and fantasy list in 1995, originating and publishing their first science fiction titles the following year. The list was subsequently rebranded as the HarperVoyager or Voyager imprint. On the Voyager Online website, a user may browse their catalogue of 992 science fiction and fantasy titles [9]. This has fourteen science fiction titles which were originated and published in Australia. After Killswitch was published in 2004, there was a four year gap devoid of new science fiction, and only four titles have been published in the last two years: Dreaming Again edited by Jack Dann, The Daughters of Moab by Kim Westwood, The Gene Thieves by Maria Quinn and Being of the Field by Traci Harding.

Pan Macmillan established their science fiction and fantasy list in 1989, but it took them until 1994 to publish a science fiction rather than fantasy title. They now report that they no longer have a distinct list. On the Pan Macmillan Australia website, a user may perform an advanced search by category for either ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Science Fiction’, though both contain titles that belong to the other: together they return 118 results of science fiction and fantasy titles [13]. Only one, Poetic Retribution from Mars by Sylvester Abanteriba, is originated and published in Australia, but by independent publishing house Brolga.

On the Penguin Books Australia website, a user may browse by subject for ‘Science Fiction’: this returns 72 results of science fiction and fantasy titles, with the six Australian-published titles helpfully labelled with an icon of Australia [16]. These six are all originated and published in Australia, but not by Penguin, who only distributes them. Five are Hal Spacejock books from independent publishing house Fremantle Press and the other is The Best Australian Science Fiction Writing from Black Inc.

In 1996, around the time that Pan Macmillan and HarperCollins were establishing their lists, Random House published a science fiction novel. In 1998 it inaugurated the George Turner Prize, to be annually awarded to an unpublished Australian science fiction or fantasy novel, with the prize including publication. However, the award only ran for three years, and its final winner may have been the last science fiction book originated by Random House. On the Random House Australia website, a user may perform a search by subject for ‘Fiction: Sci-Fi’: this returns 500 results of science fiction and fantasy titles, but these are all originated overseas [17].

Before the large publishing houses took their interest in the mid-1990s, Australian-originated science fiction was primarily represented by small presses dedicated to science fiction and fantasy. Currently, there are approximately eight small presses that focus on science fiction and fantasy‡. Exact numbers are hard to obtain due to the nature of small presses. The oldest extant small presses are MirrorDanse, founded by Bill Congreve in 1994, and Ticonderoga, founded by Russell B. Farr in 1996. MirrorDanse have thirteen books in print, predominately anthologies containing science fiction, including the ongoing Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy series. Ticonderoga have twelve books in print, including seven anthologies containing science fiction. Both publishing houses sell their books online, though MirrorDanse distributes Year’s Best to bookshops.

Why Science Fiction Isn’t Published in Australia

Despite the thousands of science fiction and fantasy titles available from the major publishing houses, there are very few science fiction books originated locally. This small number, coupled with the verities of distribution, results in even fewer titles finding their way onto the shelves of bookshops. The obvious question, given the large commercial support for science fiction, is why?

The Australian publishing industry is capable of publishing science fiction. Editors and designers are familiar with publishing foreign-originated titles. Marketers already sell foreign-originated titles to booksellers. The distribution chain for foreign titles is already in place. There are three reasons that are given time and again for the lack of science fiction: snobbishness, fantasy and importation.

The noted Australian scholar and editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Peter Nicholls claims that ‘Australia has always been rather snobbish about the popular genres’ [5, p. viii]. By this he means not that science fiction is unpopular in Australia, but that there are social forces at work within publishing companies that prevent them from supplying the market themselves. Garth Nix, who was an editor at HarperCollins, where he tried to start a science fiction and fantasy list in the late 1980s, puts it more bluntly: ‘the people who actually had the power to decide what we published weren’t interested in [science fiction]. It was as simple as that.’ [14] Louise Thurtell, who succeeded in starting the HarperCollins list, thinks this lack of interest is because ‘a lot of the people who are commissioning and publishing fiction at the moment have Arts Degree backgrounds’ where they no doubt learnt the orthodox critical view that Australian fiction is realist in orientation [15][20]. This is certainly a view which has been obvious to Australian authors; in Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction, the three authors, all of whom are also published science fiction authors, write of the problem that science fiction is regarded as ‘juvenile in appeal’ [3, p. 217].

This problem of snobbery has been at least partially overcome: after all, three major publishing houses have started adult science fiction and fantasy lists. Thurtell didn’t have a ‘long background of reading science fiction and fantasy’ but pursued the creation of the HarperCollins list for commercial reasons. She knew that science fiction and fantasy were a success for HarperCollins in the United Kingdom, and that the Australian sales representatives were already familiar with the genres through distribution. She was allowed to proceed once she got a ‘report about what was selling in Australia and the commercial viability of it’ [15].

The move from editorial taste to commercial viability was a global trend in the late twentieth century. While this market-driven approach opened the door to popular fiction, it also demanded that books at least pay for themselves, or, better yet, become bestsellers. This led to an emphasis on the second and third reasons for the lack of science fiction published in Australia.

The second reason is that science fiction always shares with fantasy. It shares shelves, readers, authors and publishing houses. It has been known that Australian-originated fantasy is successful in Australia since 1989 when Pan Macmillan published the fantasy novel Circle of Light by Martin Middleton and sold 13,000 copies [11]. Sean McMullen used this to suggest that science fiction could enjoy similar success if similarly printed, promoted and distributed by a major publishing house. Unfortunately, science fiction and fantasy do not share equally. Thurtell says that ‘Science fiction is harder to publish commercially because, in general, it doesn’t sell as well as fantasy.’ [18] This is reflected in the long time it took Pan Macmillan to originate a science fiction title, the few science fiction titles from Voyager today, and the fact that Orbit have yet to originate one. As small press publisher Bill Congreve says, ‘Why sell 3,000 of [a science fiction] novel when for the same effort you can sell 8,000 of a fantasy novel?’ [10].

The third and final reason given for the ‘weak indigenous [science fiction] industry’ is, according to Nicholls, the ‘ready availability of [science fiction] from other countries’ [12]. George Turner agrees that Australian science fiction fans ‘will not, will not, will not buy Australian [science fiction]’ [19]. McMullen puts this imbalance down to Australian publishing houses playing it safe with ‘outmoded formulas, while the people who like reading such works prefer to read those by the masters themselves’ [11]. This latter claim seems to be false, with, for instance, HarperCollins investing in Sean Williams, whose ambitious Metal Fatigue has an ‘extraordinarily complex’ plot with an ‘enormous effort [put] into working out a detailed scenario for the near future’, and whose The Resurrected Man won a Ditmar Award [3, p. 211–212]. Furthermore, the fans can only be counted on to buy at most 200 copies [10]. Most likely the imbalance is not unique to science fiction. Because of Australia’s distance from the United States and the United Kingdom, Australian readers have always favoured access to those cultural powerhouses over development of their own national publishing industry [6].

It must be noted that Australian publishing houses make money by distributing or publishing foreign-originated titles. Though doing so does not make as much money as originating titles, neither does it require as much investment on the part of the publishing houses. In a sense, publishing houses are competing against themselves. As new authors take time to catch on, so this competition is biased towards the incumbent foreign titles.

And foreign titles include those written by Australian authors. Our biggest authors, such as Damien Broderick, Greg Egan and Sean Williams, are first published overseas. This makes sense as the American and British markets are larger and more developed than the Australian market and so offer more reward. Some authors have been able to start their careers overseas; others have started their careers with an Australian publishing house, only to move overseas when they are prominent enough to be noticed by foreign publishing houses. Australian readers wishing to read Australian authors will in these cases be paying at least some of their money to a foreign publishing industry; it will be a lot of money if the book is merely distributed by a local publishing house, as is often the case. If the book cannot be found in a local bookshop, then the reader may buy the book online from Amazon or direct from the foreign publishing house, in which cases there is no money earned by Australian publishing at all.

No Future?

This paints a bleak picture. It seems that, in the future, while science fiction is celebrated, written and bought by Australians, they will buy foreign editions of science fiction books which sit on shelves alongside Australian-published fantasy. However, publishing is both a commercial and a cultural activity, and in both the fields of commerce and culture, nothing is certain.

In the manner of utopian science fiction, another picture can be extrapolated. Publishers might nurture the diversity in their lists. They might develop their own strengths rather than remain beholden to external suppliers. They might retain authors by developing Australia as a rights territory from which Australian titles can be sold into other territories. Alternatively, it might simply not be as late as doomsayers think, and the market might lose its hold on the industry. There is no reason that Australian-originated science fiction might not follow a traditional path of slow development.

Sean McMullen proposed the author Martin Middleton, with his fantasy novel Circle of Light, as a model for how science fiction could be successful here. I now propose a different author for such a model: Margo Lanagan. Lanagan writes both short stories and novels, in both science fiction and fantasy. Her first novel, WildGame, was published shortly after Middleton’s, in 1991 at Allen and Unwin. She was published there steadily throughout the 1990s and 2000s without becoming a bestseller. In 2005, her most recent anthologies attracted the attention of American and British companies; they acquired rights to publish their own editions. This lead to an agent securing a deal for her fantasy novel Tender Morsels to be published simultaneously in Australia (by Allen and Unwin), the United States (by Knopf) and the United Kingdom (by David Fickling Books). The novel has been a success, winning both the local Ditmar Award and the World Fantasy Award.

What if the Lanagan model were followed? The number of all titles originated and published in Australia has been steadily increasing since 1970. In 2003–2004, locally published titles represented 68.1% of general books sold [2]. For adult fiction, 47.5% was locally published. It is said that ‘Australia is a mature book market, with few easy pickings to be made’, but an increase of science fiction to 47.5% of 625 (the number of science fiction titles carried by Borders) would mean that—along with more work for agents, editors, designers, printers, and others—there would be 296 more Australian-originated books in the bookshop [4, p. 22]. That’s what success might look like in the future.