Mike Ashley on Gateways To Forever, SF magazines of the ’70s : UK SF Book News

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Jun

16

Mike Ashley on Gateways To Forever, SF magazines of the ’70s

Posted in: UKSFBN Talks To on 16th June 2007 by Sandy Auden

Author Mike Ashley hit a problem when he was researching Gateways To Forever, the 'final' title in his book series about the history of SF magazines - the 1970's were just too complicated to squeeze into one volume…

"The seventies were a time that had to cope with considerable change," said Ashley. "The sf field itself was starting to feel the full effects of the New Wave revolution and though critics today believe that it had dissipated itself by the early seventies that is far from true. The longer term effects continued to develop through the seventies and would eventually feed into the cyberpunk movement of the eighties.

"Also the field was still trying to adjust to the impact of the paperback book and the late sixties/early seventies saw the flourish of the original anthology series, most notably Orbit, New Dimensions and Universe along with many more such as Quark and Nova and so on. For a while some believed that the anthology would usurp the role of the magazine and some of the anthology series, such as Infinity, promoted themselves as paperback magazines, an idea that was picked up later by Destinies and also formed the basis for the US edition of Perry Rhodan.

"The original anthology boom was also the era of Roger Elwood and many claimed that Elwood had so saturated the anthology field that he killed it off. I needed to explore all of that and see what effect these anthologies had on the magazine field.

In fact it soon became evident that the passing of Campbell was like seeing a valve being released and certain forms of sf that had become so controlled by Campbell suddenly resurged..."And that's only part of it. At the start of the seventies John Campbell died after editing Astounding/Analog for 34 years and some wondered how Analog would cope. In fact it soon became evident that the passing of Campbell was like seeing a valve being released and certain forms of sf that had become so controlled by Campbell suddenly resurged so that by the mid seventies there is a huge sense of freedom in the sf field. Paralleling this was the growth in the feminist movement which also recharged the sf field.

"And there's much more! The small press movement began to flourish entering the semi-professional field and challenging the prozines – publications like Whispers and Shayol and most especially Galilieo, which turned professional. Alongside these was a growth in other forms of related sf magazines, including role-playing games and the media magazines, the growth of Star Trek fan fiction. All of these had an impact on the magazines and would continue to do so. After all TSR, which publishes The Dragon, took over Amazing Stories in the early eighties, and so I needed to explore the background to all of this.

"The decade also saw the rise of the academic study of SF and the appearance of Foundation, SF Studies and so on, which also had an effect on attitudes to the field. Linked in with this is the rise in writers' workshops, like Clarion. There was a huge upsurge in new writers in the seventies - the second greatest flourishing of sf talent since the early fifties - and I needed to explore what was encouraging and developing these authors and how much of it was related to the various emerging markets.

"And then there's the emergence of other new magazines, most notably Omni and the rise of the popular science magazine, and Asimov's SF, the first magazine to outsell Analog for 25 years.

"As you can imagine there is considerable interaction between all of these threads and unraveling them in such a way that I could weave them back into a coherent narrative took a lot of time and a lot of space. In the end I had to give in to the inevitable and treat this third volume as only covering the 1970s - in fact I take it through to 1982 for a few threads as an obvious cut off point - rather than try and cram all the last 25 years in there as well."

A fourth volume, The Eternal Chronicles, is now planned and Ashley continues his research with relish, building on the work he's done already. "The vast majority of the research involves the magazines themselves and I've spent a lot of time re-reading the magazines thoroughly - not just the fiction but editorials, letter columns, book reviews - and not just the pro-zines, all the semi-pro and academic magazines too.

"I've contacted many people and that's where e-mail comes to the rescue. If I'd had to write to everyone by post I can't imagine how long it would have taken me. Thankfully I had undertaken a lot of this research back in the 1970s when I did the original series for New English Library which was fortunate because I had correspondence with authors and editors who are no longer with us.

"But no matter how much research you do there are always questions that surface once you're writing the book and the value of e-mail is incalculable. I could just whiz a query off to Bob Silverberg or Ben Bova or Ed Ferman or George Scithers or whoever and usually within hours I'd have a detailed answer. That way I could also double check what I'd written with writers and editors to make sure I hadn't misunderstood anything. So I hardly needed to move at all, physically, but electronically I was all round the world. The book includes an appendix on non-English magazines and the benefit of the internet there was remarkable."

You find your brain bursting with all the data because you can't mentally relax until everything is done.With the 50's and 60's covered in volumes one and two, this series has already required a big commitment from Ashley and the rapidly expanding 70's affected him unexpectedly: "To be honest my energy did flag considerably once I realised I wasn't going to do it all in one book. I had started it all determined that this was going to be the third and final volume. I've been writing on and off about various magazines for years and years and there reaches a point when it's difficult to say anything new. What's more because the decade was so intense I found myself frequently shifting text about deciding that the discussion about a certain topic, such as Star Trek fandom, came better later in the book than earlier. Once you start shifting text you're changing the pattern and dynamics of the book and it gets harder to recall what you've said and where you said it. You find your brain bursting with all the data because you can't mentally relax until everything is done. So the whole book was exhausting.

"What kept me going - and what always keeps me going on books of this size (and I've done far too many of them over the years) - is pursuing that cause and effect and seeing how patterns emerge. It's extremely satisfying to start off with a complete maze of data that seems almost at random and develop it into a coherent narrative. Least, I hope it's coherent. Thankfully the sections I sent to various authors and editors where I discuss their work in detail commented that I had covered it all very thoroughly, which is always a relief, because you get far too close to these things."

Ashley's research gives him a crow's nest view of science fiction, so how accurately do the magazines represent how sf has evolved over the years? "For the years 1926 to 1980, very accurately, because virtually every writer debuted in the magazines and learned their craft there and many of the novels were either first serialised in the magazines or had appeared there in some other form. You can look at writers who emerged in the seventies, like George R. R. Martin, Michael Bishop, Joan Vinge, Joe Haldeman, and see how their work evolved in the magazines, was then adapted into bookform and finally what further effect that had across the field.

"From the eighties onward I think the effect becomes less pronounced, but cannot be entirely discounted. The magazines are always the cauldron from which new ideas emerge - all the various movements of the last 20 or 30 years had their origins in the magazines, and most of the writers still learn their craft there. What is noticeable when looking at periods when the sf magazines diminish, such as in Britain in the late seventies, is you find that the sf field also shrivels, and this is especially true in other countries. So the sf magazines remain the engine for change."

Gateways to Forever is available from Liverpool University Press and Amazon.co.uk.

Source: Mike Ashley

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