More on self-publishing

As fate would have it, days after the recent posts by Chris and I on the problems with vanity publishing, I spotted this post on self-publishing by CNET writer David Carnoy. It's especially interesting in that he's self-published his own novel, a thriller.

Though I disagree with his article on several points, it's well written, and far more balanced that most pro-self-publishing articles you're read. Carnoy seems to have gone into self-publishing with his eyes open, and without the unreasonable expectations that seem to trap most self/vanity publishers. It also deals more with new models of self-publishing such as print-on-demand (known as POD in the industry), something that Chris and I really didn't touch on. So it's certainly worth a look if you're interested in the subject, and then come back here some comments. I'll wait.

Okay, let's continue.

As I said, Chris and I didn't break out print-on-demand or e-publishing schemes in our discussions, in part because we were responding to an article about what appears to be a traditional vanity press, and also because we're skeptical of all self-publishing schemes on principle, POD, vanity, or whatever.

But if you still feel compelled to go this route, there are important differences, and such forms of publishing do offer some advantages. At the very least, they don't lock you into a print-run of physical books that you need to store and (hopefully) ship or distribute. They reduce some of the up-front costs (though as Carnoy discovered, turning a manuscript into a professional quality book isn't quick, easy, or cheap). Carnoy's article has some useful information on these differences.

What we also left out of our posts is that there's a world of difference between a non-fiction book and a novel. In my opinion, the chances of a self-published non-fiction book becoming a commercial success are slim, but the chances of a self-published novel are nearly nil. With the right subject matter, the right title, the right hook, it's much easier to hook a buyer than with a novel from an unknown. Not only is it difficult to create a fiction premise that sells itself, reducing that premise to a cover blurb or a marketing slogan is an art-form in itself, one completely beyond the reach of most self-publishers (and to be honest, most of the people they might hire to do the job for them).

But let's go over the article point-by-point. Carnoy has enumerated his major points in a list of "25 things you should know," so we'll follow his template. We'll talk about some of the areas where I agree or disagree with the article's conclusions, and add some speculations where I think Carnoy has gone wrong (and right) on his path to self-publishing.

1. Self-publishing is easy.

No, as Carnoy himself concludes elsewhere in the article, self-printing is easy. Self-publishing a professional quality book is hard.

2. Quality has improved.

Quite correct. Print-on-demand systems have come a long way, and now produce books nearly on-par with traditional (vanity and otherwise) publishing system. But as Carnoy discovered, having something that looks like a professional book doesn't mean it is a professional book, or that it will be treated like one by reviewers, publishers, and booksellers. The nice results just make it easier for self-publishers to fall into that trap, and set themselves up for, at best disappointment, and possibly complete failure.

3. Some of the more successful self-published books are about self-publishing.

An astute observation, and a telling one. This was about the point where I decided Carnoy's article would actually be worth reading.

What this reminds me of is the old scam of ads reading, "Find out how to make BIG MONEY, no work, from your own home! Send $5 to XXXXX" And if you respond, you get a letter telling you, "First, place an ad in the newspaper reading: 'Find out how to make BIG MONEY...'"

It doesn't mean other types of self-published books can't sell. It just means that selling books is hard, and they don't sell themselves.

4. Good self-published books are few and far between.

Another astute observation, and very true. Most self-published and vanity press books are amateurish dreck. And what that means is that, no matter how good, how professionally prepared your book is, it will be judged by the lowest standards of that dreck.

It isn't that major publishers don't publish plenty of bad books too. But at least they're bad books prepared to certain professional standards, backed up with at least some minimal bit of marketing and the cachet of a brand-name on the spine.

I know plenty of booksellers (good company for writers to keep, don't you know) and they all tell stories about self-publishers who wander into their stores and introduce themselves. "Hi, I'm an author with a new book out."

Most booksellers are glad to meet authors, so this usually generates a positive reception. But at some point, often no more than a sentence or two into the conversation, though sometimes longer, the bookseller learns the truth. And as a rule, the reception cools, to a degree depending on the kindness and patience of the bookseller. At best, the bookseller will usually stop listening, and withdraw to some deep, happy recess of their mind, the place were torture victims go to survive.

Yes, your book may be wonderful, but don't count on convincing a conventional bookseller of that unless they're an immediate family member.

6. Creating a "professional" book is really hard.

Amen to this. As I said, there's a big difference between "printing" and "publishing," Carnoy states that he's spent around $5000 on his book so far, and I don't find that sum shocking, if he pulled in professional editing, graphic design and art skills.

Keep that in mind when you're marketing your book to publishers. What they're putting on the line in buying your book is always far more than whatever they're offering for an advance.

7. Have a clear goal for your book.

What Carnoy talks about here is, essentially, minimizing the damage. If the goal is simply to hold a book with your name on it in your hands, rather than selling a truck-load to others, you may not need to blow your life savings.

I'd add to what he said that, if you'd really like to leave something to family posterity, a hand-written ledger or hand-crafted scrapbook is more likely to be appreciated than a slickly printed paperback. Your great grand kids are only a little more likely to be impressed by that self-published book than the fore mentioned booksellers.

8. Even if it's great, there's a good chance your book won't sell.

I've already beat this horse pretty thoroughly. Books don't sell themselves, and selling books is hard, even if they're good.

(By the way, one point about self-marketing that Carnoy ironically doesn't make, is that your best chance for marketing your self-published book may be to exploit an established audience or reputation already at your disposal and use that to make people aware of your book. Which is exactly what his article does.

This isn't a criticism. Kudos to him.)

9. Niche books do best.

This applies mostly to non-fiction, but it's absolutely true. If you're an expert in some specialized area with a small but enthusiastic interest group, and you can communicate well, there might be an opening for you. A self-published book can be termed successful with a much smaller print run, sold over a much longer period of time, than would be possible for a commercial publisher.

But I suspect this isn't as true as it once was, ironically, because of technology. Much of the information once only communicated by word-of-mouth or through niche books, magazines, and newsletters is now available on the internet.

In fact, if you have a good niche in mind, you may well be smarter to start a web-site or on-line forum than trying to publish a book. The up-front costs are often smaller, the profits (from advertising or sales of associated merchandise) while small may start to trickle sooner, and you can evolve and grow it over time.

Many people have even used successful niche web-sites to (surprise!) leverage the launch of self-published books.

10. Buy your own ISBN--and create your own publishing house.

This is another annoying up-front cost, but if you have any hope of all of getting into bookstores or getting reviewed, this is probably a necessity. The bad news: you probably still won't get into major bookstores or get reviewed anywhere that counts.

11. Create a unique title.

Carnoy's point here is that you need something easy to search on Amazon or on search engines, and that's a valid point.

But there's a lot more to titles than searchability. A title is a sales tool. It's often the potential buyer's first contact with your book, and in most cases, their last and only contact. Unless you can interest them with the title, they probably won't read your cover copy, or blurbs, or listen to the radio interview you've been struggling for months to line up, or engage with you or the book in any other meaningful way.

Good titles are hard. You have to tell, in as few words as possible, what the book is, who should be interested in it, and why they should care. On a professionally published book, the title usually has a lot of marketing backing it up, as well as open doors to reviewers and booksellers. It's important, but the whole book isn't hanging on the title. (Carnoy's title for his thriller, by the way, is "Knife Music," which is a pretty darned good title for a novel from a major publisher. For a self published novel though, it's a mixed bag. For starters, while it's memorable and evocative, it's also ambiguous. It could be a thriller, yes, or a horror novel, or a It could also be a non-fiction true-crime book, or one about music, or knives, or martial arts, or even a cookbook. One moment, one millisecond of confusion or indecision is all it takes for a potential reader to pass the book by.)

12. Turn-key solutions cost a lot of money.

What Carnoy is talking about here is more traditional vanity-publishers, while he's advocating a more do-it-yourself, be-your-own-general-contractor approach. As far as it goes, I agree with him. My trust of companies who make most of their money printing unsalable books is very, very, low. If they really thought these books could be successful, why aren't they offering better deals for a cut of the profits? Why aren't they just buying the rights up-front and being a real publisher? In my opinion, it's because this is easier. It's because they make money, even if everything is done poorly, and because they know that even if everything was done right, there would still be no profits to split.

On the other hand, doing it yourself, even when contracting out the hard parts, requires you to be a jack-of-all-trades, and to make a bunch of critical decisions, the failure of even one of which could doom your book. Greater potential to get things right, but greater potential to screw it up royally too.

13. Self-publishers don't care if your book is successful.

Here is this section, in total: "They say they care, but they really don't care. You have to make them care." By "they" I assume he means the people offering self-publishing services, and if so, he's correct. But he's wrong about the "make them care" part. Don't worry if they care. Nobody cares about your self-published book but you. Conventional publishers care, at least a little, because they have more of a financial stake in the book than you do.

But in the self-publishing world, everyone else is just somebody you've hired to do a job. You have to make sure they do it, do it well, and give good value for your money. Asking them to care is like asking a prostitute to love you. It only proves that you don't understand the nature of the transaction.

15. If you're serious about your book, hire a book doctor and get it copy-edited.

Most of what follows this point is correct, but I'm put off by the use of the term "book doctor." Many, many people who advertise themselves as book doctors are, themselves failed writers, or (maybe worse) academics who wouldn't recognize a commercial book if they saw it, and would probably hold it in contempt if they did. Convoy talks about hiring someone who has editing experience with real publishers, and that's, ideally, what you need.

Yes, some people like that offer their services as "book doctors," but the term, to my mind, borders on an insult. What you need a freelance editor with credentials. A good one. That may not be easy to do, and it may not be cheap.

And keep in mind that even the best editor can't polish a turd. If your book sucks, an editor won't fix it. If it's good but flawed in some fundamental way, an editor may not be able to fix that either. They may be able to point you in the direction of fixing it yourself. They may be able to tell you how to avoid the pitfall in your next book. (You are writing a next book, right?) But at some point, if the book can be fixed at all, it isn't editing, it's collaboration.

16. Negotiate everything.

Personally, I rarely have the stomach or the nerve to do this, but in most all things in life, these are words to live by.

17. Ask a lot of questions and don't be afraid to complain.

Again, this is just generally good advice.

18. Self-publishing is a contact sport.

We're back to the point that books don't sell themselves. I don't know what this "buy X get Y" program he's talking about is, but a self-publisher has to be prepared to do a lot more to market his book than one thing. And they should resign themselves that any "turnkey solution" is probably wasted money. In fact, they should be prepared to do most of the heavy lifting (and spending) of a multi-pronged marketing campaign.

To put this in perspective, according to an essay I just read in the New York Times, more than 250,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Think about it. If you'd never heard of you or your self-published book, how likely is it that any grass-roots effort is going to bring that book or its author to your attention? You're just one flake in a snowstorm, shouting into the wind, "pick me! Pick me!"

19. Getting your book in bookstores sounds good, but that shouldn't be a real concern.

I don't find much to disagree with here. It's possible you can seduce some local bookstore to become an enthusiastic hand-seller of your book. In that case, write off the low royalty return to publicity. But don't count on it. And pay special attention to the "no returns" policies he mentions. Bookstores have to take a risk, money out of their pockets, in stocking your book that they don't in stocking the latest James Patterson or Nora Roberts. Why on Earth would they chose you?

20. Self-published books don't get reviewed.

True, but maybe not as important as he thinks. Below a certain level, reviews just don't have the commercial value they once had. Getting a positive review in some publications may get you noticed by libraries or independent bookstores, but they're only one part, maybe a vanishingly-small part, of getting your book noticed by the public.

21. Design your book cover to look good small.

This goes with number eleven about titles. It applies to on-line sales, and is good as far as it goes. But there's obviously a lot more to covers than that.

One of the arguments used by the vanity publisher, in the article that set Chris and I off last week, was that the author had no control over their cover. My response to that is, What makes you think you know the first thing about book covers? You may, may be able to recognize a really terrible one. (I'm reminded of the featureless, black "Smell the Glove" album cover from the classic movie "This is Spinal Tap.") But designing a book cover that sells is an art-form that people spend decades learning and perfecting.

You don't know squat, and probably neither does the guy at the art student, or the local graphic art or advertising firm you hire to design yours.

22. If you're selling online, make the most out of your Amazon page.

More reasonable advice on on-line selling and marketing. Given that Carnoy writes about tech stuff for CNET, it isn't surprising this is where he gets things most right. (Even authors published through conventional publishers might pick up some ideas here.) And he's right that Amazon (and other on-line sellers, but mostly Amazon) is increasingly important to book sales. And on-line sellers are one place where a self-published book has a chance to compete on even a vaguely level playing field.

23. Pricing is a serious challenge.

Again, this seems solid. There also some advice on leveraging the Amazon affiliate program to increase author profits that could work for conventionally published authors as well. It might not amount to much, but every little bit helps.

24. Electronic books have potential, but they're still in their infancy.

Again, solid. Even conventional publishers are still trying to figure out how to make money off ebooks.

On the other hand, for future reference, keep in mind that ebooks are about the only growth area in conventional publishing at the moment, and they will become important. How this figures into self-publishing isn't clear though. The lack of the physical package, or the simple ability to discover a book while browsing in a store, it may make the "branding" of a major publisher more important, not less.

My bet is still on the people who have been making money at publishing all along.

25. Self-publishing is a fluid business.

True, as far as the technology goes. But there's one constant that runs through the whole history of self-publishing and vanity presses. The vast majority of such books are expensive failures that never find an audience.

Given that simple fact, you've got to ask yourself if the time, effort, and money wouldn't be better spent improving your book and working harder to get it published through conventional means, or more likely, writing more, better books that will sell.

Here's another important, secret fact about publishing. Of first books by successful authors that sell (and many do), many didn't sell first.

Let me explain that a little more. A first book, like any first effort anything, is likely to have flaws. Even if it's good, plenty of good books don't sell for any number of reasons. Maybe the topic is overdone, or hard for the marketing people to sell, or maybe it just isn't commercial enough.

Just for an example, take mega-best-selling author Ken Follett. His first novel was his most successful, "The Pillars of the Earth."

But it wasn't his first published book. Publishers balked at the huge novel, a sprawling, generational, historical about a seemingly unsexy subject (the construction of cathedrals) where the only central character is the building itself.

Did that mean the book was bad? To the contrary. But it wasn't safe, conventional, or based on something else with demonstrated success.

So Ken Follett self-published it and sold a billion copies.

Not.

He put it aside and used his considerable skills to write more conventional thrillers like "The Eye of the Needle" and "The Key to Rebbecca."

Only after these books were successful was he able to convince them to take a chance on "Pillars" to tremendous success.

I've heard this story over and over again, from writers big and small. The first novel doesn't sell until after the second of third novel sells. Until after the writer has the track-record and the clout to make it happen.

Now keep in mind, in many cases, the first book still wasn't a success. Often there were still flaws or marketing issues that made it a hard-sell to readers. Sometimes, the publisher still didn't understand or want the book, and did it only to humor the successful author.

But even the-least successful commercially-published book is going to outsell 95% (and I think I'm being very conservative with that estimate) of the self-published books ever produced.

Those first books, where the author had the patience and the determination to see them through the process, found an audience, no matter how small. Most self-published books never come close.

Ultimately, as an author, what you want (or should want, in my opinion), is not to be printed, and not even to be published. You want to be read.

Or maybe you just want money, but if you've done things right, that just comes naturally with being read. Win-win. Most self-published books don't make money (quite the contrary) and they don't get read. Where's the upside in that?

Which brings me to:

4 Reasons David Carnoy Probably Shouldn't have Self-Published

Now, keep in mind that I don't know all the specifics of his experience or his situation. I have only the details he chose to share in his article, as he chose to share them. And I certainly haven't read his book. I base my opinions on what I could glean or extrapolate from what he said, and on some rather broad assumptions I make based on my own experiences and knowledge of the publishing industry. Given that, here we go...

1. It might have sold if he'd just written the next book.

See my example of Follett above. Mr. Carnoy obviously put a lot of money, time, and effort into self-publishing his novel. Could have have translated that into a second novel, or even a third? He doesn't mention any follow-up writing at all.

Here's one more little secret fact about publishing. Publishers are less interested in individual books than in careers. This is especially true of novels. They don't want a writer with one good novel. They want a writer with one good novel and the ability (at least the strong promise) to turn out more on a regular basis.

I recently heard an interview with a writer I've recently come to enjoy, New York Times Best-selling crime writer Tim Dorsey. Dorsey was, like Carnoy, a journalist who put several years into writing a novel.

Things diverge in that he got a publisher interested in that first book. But things are the same in that, Dorsey hadn't even thought of writing a second novel. So he was shocked when the book sold as part of a two-book deal. He had to quickly write a prequel to his first book, because he'd killed off most of his characters in book one! (Find his discussion of this point just after the three-minute mark in the YouTube video.)

The publisher didn't see that first book as marketable. They saw Dorsey as a marketable writer, and in that, they were obviously correct.

2. I doubt he exhausted all possible avenues to sell the book to conventional publishers.

Okay, I confess that I'm way into speculative territory with this one.

According to Carnoy he got a "top agent" on the job, and I'll take him as his word.

But speaking as someone who recently let go a "top agent" (by at least one measure, the top agent in the industry right now) because they weren't doing enough to market my original work, a "top agent" isn't always what you need.

It's like looking for a spouse. You might want the most beautiful person on the planet, or the smartest, or the most powerful. But that doesn't mean that's what you need. You might discover that being an average schmo being married to Angelina Jolie, or Hugh Jackman, or Stephen Hawking, or George W. Bush, it might just have a down-side. It might not work out. It might not last long at all. It might cause you a boat-load of grief and pain along the way.

What you want is somebody compatible, even if they aren't quite as beautiful to behold, or smart, or powerful. What you need is somebody who's a good fit with you. That's where 70th wedding anniversaries are made.

Maybe that still means a top agent, but maybe not. Top Agents are top agents because they are specialists at big books and big deals. Maybe that's not what you need a this stage in your career.

A "top agent" probably is only interested in you if you are, or they think you can be, a "top author." As a first-time author, they may not work as hard for you, give you the individual attention you need, or keep trying as long as a lower-tier agent would. Maybe you need someone who will put your book on the desk of every editor in New York, not just the desks of five VPs at the biggest publishing imprints on the planet.

Or maybe the agent isn't interested in a deal below a certain level. Maybe you'd be thrilled with a five-figure deal, and the agent really can't (quite reasonably, they're a top agent after all) be bothered with anything less than six figures. (And keep in mind that even a three-figure deal is still way better than the negative five-figure or more deal that most self-publishing projects turn into.)

Or maybe, no make this for certain, a "top agent" is going to have bigger fish to fry than you. They've got top clients, best-sellers who are always going to be their first priority. No matter how much they may like you, no matter how sincere their interest, there are going to be times, maybe lots of times, when little clients like you fall between the cracks. Fact of life.

3. Maybe the book didn't sell because it SHOULDN'T have sold.

Like I said, I haven't read the book. And it's just possible that is sucks.

I rather doubt that though, since a high-level agent apparently took it on. I'm guessing that it's at least a competent book with some gleam of specialness that separates it from the pack.

But it's possible that there's some flaw that the agent overlooked. Maybe the "gleam" is just something that pushed their hot-buttons, that wouldn't register with anyone else on the planet.

Really, it's entirely possible that the book is fine. Lots of fine books don't get bought (or at least, bought immediately) for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the book.

But many, maybe most, first novels aren't fine. Mistakes are made. Maybe the plot is great, but the prose sucks. Maybe prose is beautiful, but there's a tragic plot-flaw that just can't be fixed. Maybe the plot and the prose are great, but the characters are flat. Maybe everything is great, but commercial publishing isn't ready for a 2000-page space western written from the viewpoint of a gall-stone, no matter how well executed.

On the other hand, maybe if he'd simply moved on and written the next book, Mr. Carnoy would have learned things in the process (writing novels requires practice, like any other craft). Maybe he'd have learned enough to spot that one, fatal flaw in the first book, and fix it, and sell it.
Maybe he'd develop the understanding to realize how embarrassingly flawed his first effort was, and how it's better sitting at the bottom of a drawer for his biographers to figure out.

In either case, he's better off in the long run.

4. Even, in the unlikely instance that the book is successful in its self-published form, it proves nothing.

As I said in my previous post on vanity publishing, there are counter-examples of self-published and vanity press books that went on to great success. But I'm of the opinion that those were mostly books that could have seen equal or greater success if the author had simple made more (or more effective) efforts to sell the manuscript, or if they'd (as in the Follett example) kept writing and let the momentum of their career pull that first book into print.

If you read the fine print, most major "self-publishing" success stories actually made most (if not all) of their money only when they were picked up by a conventional publisher. The "self-publishing" stage only created enough success to bring them to the attention of the publishers, or to convince them that the book reached a market they didn't know existed.

As I said, there are other, probably more cost-effective ways of marketing a "problem" book. Most of these involve writing the next book, of course, but that's the thing that's going to develop your career, your reputation, and your abilities as a writer.

And isn't that what you want?

(I've beaten on Mr. Carnoy pretty hard in this post, and if he takes any notice of it at all, I hope he can be a good sport about it and take it in the constructive spirit that it was intended. I wish him all success with his book, and hope it's one of the exceptions that makes the rule. The very least I can do is offer him plug. You can order his novel "Knife Music" on Amazon here. Or better yet, order it through his web page and give him an extra cut.)

Vanity isn't Easy

There was a rather annoying article in one of our local papers the other day: a rather glowing profile on a vanity publisher.

Now, if you don't know what a vanity press is, it's a publisher that will, for a (often sizable) fee turn your manuscript into a printed book.

Such presses can take slightly different forms at this point.. They may (usually for yet another fee) pretend to market your book.

More likely, they'll simply deliver a pallet of books to sit in your garage while you try unsuccessfully to pawn them off on local bookstores, until finally you give them away to every friend and relative on every birthday and Christmas, leaving the bulk of them as a white elephant for your estate to dispose of at the local landfill.

Oh, come on, Steve! Tell us what you really think!

Okay, perhaps my usual level of contempt for self-publishing is a bit pumped up by the article, which was full of myths, distortions, misinformation, unquestioned self-promotion, and generally suffered from a complete lack of basic fact-checking. (For example, it went unchallenged that conventional publishers take ownership of the copyrights on books they buy. You'd think that newspapers would know at least the barest essentials of copyright law, but I guess not.)

But for the purposes of this rant, I'm going to push all the misinformation aside and deal with a couple of things the article (and the vanity publisher) got right.

One fact that the publisher used in support of using their service was that getting a book sold to a conventional publisher is hard.

This is true. It is very, very true. (Speaking as someone who's currently trying to turn a string of well-received media tie-in novels into an original novel career, I can speak to this personally.) It's hard. It takes time. The deck is stacked against you, and a lot of the publishing process exists primarily to keep the flood of dreck out, sometimes keeping good books and writers out in the process.

What's wrong is that this is any reason for an aspiring writer to turn to self-publishing and vanity presses. If it bothers you, and it probably does, I've got two words for you.

Boo.

Hoo.

Like many things worth doing, getting a book published is work. It requires patience, resilience, and determination. And despite all this (and this is what the vanity publishers don't tell you), it beats the alternative.

Okay, early on I told you what self-publishing is, but now I will give you the precise definition of self-publishing: A process by which, through the application of large amounts of money, an unsold manuscript can be transformed into a large quantity of unsold books.

There's the ugly truth of it. If selling your book to a legitimate publisher is too too hard for you, then going to a vanity press won't solve your problem, it will multiply it.

Yes, for only a few (maybe quite a few) thousand dollars you can expand a hundred-fold your opportunities for rejection, abuse, disappointment, and perceived failure! But wait, there's more! We'll throw on a huge distraction from your writing, and a tangible monument to your inadequacy that can squat in your garage, basement, closet or unit at the Mini-Storage for decades to come!

Where's the logic here? Getting a job is hard too. Does that mean that if you can't get a job as a dish-washer, you open a restaurant? If you like to fly, do you start an airline?

Of course not. It's obvious that these enterprises are expensive, time-consuming, risky, and highly prone to total failure, and that to manage one takes a skill-set completely separate from those possessed by most of the people it employs. You start an airline because you want to start an airline, not because you think it's a shortcut to getting some time in the cockpit.

Why then do so many would-be writers think they should start a publishing company? I can't tell you. If you have the skills and desire to be a manager, a salesperson, a marketer, a warehouse manager, a shipper, a bookkeeper, and you'd rather do those things than write, then maybe a writer is not what you want to be. Maybe you should start a business. (I wouldn't recommend publishing though. There are easier ways to make money.)

Writers write. That should be obvious.

Being a writer already is a business anyway, one that will, as you become more successful, take far more time and energy from your writing than you want. If you are a writer who has time to run a second (publishing) business, then it's a good sign that you aren't very successful as a writer (and probably as a publisher too).

It's that simple. That should be the end of it, and we should never speak of this thing again.

Not.

The whole vanity publishing thing is like Dracula. You think you've got it staked real good, and it just keeps popping out of the grave. It doesn't help that every now and then you hear (usually a lot, because it makes a good story) about the exceptions to the rule, the self-published books that went on to great success, that were picked up by major publishers, and in a few cases, even turned into New York Times best-sellers.

I shake my head every time I hear one of these, because they are rare exceptions, because most of them would have sold through conventional means if the author had only been a little smarter about it, and because I know it's the nature of would-be writers to treat any crumb of false-hope like the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Rio.

Just because somebody won 40 million in the Powerball doesn't mean you should invest your life savings in lottery tickets.

Yes, selling is hard.

Buck it up, keep writing, and keep the manuscripts in the mail.

It's easier that way.

(Postscript: Chris just wrote her own blog post covering some different aspects of this same issue. Read her "No Hope Publishing Plan" here.)

The Tale of the Ackerfish

If you haven't heard, the broad field of science fiction and fantasy lost a legendary figure last week: Forrest J. Ackerman, perhaps best known as the editor of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" magazine, and as one of the world's foremost collectors of science fiction, fantasy and horror memorabilia.

Those things are only a little of what Forrey was, and what he meant to our genres. In his time, he was a writer, editor, literary agent (for many major writers, including L. Ron Hubbard), and translator (bringing the countless Perry Rodan books to the United States). He coined the dreaded term "sci-fi." He's reportedly the first person to wear a costume to a science fiction convention, giving launch to every cosplayer on the planet.

Okay, it starts to become clear why Forrey was to some, as infamous as he was famous. But his importance to the history of the sf/fantasy/horror genres, both in print and film, can't be overstated.

And what made Forrey great wasn't all the professional things he did in the field, really. It was that, through it all, Forrey was a fan. An uber-fan. The god-king-500-pound gorilla-high-wizard-United-Federation-of-Nerdery-atomic-supreme-Dalek of fans.

He did fannish things, only on a scale comparable with the pyramids. Fans have collections of book, or comics, or toys. Forry had the "Ackermansion" a home jammed with a massive collection of books, pulps, posters, and original film props, masks, models and costumes. Fans write fanzines. Forrey (in 1958) started "Famous Monsters of Filmland," a newsstand publication jammed with pictures and writing about genre films (mostly horror and fantasy, but a smattering of science fiction as well).

It was through Famous Monsters of Filmland that Forrey entered my life, as I discovered it hidden in the back of magazine rack of a little drugstore in Geneva, Alabama. I flipped through its pages, wide-eyed at creatures, sights, wonders and horrors, most of which were completely alien to me.

It's impossible for anyone born after the 70s to understand what this magazine meant to a generation. If you want to find out about films, or see them, it's easy. You've got cable, DVDs, the internet, pay-per-view, satellite, a zillion ways to access them.

But Famous Monsters of Filmland came along at a time before the internet. Before DVDs, or VHS, or even Beta. It was before Cable. It was at a time when television often meant a tiny, blurry, black and white picture selected from no more than an handful of channels, and in most areas, far less.

If you missed a movie in the theaters, you missed it, unless it eventually ran on TV, jammed full of commercials and cut to shreds by the censors. And I missed a lot of genre movies as a kid. Pretty much all of them, as a matter of a fact.

I lived in a tiny Alabama town, barely more than a wide spot in the road. I was miles (which might as well have been light-years) from the nearest theaters. On rare occasions I'd go to a movie with my family, or with family friend and sometimes baby-sitter Linda Miller (hi, Linda!), but rarely did I get to see the space-ships and monsters that I craved.

So Famous Monsters of Filmland was a window on a world I only barely knew existed, films I knew mainly through tiny ads in the monthly schedules that the local drive-ins printed and distributed everywhere. From those schedules I had only titles, and maybe a tiny picture of slogan to go with it.

In the pages of FMOF I could see pictures and read about the plots, special effects, and actors. I became obsessed with some of the images I saw there, and waited patiently until the movies that spawned them showed up on TV in some late-night or Saturday-afternoon time-slot. I might have eventually seen those films anyway, but FMOF told me what to look for, which films might be worth fighting my parents to stay up late or missing a sunny Saturday afternoon's playtime to watch TV.

It's certainly not the only thing that fanned my interest in science fiction and fantasy, but it was a major early influence on me.

Ironically, I don't think I bought many actual issues of the magazine. Maybe I preferred to spend my money on the comic spinner rack next to the magazines. Or maybe it was just that my mom considered the magazine to lurid and scary and discouraged me from buying it. I really don't remember. But I'd always pick it up off the rack and flip through it when the druggist wasn't looking. ("This isn't a library!")

My interest in FMOF waned after a few years. We moved to bigger towns where I had better access to theaters, and often more TV channels (some of them those wonderful independent stations that tended to cram their schedules with old movies). I got older, became more independent, and was able to stay up to catch the late-shows where genre films often played. But Famous Monsters of Filmland played a critical role in priming my interest.

I wasn't alone. A whole generation of people like me were also reading the magazine. Some, like me, went on to become writers. Others became makeup artists, prop-builders, costumers, and film directors. Out of its lurid covers and pulpy black-and-white pages came an army of genre creators, who unleashed countless pop-culture wonders and terrors upon the world.

Flash forward thirty years ago. I'm a struggling but published writer of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror, attending conventions to chase editors, make contacts, and learn my craft. My wife Chris and I are at a Westercon in Seattle, where we're approached by our friend, con-runner Richard Wright (who we sadly also lost a few years back). He asks if we'd like to attend the Locus Awards banquet. The convention has had to buy a minimum number of banquet tickets, and there are extras. Would we like a pair for free?

Starving writers don't turn down free food (even rubber chicken), and we gratefully accepted. We also figured we might make some contacts.

We didn't know many people in the field back in those days, and the few people we did know were sitting at already-full tables, so we got a table by ourselves. I'd seen Forrey's picture many times, and I knew he was at the convention, but until that point in time, I hadn't seen him. So I recognized him when he walked in late, accompanied by another old-time fan (whose name now unfortunately escapes me). They looked around for some place to sit, and we asked if they'd like to join us. Maybe to my surprise, they did.

I don't remember a lot of specifics about the banquet, but Forrey was charming, friendly, and talkative. We quite enjoyed their company, and I was a bit dazzled to be sitting across the table from someone who had so influenced my youth.

But one thing I'll never forget about the banquet were the table decorations. For reasons that escape me, the place-settings consisted of some kind of beach/luau kitsch, and at the end, we were encouraged to take anything we wanted as with us. At our table we all laughed about that, as we'd spent a good deal of time making fun of it all. There was certainly nothing there that any of us wanted.

But then, I had an inspiration. I'd not thought to bring a camera, so I couldn't get a picture with Forrey, but there was a way I could get a remembrance. I grabbed a cheap, ceramic fish from the centerpiece, held it out and said, "Forrey, will you sign my fish?"

He stared at it, puzzled, then laughed and took it. We found a ball-point pen somewhere, but it wouldn't write on the glazed part of the fish. Forrey turned it over and signed it on the unglazed bottom.

We've carried that fish around for years, through multiple moves, two states and three cities. It's usually been on display somewhere in our house, an incongruous item amid all the books, comics and sci-fi toys. I drew attention to itself. Visitors would ask why we had that ugly little thing, and I'd always pick it up, turn it over, and tell them the story.

When I learned of Forrey's death, it was in my living-room, sitting on a bookshelf. I knew exactly where to find it. The Ackerfish.

Some day, when we're old and gone, I imagine our our kids will be going through our stuff, and they'll see this ugly little fish, and maybe they'll throw it away without a second thought. But I hope not. It's an artifact. A link with an important bit of history that shouldn't be forgotten.

It's appropriate, somehow, that of Forrey Ackerman, collector, keeper of things, curator of whole genres, I have an object, an artifact to remember him by.

Goodbye, Forrey, and thanks for the fish.

More on book returns

As a follow-up to my recent post on how book-returns may be a necessary evil if you value independent bookstores, here's a great post from an industry-insider on the dark flip-side the equation. Returns are hurting publishers in a big way during the credit crunch, and it's behind a lot of the dire financial news you're hearing about publishing companies at the moment.

Ignoring my arguments about how they benefit indie booksellers, it's otherwise hard not to conclude that the return system is insane. But it isn't likely to go away, or even be substantially modified, any time soon. There are lots of reasons, but here are the big two:

For any one publisher to modify or eliminate the return system would be suicide for that publisher. Buyers, especially the 500-pound gorillas of retail, would simply stop ordering.

But for all, or even several of the publishers to change the terms in lockstep would undoubtedly cause anti-trust laws to kick in.

Loved to Death (or, why book-lovers don't always make great book-sellers)

We'll get to the meat of this post in a minute. First, some background material authors, would-be authors and book-lovers should be aware of...

I've just been reading a fascinating post over on the blog of Andrew Wheeler, a 20-year publishing professional who should know his stuff.

His post is prompted by the outrage several science fiction and fantasy authors about having their recent books "skipped" by chain bookstores. Apparently there was some talk of a boycott, but that seems to have gone nowhere so far. Probably a good thing.

Anyway, that's the start of Wheeler's post, but he goes way beyond that. He explains, in painful-but-necessary detail the realities of the book business. How and why books get ordered (or don't get ordered), and why there are some sound reasons for "skipping." He also talks about the flawed nostalgia that always clouds such discussions of business; the days when books were all good, bookstores were all small and independent, and good authors (was there any other kind?) were carefully sold, nurtured, and rewarded.

And that's where my post begins. Wheeler talks at length about the many shortcomings common to indie bookstores, and why many of them deserved to die. Many are (or were) poorly managed, under-funded, dirty, disorganized, stocked only to suit their owner's peculiar tastes and interests. I can't disagree with much of what he says.. We'll all been in great indie bookstores, but we've been in the clunkers too.

But he doesn't address another kind of doomed bookstore, one I've had the sad experience to observe closely in recent years here in my town: the Store That Loved Books Too Much.

We used to have a great little indie store in the town where I live. It's a beach-resort town, and so I became familiar with the store long before I moved here. In fact, though I lived in a much larger college town with some pretty good (chain and indie) bookstores, I always looked forward to visiting this one. A stop was a necessary part of any trip to the beach, and I rarely walked out without a bag full of books and periodicals.

It wasn't a big store, nor did it have a picturesque location. It was a bland storefront in a strip-mall, located next to a chain grocery store. It wasn't the store. It was what was in the store. Which was (stand by for the big surprise...) books.

Okay, it wasn't just that. It had new books. Every single week. Hot-off-the-presses books, mostly paperbacks, just the thing for a beach read. Most of the paperbacks were displayed face-out on racks along the side walls for easy browsing. Even better, new releases were on the floor below the racks so you couldn't miss them. Sure, this runs contrary to the logic that puts new books at the top, but it worked. The latest thing was there, and easy to find.

They weren't snotty either. They had a rich stock of best-sellers, thrillers, trashy-beach books, and good sections for all the genres, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, western, horror, you-name-it.

Oh sure, that wasn't all the store carried. They had a small but rich assortment of hard-covers and trades, fiction and non-fiction, children's books, an old-fashioned comic-spinner rack (the kind that collectors hate because they crease the comics, but which are great for kids who might actually read a comic for pleasure). a huge magazine section (another good source of beach reading), and a few gifts and cards.

They also had a few of those things that people think of when they think of indie bookstores. They had a nice little rack for local authors that was always well-stocked, and another one for staff picks and recommended reads. They hand-sold books, and were always glad to recommend an author or book in any given genre.

They also had a small blocked off corner for "adult" magazines. I never shopped back there (you believe me, right?), but it was somehow reassuring. I always figured a news-dealer that didn't traffic in material that was offending somebody just wasn't doing its part for the First Amendment, and was probably incomplete in other important areas as well.

Near as I could tell, they did a brisk business. There were always people in the store when I went in there, and the register was always busy. There were even lines sometimes.

What the store had, and I think this was key, was energy. The pulp and newsprint were always fresh, and smelled that way. It was exciting to go into the store on a shipment day, when the new books or periodicals were being unboxed and shelved. Often I'd hover around the magazine racks, waiting to see if the latest issue of one of my favorite magazines was coming out. Every week you'd go to scan the racks for your favorite authors and genres, and never were you disappointed. There was always something new and interesting, even if it wasn't what you went in looking for.

I've never seen anything like it, before or since, in such a small town. I was reminded of some of the big cities I'd lived in, the huge corner newsstands in Los Angeles, the huge Paperback City store in North Hollywood, the seedy-but-has-everything Magazine City in downtown Seattle. Most of these places were dirtier and colder and less refined than our little bookstore, but the buzz was there, and they shared another important characteristic: turnover. Most things moved, one way or another. If they didn't sell, then they were gone.

I'm an author, and I know, I know. If there's one word in the English language we writers hate, it's strip, at least where it's not being applied to an attractive member of the opposite sex (or same, if that's the way you play it).

Stripping, for those of you who don't know, is the process of getting credit on unsold paperbacks and periodicals. The book (or magazine, or comic, but what we complain about are the books) isn't returned. Only the cover is ripped off and returned for credit. The body of the item is (theoretically, that's another story) destroyed. It's a wasteful system, one rooted in history more than business logic, and one that authors just hate. A stripped book is not only unsold, not only returned for credit (and thus taken out of your royalties) it can't be reshipped or resold at any price. It not only isn't sold, it's an anti-sale.

One of the reasons that people like indie bookstores is that, in theory anyway, they don't strip as much. They keep back-lists on the shelves, and give books time to sell. They hand-sell good books that aren't from big-name authors, and aren't fortunate enough to make the Times best-seller list.

Like I said, theory. And at this little bookstore, there was a little truth to it. They shelved back-lists, for top authors and favorites anyway. They kept smaller authors they liked around for a while. But money and space were finite, and things got stripped.

Every. Single. Week.

See, there are places where stripping makes sense: places with high traffic and high volume. Places where people go to look for something new and fun to read. Places like our little store.

It was harsh but true, and while the writer in me would sometimes cringe (especially when it was one of my books), as a reader I loved the place. It was actually a factor in my decision to move to town.

So what happened?

Well, I'm unclear on the details. As I recall, the out-of-town owners sold-out, and it was bought by a well-meaning couple who clearly weren't cut out to run a bookstore. They didn't last long. Just long enough to mess up the stock and chase off a bunch of the staff.

They wanted to sell out, and when that didn't happen, planned to close.

Then a white-knight appeared in the form of a true book-lover. A guy who runs several used bookstores in the area, stores that are still open. There are good stores, and his flagship store is world-class, one of those places a book-lover can wander for hours through the maze-like stacks and never see everything.

But the trouble was, he loved books too much to run a new bookstore. He never stripped anything. The magazine second, already reduced, got smaller still. The adult section disappeared. The wall racks gave way to shelves to make room for the rapidly growing stock of dated (and eventually yellowing) paperbacks. Staff morale was low, and turnover rapid. Various other things were tried, more gifts and cards, games, more comics (but not enough to be a real comic store), music, a bigger kid's section, but nothing seemed to take hold. The foot traffic wasn't there to support it, because people weren't coming back as often.

I found myself going in less and less often. Once a month would catch the new magazines, and there weren't many of those that interested me any more. I stopped looking at the paperbacks. Of course, they were still happy to special order, but without the browsing experience to fuel purchases, I didn't do it often.

It was depressing. Nothing new to browse, and the new releases I'd heard about weren't going to be there. Maybe in the grocery-store next door...

It's sad when the book department at a grocery store starts to look better than a "real" bookstore.

Towards the end, the shelves thinned out as the old stock was presumably sold or stripped, but the money apparently wasn't there to restock. Books were face-out on the shelves, and got further and further apart. Used stock was moved in from other stores to fill the shelves. Even the reduced magazine section was getting thin. Hours were cut back.

There were "business for sale" signs in the windows, but it was hard to imagine what there was to buy. The stock was old and picked over, the traffic gone, the staff decimated, the reputation tarnished beyond repair. The death-spiral was solidly confirmed by then.

A couple weeks ago, while shopping for groceries, I happened to glance over and see the storefront dark and empty. I went over and examined the sign on the door. It had been closed for almost two weeks, and though I shop for groceries next door three or four times a week, I hadn't noticed.

Our little town is full of writers, and near as I can tell, none of them in my circle had noticed either. We all order our books on-line now, or drive to chain stores in the bigger towns in the valley 60 miles away, or go to indie-monster Powell's Books in Portland a couple hours from here.

I was sad, but hardly surprised. Clearly the book-loving-owner was just riding out the lease. He had loved a once-great store to death.

This isn't intended to be critical of the guy who bought the store. He's a neighbor of mine, and a good guy, and he still has those great used stores. It would have died a lot sooner without his intervention, and he tried to make it a success the best way he knew how. God knows how much money he lost in the deal, and I'm certainly not privy to all the many things behind-the-scenes that may have contributed to the store's slow demise.

But it's difficult to see how he could have ever succeeded because of that one blind spot of his. He couldn't strip books, and without that, the store could never again flourish.

Let that be a lesson. Independent book stores aren't magic fairy-lands of literature and enlightenment. They're businesses, and to succeed, they have to be run as such.

Chain book stores didn't kill our nifty little bookshop. We don't have any within 60 miles. Wal-Mart didn't kill it. It's 30 miles to the nearest big-box store. Amazon didn't kill it. Its troubles were apparent long before Amazon was a significant factor.

Management decisions killed it, plain and simple. Decisions that were well-intended, and right minded, and intended to be charitable to authors. Decisions that were still wrong.

The store is gone now, and it isn't coming back, nor is there likely to be anything to replace it. I order on-line, and I look forward to out-of-town trips where I can go to a large book-store and browse (as good as Amazon is in many respects, it has never replicated the book browsing experience).

I miss the magazines more than anything, but magazines are on the decline. Many of the more obscure magazines I used to enjoy have died, and with others, the internet provides more useful and current content. The more popular ones are cheaper to subscribe to, often at a fraction of the newsstand price, and increasingly that's just what I'm doing.

But to be honest, I suspect even this is short-term. Electronic book-readers are getting attractive, and I fully expect most print magazines to go the way of the dodo in only a few years. I recently subscribed to a magazine for three years (they were practically giving it away) and wondered if my need for a print version would run out before the subscription did.

Books are still with us though, for a while anyway, and independent stores have to depend on them to survive. Much as we rail against the return system and stripping, as illogical as it is, if we were somehow to end it today, it's the independent stores, the small stores, that would suffer the most. Chain stores have the size, the volume, the financial resources to soldier on through, but the marginal little stores like ours won't. Let our store serve as an example, and a warning.

Our beloved little store is gone, and it isn't coming back. Nostalgia is all we have left, and that doesn't pay the rent.

But some days, in some ways, stripping books does.

Countdown to Nowhere

(This is a follow-up post to yesterday's "Buzz Off" which concerns astronaut Buzz Aldrin's recent statements that shows like Star Trek led to the decline of support for the space program. If you haven't read it, go there first.)

I've gotten a lot of support and "attaboys" from people who read "Buzz Off," but it turns out I didn't win over everyone. Fact is, I thought this over pretty carefully, and there's a lot of stuff I DIDN'T put in the original post, because I didn't think it was necessary given the basic
facts. More would have just been clutter.

But since the facts weren't as obvious as I supposed, let's look at another major
problem with the Buzz Aldrin theory. I don't think the historical time-line supports it.

At first glance, though, you might think the dates line up well. Star Trek was on TV from September 1966 through September 1969. The collapse of the space program's support is really centered around 1970. (The live TV broadcast from Apollo 13 wasn't covered by any of the major networks live, and it flew in April 1970. Apollo 20 was canceled in January of 1970. Two more Apollo missions were canceled in September of 1970.)

So the dates seem close, but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny.

First of all, remember that Star Trek was a failure in its broadcast run. It was nearly canceled in September of 1968 (while Apollo 8 had the world's attention, and Apollo 11, which drove the country (and the world) into a frenzy was nine months away. In fact, the decision to pull the plug on Star Trek had to have been made just about the time Apollo 11 landed, and the program was at the peak of its popularity and public interest.

Star Trek REALLY didn't take off until it was in syndication and college kids started watching it. I don't have a good date for that, but I suspect we're talking 1971 or 1972, when the smoking gun had long-ago gone off.

But the decisions to pull the trigger on that gun had to be made earlier.

Congressional support had to deteriorate sometime well before the cuts started, and the decision not to cut-in live on Apollo 13 probably resulted from viewership numbers on Apollo 12, which flew in November of 1969.

Of course, Apollo 12 blew out its TV camera shortly after landing, and that probably accounts for a lot of any ratings tumble. You can hardly blame that on Star Trek. (Ironically, almost without exception, Star Trek never showed TV cameras being taken along by its explorers.)

In any case, if Star Trek somehow poisoned the U.S. public on the space program, it did it as a low-rated show with a limited audience. And indications are that, during both first-run and in its re-run "boom" period, the audience for Star Trek largely consisted of people under 21. The voting age was still 21 at this time, and wasn't lowered to 18 until July of 1971. So as far as political influence, it's hard to see how it ever could have had any significant impact at that point in time.

The first evidence that Star Trek fans had political clout didn't come until the first Space Shuttle was renamed ENTERPRISE, following a letter-writing campaign to the Ford White-house by fans. I don't have a date for this, but it happened sometime between when President Ford took office in 1974 and the Enterprise roll-out in 1976. Since construction didn't start until June of 1974, and its original name was "Constitution," and Ford took office in August of '74, it would not likely have been any earlier than that. It's very likely that the reduction in the voting age was a factor here.

Regardless of the date, this hardly supports any lack of support or interest in the real space program by Star Trek fans. Quite the contrary.

On the other hand, NASA's internal grumbling and foot-dragging on the matter is a fine example of how they loved to shoot their public image in the foot. Here was a great opportunity to connect their mission with the public, and rather than exploit it to the fullest, they minimized it as much as possible.

I just don't see any evidence here that Star Trek harmed the space program in any way.

Of course, Aldrin wasn't specific that he was talking about Star Trek, but there just aren't many other on-air TV candidates for killing support of the Space Program.

Lost in Space started (and ended) a year earlier than Star Trek, and had a much bigger audience than Star Trek, but there was no beaming there. There were aliens (often very silly aliens) and interstellar travel (though the science was so weak that I don't recall any kind of faster-than-light drive ever being mentioned). But most of the signature hardware, robots, space-walks, jet packs, surface crawlers, and a very LM-like landing vehicle, were all right off the NASA drawing boards at that time. It was more futuristic and advanced, but in its own way, much more realistic than Trek.

The British series UFO (which featured a modest and fairly believable lunar base) didn't reach U.S. syndication until 1971 and 72. The follow-up Space 1999 with a much bigger Moon base (and some screamingly bad science) didn't show up until 1975.

Other than that, I can't think of anything (other than some Saturday morning cartoons) that qualifies. Feel free to correct me if I've missed something significant.

Meanwhile, all the stuff that Aldrin frets about, teleportation, faster-than-light travel, and so on, had been popular staples of print and comic science fiction since at least the 1930s. Somehow, the U.S. space program got off the ground anyhow (mostly by people who had at
some point read plenty of the stuff.

And we can't ignore movies. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were rocketing off to alien worlds in theaters as early as 1936 (and on radio starting in 1932). Heck, even Duck Dodgers used a teleporter in his first 1953 cartoon appearance!

None of the offending concepts or devices was invented by Star Trek, or any TV show. It predates broadcast television entirely.

Really, looking at the evidence, if the time-line supports anything at all, it's the idea that cutbacks in the Apollo program (and news coverage of same) may have contributed to the renewed popularity of Star Trek in syndication in the early 70s.

If the real space program wasn't going to give us the stars (or even the Moon again, or Mars) anytime soon, we'd watch Star Trek and dream until it did.

That just makes more sense than the idea that B led to A.

But there's a subtext in the time-line the supports more significant factors.

At least some of the press (and the public's) interest in covering the Apollo program has to be traced to the camera failure on Apollo 12. Apollo 13 might have turned that around, but it never made it to the moon, and was covered for entirely different reasons.

Support for Apollo in congress was weakening by early 1970, when Apollo 20 was canceled. The next two cancellations happened after the near loss of Apollo 13. By then, the risks were obvious, and there's no political stock to be gained in backing a losing horse. Better to end the program a winner.

It was also obvious by then that the press was more interested in covering failures in space than successes. Lose, lose. Not much here you can blame on Star Trek.

Combine this with the growing cynicism about government, and the huge cost of the Vietnam war (which lead directly to the cancellation of the Air Force's manned space program before it even started), and there just wasn't anything to be gained politically by backing NASA. Again, not Star Trek's fault.

The facts aren't there. The logic isn't there. Star Trek didn't do it. No science-fiction TV show did. If anything, Star Trek has been a positive influence on people's interest in space.

So, anybody want to start a write-in campaign to name the first, manned, Orion crew-capsule to reach orbit (no test models this time!), Enterprise?

More writings about the Moon:

Closely related to this topic, I have a couple of previous posts about the Moon and the Apollo program that you should check out:

Buy Me The Moon
Why the Apollo program didn't cost nearly as much as most people think it did, and how we might trade certain -- luxuries -- for a Moon base or a Mars program.

1200 Days On Mars
People say there's no reason to return to the Moon. "Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt." Well, we haven't been there, haven't done that, and we don't even know where the tee-shirts are sold. How we've barely touched the Moon, and how it compares to our current unmanned explorations of Mars.

Buzz Off

Don't you hate it when one of your childhood heroes says something so profoundly wrong and stupid that you just have to call them on it? Unfortunately, it just happened to me.

The hero in question is Apollo 11 moon-walker Buzz Aldrin. Ironically, I ran across this story on the US Sci-Fi Channel's "Sci-Fi Wire" news site. If any of the space sites or major news sources picked it up, I didn't see it. Aldrin was shilling his new National Geographic Channel show, "Unseen Moon," at the annual TV Critics Press Tour.

Anyway, Aldrin went on about how "unrealistic" science fiction television shows caused the public to lose interest in the space program. He doesn't name names, but he keeps mentioning "beaming," which seems like a reference to Star Trek. But he also is quoted as saying something about the shows being on "today," which kinda points a finger towards Stargate Atlantis, the only other current show I can think of that "beams" people.

Or maybe he's confusing reruns with new shows, or is being unclear about the time. Because, the public started losing interest in the space program before half the people working on Atlantis were born.

So I'm going to assume he's talking about Star Trek, since its the best known and most iconic space science fiction show, and its history somewhat parallels that of the space program.

Just so's you know I'm not taking him entirely out of context, here's what he's quoted as saying:

"I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today. All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It's not realistic."

and later in the article:

"But, if you start dealing with fantasy and beaming people up and down and traveling seven times the speed of light, you are doing damage. You're not helping. You have young people who have got expectations that are far unrealistic, and you can't possibly live up to the expectations you have created in young people. Why do they get bored with the space program? That's why."


Can't have those young people stretching their imaginations and developing unrealistic expectations, can we? Good grief. Next thing you know, he'll be going on about the sins of dancing and the dangers of "the rock and roll."

Seems to me, Buzz, that if some young people, scientists and engineers, had not developed unrealistic expectations based on the unrealistic works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, there might never have been rockets into space.

Though Verne is credited with being highly predictive of the Apollo program in many respects, he shot his adventurers to the moon with a giant cannon, something even an engineer of the time could have shown was impossible. Verne, in turn, scoffed at Wells, who sent his travelers to the Moon using an "unrealistic" anti-gravity metal. (This debate is not a new one.)

Many later space program participants also cite the Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs as inspiration, which were even more fantastic and romantic. His hero, John Carter, travels to Mars through some kind of ill-defined astral projection, and his Mars is populated with all manner of fantastic creatures and races, including one that happens to have hot (yet egg-laying) females with whom Carter can conveniently interbreed. (Thus, I suppose, clearing the way for Captain Kirk to later bed-hop across the galaxy.)

And of course from there we can go the the Lensmen books of E.E. Doc Smith, or the juvenile novels of Robert Heinlein, for example. Smith's books are as fantastic, in their way, as Burroughs. Heinlein tried to be more realistic, but his books are still full of aliens and rockets flitting from star-to-star.

Yet this sort of stuff has managed to somehow inspire generation after generation of scientists, engineers, pilots, space advocates, and yes, even astronauts. In fact, many of the current crop site Star Trek, and the even-more-fantastic Star Wars, as inspirations.

The fact is, Buzz has it all wrong. Realism isn't the issue. Scientific accuracy isn't the issue. Science fiction is inspiring to those who make real space travel possible, and it's inspiring for entirely different reasons.

Star Trek offered hope that humans could go to the stars, that there might be other life in the universe, and that we would find it, and it would ultimately be good. It also offered the hope that humans could solve enough of our internal struggles to survive and work together to make it possible.

The how of getting there isn't important, it's the hope, the wonder, that we could. Once you've embraced that, you don't look around and say, "well, I can't beam to space, so I'm not going." No, you go and find the next nearest thing you can, the Shuttle, Spaceship One, the new Orion vehicle, and you try and get on it if you can.

And if that isn't good enough, you roll up your sleeves and try to make something better. Not the Enterprise probably. Not a transporter. But better.

Or at least, you hope somebody else does, and you're much more likely to support them if they say they're trying.

No, I'm afraid Buzz has it all wrong.

Not that I can blame him for his frustration, maybe even anger at our lack of progress in space, and the public's seeming apathy towards it. It's just that he's lashing out in the wrong direction.

The reasons for the public's lack of interest are complex, and I don't think there's one single thing to blame. But if fingers are to be pointed, I think you can start with NASA's stunning ability to counter-promote itself. We're not just talking inability to promote here. We're talking an exhaustive 40+ year campaign to dehumanize its astronauts into bland, interchangable drones in the public eye, and to make some of the most exciting voyages of adventure in human history, seem boring.

Buzz has always been one to buck that trend. Unlike some of the Apollo astronauts, he's not been reclusive, or allowed himself to be one of NASAs obedient PR pawns. He's been out there, in the public eye, pushing himself as an individual, and yeah, even licensing his image for toys, models and other trinkets.

Even signing on to host TV shows. Yeah.

And I've always backed him on that, because the astronauts should be rewarded for their courage, celebrated for their place in history, and appreciated as the deep and complex human beings that they are. If that means Buzz Aldrin Action figures, well, that's fine, because I want a Buzz Aldrin action figure, and I want one for my grandkid too. I want to know their stories, the good and bad of them. If they have something to say, I want to listen. And if they make a little cash along the way, more power to them. Who do I make the check out to?

But this time, Buzz is just wrong. He just doesn't know what he's talking about.

We should be thankful for Star Trek and Stargate and Star Wars and all the rest, that kept people thinking about the future, thinking about the stars, thinking about the planets, and not thinking about "if," but only "how, and when?" Because it's only through that spark of hope that we'll get there, however we do it.

And I'll take that spark any way I can get it, thank-you...

(While most responses to this post have been supportive and positive, not everyone was convinced. So I put some of my cast-off arguments into a follow-up post that I hope will put the matter to rest. Check it out.)

A Thumbnail Cover Gallery

Click on the picture for a larger version.

A while back I started collecting recent covers from books in which Chris and I were published and combined them into a single graphic to use as a backdrop for our oft-neglected web-page. I realized today that I hadn't updated it in a long time, so I wasted several hours this afternoon tracking down covers (new ones, and old ones that I hadn't included before), resizing, and editing them in.

This is what I came up with. It still isn't complete. For example, I can think of at least four anthologies that aren't included (with several more coming before the year is out), plus a computer game (yeah, there are already two computer games in the grid that I wrote for), and a non-fiction book. I'll add another row later this year if I think of it.

It's been my experience that if you write and publish enough, you quickly start to forget things that you did, even if they were only a few years ago. Having an "at a glance" cover gallery like this is a bit of an ego booster, and a reminder on the hard days that you have accomplished something.

Borrowing Against the Future

One of the most powerful tools the right has used to pull the wool over America's eyes these last many years has been their ability to define the terms used to discuss key issues like the economy. One of my favorite examples is "tax and spend."

It's been a rallying-cry of conservatives for years, and a knee-jerk tag to attach to anyone of liberal stripe.

But what does it mean?

Almost nothing, actually.

First of all, while liberals do tax and spend, so do conservatives, especially the spend part.

But what's missing from the phrase is the wonderful loop-hole that conservatives so often skate through. If we keep repeating "tax and spend" over and over (and it appears so often in the media, political advertising, and political speeches, that it feels like being stuck in a room-full of parrots all with the same trainer) it trends to frame all our thinking on government spending and taxation. "Tax and Spend" implies that those are the only two options, and that isn't at all the case.

Okay, the spend part of the equation is pretty accurate. Show me a politician who doesn't spend. Left, right, I don't care. Show me one. I'll go wait.

Pretty hard to find, aren't they? Actually, we pretty much hire politicians to spend, much as we hate the idea. They're there to administer our collective will and resources to solve problems too big to solve ourselves, and too important to ignore. conservatives and liberals (and even fiscal conservatives and some other kinds of conservatives) differ greatly on how these things are defined, and that's a legitimate area of debate, which is probably why the political machine has chosen to avoid it.

Taxing, on the other hand, is far from the only option on how to fund that spending. But it's significant in that it's the most direct and honest way of funding the government, and we can't have that, can we?

Governments, on the other hand, can borrow money, or issue bonds, which is just another form of borrowing. Sure, these just defer the eventual payment, and make it more expensive in the long run, but like running up your personal credit-card, it somehow feels like free money, something that a straight-forward tax is never going to be.

Now sure, there are legitimate reasons for governments to borrow and issue bonds, but it's the "candy-coating" factor that I'm talking about. "No money down! No payments for 90 days! What will you do with all the money you save?" Republicans spend (in different amounts, and on different things, but spending is spending) just like Democrats do. What's different is in how they choose to pay (or often not pay) for what they spend, and how carefully they obscure the facts of that payback.

Okay, I'm getting a bit side-tracked here, as I'd actually like to talk about a specific kind of "obscured borrowing," one I consider the sneakiest, most insidious, and most destructive of all. Call it borrowing against infrastructure. Call it borrowing against the future.

How this works is simple. Governments have assets, usually lots of assets. Buildings, land, vehicles, bridges, subways, equipment, computers, weapons, pipes, wires, office supplies, all kinds of things. But few of these assets are of fixed value. Many things depreciate just sitting there. Others wear out or are depleted as they're used. And most require maintenance, otherwise they depreciate faster and wear out faster. Also, in most governments these assets need regular updating, both to keep things current, and to adjust capacity of government services to follow rising (or changing) populations.

There are other kinds of assets as well that are even less obvious. Employees for example. It's hard to think of the stereotypical, under-motivated government worker as an asset, but each one represents a bank of experience, knowledge and training that would have to be replaced right along with the body. Yes, some employees are much more valuable than others, and some are much more expensive to replace. We'll get back to that.

When you run up financial debts, it's pretty obvious. When you issue bonds, its there for everyone to see. And when you raise taxes or fees, everyone screams. But all this other stuff I've mentioned is like an invisible bank account that politicians can dip into without creating much attention.

The easiest way is simply to defer maintenance. Stop fixing school roofs. Stop repairing bridges. Don't change the oil in government vehicles. Don't replace vehicles as they wear out. Don't paint. Don't repair. Don't fix.

Another way is to delay needed upgrades. Sewage plant over-burdened? Why worry? So what if you have to dump raw sewage into the river every time it rains? And if the EPA wants to fine you, well, blame it on the liberals... Fact is, most any such crisis of capacity is usually slow in coming. Almost universally it can be pushed past the next election cycle, and with luck, until term-limits kick in. Then it becomes someone else's problem (hopefully, the other party's).

The massive application of this strategy dates back to the Reagan administration, which just stopped spending money on infrastructure. We're, in many cases, only now seeing the fall-out (no pun intended) from that policy today, with collapsing bridges, crumbling roads, and failing levies. You've got to give some grudging respect. All than invisible borrowing deferred to not only decades after Reagan left office, but until he is several years safe in his grave.

And since our national government tends to change hands periodically, if you can simply stall long enough, any debts you run up will simply get handed off to the other party, who can take the blame if they actually to raise funds to pay off your debts. Yet another implication of "tax and spend" is that the person or party doing the taxing is also the person or party who did the spending, but very often that is not the case.

Reagan ran up the debt, Bush I ran it up more, Clinton paid it down (more than canceling out the Bush I years) and now Bush II has run it up to unprecedented levels.

Speaking of, a more contemporary (and far more contemptible) example of borrowing against the future is to be found in current US war in the middle-east. Of course, the obvious up-front costs of the war are already eye-bleedingly staggering (if there were some sort of Oscar for Government Spending, George W. Bush would certainly deserve the statue), but there are equally staggering hidden cost here.

The war has been grinding our military down to a nub. Equipment is wearing out at a phenomenal rate. Stockpiles of ammunition, equipment, and supplies (a lot of this stuff in turn left-over from the Cold-war era) have been drawn down and not replaced. Sooner or later, all this junk will have to be repaired or replaced, and somebody will have to pay for it.

But to my mind, the really tragic cost, the one that makes me want to spit, is the human one. This war has been run on the backs of National Guard and reserve units who have been deployed again and again and again in a way that nobody, a few decades ago, would have ever imagined happening short of an alien invasion or World War Three. These people, even the most loyal and determined of them, are exhausted. Most of them have to be thinking that, by now, they've more than done their service to their country, and I don't see how you can argue with them.

For many of them, they're going to take the earliest opportunity to get out of the service, and that means losing their experience and training.

Remember when I said a while back that some government employees are more valuable than others? Well, there are few more valuable than the modern military man or woman. The day of the ignorant grunt is over. The typical modern soldier is a highly trained technical expert not easily, quickly, or cheaply replaced. I'm finding good numbers hard to come by, but it seems safe to say that even the most basic infantryman has several hundred thousand dollars invested in them, and on the other extreme, a fighter pilot's costs are likely well north of two million dollars.

There's also the simple fact that combat veterans have an experience and perspective that can't be obtained through training at any cost, and to which a monetary value can't be assigned. The men and women who fight future conflicts and defend our shores need these experienced fighters, and we're pissing them away.

When you drive people out of the service, and we're doing so on an epic scale, you're most certainly borrowing against the future.

Of course, this only considers the people who are able to walk out of service whole and hearty (and bless them, I wish it was every one), but there are many more who come home with shattered bodies and injured minds, or who simply come home in a flag-draped box. To those people (or their survivors) we owe compensation for their sacrifices. To my mind, when you've borrowed against a soldier's life and future, this is (or should be) an immediate pay-back time.

Sadly, we still hear again and again of nightmarishly run-down medical facilities, of injured veterans denied benefits and proper medical treatment, even of the bodies of returning soldiers being treated with disrespect because somebody found a way to cut corners on the processing.

This makes my eyes red. If you're going to do this thing, run out the national debt, raise taxes, do what it takes, but don't try to hide your spending by putting it on the backs of the very people who have fought the war.

I know that "honesty" and "politician" are two words that rarely interact, but I think the Republicans have pushed fiscal deception to an unprecedented level. It's time for a hard, hard correction. I suggest when election time comes in November, that if you want any possibility of fiscal responsibility and accountability, you look for someone with the "tax and spend" label attached to them.

Sure, you may not agree with them on every detail, but it's right there on the table: what to tax, what to spend, and what to spend it on. From there you can negotiate.

The option is be left eternally wondering what the Republicans are borrowing, how they're borrowing it, who they're borrowing it from, and when you are going to have to pay it back.

What is Science Fiction Anyway, and Does it Matter?

Just stumbled on this (to me) very annoying essay that attempts to ever more narrowly define what is "real" science-fiction.

I'm annoyed on multiple levels, starting with the idea that this distinction is somehow important, moving on through how the author seems to think "real" sf is somehow superior, just on principle, to that Tolkien and Harry Potter crap, and continuing on from there.

I do, however, think there's some interesting validity to the author's idea of an scientific “event horizon” that defines whither a science fiction story is technically plausible or not. His idea is that the line between science fiction and fantasy (his term, though I think “science fantasy” is more correct, if a distinction must be made) isn’t a static thing, that a story can be written as science fiction based on the best scientific knowledge of the day, and be turned into science fantasy after the fact as science marches on.

Yet his central premise is that most sf produced today, especially media sf, actually starts out inside his speculative "event horizon," that most of it is scientifically implausible by today’s science (and probably yesterday’s as well) not tomorrow’s.

Okay, actually, I agree with this too. Where I differ is that this is somehow a bad thing. I think it's time to embrace it, fess up to the fact that it’s absurd to think that (as an example) Star Trek is, an any way more than metaphorical, any kind of prediction of the future, and that as long as we enjoy the stories, that's FINE.

First of all, I'm of the opinion that a good story rarely starts out, "An idea walked into a room." That notion has damaged sf as a literary form more than any single thing. Stories are about people, and if an idea enters into it, it is how the people react to that idea which is involving to the reader. The idea may be interesting as well, but a story is not simply a science-fact essay with dialog and a villain. This is important, because if the story is good, the failure of the science (by time or intentional design, at least, not withstanding the author's ignorance) will not significantly diminish it.

Frankly, I think that science fiction's function as a literary crystal ball predicting the future has always been highly over-rated. For starters, "science fiction" is a misnomer. Science fiction CAN'T predict science, except through guess-work, and where sf has attempted to anticipate hard science, it has almost always been wrong. Making up undiscovered subatomic particles is just fantasy with sf trappings. Even speculating about predicted-but-undiscovered particles (such as the Higgs Boson) is questionable, because, even if they exist, most likely anything you say about it will be wrong (and is likely to be proven so within a few years).

Most of what we think of as "science" in science fiction stories is applied engineering and technology, and it IS possible to extrapolate these things, to some limited extent. Jules Vern, for instance, didn't predict the submarine, or even its use in war. But he did extrapolate the submarine into a capable and useful vehicle and consider how it could be used for good (exploration, access to aquatic resources) and evil (terror attacks on shipping). He predicted lunar travel, but even by the science and engineering of his time, his technology was fatally flawed. The story's predictive value is not in that his science or technology were correct, but rather in its (quite correct) assurance that the technology COULD solve the problems involved with enough time and effort.

It’s ironic that Vern then scoffed at H.G. Wells book on lunar travel because he relied on anti-gravity metals and other such implausible devices. Yet neither book holds up to modern science, and the flaws in Vern's work are much more obvious and easier to prove. Yet Vern’s work is also satisfying in part in the his method for reaching the moon, though scientifically flawed, is at least plausible and understandable. Never mind that it would never reach the moon, and even if it did, it’s passengers would be nothing more than jelly due to the incredible acceleration. The method allows even the modern reader to willingly suspend their disbelief.

Classic Star Trek is sometimes given credit for "inventing" the cell phone. Yet all it really predicted was the shape and size of a cell phone, not the technology that makes one work, or the science behind it, or even the functional way in which a cell phone works. Functionally, near as we can tell, a Star Trek communicator was just a WWII walkie-talkie decreased in size, and increased in power. Actually, what it did, how it worked, and what those little dials and buttons did is all rather vague. From a story standpoint, that's actually good, as in being vague, it has dated less than a more scientifically-grounded device would. It served a story purpose, and served it well.

Really, that’s all most early Star Trek technology was, story devices dressed up with flashing lights, buttons, and sound-effects. Look at the elegant, self-descriptive names of those devices: transporter, communicator, shuttlecraft, warp drive, impulse engines, photon-torpedoes, phaser, tricorder. A transporter is less a teleportation device than a method of moving characters rapidly through the story (and without the expensive special-effects necessary to show a spaceship landing). A shuttlecraft isn’t a form of transportation at all, it’s a bottle to stuff a couple-or-three characters into and then crash into a planet for story purposes. A communicator is a delivery device for exposition (and so is a tricorder, for that matter). And so on…

Science Fiction was born in an age when science was expanding into a vast unknown, and when technology was advancing in absolute terms. But while technology moved slowly (by modern standards) in those days, it pushed regularlly into new realms, and seemed able to advance without limits. These days, things are much different. Technology is moving so fast these days than any such speculation is almost certain to be rendered either wrong or obsolete in very short order. And fast as it moves, it does not heave blindly into the darkness.

We live in a world where science bounds us at every turn by provable or demonstrated limits. The speed of light seems much more absolute than it once did, and time-travel far more likely to be an absolute fantasy. The list of unknown scientific things to speculate about grows ever shorter. Even the day in which you could imagine planets at random around known stars is growing to a close. We're mapping distant star systems, with new planets discovered almost every week. There are still gaps in our understanding of physics, but they're relatively small, and their practical implications far less profound than the heady days of the atomic era.

Computers continue to advance, but in such regular and predictable ways that the progress has gone on for decades, regular as a clock, far more predictable as the weather. Yes, we can speculate about artificial intelligence, or robots, but we've been speculating about those things for a very long time without a clear grasp of the technology that might make it possible. Are Asimov's robots no longer valid because of that? Hal 9000? Frankenstein's creature? The Golem?

Really, some of the best and most enduring sf isn't even about technology, it's about society and culture. A good example is, unfortunately, a story I can't name. I think it's a Bradbury story (though it might be Asimov, or someone totally different, I haven't read it in a long time). This is from memory, so forgive me if I get the details wrong, but here's my recollection about the story. It's about a future world where everyone gets from place to place using teleportation doorways, and as a result, culture has evolved to a point where nobody goes outside any more. One day a household's door breaks, and a boy walks to school. He discovers that he LIKES going outside, and even when the teleportation door is fixed, he continues to go outside. His concerned parents, of course, try to break him of this aberration. My memory of the ending is vague, except that the pleasures of going outside won't go away, and the idea spreads...

Looking at this from a scientific standpoint, it's kind of absurd. Science is showing us that certain kinds of "teleportation" may be possible, but the idea that we'll be routinely teleporting people from door-to-door is highly unlikely. The energies involved are incredible, for starters. Quantum uncertainty is another huge issue. But the story is no less valid because of this. In fact, it may have become MORE valid with time. We might turn into these people, even if the technologies responsible aren't teleportation, but some combination telecommuting, the internet, console gaming, robotic cars and general paranoia. In fact, to some extent, we're well along the way to turning into these people. The story still works as a metaphor for that. It doesn't matter if teleportation doors are possible by the most current version of physics or not. It doesn't matter if the story had used magic mirrors instead of teleportation doors.

Or look at Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands." If you haven't read this story, you should. It's about a man who discoverers a new store in town, one selling household robots. The robots are black, sleek, beautiful, and perfect. They clean house. They run errands. They do chores. They wait on their owners hand and foot. And they are completely incapable of harming humans. They EXIST to protect us from harm. It is their primary function. Never mind where they come from. Never mind how they work. Not really important.

Of course, there's a catch. The robots are TOO perfect. They move in and take away all human want, all human suffering, and in the process, all human freedom. Humans become prisoners of safety, not even allowed a knife to cut their food, least they injure themselves or others. The hero realizes this, tries to thwart them, but it's too late.

As I said, not so important how the robots work or where they come from (space, presumably from some non-existent planet via non-existent FTL). It isn't important how likely real robots are to be human-shaped or not. It isn't important if robots could really take over this way. The story is more valid than ever because it's about the slippery slope of trading freedom from comfort and an illusion of safety. It doesn't matter if the "safety" takes the form of a sleek-black-robot or a border-line fascist government, or helpful fairies that help too much. It's the sort of thing every school kid in American should have been reading post 9-11, every voter should read before choosing their next president. It's a story WITH robots, not a story ABOUT robots. That's an important distinction, and one that's lost on a lot of sf purists.

Sometimes a science-fiction can even be accurately predictive in ways that have nothing to do with the scientific device in the story. In 1971 hard-sf writer Larry Niven published a novella titled “Flash Crowd.” The story is set in a world where teleportation booths make instantaneous travel anywhere in the world possible. The basic premise is that with live television reporting of breaking events, people would naturally jump into a teleportation booth to see things for themselves. The result: instant crowd, instant mob, and potential instant riot.

In fact, “flash crowds” did happen, and they didn’t require teleportation. Live coverage of TV did play a role in some real “flash crowds” but the cell phone turned out to be a far more effective device for creating them. Ask the teen in the news a while back who threw an adult-free party at his house and invited a few friends. Apparently they invited a few friends as well, and they told other friends, and so on, until the police had to be called to break up a near riot of hundreds of teens converging on the home, drawn there by an invisible web of phone calls and text messages.

The point here is that, who cares if teleportation is possible or not, or if real teleportation would ever look or work like Niven’s teleportation booths? That isn’t where the predictive value of the story is at all. It was a “what-if” thought problem that translated to the real world in a completely different form.

If we define science fiction and fantasy as stories built on the premise or "what if?" and If science fiction (valid science fiction) is defined purely as a "what if" story that "could happen" then we're left with a pretty narrow field indeed, an even the stories that pass this litmus test are inevitably headed rapidly into the dust-bin of history, to join the huge pool of "real" science-fiction that's gone before. Whole subgenres, such as alternate history, are excluded from the canon as well. (Yes, you can scientifically justify alternate history through some application of the "many worlds" theory, but few books in the genre even bother. And of those, I rarely see it as more than tissue-thin rationalization; science as window-dressing.)

Really, for science fiction and fantasy I think the important distinction is not "could this happen," but how willing and able the reader is to BELIEVE that it could (or did) happen for the purpose of, and duration of the story: the suspension of disbelief. Fantasy has its roots in myth and legend, in a time when monsters, gods, and magic were, if not believed, then no less incredible than FTL drives or time machines are to most modern readers. Science fiction was born out of time when science and technology had largely replaced those things and in the realm of "fantastic but credible" in the public consciousness. (There was still religion, of course, but speculating about religion has always been and remains to this day, a dangerous pursuit, more likely to enrage than enlighten.)

Mind you, it isn't important to REALLY make the reader believe in the fantastic elements of the story. They can enjoy and be moved by Lord of the Rings without thinking that Middle Earth is historical truth, or that orcs and elves are real. They need only be willing to embrace them in the context of the work. The same is true of science fiction. It really doesn't matter if teleportation doors or warp drives work or not, only that the reader is willing to believe them in the context of the story. If scientific or technological trappings make that easier, then so be it.

In fact, a distinction one could make of fantasy is that the average reader has the comfort of putting down the book and knowing that the fantastic things they're just read are NOT possible. The story mentioned could make the same point with magic mirrors as with teleportation doors, but would it have the same impact if the reader could so casually dismiss it in the end? Perhaps not. But that distance also has its advantages. "The Golden Compass" can write about religion (like I said, dangerous) in a way that might not be possible in a science-fiction book, or even in non-genre fiction. The subject is dangerous, but there's the emotional and societal safety-valve that it "isn't real," making such an examination much more palatable than it would otherwise. This is true of any hot-button topic. A little distance, the different perspective provided by a science fiction or fantasy context, makes it a bit easier to approach objectively. It's a bit of trickery that Jonathan Swift understood well almost 300 years ago, and it's still valid today.

Likewise, there's great value in allowing the reader to believe that a thing could be possible. "From the Earth to the Moon" is important, not because it accurately shows how a trip to the Moon might be made, but because it makes it credible that through industry and determination, such a thing IS possible, even if the details differ. Compare that to Star Trek. We know that space travel, even to distant stars, IS possible. And while I can say with some certainty that our methods of accomplishing this will not resemble the Starship Enterprise, that the explorers aren't likely to have much in common with Kirk and McCoy, and that the aliens will almost certainly not resemble Mr. Spock, that DOESN'T MATTER. We can understand and identify with Star Trek far more easily than we can, for instance, post-human intelligences spending centuries traveling between stars in "spaceships" that resemble silicon cobwebs thousands of miles across.

If Star Trek makes us believe that such voyages, through industry and determination are possible and desirable, then the rest is just window dressing. Details. And though science fiction can't predict how, we will get there someday.