Re: The Sparrow

On May 14, 7:19 pm, Gene <g...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> acwhe...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Andrew Wheeler) wrote
innews:1igy1pp.1yuhd6p1q8gr4=
0N%acwheele@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
> > The world does not revolve around either SF or its readers.
> The vast
> > majority of well-read people in this world have never even
> *heard* of _A
> > Case of Conscience_.
>
> This argument is idiotic. Russell is not vast numbers of
> people, she's part of the tiny, tiny minority who have ever
> been nominated for a Hugo. The attitude "I'm so brilliant I
> don't care about my predecessors", which I thought I detected a
> trace of, occurs in a context where she has predecessors.

It was fairly well-known, althought it might not have been true, that
her publishers did not want to hear about any SF predecessors or
connections with the first book. It was said that they _told_ her to
deny that she read SF. Those early blurbs that I happened to see did
not mention SF. They certainly put "fiction" on the spine and the big
chains all put the book on their fiction shelves and not genre
shelves.

At the Yale Co-op, we did that for a few months and the book didn't
sell. Then we put it in the SF section and it sold. Since we were "put
the hay where the goats will get it" purists, that's where it stayed.
The book migrated to SF shelves all over the country and won an award
and the publisher changed its attitude.

If I had read that interview during the first few months that the book
was sitting on fiction shelves, I would have blamed the Evil
Publisher. Now I work for a publisher and no longer believe that
publishers are evil. Or not VERY evil. Not all of them, anyway.

=96
Will in New Haven
 "To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee;
 For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
     -Herman Melville, "Moby Dick"