Persons of a certain age—not old, you understand, just mature enough to remember inkwells in school desks, paddle-wheelers plying the Atlantic1, and the days when “computer” was a job description, not a machine—often enjoy making helpful comments on the current scene2, some more useful than others. One that I have heard several times: the number of science fiction and fantasy books now published is too large for any one person to read in timely fashion. Let’s discuss.
The average Canadian reader3 reads only about seventeen books a year. A book and a half per month won’t keep up with a single imprint, let alone all of them.
Even if we limit ourselves to Books Georg (someone who reads a book or more a day, the literary equivalent of Spiders Georg), the situation isn’t much better. A book a day adds up to 365 books (except in years divisible by four, when it totals 366). That would not even keep pace with the 1,500 or so new speculative fiction books listed in Locus each year. And it is certain that Locus does not document every text that could be classified as speculative fiction.
When did SFF transition from a field readers could be expected to have covered thoroughly (thus ensuring common ground for conversation at fannish gatherings) to one in which each reader was aware only of a subset? One might think this question unanswerable, but there is some pertinent data.
In 1953’s Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future (edited by Reginald Bretnor), Anthony Boucher estimated that there were forty-one SFF books published in 1949; sixty in 1950; fifty-seven in 1951; and forty-five in the first two thirds of 19524. That seems easily doable, at least for Books Georg. Except, of course, it doesn’t really account for everything published in the SFF magazines of the era, of which there were many.
Jumping forward a generation, Lester del Rey’s 1972 Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year asserts that there were 195 new SFF works published that year. By this point, the number of SF magazines had plummeted sharply from the Eisenhower-era high. Still, 195 + Analog + Galaxy + If + The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction probably kept Books Georg busy. In fact, as a Books Georg myself, I know for a fact that there’s lots of stuff I never saw, although here I am inclined to blame spotty book and magazine distribution rather than book and magazine superabundance.
Skip forward another generation to Gardner Dozois’ 1993 The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection. Despite 1992 having been a rather grim one for speculative fiction, with publishers cutting back lines in the face of weakening demand, Dozois suggested there were about 710 new speculative fiction novels. Unfortunately, Dozois did not quantify the number of anthologies. Nevertheless, 710 new SFF books + Analog + Asimov’s + F&SF + Omni + Amazing + Weird Tales + an unknown number of anthologies seems insurmountable even for Books Georg.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that sometime between the 1970s and 1990s, SFF became too large for even avid readers to keep pace. Once that happened, it was inevitable that the field’s readers would become overlapping but heterogenous groups. It would be entirely possible for two Books Georg to discover that despite reading a book a day, they had read no books in common.
This is all nice and mathy. Too bad for me that I just reread Who Killed Science Fiction, Earl’s Kemp’s Hugo Award-winning essay on the state of science fiction in 19605. Contributor C. L. Barrett, M.D. observed:
What we also forget is that from 1922 to ’23, the time I can remember, I knew everything that was being published and read everything up until the 1940s. Since that time, it has been impossible for any one person to read all of it.
Barrett asserts the field was too big by the 1940s, when Gernsbackian SF was at most twenty-two years old. Was there ever really a time when people actually could read the whole field? Or is that just a story older readers tell themselves, with the line between “fully known” and “too big for one person” drawn at the moment the reader became aware how large the SFF field is? I suspect the latter.
- Which is to say, 1969.
- Such as “modern music is too commercialized and lacks the timeless qualities of classics like ‘Sugar, Sugar’ and ‘Honey,’” “Today’s kids dress weird; what ever happened to paisley, bell-bottoms, and stripes?” and the ever popular “In my day, students didn’t need an app to locate the Austro-Hungarian Empire!”
- A quick survey of my neighbors suggests that most people live in Canada, so it’s reasonable to use Canadians as a universal measure.
- Which might mean sixty-seven for 1952 as a whole? Except Boucher felt that the books published per year had plateaued.
- A general review of which will appear over at Seattle 2025 WorldCon’s Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow blog.
Just like the true Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve…the year that the SFF field became too big to read is when you as a reader grokked just how large SFF as a field is.
My grade-school desks *did* have inkwells.
I don’t think I’ve ever been able to keep up with SF, and I was reading it while still using those inkwell-bearing desks.
I read ‘Stranger in a Stranger Land’ in those days, when I was 12-13. There’s an education. :-|
No inkwells in our desks! Just holes where the inkwells used to be….
Evidence from Star Trek suggests functioning inkwells persisted into the 23rd century in that timeline.
***
KIRK: Then he was a very strange small boy. One the other hand, he was probably doing things comparable to the same mischievous pranks you played when you were a boy.
SPOCK: Mischievous pranks, Captain?
KIRK: Yes. Dipping little girls’ curls in inkwells. Stealing apples from the neighbours’ trees. Tying cans on
(He’s stopped by the look of horrified incredulity on Spock’s face.)
KIRK: Forgive me, Mister Spock. I should have known better.
SPOCK: I shall be delighted, Captain.
***
My first elementary school was still teaching writing with cartridge pens in third grade in the mid-70s if not dip pens, but I never saw them again after we moved the next year.
Kirk is a history buff, so he may have been speaking figuratively.
I should clarify that I don’t mean too big in a negative sense, that it should be constrained to keep it small. But with the growth of the field comes a point where multiple, non-intersecting conversations are inevitable.
I suspect that Jules Verne was still publishing the last time one person could reasonably have read all the SFF out there, as long as one excludes the Matter of England and the Matter of Rome from the category. If one doesn’t, then probably sometime around when Gutenberg introduced moveable type.
Jules Verne is something of a special case, because death did not impede his rate of new books anywhere near as much as you’d expect.
I started reading SFF in the mid-70’s, I was a voracious reader, and I never even tried to keep up. I also read popular history and science books.
Yeah, the days of a shared canon are long gone. The best you can hope for is to have a handful of well-known touchstones, usually works that have made it into the big leagues of popular culture and that everyone can be expected to have at least some familiarity with. Fans find other fans by starting with the “everyone has heard of it” stuff, then looking for any other points of shared interest, and from there recommending works to each other. That way, any two random Books Georgs may share almost nothing in common other than “Yeah, I know what a Hobbit is,” two Books Georgs who know each other for a while will have built up a library of shared experiences.
After all, with there being too many books to possibly read, your best bet is to try a few things at semi-random, then pool impressions with friends and acquaintances. Maybe a book is only popular with your circle of friends, but that’s enough, eh?
A multitude of books does not impede having a shared canon. Thomas a Kempis was complaining about an excess of books back in the fifteenth century; the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries did not find this an impediment to creating an English canon where there had been none before.
A canon (more-or-less) is the books one takes as a guide, based on some form of consensus. The problem with SF/F is that it’s too young for any such consensus to have really settled out,
The other problem is that SF/F isn’t one domain. It’s not even two domains (SF and Fantasy); near future cyberpunk and space opera SF are disjoint fields. de Lindt’s style of urban fantasy and Jim Butcher’s don’t have much in common, either, and Little, Big, is further away again.
For me, it was sometime in the 80s, but I wasn’t expecting myself to read everything, just what I was interested in of what was available to me, so a good bit.
For me is was around the time mortgages and children entered the picture. Before that I’d read everything that attracted my interest but after I found myself filtering out more due to money/time.
Scaling up the scope slightly, when I came to MITSFS (MIT Science Fiction Society) in 1975 our monthly order from the distributor from whom we purchased books was ‘send us everything’ (hardcovers and paperbacks, no magazines.) By 1977 that was no longer true, our budget could no longer cover all the books available for sale.
My effort to read the entire field, begun some time around 1974, is probably what derailed me from reading everything published in a year at that time. Sadly, I started in the As. Asimov had written 300 books by then ..
The upside to an expanded field is that I don’t *like* everything that is published in a year, but there will still be as many anti-colonial novels in a year as I can read.
I think that the fallacy of this idea is that SFF is anything like a homogenous whole. When I was a kid in the 1960s there was a lot of juvenile and YA SF that only seemed to be known in Britain and Europe, and was probably little-known elsewhere. I knew nothing about SFF that was only available in other languages then, and very little now.
In the Seventies I was a voracious reader but there were big categories I hardly ever looked at – the weirder areas of Paranormal Romance spring to mind, but I also wasn’t a fan of MilSF at the time – I later encountered some examples that I thought were worth reading, but there are huge swathes of Extruded MilSF product I probably missed. There’s endless stuff on the borderline between SF and action thriller – was The Satan Bug SF in its depiction of biological warfare? What about Doctor No, or Moonraker? How much of that stuff makes it onto the lists of new SF? What about graphic novels, comics in general, and so forth? What about TV and film novelizations?
I think that this goes back to the old argument that SF is “what I point at and say is SF” or something of the sort. Different people will be pointing at different areas, and while there may be some overlap a lot of material will be omitted from any given list of new material in print.
If SF was homogeneous, it wouldn’t really matter that we’re reading different subsets.
I had to look up the Damon Knight quotation recently, so in the spirit of fannish politeness allow me to correct you: he said “(science fiction) means what we point to when we say it.”
I surveyed my neighbours and they all live in Canada as well, so I think we’re good there.
I was curious so I went on to my porch and shouted “is anyone there” but got no response. I concluded that houses exist but neighbors don’t.
That’s odd. The survey of my neighbors found none live in Canada. I think the evidence shows “Canada ” is a mythical place, like Shangra-La.
Half of my neighbours are sheep, which is strange, because I don’t think I live in Wales.
Could you be living in New Zealand?
I don’t see sheep around here, any more (the sheep in my hometown were replaced by, alas, a Walmart). Are sheep extinct?
Are you in Utah?
I have no hope of keeping up. Even restricting my lists to books mentioned in Tor which don’t mention horror and are available from the seven libraries i have accounts with, I still see my TBR list (currently over 100) growing faster than I can read them.
C’est la vie. At least I always have something to read. Now remembering what I’ve read at my age (inkwell hole but no inkwell) is another issue.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/76/ might be useful here, and estimates the last time at which someone could keep up with all English language books as the late 1500s.
However, we can probably agree that not every work published since 1500 was SFF. Agreeing what proportion were might take longer.
But it was harder to read in the 1400s.
Lesstimehadtobespentworking outwhatwasawordandwhenanewthoughtbegan
with the introduction of spacing between words, paragraphing, and punctuation.
It depends on whether you classify religious holy books as historical fantasy. ;-)
Fascinating essay and comments! I’ll just note that you have combined two different questions (at least) in your essay: being able to make an attempt at “reading the whole field” (meaning, I take it, to at least survey previously published work in addition to keeping up with the current year); and reading what is now published in a timely fashion (which I take to mean keeping up with the current production). If the first, that pushes it back quite a way before the second.
When I was in HS, and even (to a lesser degree) in college/grad school, I read voraciously. Now, I am lucky to get even a book a week, what with family, work, and increased work load. It takes a lot of time to keep up a house that can hold a huge pile of books. When I was a kid, my parents handled that part (and also read at a rate that is, to me today, breathtaking).
But I think the “mainstreaming” of SF/Fantasy is certainly partly responsible; today, a much larger percentage of published works are SF/F/H than was the case in, say, the ’70s when authors bemoaned the “ghettoization” of the genre.
My count of novels published by year from the Internet SF Database says in 2019 there were 8,293. Now that could well be counting multiple editions (hardcover, paperback, ebook) and certainly includes reprints, so it depends whether you want Georg to just ignore books once their first year of publication has gone by.
For comparison, my counts from ISFDB for 1949 are 152, for 1964 (after Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, and the almost nuclear war of 1962) are 393, and for 1973 (after Tolkien became a best-seller) are 631. With the failure of the counterculture and approach of Orwell’s magic date in the mid-1980s, the numbers jumped again (to 926 in 1984). After smart phones came out, the numbers surged tremendously. My guess is that Locus was only counting one edition of a novel from the year it was first published, but that’s still a fraction of the books published overall. I also wonder if Locus and Dozois were drawing some lines around what they count as genre that exclude some books that should be included.
There are too many books to read, and the problem is cumulative, because if you don’t read a book in the year of first publication, you still might have it on your list in later years. So that list keeps getting bigger. I’m still reading books for the first time that were initially published around the time of World War I.
The design center for SFF stories, in the bad old days, was a 12 year old boy. Now it’s a 17 year old girl. Apparently, that’s progress.
To go to a Tor source – the MOST anticipated indie books for Sep-Oct numbered 43, or over 5 books a week to keep current. And that’s just the indie books. YA adds 37. General adds 47 for September alone.
Keeping up is a losing preposition.
I have had to resort to critic reviews to try and decide whether or not to read a given book. Even so, because of the volume of critical reviews it’s difficult to do even that
I recall then-noted fan (more recently author) Don D’Ammassa saying in the 1970’s that he was reading everything that came out — but not-that-many years later he said the field had grown too much for that. ISTM that Barrett was either a slow reader or even more drowned in responsibility than D’Ammassa, who at the time had a full-time job when he said this and was also occasionally publishing a fanzine.
Use of dip pens was taught, but they weren’t normally used. Some desks had holes for inkwells. I have also been on a school field trip to go see a computer.
Besides the number of books published per year increasing, I believe (but do not have statistics to prove), that the number of pages per book has also increased. I think modern computer word processing tools are mostly to blame(?) for this, although occasionally one reads of an author who still writes everything in longhand. Some modern teenagers do still read a book a day – schools around here don’t try to stop you from reading in class, perhaps they are too busy stopping cell phone usage (which is now banned, except for when it’s mandatory).
I read recently a claim that better booking binding technology is also a factor.
Gordon R. Dickson somewhere I cannot track down just now complained about length restrictions due to the supposed lack of attention span of the target market. This would be a very impolite moment for someone to point out my interminable complaints about book length.
There are also savage length restrictions being imposed by non-ebook publishers now because of inflationary cost pressures.
I have shelves and shelves and shelves of mass market paperbacks with teeny tiny print, due to publishers trying to contain costs during disco-era Stagflation.
I believe it was the day I discovered the SFF section in my local library.
For me that was 1953 when our new suburb got a Bookmobile.
Babar is SF, right?
The Shy Stegosaurus of Cripple Creek certainly is.
“The Shy Stegosaurus of Cripple Creek”
I’d read that!
[googles]
Exists, but hard to find. Kid’s book. Love the title!
I worked in CC, back in the day before the Casinos took over. Heard some great stories . . .
You yourself keep popping up books from the 1970s that I don’t even recognize, let alone have read. I thought I was at least familiar with them all from then. Maybe they’re just leaking out of memory and I really was? Yeah, that seems likely.
I think a big part of it was the agglomeration of publishers in the 70s and 80s. Genre fiction grows massively in that period as publishers seek to increasingly rationalize publishing, developing methods of predicting book sales and potential markets. Bigger publishing houses wanted bigger sales, and genre marketing books was one of the favorite ways of predicting sales. This is super visible in romance (the grandparent of all genre publishing models), where every book is described in press as an intersection of different romance subgenres, but most of the genres boomed in this way mid-century. Dan Sinykin actually wrote a very good book on this subject, Big Fiction, that explores how the consolidation and marketing practices of big publishers and the alternative publishing models that spring up in response to them shape our contemporary literary landscape.
That reminds me of The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa where a publisher seeking best sellers prints massive quantities of books and immediately burns them.
I peg it to the late 1960s and early 1970s. TV shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek helped move SFF into the mainstream, and publishers wanted to fill the demands of readers.
And also, can we note that SFF being huge is NOT an issue? So many more voices are at the table now; it is not the exclusive domain of white writers and gatekeepers as it was for most of the 1920s-1960s. In fact, I think now is the Golden Age of SFF, as there are so many great writers from around the world taking up the SFF mantle.
And my goodness, having too much to choose from is not a problem! Let academics debate what should or shouldn’t be part of a canon (I mean, that’s what most English professors do nowadays anyway–as a professor I can attest to the incredibly nitpicky arguments that matter to no one other than academics).
Rather than being presented as a problem, we should be looking at this as a celebration: when did SFF get so big that everyone can find a way in and enjoy it!?!
OST may be a factor, but not the only one. Worldcon attendance (back when most conventions involved mostly readers) jumped right after OST started — but also in the early 1970’s, while my local convention (Boskone) almost doubled in size in the two years after Star Wars came out. ISTM that the TV shows you cite were still seen as niche interests, where I remember a line several blocks long to see the movie.
When did Terry Carr stop claiming to read everything every year?
“…we make a conscientious effort to read every science fiction story published everywhere in the world…” (Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, World’s Best Science Fiction 1969)
“Before his death in 1987, Terry Carr claimed that he read every science-fiction book published each calendar year, but at the end of his life even he had given up, saying it was an impossible task.” (Kevin J. Anderson, NRYSF 131, July 1999)
I was disappointed that by the time I discovered the existence of the Star Wars EU it was already overwhelmingly big. And this was many years ago.
Life will be much easier when our robotic overlords take care of such mundane endeavours as literature on our behalf.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/picture/2024/sep/21/tom-gauld-on-the-ultimate-writing-machine-cartoon
Everything I know about literature, I’ve learned from Tom Gauld
https://www.theguardian.com/books/picture/2020/sep/05/tom-gauld-on-the-possibilities-of-sci-fi-cartoon
I’m gonna try this
https://www.theguardian.com/books/picture/2024/dec/28/tom-gauld-on-hibernation-cartoon
The gradual decline of the backlist (after Thor decision c. 1979) probably contributed to shorter shelf life and reduced availability of SF books that weren’t blockbusters, making it harder to follow the field unless you lived next to a specialist SF book store or big library, or religiously followed Locus and were fond of mail order.
The Worlds Best-type anthologies made it possible to keep track of key short stories (until recently, anyway) . In the 80s and after the fantasy and then YA booms probably expanded the field while the shared world/media tie boom reduced shelf space. I think I felt I was keeping track up to about 1988-1990, but not after that…
…1,500 or so new speculative fiction books listed in Locus each year …
Hmm … with the seven basic plots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots),
that’s over 200 books per plot! Truly, we live in interesting times.
Dozois regularly wrote in his Year’s Best introductions that he rarely read any novels because he had too much short fiction to read.
My personal realization came in the late 80s or early 90s, though I don’t recall the exact year. I used to frequent a genre bookshop in Chicago back then. One day I went in to browse, hoping to find something interesting, and all I heard that day was talk of Ron Goulart and Jack L. Chalker. I think that’s when I decided I didn’t need to keep up with the flood of genre works each year.
I still try to read new things, though. I recently started James SA Corey’s Mercy of Gods, Neal Asher’s World Walkers, and Peter F Hamilton’s Exodus: The Archimedes Engine (a 1000 page tie-in novel to a video game). I set them all aside. I did finish Adam Roberts’ Lake of Darkness, which I liked and recommend. I’m currently reading one of Iain Banks’ mainstream novels.
I’m also moving backwards by reading stuff more than a hundred years old, like ERB’ Barsoom series, so even less room for newer books.
Added: regulars were asking back then about when Last Dangerous Visions would come out. The shop owner said not to bother too much about it, that there were better stories coming out in other anthologies. Now decades later, it’s about to be released and we’ll find out whether it was worth waiting for. Apparently only one of the stories/authors features the patented Ellison hype-man intros.
For me this realization came when my pleasure reading transitioned from being mostly children’s SFF (as an actual child and then as a children’s lit student and bookseller) to mostly adult SFF, and I find it such a relief! I’ve always been a completionist, but knowing it’s physically impossible to keep up with everything means I can feel free to focus on the little microgenres that bring me the most joy. (And when I find other fans whose reading overlaps significantly with mine, I know we’re meant to be friends!!)
Arthur C. Clarke, in the introduction to his 1983 collection Sentinel, wrote something to the effect that, “Ours was the last generation to read everything. No one will ever do that again.”
I discovered SFF growing up in the mid-to-late seventies and early eighties. However, my guess is that the forties might have been the last period when one could read almost all the genre SFF being published, before its expansion in the fifties with Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction and dozens of other mags in the early fifties.
Okay, I’ll show my ignorance. What is a Books Georg?
The literary equivalent of Spiders Georg, someone who reading habits are extreme enough to distort the reading habit stats for a large group.
I can tell you exactly when it got too big, when lazy list makes thought that SF and F belonged in the same list, which is just lazy. I’m going to pick a side, but people that like space opera are generally not going to be the prime consumer of dungeons and dragons sorta sword and magic. Two, count them, TWO, genres.
I would mark the date as 1972, when Asimov’s The Gods Themselves was published in hardcover. He talked about it at the New York Star Trek Convention in February 1972 and said that it marked a milestone in SF publishing, just like 2001 was a milestone in SF movies; that SF was being taken seriously. Within the next year, I noticed that the amount of science fiction published had increased and that it was too much for me to really get a handle on, even if I, a high school senior, had had the time or the money to read all the newly published material.
For some time now I have been increasingly bored at the number of times similar themes and plots pop up among the available literature. The more mature reader, such as your’s truly, gets quickly bored at what can best be described as plagiarism. There was only ever one Asimov and one Tolkein – as a lover of Asimov I am relieved he gets less trivialised than others, but the issue remains that the carapace of available plots and themes needs to be stretched further. The same old, same old should no longer be seen as new, particularly when it comes to literary competitions and awards.
I appreciate this issue belongs more to the fantasy end of the genre as by now I have seen so many versions of Arthurian-style legends that tedium sets in on the first page.