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. ↩︎
