Letter to SFWA's Bulletin

by Gardner Dozois

Was reading the new Locus today, with the sad tributes to G.C. Edmondson, the fact of his death made even sadder by the fact that practically nobody knew who he was by the time he died. This is a field with a very short memory, and getting shorter all the time. (It's also a field where "Yeah, but what have you done for us lately?" is all too common. Jeez, if someone like H.L. Gold, probably one of the three or four most influential editors in the history of the field, didn't do enough to be remembered by anybody, what hope is there for the rest of us?) I've been brooding on and off about the dwindling historical memory of the field, something I'm reminded of every time some bright young kid who considers himself to be a core SF reader -- even writers, even SFWA members -- says that he's never heard of Cordwainer Smith, or Alfred Bester, or Theordore Sturgeon, or James Blish, or, in some cases, even writers who are still working, such as Jack Vance or Poul Anderson, and I have a Modest Proposal. SFWA has a Web page. Why not get writers to contribute lists of novels and stories that they think are good and/or particularly influential, and post them there? Young readers and writers, in my experience, are often eager to catch up with the good stuff from previous ages in SF, they just don't know what the good stuff is, and seem to have trouble finding the information. They also have trouble finding a lot of this stuff, of course, since a lot of it is out of print -- so why not, on the same SFWA page, include the addresses of mail-order services from which backlist stuff can be ordered, addresses of used bookstores that carry big out-of-print selections, specialty SF bookstores, links to other Web sites where lists of classic fiction also appear, and so forth? Features such as these could also be published in the Bulletin. This suggestion, which really is a modest one, is certainly not going to save the world, of course, or even turn the decline in historical memory around all by itself, but it's at least a start, and the good thing about it is that it's something that can be done right now, without much trouble, and with no SFWA resources needed other than the time it takes for a few people to sit down and work up such lists, and post them on the SFWA page. On a much more specialized topic, one probably of interest mainly to editors and anthologists, I think that SFWA should maintain, and routinely publish, either in the Bulletin or on its Web page, a list of who is in control of the estates of dead authors -- the number of which swells daily, it sometimes seems. It can be a real problem for an editor who wants to use a story by a dead author to find who the contracts should be sent to. In some cases, it's taken me months to find out who controls an estate, and sometimes you just can't find out at all -- which, of course, means that you can't use the story that you want to use. This would probably require someone in SFWA to actually do the legwork, but it seems to me it would be a service to the community at large, as well as to anthologists, to have such regularly updated estate lists on hand. After all, why should a Lifetime Member stop getting the benefits of membership just because he's dead? It would also help keep the work of such members from falling out of the public eye, because it would be reprinted more, because it would be easier to obtain the rights. So, a Modest Proposal (or two, I guess). Any comments? Copyright © 1996 by Gardner Dozois. First published in the Summer 1996 issue of the Bulletin of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Authors, editors, collectors, scholars: If you would like to contribute information or recommendations, please use these forms (for those whose browsers do not support forms, email instructions are included): [Add Recommendations] [Add Sources] [Add Estates] [Comments]