The following post has been assembled from my comments in a recent discussion on Google+.
The social aspect of the battle for SFF’s soul has been pretty well covered by others. I’ll address the business angle, which is the biggest factor that got us here, and which I’m convinced will be decisive and definitive.
Jeffro has written eloquently on the group amnesia that’s stunted fans’ and writers’ knowledge of the pulp SF canon. A similar; perhaps even worse, historical illiteracy now enforces the false notion that “The Big 5 are the industry, and it’s always been this way.”
The same propaganda machine that’s foisted PC message fic on readers works overtime to hide its own quite recent WWII-era origins. People forget that Poe self-published, & it was considered normal. 19th century bookstores had their own presses for POD.
“Publishing” poorly describes The NY houses’ business model. They’re really a consignment lumber distribution cartel. These paper monopolists cast themselves as the True Guardians of Literature.
Meanwhile, frustrated lit fic authors started slumming it as SF editors. They shifted the focus in spec fic from fun to sentence-level wordsmithing and socially relevant messages. The entryists sought validation for their literary pretensions from NY. Now we have The Fifth Season.
“What is the purpose of art?” is a self-negating question. It’s like asking what the other person wore if I say I was alone.
Even saying that art is for entertainment is a slight distortion. Entertainment is a leisure activity. Marxism gives leisure a bad rap, since Marx defined man as “the animal that works.”
As usual, he had it backwards. Man doesn’t perform work as an end in itself. Man works to obtain leisure, which is its own end.
Long story short: Oscar Wilde & MGM right. Marx wrong.
Those who use SF as a vehicle to push a Narrative aren’t making art. It’s propaganda. You might as well say that real fruit and wax fruit can coexist in the same market.
It doesn’t matter how skillfully a wax apple is made to look like a real one. I’m not eating it.
To wrap up by way of analogy, NY almost wiped out citrus and apple farmers by shipping crates of wax fruit through their lumber sales channels. Meanwhile, their shills told everybody that the wax fruit was real.
Then something happened that the lumber cartel did not intend. Individual gardeners started selling homegrown produce online, totally bypassing the NY-controlled lumber distro channels.
NY cranked up their wax fruit sculptors’ PAs to 11, but to no avail since people have taste buds.
The perfect example to bridge analogy and reality: David the Good.
Numbers don’t lie. The Big 5’s latest earnings report shows most of them taking losses (some approaching 11%) or at best breaking even. All pegged falling eBook sales as the reason for their decline.
Amazon, the #1 sales channel for print and eBooks, reports that the eBook market is still growing.
The Big 5 wish this was a zero sum game. For them, as Vox rightly pointed out, it’s a negative sum game. Not only are they losing market share, people are abandoning the one distribution channel that NY controls for one where indie dominates.
It’s already over. There will be no coexistence. There will be no reconciliation. Because you can’t reconcile with a corpse.
Jeffro also has oblivious Big Five authors dead to rights. Every writers’ panel still takes NY’s dominance for granted. They have no idea what’s happening. The wailing and gnashing of teeth on the (very near) day when the hammer falls will be epic.
You can help to hasten the inevitable:
