And Now A Word From Our Sponsor
Geoff Ryman

I'm not qualified to comment on Scientology as a philosophy or as a practice, nor am I familiar with the nature of its relationship with New Era publications or Writers of the Future.

But I can say that the fans who organized the World Science Fiction Convention must have been very grateful when New Era agreed to help with costs. The encouragement given by Writers of the Future in the form of workshops and the opportunity to publish must have been very welcome to new writers. The professionals who helped with the workshops must have been pleased with the handsome treatment they received.

The only people left out of the equation were the readers.

And it is readers that science fiction needs to develop if it is to continue as a thriving, independent genre. Written science fiction, like most other things, has to be marketed. Like any other marketing exercise, it must continually attract new customers to replace the old ones. An established newspaper must attract young people to replace its ageing readership. Recruitment literature must be targetted at the people who are undecided rather than at those who have already made up their minds to join.

In most respects, from its kitsch and dated presentation to its inward-looking insularity, the science fiction industry fails to reach out for its full potential readership. In marketing terms, it aims for its core market rather than for new buyers. This is a fundamental mistake. Committed buyers are never enough to keep any product going. Marketing, therefore, aims to attract the undecided.

The people who sell SF seem to have given up doing this. The packaging of SF novels, for example, fails to attract a substantial proportion of young people. Compare the stylishness of most magazine or record covers with the stereotyped pandering of SF covers. Why is it necessary to sell SF as junk? The tired imagery – the armoured women, the men with lasers, the impossible machinery – actively puts off most readers of any age. Their appeal is almost solely to the fans.

Fortunately, the substance of SF is better than its marketing. One of its greatest assets is its openness. As a literary genre and as a social activity, science fiction can accommodate right wing, left wing, technophilia, technophobia, mysticism, materialism, Marxism, Christianity. It is a broad church. It can attract the young person who thinks SDI is neat; it can attract the young person who wants to see unicorns. It can be written by both Jerry Pournelle and Ursula Le Guin. Basically, it has extraordinarily broad appeal, which its marketing then narrows.

If sponsorship identifies science fiction as a whole with a particular philosophy, then SF's openness to all ideas is less visible to potential readers. If the sponsorship identifies SF with particular philosophies that are regarded by the mainstream audience as cranky, then we in turn can be even further marginalized. Simply, sponsorship can limit our already narrow appeal.

Second, I wonder if the broad church itself can be disrupted. In British politics, we have recently seen what happens when a broad church becomes too closely identified with one of its constituent strains. The identification loses part of its support. The resulting internal conflicts do further damage.

Finally, sponsorship is a way of finding a substitute for an audience. It can indeed help bring into being good things that might not otherwise exist. Britain's only SF magazine, Interzone, would not exist without sponsorship, for example. But we might find we could pay for our conventions and our magazines, and improve book sales by a more active attempt to attract an even wider range of readers. The broad church could be made even broader. By allowing us to keep old fannish habits, sponsorship encourages our insularity and cosy conservatism, at the expense of our independence. It means we don't have to aim for new readers. It means we can even avoid improving the product.

In the meantime, if we need sponsorship, we have to remember that no sponsor is entirely altruistic. Any sponsor is at the very least going to want to be seen as a good guy and to be identified with the product in some way. To accept money without expecting that is simple bad faith or foolishness. If we have a sponsor, we must expect him to have a word or two to say on his own behalf.

And we might as well be sure that we are ready to say thank you.

Marketing point 2. The science fiction industry has done such a poor job of presenting itself that many people think we're dotty. Why would a successful organization offering, as I understand it, therapy and self-development to a huge mainstream audience want to be identified with anything as marginal as SF?