Talk:Roger Elwood
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page. | ||
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. [FAQ] | ||
While statements like "By the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn't have sold an SF anthology into the North American market if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate." may be cute, they're not exactly neutral-sounding.
This article may not be remotely NPOV, but is it wrong? That's another question, I think. Anyway, it's a classic; if someone were to rewrite this article the older version should get a web page of its own somewhere. Gene Ward Smith 00:55, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for the kind remarks. The sentence in question is mine. I've never had any personal interactions with Roger Elwood, and I doubt I'd recognize him if I saw him. The entry is as factual as I can make it. Parts of it are my own interpretations of known facts, but it's an area where I have a fair amount of expertise.
I'm a science fiction editor. I have in the past edited reference books, and I'm quite familiar with the NPOV convention. (In general I think it's a good thing, though I could wish more schoolchildren were taught that it's a literary convention, not evidence that they're hearing the Word from Olympus.)
Explaining publishing is tricky. The industry people imagine is much simpler, and seems far more logical, than the one which actually exists. Sometimes it's as important to exclude misapprehensions as it is to convey information.
There were several ways I could have described the state of the anthology market after Roger Elwood's binge. In my view, none of them were entirely satisfactory. My point was that the market had been artificially exhausted, and that bookbuyers and distributors had suffered a catastrophic loss of faith in the desirability and commercial viability of SF anthologies, such that anyone else who tried to put together and sell an anthology would almost certainly be rebuffed, no matter how good it was.
That explanation as I've just given it is much longer than the "Godiva chocolate" sentence. While it superficially explains more than my disputed sentence, the additional information doesn't help the reader understand the Roger Elwood anthology explosion and die-off. It just creates an unnecessary bunch of opportunities to misunderstand it. Compare the version above with the "made out of chocolate and priced at ten cents" passage. The latter is not going to be read literally. It conveys the necessary information. It doesn't drag in other issues and entities that don't need to be there.
It's a very clear explanation.
Are there objections to any of my other wording? If you'd like, I could poll other people in the professional SF community who are familiar with the episode, and ask them whether my language choices (bizarre, carelessly, squandered, wrecked, tanked, debacle, professed, lightly, peculiarly, neither good nor probable, never terribly good, hard to imagine a scenario that accounts for, no very creditable explanations, well below par) was inappropriate. I'm fairly sure they'd say it was descriptive, and nothing more. TNH 17:05, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
- Most of the assertions for this article don't seem to have any sources. All we know for sure is that he published a long list of books and articles. In addition, a large number of POV assertions are made about him. Have any articles or books been written about him? If not this article appears to be written entirely from the personal knowledge of some editors. That would violate our policy, Wikipedia:no original research. Unless we can find some sources, this article should be cut down to the verifiable facts, his publication history. -Will Beback 23:39, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
I understand your concerns. I'm not spoofing, I'm not pursuing some peculiar agenda, and I'm not out to get Roger Elwood. I'm a professional science fiction editor and a former reference book editor. I've been involved in the SF community, fan and pro, since the mid-1970s.
Are all my points capable of being substantiated? I honestly believe they are. But as I said earlier, explaining anything having to do with trade publishing is tricky. There's a real shortage of insider histories written for the general audience, and the ones that do get written tend to shy away from nuts-and-bolts explanations. The data's out there, but it's not in narrative form. There were general articles written about the Roger Elwood anthology deluge back when it was happening, but like so much of science fiction and fantasy's early secondary literature, it was mostly published in fanzines.
Let's suppose I had near-infinite time and energy to devote to documenting my assertions. (I wish I did. That would be a pleasant scholarly universe to live in.) I could comb through the ISFDB and compile a list of anthologies, year by year, from the earliest unto the latest, and divide them up by publisher, distinguishing nationally-distributed trade publishing houses from scholarly, regional, specialty, and other small presses. (The latter, while respectable, aren't relevant to the matter of Roger Elwood.) After that, I could reconstruct the year-by-year lists of titles published by all the houses to which he sold anthologies. When that was done, I could go through magazines like Locus and Publishers Weekly, comparing them with Books in Print, and show the range of elapsed time between the announcement that a contract has been signed, and the eventual scheduling and publication of the finished book. That is: I could mechanically reconstruct for you some portion of the background knowledge that publishing professionals carry in their heads.
Two points. First, if I did all that, I have no doubt that I could demonstrate what any SF editor at a trade house would know just from looking at a list of the dates, titles, and publishers of Roger Elwood-edited anthologies: over a very short period of time, he entered into contracts with more than thirty New York publishing houses, selling them at least fifty-five science fiction anthologies, which he cannot have failed to know was far in excess of what the market could absorb.
(Would it make you happier if I asked other SF editors and booksellers to weigh in on that question? I'm sure they would, if I asked them.)
Second, and this is the subtler point, you would still be taking my word about what data was relevant, how it related to other data, and what it all signified. The quality of the information derived from it would be no better than the quality of the information already present in the Roger Elwood entry. The only difference would be the creation of a spurious appearance of greater objectivity.
Some people find that consoling.
What are my other options? I suppose I could arrange to have altered versions of the entry published elsewhere, by confederates or sockpuppets, then quote them here. It wouldn't increase the entry's objectivity, or make it a better work of scholarship. In fact, it would make it worse, because it would destroy the provenance of the information.
Would it really be so terrible to take the word of (forgive me; I'm about to sound pompous) an expert in this field? It was good enough for the 1911 Britannica, which is hardly a hissing and a byword in the annals of reference publishing.
As for the notion of reducing this entry to Roger Elwood's publishing history: don't do that, please. It might lead you to do the same to all the other entries about science fiction, publishing, literature, et cetera, which are rife with unverified or unverifiable facts. And if you didn't do the same to all the other entries, it would look so very particular to do it to this one. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tnielsenhayden (talk • contribs) .
- Please see our core policy, Wikipedia:No original research. Even if you did the research you mentioned it would still be inappropriate material. On the other hand, if you'd care to write an article and get it published in a Wikipedia:Reliable source, then we can refer to it. The provenance of this work is that it is an original essay by you. While interesting, we don't allow essays in this enyclopedia. We all have fields in which we have special knowledge, however we all have to avoid relying on our personal knowledge when writing encyclopedia articles. Our job is just to summarize reliable sources using the neutral point of view. Finally, POV assertions, such as saying that Elwood had an effect on the field, need to be attributed to the person making the assertion ("According to Larry Niven, Elwood ruined to anthology market"). -Will Beback 22:55, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
