Add Category
Updated
While the overall Australian publishing scene is robust, Australian science fiction writers believe their work is not being adequately supported by the industry.
"It's quite difficult to get a science fiction novel published by an Australian publisher," says Cat Sparks, a publisher of science fiction anthologies.
Sparks was the fiction editor at Cosmos, a popular science magazine, until 2016, when the magazine stopped publishing short fiction.
"Now our top quality short story writers need to send their work overseas to get a broad readership," she says.
The same issue applies, Sparks says, with novels as well.
Issue not confined to anthology writing
Sparks' own far-future sci-fi novel, Lotus Blue, is set in Australia but published by the American firm Skyhorse.
"It's an Australian story, and that's why it was so disappointing I couldn't sell it in Australia," she says.
"The American publisher wasn't worried about it being Australian. I was not made to change anything except for the spelling."
In the US, the major science fiction publishers are Tor and HarperCollins Voyager.
Sparks thinks Australian publishers' caution when it comes to science fiction can be explained by the state of the industry more broadly: the shockwaves from the the rise of ebooks and big online retailers are still being felt.
In this challenging landscape, Sparks says, she doesn't blame publishers for not wanting to try new things.
As a result, many Australian science fiction authors resort to self-publishing — or go with smaller publishers that might not have the marketing might of the bigger players.
The rise of the young adult market
There's one exception to this rule is Australian science fiction written for the young adult market.
"It's worth pointing out that they don't talk about it as sci-fi," says David Henley, a small publisher and the author of Hunt for Pierre Junior trilogy.
"YA, or young adult, is a place where sci-fi is broadly accepted. Everyone loves it in YA."
That may be because the science fiction label scares some readers off.
"I think science fiction still suffers from bad PR from the days when it was considered the domain of nerds and geeks," says Sparks.
But when you look for books in the YA section of the bookstore, they are simply ordered by author rather by romance, literary, crime or science fiction.
"I write young adult novels, and though my readership is more than 50 per cent adult, we are marketed as young adult," says Amie Kaufman, the co-author of the Starbound Trilogy and the Illuminae series.
"Young adult readers are pretty much ready to jump from genre to genre. They're not as afraid or as siloed."
The Illuminae books are promoted as "Battlestar Galactica meets Ten Things I Hate About You", but she says that in America her publisher doesn't shy away from marketing them as science fiction.
Australian-ness in science fiction
Science fiction is an internationalist genre. When a novel is set in a galaxy far, far, away current geopolitical boundaries don't have a lot of meaning.
However, Kaufman says there was a time when you could sell a novel set in space, but you couldn't sell a science fiction novel set in Australia.
"The Americans are coming around now — YA set [in Australia] is selling more into the US market."
Kaufman's own novels are set in the distant future — meaning their Australian-ness isn't as pronounced — but her characters use Australian slang, and she says her American publisher isn't put off by it.
For her part, Sparks is hopeful that interest in Australian science fiction is increasing both at home and abroad.
"We're now living in the science fiction future that was written about in the 50s and 60s. Technology is so interwoven into our lives these days. The field has never been more diverse."
Topics: science-fiction-books, books-literature, arts-and-entertainment, australia
First posted