Star Wars on Trial (38 page)

That changed with Star Wars.

But wait, what about Star Trek, you ask. Wasn't the original Trek (1967-69) hugely popular?

Yes. And no.

The original Trek was hugely popular among those who have always made up the science fiction audience, but I don't remember it being exactly must-see TV among the general population. We read the James Blish novelizations (I have the fifteenth printing of book one July 1972), we watched the appalling cartoon, and, suddenly more visible than we'd ever been before, we accepted slings and arrows of those who just didn't get it.

Some people came into science fiction through Trek, some people remained exclusively Trekkie (or Trekker), but there weren't enough of them to affect the genre as a whole.

The Trek phenomenon is more about staying power than size.

Don't ever let anyone tell you size doesn't matter.

To paraphrase the late, great Douglas Adams, Star Wars was big. If you think space is big, well, take a look at what George Lucas did to it. According to IBM.com, Star Wars (now known as Star Wars IV: A New Hope but not by those of us who saw it first in 1977) is number two in the top-grossing films of all time with U.S. box office earnings of $460,935,665. That's almost $461 million in the United States alone. On May 25, 1977, Star Wars's opening day totaled $254,309 from just thirty-two theaters. That was Wednesday, there were fortythree theaters by Memorial Day Weekend, and the box office gross had risen to $2.1 million.

According to ABC News online, Star Wars had over the course of its first run 178,119,595 admissions. That doesn't mean 178,119,595 individuals. I personally saw it once a week for the seven remaining weeks I was posted in Victoria, B.C., five times once I got transferred to the East Coast and once in Mann's Chinese Theatre that winter when I was staying in L.A. Even the decidedly non-fannish border guard had seen it three times by 1980.

If we assume, just to get us a little closer to a number we can work with, that I was fairly typical of the non-obsessed fan and divide those 178,119,595 admissions by thirteen-recognizing that for every person who saw it once there was someone who saw it twentyfive times-we still have 13,701,507. Let me spell that out for you: thirteen million, seven hundred one thousand, five hundred seven people.

Thirteen million, seven hundred one thousand, five hundred seven people all, if not obsessed, at least fascinated, with the same thing.

And they wanted more. Science fiction was no longer weird; it had become trendy.

Movies-even the fascinatingly bad movies like Battle Beyond the Stars, which immediately jumped on the Star Wars bandwagon-take time to produce, so a large part of that nearly fourteen million headed for bookstores. Some of them very probably for the first time ever.

Those of us who were already readers had a couple of reactions. Some of us welcomed these new numbers, the thrill of being suddenly popular going to our heads. Some of us sneered at the Johnnycome-latelys with so much to learn about what it meant to be an SF fan. Some of us ran for cover. Many of us managed all three reactions simultaneously.

But what we missed, what hadn't actually occurred to most of us, with our noses buried in books and our conversations peppered with phrases like, "If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is
opinion,"'
was that these new people in our playground weren't science fiction fans; they were Star Wars fans. They wanted more Star Wars, and there were a lot of them, and they'd already proven themselves willing to pay for what they wanted.

Publishing companies are not in business to promote whatever specific branch of literature they produce. They do not exist to nurture talent or to enrich the lives of their readers. They are in business to make money. If they can also promote, nurture and enrich, even better, but if they don't make money, they disappear. Before 1977 science fiction publishers made enough to stay in business but not much more; there just weren't enough of us buying their books. What profits there were got funneled back into the companies.

Then all of a sudden a cry of "We want more Star Wars!" went up across the land and the novelization which had been released by Ballantine/Del Rey a year earlier to typical science fiction numbers was suddenly in great demand. By 1980, and the twenty-fourth printing of the paperback, there were five million copies in print. (I'm looking at my copy of the paperback, and that's the number splashed across the cover.) Five million copies at $2.50 translates to $12,500,000, and that's more than enough to be noticed.

According to Sarah Brouillette in "Corporate Publishing and Canonization: Neuromancer and Science-Fiction Publishing in the 1970s and Early 1980s," (Penn State University Press) "From 1977 alone, production was up 21%."

Thanks to Star Wars the audience for science fiction had expanded enormously. Unfortunately, the weight of those numbers insisted that Star Wars-type stories be produced. Spin-offs appeared. In 1978 there was The Doomfarers of Coramonde and The Starfollowers of Coramonde. In 1979 there was Han Solo at Stars' End and Han Solo's Revenge. In 1980 there was Han Solo and the Lost Legacy. All of these published by Ballantine/Del Rey, which had (and still has) a contract with the Star Wars Corporation.

Other publishers, understandably, wanted in on the action. How hard could it be? After all, Star Wars was nothing more than old-fashioned space opera mixed with some New Age "living force," vaguely spiritual flavoring. It was heroes and villains and very little science. It exploited the most basic of all fairy tales-the hidden prince who would discover his destiny and become something larger than life. Most of all, it was fun-George Lucas's gee sparkly method of storytelling could be enjoyed with critical and analytical thought turned off for the duration. Best of all, a book purchased by those nearly fourteen million Star Wars fans would allow a lot of promoting, nurturing and enriching of the rest of the genre.

So here we are, entering the 1980s. Star Wars is a worldwide cultural phenomenon and a useful shorthand for getting carloads of science fiction fans across international borders. Science fiction publishers are actually making money. What's the problem?

Strangely enough, the problem is that, because of Star Wars, science fiction publishers are actually making money.

One of the tenets of capitalism is growth. Corporations, the backbone of the capitalist system, must continue to grow or they die. One of the ways they do this is by acquiring profitable businesses and adding them to their bottom line. The moment small specialty publishers began to make money, they suddenly became attractive to corporate publishing.

Back in the early 1980s when I started working at Bakka Books in Toronto (now Bakka-Phoenix and still North America's oldest science fiction bookstore), there were dozens of small imprints handling science fiction. Even Playboy had a science fiction imprint. The power to buy manuscripts rested in a lot of individual editorial hands. There was room for the weird and the wonderful. For hard science and engineering. For social commentary. For literary merit. Very few of these imprints made much money when looked at one by one, but the genre as a whole, supported by those nearly fourteen million Star Wars fans, was actually running comfortably in the black.

And then, one by one, over the years the smaller imprints began to disappear.

Right now, Holtzbrinck Group, a transnational German-based media corporation, controls (among many, many others) these familiar North American publishers: Macmillan, St. Martin's Press and Torall of whom have imprints of their own. Bertelsmann AG, another transnational German-based media corporation, controls Random House, Inc., which is responsible for Ballantine, Del Rey, Del Rey/ Lucas Books, Fawcett and the entire Bantam Dell Publishing Group. Pearson, PLC, an international media corporation based in the U.K., controls Penguin Putnam, which is responsible for Ace, Berkley, Penguin, Jove, NAL, Putnam and Viking. This didn't happen all at once, of course; it took years of larger companies devouring smaller imprints who were then devoured in turn. At Bakka we called it "PacMan Publishing" because imprint after imprint got munched.

Three international media corporations control most of the genre publishing in North America. Genre publishing made profitable and therefore acquirable by the massive influx of Star Wars fans.

And again, what's the problem? It's already been established that publishing companies must make money or they don't last. Isn't this just a difference of scale?

Yes. And no.

Back before Star Wars, the people in charge of the publishing companies were, if not also the people who chose the books, not very far removed. Now, the people in charge answer to the shareholders and the shareholders could care less about promoting, nurturing and enriching. Marketing has more power than editorial, and marketing is all about numbers.

Remember those 13,701,507 Star Wars fans?

That was a rhetorical question, by the way, since I doubt at this point you're able to forget them.

And lo, as corporations began to take over genre publishing, Marketing looked at what was selling and said, "Damn, this Star Wars stuff is selling like crazy. Let's give the readers more of what they will pay us money for." And Editorial said, "Wouldn't it be better if we gave the readers books that would challenge them and make them think? Books that explore new ideas and delve deep into the human psyche trying to find out just what it is that makes us human?" And Marketing said, "Are you nuts?"

I'm paraphrasing a bit, obviously.

Now, trends come and trends go, and we might, as a genre, have been able to get through this and eventually make up lost ground, except Star Wars was not a one-hit wonder-unlike Gone with the Wind, which is the only movie ever to rake in more at the box office. The Empire Strikes Back was the highest-grossing film of 1980, and any hysteria that may have begun to die down in the intervening three years was ramped right back up again. In 1983 Return of theJedi did the same thing. It seemed Star Wars hysteria was self-sustaining for three years and then needed a hit. Unfortunately, in 1986 there was no new Star Wars, as Lucas had walked away from the series.

"What will we do?" cried Marketing. Unfortunately, before Editorial could make its voice heard, they answered their own question. Movie tie-ins were clearly hot properties. And if movies, why not television?

In 1997 John Kessel, referring to the Star Wars phenomenon, said, "Ask yourself why 60% of SF today arises out of the media."3

60% in 1997.

In 1999, Star Wars came back. It has been said that The Phantom Menace was the most eagerly anticipated sequel in the history of motion pictures. All right, technically it was a prequel, and people quoted were usually fans or in marketing, but that doesn't change the fact that most of the 13,701,507 million of us went back to Luscasland, all of us trained by over twenty years media tie-ins to expect a new surge of Star Wars books.

Nor were we disappointed.

May 2002, and Attack of the Clones goosed the marketing hysteria by earning $110 million in its first four days of North American release. May 19, 2005, and Revenge of the Sith opens at theaters all around the world to record box-office grosses. It was deja vu all over again, except this time, the marketing forces were already in place.

Amazon.com, the largest online book retailer, has a Star Wars store. The day I wrote this, a simple Star Wars search gave me 203,459 hits. At Barnes and Noble online, 1,412 hits under books alone. Even up here in Canada, with roughly one-tenth of the U.S. population, a search in books on chapters.indigo.ca came up with 1,014 responses.

In large chain bookstores, the books that sell are given the prime positions. They're given the displays with brilliant eye-catching head ers. They're given the shelves that are the most visible from the common areas of the store. What science fiction books have the highest numbers in chain bookstores? Go on. Take a look. I'll wait here. The evidence certainly suggests that those books are media tie-ins. Movies. Television shows. Computer games.

Yes, computer games. Which would not be as advanced as they are without the CGI developed by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, a company made possible by the success of Star Wars.

Of course there are other books in the stores. The year I was on the jury for the Philip K. Dick Award, I was amazed by how many smart, exciting, convention-breaking books are still being written. Mind you, many of them are coming from independent presses, most of their marketing done by word of mouth, a large percentage of their distribution done over the Internet one sale at a time, and most of them never see the inside of a large chain store where books are treated as product.

However, large chain stores are exactly what the general public wants in a bookstore. They can get a coffee and a paper and pick up the latest celebrity offering and maybe wander around a bit to see what's happening in the rest of the store. An SF fan might indulge a craving for trendy bit of fluff and then move on to find something a little more substantial, but the general public, wandering past Mysteries and into Science Fiction while sipping their pumpkin latte, takes one look at shelf after shelf after shelf of media-tie ins and thinks, understandably I'm afraid, that this is all that Science Fiction is.

Why do we care? We care because that author writing the smart, exciting, convention-breaking book is barely making a living, and, eventually, the knowledge that multinational corporations are making millions from books that say little more than "good is better than evil because good has snappier dialogue" will have one of two effects-that author will realize he or she doesn't want to be associated with that kind of thing or that author will sign on to do the next blockbuster novelization.

Cops. Lost another one.

And we could have never devolved to this point without Star Wars.

Star Wars was the grandpappy of media tie-ins and has become a shorthand definition of science fiction for an entire generation. It isn't just that Star Wars-simple, sparkly and not exactly cohesive under critical analysis-has wiped out any literary merit science fiction had gained in the minds of the general public; it's worse: there are adults, with children of their own, who have never lived in world where science fiction wasn't reeling under the weight of Star Wars. There are adults who have never known the science fiction section of bookstores when they weren't dominated by media tie-ins.