Elwood's significant presence in the genre anthology field in the mid seventies is not without its detractors, whose criticisms range from professional to ad hominem. Many of them are summarised in senior editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's original essay on Elwood, which was for some time the basis for this article .
A review of Elwood's 1976 anthology "Six Science Fiction Plays" in the
Star Trek fan magazine "Enterprise Incidents" remarked that except for the inclusion of the original teleplay of the episode The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison, the book was "another excursion into mediocrity by Roger Elwood".
Market flooding
Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's historical study
Trillion Year Spree (1986) says of the
theme anthology:
- "The seventies had also seen the growth of another phenomenon — the theme anthology. A vast number of such original anthologies, most of indifferent quality, glutted the market, to the detriment of writers, editors, magazines, and publishers alike. An editor previously unconnected with the SF field was mainly to blame, Roger Elwood. At one stage, estimates suggested that twenty five per cent of the anthologies on the market — numbering hundreds — had been edited wholly or partly by Elwood.
- "The bubble burst dramatically in the late seventies and markets for new writing shrank dramatically and suddenly"
According to Nielsen Hayden, Elwood is best remembered for "the bizarre episode in which he flooded the SF [anthology] market in 1972-1975", which she credits with the collapse of that market.
- 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.
Publishers
Publishing houses which published Roger Elwood's anthologies:
- 1964: Paperback Library
- 1965: Paperback Library
- 1966: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
- 1967: Tower
- 1968: Tower
- 1969: MacFadden-Bartell (3x)
- 1970: MacFadden-Bartell
- 1971: ---
- 1972: Avon, Chilton, Fleming H. Revell, MacFadden-Bartell
- 1973: Avon (2x), Concordia, Doubleday, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, Follett, Franklin Watts, Harper & Row, Macmillan Publishers (2x), Manor, Rand McNally (2x), Random House, Trident, Walker, Whitman
- 1974: Aurora, Berkley/Putnam (3x), Curtis, Dodd, Mead and Company, Doubleday, Franklin Watts, John Knox Press, Julian Messner, Lerner SF Library (8x), Pocket Books, Rand McNally, Thomas Nelson, Trident
- 1975: Berkley, Berkley/Putnam, Bobbs-Merrill, Evans, Follett, Manor, Prentice Hall, Warner
- 1976: Archway, Pocket, Washington Square Press
- 1977: Bobbs-Merrill Company
Contract timing
It seems likely that Elwood's "mid-70s tidal wave" of anthologies were contracted at least two to three years prior to publication. Additionally, all but a couple of the contracts for Elwood's series were modest one- or two-book deals, spread out over more than two dozen publishing houses.
To quote Nielsen Hayden:
- Anthology sales had tanked long before all the books came out, so it seems likely they were contracted significantly ahead of publication; potentially, they may all have been contracted for in the early '70s.
She believes publishers were unaware of the situation until the books started coming out, and that this helps explain the publication pattern.
- Publishing houses that got wind of the incipient debacle might easily have set forward the publication dates of the anthologies they had under contract, trying to avoid having them come out in the same month as a half-dozen other anthologies.
Quality
Amongst other criticisms, which she suggests "are more conjectural, but not easily dismissed", Nielsen Hayden nominates "the quality of the books themselves". She describes Elwood's theme anthologies as "carelessly edited" and "low-grade", although she allows that "some of Elwood's collections were quite decent," and that "all of them featured some good writers and good stories."
Professionalism
Elwood is reported to have underpaid authors . Additionally, Nielsen Hayden discusses speculation about the financial details of some of Elwood's projects "that by all indications should have had generous budgets" but were "peculiarly long on authors who had slight or nonexistent publishing credentials outside of Roger Elwood projects."
Elwood's eight-volume YA hardcover
Lerner SF Library (1974), with three or four stories per volume, includes stories from three authors whose only recorded sale, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, was to that book; two more authors who only ever sold stories to Roger Elwood; and one whose only first sale was to Roger Elwood, but who had the story picked up for republication elsewhere.
SF hardcovers were relatively uncommon in the 1970s and the stories were supposedly original commissions, so Nielsen Hayden believes it is reasonable to assume that this was a well-funded project. Normally the entire advance for an anthology is paid out to the anthologist, who then purchases story rights out of his or her own pocket, retaining any unspent advance money.
Given the availability of experienced short fiction writers at the time, Elwood's choice of inexperienced authors aroused suspicions.
Nielsen Hayden suggests that:
- an editor who's commissioning stories on a set theme for a premium project doesn't normally buy work from writers who have no track record. Editors know better than anyone else how many people there are who think they can write, and how few of them are justified in holding that opinion.
The
Lerner SF Library also contains two stories by Earl and Otto Binder, and a third story by Otto alone.Given Earl and Otto Binder ceased to co-author stories in 1955, and that Earl died in 1965 and Otto in 1974, it seems unlikely any of these stories was a commissioned work.
Industry impact
Nielsen Hayden reports that, prior to Elwood's involvement in the market, anthologies and collections were very popular with readers, and were considered by the publishing industry to be "a surer bet than novels." She goes on to accuse Elwood of "singlehandedly breaking the story collection/anthology market". By "wreck[ing] the readers' faith in collections" she says, Elwood "squandered industry credibility accumulated over decades by better anthologists". Anthologies and story collections, she suggests, became "a hard sell".
- That's made life harder for short fiction writers, who lost their second-rights sales, and damaged the readers' relationship with short fiction. It's been a real loss. Short fiction was always the genre's R&D lab.
Whether Elwood's impact has been a long-term one, as Nielsen Hayden maintains, is difficult to discern from the figures, which point to continuing high numbers of anthologies published annually .
While declining to accuse Elwood of dishonesty, Nielsen Hayden suggests that:
- there are no very creditable explanations for his flood of anthologies in the mid-1970s; that the publishers who bought them would never have done so if they'd had any idea that he was carpet-bombing SF publishing with anthology projects; that many of his anthologies (if not all the stories in them) were well below par in terms of their quality; and that the subsequent collapse of the anthology and story-collection market did long-term damage to science fiction as a whole.
- Elwood professed to be as surprised as anyone when the anthology market collapsed — an odd claim, considering he'd been a working anthologist for a decade or more — and lightly departed the SF field to pursue other interests.
