SF Market

[William T Goodall]

On 11 Apr 2008, at 20:19, jon louis mann wrote:
> 10,000 sf/fantasy novels published since 1960 and at least 5000  
> before?

Just SF. Probably the same again for fantasy. In 1990, according to  
the figures from Locus quoted by Gardner Dozois in his summation of  
the year, there were 281 new SF novels, 204 new fantasy novels, and  
168 new horror novels. In 2006 the corresponding figures were 223, 463  
and 271 (showing the continuing rise in popularity of fantasy compared  
to SF). Without looking up all the years I'd estimate about 4000 new  
SF novels published just since 1990.

If you go to the MIT SF library at

http://stuff.mit.edu/activities/mitsfs/homepage.html

which contains "both fantasy and high-tech sf, including sf horror"  
and " includes some foreign-language material and over 90% of all  
science fiction ever published in English" it appears to contain about  
30,000 titles and a quick check showed it missing some that I have in  
my collection.

>
> i was a pretty heavy sf reader back then and running out of quality
> sf, so that i was driven to reading heroic "doc" smith, lensmen, and
> robert e. howard, "conan the conqueror" series.

Most books are out of print at any time. Most only ever appear in one  
edition and are never reprinted. Taking DAW as an example - their  
publications constitute only a small proportion of my sf collection  
and they have published over 1400 titles since they started in 1972 of  
which the majority are original SF titles (not reprints, fantasy or  
horror). Most of them are out of print.

Collectables Maru

-- 
William T Goodall
Mail : wtg at wtgab.demon.co.uk
Web  : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/

Most people have more than the average number of legs.