The Gatekeepers

The development of SF as a genre has been directed and determined to a significant extent by editors. They established their preponderant influence at the beginning of this century with the appearance of the first magazines devoted exclusively to producing SF in a “closed milieu.” Frank Munsey, first, and then other editors of “pulp magazines,” changed the reading habits of an entire generation. Witness the power of the stance and editorial biases of Hugo Gernsback (the creator of Amazing Stories |1926-29|, and later of Wonder Stories), and also of the subsequent policies of the SF magazines of the between-wars period. The power of the editor culminates in the person of John W. Campbell, who actively sought certain types of stories and intervened directly to influence the work of the authors whom he recruited. Out of the needs and preferences that Campbell made Astounding a vehicle for between 1937 and 1950 came the “modern” understanding of what SF is. New criteria and new models came on the scene in the 1950s: but here, too, the influence of the magazines and their editors-in-chief has been a determining factor. Indeed, that editorial influence can be gauged by the fact that authors frequently subordinated financial considerations (which in any event remained for most of them too modest to live on) to those of the editorial policy and prestige of the magazine in which they would choose to “place” their fiction. In the 1950s, the paperback market began to expand, and with it the thematic field of SF. Even so, the 1960s’ influence of the last of the Gatekeepers was considerable: Michael Moorcock, in his capacity as editor of New Worlds, encouraged the bold departures from previous practice which produced the generic revolution known as the “New Wave.” These days, however, books have taken over from magazines as the principal format in which SF is read. It is now the book-publishers, rather than the magazine editors, who determine what counts as SF—and these days almost anything might be marketed under the rubric. In short, the Gatekeepers have disappeared, and the kingdom that they guarded is in the process of falling apart. (RMP)

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