Rachel Thompson has been reading our columns about science fiction and asked an interesting question.

“I write sci-fi and fantasy and I’m learning the market for it is as tight as a buzzard’s ass in a power dive. Its seems to me zombies have taken over the ideas and market that sci-fi once dominated. I still love old fashion sci-fi as you do but it’s getting very hard to find sci-fi in book stores and even harder to get mine published. I do Kurt Vonnegut- like social satire along with outer forms: will sci-fi ever make a popularity come-back or I’m I just pissing down a gravity well?”

I put it to our collective for responses and here’s what some of us have had to say:

Aaron Rosenberg:

The thing about SF is that it’s actually more popular than ever. Just not in print. It’s appearing more and more in mainstream movies and even TV shows (Pacific Rim and Almost Human, anyone?), and people are loving it, including people who before this would never have read an SF novel in a million years. My hope is that at least some of those new fans will realize there are–gasp!–BOOKS with the same ideas and topics they’re now enjoying onscreen, and will then become new SF readers as well. In the meantime, SF fiction continues to have a hardcore fan base which I don’t think will ever go away. Market share is certainly tough right now, though, because publishers, especially the big houses, only want The Next Big Thing–they don’t do a lot of mid-list anymore, so they’re not interested in books that would still have solid sales numbers but might not crack the bestseller lists. Fortunately, there are tons of small presses out there now picking up the slack. People just like us. :) So don’t give up hope, and make sure to explore all your options–shoot for a big publisher first because if they pick you up they can do more marketing and publicity and distribution than you’d get otherwise, but don’t  ignore or discount a small press that can still do a nice job on your book and will work a lot harder for you because they form a more personal connection with each of their authors.

Paul Kupperberg:

The market is tight all over. The genre markets may have been hit hardest, and, yes, science fiction has been supplanted in the marketplace by zombies. In mysteries, I think the market usurper is the mainstream thriller. And the Sherlock Holmes pastiche. (And cats.) I believe the more eReaders there are in peoples’ pockets and purses, the more the tendency is going to be to lean towards “lite” versions of the popular genres because they’re going to be reading them in more frequent but shorter bursts; whenever there’s a spare moment, whip out the Kindle and read a few paragraphs before it’s your turn at the ATM. In the olden, pre-corporate days of publishing, untried writers stood a greater chance of being published because there were more slots to fill on the newsstand racks and bookstore shelves. Now, with distribution so tight and expensive, publishers have adopted the Hollywood-model–put everything you’ve got into the next summer blockbuster and leave the low-budget fare that needs the P.R. push to fend for itself. Which is likely to lead it to online publishing…but I wonder how many buyers browse Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com the way they browse bookstore shelves, looking for something that will catch their interest, rather than logging on to buy a specific book or author they’ve just heard about. So small publishers are the future.

So small publishers are the future. The SF marketplace may seem a bit slow now, but as readers increasingly buy books online, the e-reader marketplace for SF will continue to expand.

And often, as it does, the quality books will rise to the top and connect with an audience hungry for those kinds of stories.

Robert Greenberger:

This weekend’s Washington Post listed their top 50 novels of 2013 and Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining is the only genre book to make the list. This does not mean that science fiction, fantasy, and horror are no longer being read, but they never get the same serious analysis, review, and exposure as mainstream fiction. It has usually been this way. While Mysteries seem to get a lot of coverage, thanks to the best selling status of so many authors, every other genre usually gets short shrift. It seems that the very idea of writing in a genre from Westerns to Military appear to be looked down upon despite how much of out mainstream media output is entirely made up of genre material. Apparently, reading is reserved for more highfalutin fare.

And yet, so many of us are writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction, just appealing to a smaller, more dedicated audience. Small presses such as Crazy 8 Press let people find the fiction they like and in many ways, there is more available to readers thanks to digital publishing. The mainstream houses continue to also pump out these genres with new imprints announced with encouraging regularity.

When did science fiction begin? It’s an interesting question. And as we decide where we’re going as practitioners of the genre, maybe we should think about where we came from.

Many a hardcore fan will tell you that the backbone of science fiction is the written narrative. After all, Hugo Gernsback, generally acknowledged as the father of the genre–though he preferred the term “scientifiction” to “science fiction”–published magazines made up of short stories.

And if we go a little further back, there are the pulps, and before that Herbert George Wells and Jules Verne, and even further back Mary Shelley’s dark and disturbing cautionary tale, a little piece she subtitled The Modern Prometheus. Should we consider Gulliver’s Travels a piece of science fiction? How about Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, written a few short years after the English started their colony in Jamestown? We can argue until the cows come home (where were they, anyway, and what were they up to? Something to do with bovine-human hybridization?) about which of these works got the ball rolling, but one observation is inescapable: They were all written narratives.

Me, I’d argue that the first example of science fiction wasn’t any of these estimable artifices, and that it wasn’t a written narrative either. Ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A: The Birds.

Not the Hitchcock movie, though that certainly has its place in science fiction lore as well. This is the comedy by Aristophanes, first performed at a festival in Dionysia in 414 B.C. (or so I’ve heard; I wasn’t present at the time, contrary to what some of you may be wondering). The Birds is about two Athenian citizens, Pisthetaerus and Euelpidies, who encourage the birds of the world to built an ideal society, which the Athenians call Cloudcuckooland. Groundbound humans are so impressed with the place that they forget to sacrifice to the Olympian gods, who visit Cloudcuckooland to protest. SPOILER ALERT: The Olympians fail and the bird society prevails.

The word “utopia” wouldn’t exist for a couple of millennia, but that’s exactly what Cloudcuckooland was. It asked the essential “What if?” question–in this case, “What if we built a society from scratch?” And that’s what made it science fiction, as much so as Asimov’s Foundation or Blish’s Cities in Flight.

George Clooney as Pisthetaerus? Anthony Hopkins as Zeus (not such a stretch now that he’s played Odin)? John Malkovich as Prometheus, who tries to hide himself under a parasol at one point in the play? Okay, not likely. But The Birds unequivocally holds a historical place on the science fiction mantelpiece. And if you’re Aristophanes, that’s something (wait for it) worth crowing about.

Experience has taught me that I shouldn’t expect a whole lot from adaptations across media. In fact, I’ve managed to reach a sort of Zen acceptance of adaptations. I have delved the secret which makes the good cross-genre adaptations a pleasure and the bad ones irrelevant.

Also, let’s not forget that I came of age at the dawn of the cross-platformization of brands. Mine was the mid-1960s generation at the peak of Saturday morning animated spokesbeings, when Bugs Bunny not only starred in his own animated series but was also used to pitch the cereal sponsoring the show and was featured on the cereal packaging as well. My awareness of science fiction comes from old TV shows, most notably The Adventures of Superman, to which I was introduced first through the syndication of the 1940s Fleischer Studios cartoons and the comic book, and The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone. So early on I was more or less aware that a character could exist simultaneously in a variety of iterations. My immersion into comic books solidified that awareness as I saw that not only didn’t every writer treat characters consistently from one title to another, but once they got into the hands of people outside the comic industry, all bets were off. Any resemblance to the character as portrayed in the comic book source material is purely coincidental! The 1960s Batman, for example.

That being said, and with the recognition that it’s necessary to make changes to a property or story for the transition from prose to moving pictures, there have been a few successful attempts. A favorite book that became a favorite movie is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, filmed by George Roy Hill in 1972. Vonnegut’s story of a man unstuck in time was adopted by the anti-war movement as an absurdist analogy to the growing resistance by Americans to the war in Viet Nam, and Hill’s deliberately paced adaptation captures the peace of Billy Pilgrim’s befuddled acceptance of his existence. Its success comes not so much from how closely it adheres to the book–I don’t watch a film with a checklist to gauge its fidelity–but how close it adheres to the intent of the book. I mean, no filmmaker could possibly film every page of Moby Dick, but director John Huston and screenwriter Ray Bradbury sure did find a way to boil the essence of Melville’s 600+ page novel down into a faithful two-hour thriller.

A more recent example of a film faithfully capturing the intent of its source novel is John Carter. Yes. John Carter. The 21^st century successor to Heaven’s Gate as biggest Hollywood mega-budget bust. I haven’t read A Princess of Mars in forty years so I’m sure some purist can tell me why I’m wrong, but Andrew Stanton’s 2012 John Carter seemed to strike all the proper chords I remembered from the books (don’t asked me why this great film tanked; I can only blame it on marketing). A lot of the current movies based on Marvel Comics properties have also found the right chord, tapping into the sense of wonder and epic excitement that made the comic books themselves work.

My two favorite science fiction novels, Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clark and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, have never made it to the big screen. Maybe if someone did attempt to do it, I would be as unforgiving as the old, original Star Trek fan is to the J.J. Abrams remakes, but I hope I fall back on the secret that allows me to shrug off objectionable adaptations

No matter how good, no matter how bad, the original source novel or TV show or movie is still right there, on your self, waiting to be read or watched again.

When I was six years old I met my first alien. He hailed from a planet called Krypton but looked like you and me. Growing up, every fall meant I would come down with bronchitis and wind up in bed for a while. That pivotal year, I was given an issue of Superman and was hooked. A few years later, my fascination with the four-color hero expanded to all manner of super-heroes which was a short leap to television, movies, and finally, prose.

I still recall being at Mid-Island Plaza with my dad, going into the Cherry Hill Bookstore and have him take me to the science fiction section. He scanned the shelves and plucked a copy of Asimov’s Mysteries for reasons lost to time. It was my first adult science fiction book – and I still have it.

So, for the last 50 years or so, I’ve been engrossed with all manner of science fiction. That means I’ve consumed a tremendous amount of fare. Truth be told, nowhere near enough of the classic or modern day prose, but I remain a fan. It also means it takes a lot to enthrall me and a lot less to annoy me.

There were moments of sheet bliss such as the first time I watched Star Wars in a theater, feeling like a kid once more. George Lucas successfully nailed the gosh wow feel of the old movie serials I grew up watching in reruns on weekend television.

I still recall the excitement my college friends and I felt when Battlestar Galactica was going to debut on a Sunday evening. We all gathered at Ricky’s off-campus house and had dinner, settling onto the couch to watch. We were uniformly appalled at how shoddy it felt with a tired script and weak actor (Lorne Greene notwithstanding). Thankfully the suck was interrupted by the news that Carter brokered a deal with Israel and Egypt. A short while later, I was even angrier at the travesty that was NBC’s updating of Buck Rogers, ignoring the source material.

Successful science fiction in the comics was easily done as witnessed by EC’s wonderful works, which I discovered in paperback form in the 1970s. Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach also showed how it was done during that same decade so I kept wondering why television kept getting it wrong (a decade later they began figuring it out).

I have a stack of science fiction books on my TBR shelf, some dating back a decade or more, some from last year. Ask me the last great one I read, the title that immediately pops up is Connie Willis’ The Domesday Book, which I read only a year or two back. There’s still a sense of wonder in a tale well told. Being invited into someone else’s imagination is a nice vacation from my reality and I marvel at where their ideas come from.

May I never lose that interest in what comes next.

After four days, Michael Jan Friedman’s Kickstarter campaign for his new novel, I Am The Salamander, is right on pace to meet its goal of $5,000 by November 16th–and he’s got a team of 27 backers to thank.

“I can’t tell you grateful I am to these wonderful people for meeting the challenge I laid out for them,” Mike said, “and there are many more who have helped to spread the word, for which I’m grateful as well.”

I Am The Salamander is the story of a teen-aged superhero. But it’s not just his strange powers that set him apart from the crowd. It’s the fact that he’s a cancer survivor–a creative risk that Mike has decided to undertake.

“People don’t like to talk about cancer,” he said. “They don’t like it in their fantasy books. It’s too real. But it’s among us. And hope is such a big part of the formula for surviving cancer. If I Am The Salamander can offer even one young person the strength to plug on against the odds…that’s a goal worth the risk, isn’t it?

“One of my backers has a child who survived cancer. That’s about the most beautiful thing I can think of. It inspires me to make I Am The Salamander the best book it’s in my power to write.”