in Boston, "that literary SF editors and writers are having trouble selling."
Where's the Golden Age?
Ordover agrees there's a malaise in the marketplace, but lays the blame firmly on SF's practitioners. "You can't blame the market," he said.
The problem, he says, is that most SF writers and editors are so well-read that they try too hard to do something that's never been done before.
"There's too much writing and editing for each other," he said. As a result, too much SF is aimed at the aging niche of readers who've seen it all before.
That creates a conflict, Ordover says, especially when you consider the aphorism that "the golden age of SF is 12." When new readers encounter a typical literary SF novel, they're turned off because the concepts are too obscure to engage their interest.
Ordover thinks literary SF would be better off if it worried less about repeating itself and focused more on classic plots and ideas.
"You can't reject the idea of a basic first contact story just because Murray Leinster did the definitive first contact story," he said. "Most people haven't read Murray Leinster today. You can do a story like that and reach an entirely new audience."
Boldly going where others may have gone before
Ordover believes Star Trek and Star Wars are mass-market hits because they use SF's best-known images and ideas -- namely, the space battles and star-spanning adventures of the pulp era.
In addition to its tropes, Ordover also likes the optimism of pulp SF. "It's time to bring it back," he said, noting that too much current SF is "bleak."
"It's become naive to predict a world that gets better," he said. One of the reasons Star Trek is so appealing, he thinks, is because it's "about going around the galaxy and helping others because you can."
Audience appeal drives Ordover's approach to editing the Star Trek novels, and he says he measures it through the most basic method of all: sales.
"The box office is where people's vote really counts," he said. For instance, "we get two to eight times normal sales on our crossovers, so we're doing more crossovers."
A new "Wagon Train"
Multi-book series are another successful experiment, and are key to Ordover's plans for this year's Original Series books. The five-book miniseries " Star Trek: New Earth" will fill in the "missing" five years between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Ordover explains that the Enterprise will be asked to protect settlers establishing a colony months away from the borders of the Federation. The lengthy assignment will force Admiral Kirk and his crew to face long-term problems of diplomacy and military strategy.
Fans will notice an echo of Wagon Train, the Western TV series that was one of Star Trek's original inspirations. Ordover says the idea also comes from the era of Spanish colonialism, when groups of settlers would be protected by a single large warship that is relieved after several years.
As in colonial days, the Enterprise will be relieved by a new starship -- the Challenger -- and a new ongoing book series when the miniseries ends.
The new series is an original Star Trek-era counterpart of Pocket's successful New Frontier novels. Ordover says the Challenger's captain will be a former "urban street kid" and a "self-made man."
Ordover enjoys working with the books' non-TV crews, not least because there's less continuity problems involved. "The story gets to evolve," he said.
The books have also been popular -- the New Frontier series regularly competes with the Next Generation novels as the best-selling line of Star Trek novels.
Thrusters at station-keeping
This year's plans for the other lines are less ambitious. There will be more crossovers and miniseries, including the current "Gemworld" for the Next Generation and next month's "Millennium," which explores an alternate future for Deep Space Nine.
Despite the
of Ben Sisko among SPACE.com readers, Deep Space Nine has been a troublesome series for Ordover. "The very things that made DS9 such a great show on the air made it impossible as a book line," he said.
Since book production usually takes a year from idea to publication, DS9 changed too fast for the novels to keep up.
"Eventually," Ordover said, "we just got stuck in the fourth season."
Now that the series is over, Ordover hopes to do more with it. Starting in 2001, he said, "we'll be developing the future of Deep Space Nine" with books that pick up where the series left off.
Ordover's plans for Star Trek extend as far out as 2002's crossover, which will explore the long-ignored Eugenics Wars of the 1990s mentioned in the original Star Trek.
"They happened," Ordover said with a smile. "You just didn't notice."
The crossover will feature Gary Seven, Khan and "every single character in the universe at that time, including the guard from'Tomorrow is Yesterday'!"
Additional reading
Ordover is also developing a non-media line of SF for Pocket Books -- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Burning City will come out in March -- and advertising on the covers of Star Trek novels.
He thinks that media fans will make the jump to regular SF if the right books are presented to them -- the key, he said, is taking a positive approach and encouraging the fans.
He pointed to Niven's Ringworld and other Known Space stories as examples of SF that can be "completely accessible to the Star Wars or Star Trek audience."
As a lifelong fan himself, he said, he wants to see fans buying and reading all kinds of SF.
"Just don't spend the money you were going to use on a Star Trek novel," he joked.
advertisement
