Chicon 2000: Editor Guest of Honor: Jim Baen
Chicon 2000
Editor Guest of Honor: Jim Baen
Rev. 09-Sep-1999
Previous: Bob Eggleton
(Table of Contents) Next: Bob and Anne Passovoy
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Infobot: info@chicon.org
Jim Baen started his editorial career at Ace Books. In 1974 he took
over as editor of an ailing Galaxy Science Fiction
and swiftly revitalized it,
corralling stories and novels by Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, Frank
Herbert, Roger Zelazny, John Varley and other notables. Ace hired him
back as its SF editor in 1977. When Tom Doherty started Tor Books
three years later, he hired Jim as editorial director. In 1984 Jim set
off on his own by forming Baen Books , which has
published, among many others, Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Lois McMaster
Bujold, David Drake, Timothy Zahn and Newt Gingrich. He has edited
almost 40 anthologies, most notably the three series, Destinies (10
volumes), Far Frontiers (7 volumes) and New Destinies (9 volumes). As
both a publisher and editor, he has been a vigorous proponent of the
space program and has worked to publicize advances on the frontiers of
science.
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An Interview with the Editor Guest of Honor: Jim Baen
by Jeremy Bloom
I could give a lengthy biographical introduction to Jim Baen, Chicon's
Editor Guest of honor. But it's so much more fun to let him tell the
stories himself....
Jeremy Bloom - To begin at the beginning, what got you into SF in the
first place?
Jim Baen - The very first SF story I read was at the age of nine:
Firehunter, by Jim Kjelgaard (although I didn't realize it was SF
then). Almost as a tip of the hat, one of the first collaborative
things I did was ask David Drake to write a sort of parallel novel and
publish them as a double. It was what happened to the tribe that
deserted Hawk and his girlfriend. Nothing good, let me tell you.
I first read a totally Science Fiction story at the age of 11. It was
"Against the Fall of Night" by Arthur Clarke, and it really knocked me
over. That got me into reading the stuff, and I was fairly intense
about SF from the age of 11 until my late twenties, as a reader. After
a misspent youth, if you will, I decided to go into publishing.
JB - But your first job wasn't actually SF at all, was it?
Baen - No, it was with the Complaint Department at Ace Books. They
really needed somebody halfway smart in there.
JB - Halfway?
Baen - [laughs] Yeah. And I qualified.
I took it on condition that if I held that job for a year I would get
to move up to editorial assistant. After the year an editorial spot
opened, and they really didn't want to give it to me - I had become
valuable. They wanted to promote me to #2 in the complaint department.
I told them "no," and then I told them "Hell, no."
Finally I became the number 2 gothics editor. I forget who was the
Number 1, but she knew a lot about gothics while I knew nothing at
all. And we both worked under Evelyn Grippo, who was the one who
bought the H. Beam Piper literary estate for the price of a funeral.
My first acquisition was actually the first pick I made out of the
slushpile: "Whispering Island," by Nel McFather. "A dream of tropic
delight becomes a maelstrom of terror on Whispering Island." That was
my first blurb, although they changed "maelstrom;" it was too
intellectual.
JB - So you learned the ropes of editing -
Baen - What I really lusted for there was the Science Fiction Editor's
job, but there was no way Pat LoBrutto was going anywhere. When Judy
Del Rey left Galaxy as Managing Editor, under Fred Pohl, I interviewed
for that job. As far as I was concerned, that was like interviewing to
be senator. I was still blinded by the glamour of publishing in those
days... But I got the job.
JB - And you ended up as Editor of Galaxy. What brought you back to
publishing?
Baen - In 1978 I was offered the job of editor at Ace SF, which was a
step up. After a couple of years Tom Doherty and I had turned Ace into
a power that was beginning to rival Del Rey. But they were
"interesting times," since Ace had gone bankrupt and been bought, and
the holding company, Grosset and Dunlap, proceeded to get into trouble
- over building their own warehouse - and sold off everything. So we
left.
It was very pleasing to me to hear a few years later that the only
profitable element when Berkeley acquired the G&D empire, was Ace SF.
And it not only lasted, and still is there, but Berkeley folded its
own SF imprint in favor of Ace.
I gloat. Hear me gloat.
JB - And then came Tor, with Tom Doherty, and now your own Baen Books.
You've worked with some superlative authors, including Niven and
Pournelle, Timothy Zahn, Lois McMaster Bujold and David Drake. Would
you say there is a "Baen writer," in the way that one could say there
were "John W. Campbell Writers"?
Baen - There are a couple of common denominators. Baen writers are
interested in the story. And in the SF aspect of it. We never will be
guilty of writing and publishing SF because SF is what we can write
that can sell. There may be some connection with marketability, but SF
is what they want to be writing, by God.
There are some in the SF field who may be guilty of writing something
that has as little to do with SF as it can and still pass muster with
the genre retailers. I will name no names, but they know who they are.
We [laughs again] are the higher and purer kind. Of course, they think
we're a bunch of Neanderthals, and that's okay. It's also what makes
horse races. I don't have much interest in writing for the sake of
putting words together prettily. We aren't big on literary tricks and
capers. Words are a tool.
I'm not trying to denigrate those who wish to write "art," if you
will. That's a worthy, if solitary pastime, and sometimes you can get
somebody to appreciate what you've done, but they're a relatively rare
breed, and unless you are extremely good you will count your audience
in the hundreds, not thousands.
When the "New Wave" came along - if I wanted to read literary
experimentation, I'd read the real thing, like the Dubliners.
JB - Are you a James Joyce fan?
Baen - (laughs) No, I'm not. That one was Judy Lynn Del Rey. She had a
Ph.D. in it.
JB - Which hat do you enjoy more, writer, editor or publisher?
Baen - Publisher. As publisher I have absolute control over
acquisitions. That's the heart and soul. Not the diddling with
manuscripts. If you have an author you need to diddle with too much -
unless it's a new writer you're trying to bring up -- then you have to
ask, what are you doing with him?
Editors acquire manuscripts. I like to think of myself as someone who
acquires authors. And likes to keep them. Which, to a degree, I have.
JB - You have been mostly successful at that.
Baen - It's a bigger picture, and it allows for both a more profitable
and healthier relationship with authors. My relationships with the
authors affect every part of my decision-making process on books. I'm
not just thinking about the current book I'm working on, but the one
five books down the road.
I'm always scheming to raise authorial profiles, because I have
gathered a group of writers - or they have gathered about me - who
like working with~ Baen, who like the freedom and the personal
interaction.
This is not to say I'm some kind of wonderful guy. But I'm not a
corporation, I'm a person. And even a halfway decent person can be
distinguished from a corporation.
JB - How so?
Baen - Any editor you work with is just as likely to be at another
house in two years. So they have a disincentive to keeping faith with
the writers, or thinking beyond the next dollar. Whereas in our case,
the goal is way down the road with many books in between, each of
which is a step on the staircase to heaven. Most people like being
treated as people, which is why some of my relationships with authors
are decades long, and some have been virtually exclusive for that
long. Even if the person treating them as a person isn't particularly
socially adept.
JB - Are you accusing yourself of social ineptitude?
Baen - I'm socially adept when I work at it.
JB - And when you don't?
Baen - [laughs] Along with Larry Niven, I am not the person people
would think of when they name "Mister Tact." And this may be why I
have a group of writers I work with - we become friends, and then I
don't have to worry about being socially adept.
JB - How about your own writing? Has your editorial career interfered
with what might have been a full career as a writer?
Baen - I don't think the writing avenue was ever really open. I can
write comedy copy, but I don't have whatever it is that makes for the
freeflowing disgorgement of thousands and hundreds of thousands of
words. It's not because I can't put sentences together. But I suffer
from some sort of permanent creative block, a "writer's block," if it
applies to those who have never written.
JB - You have done some -
Baen - Sort of. The closest I came to writing hunks of a novel was
"The Taking of Satcom Station," but the real author was Barney Cohen
and it was his novel to which I gave a very heavy edit, and my name
went on it. The tech in it is completely mine, and the
momentum-sharing cable-linked space habitats are purely mine. [Twinned
or multiple living environments linked by cables and spun for
"gravity," like two dancers that link arms and whirl around a common
center.]
They were devised for a funny purpose. Barney wanted a chase scene up
a stairwell in orbit. In my habitat modules you could take a
stairflight up the levels and have a gunfight that way.
I also think it's a sound way to develop space infrastructure. You can
have virtually coriolis-free gravity that way. And I will say here and
now that all this fufraw over space-sickness in zero-gravity
environments [which NASA is spending billions to research] will be
regarded as ludicrous when we start getting serious about stuff. It's
plain as the nose on your face that we will use momentum to simulate
gravity, because we need gravity. It's not rocket science - there are
any number of carnival rides that use the principle.
JB - But not the current space station.
Baen - It's a political space station. They called it Space Station
Freedom, and then they kept cutting off pieces, so that now it's
either Space Station Fred, or maybe just F.
JB - You've used that line before.
Baen - I stole it, too. I think it's Pournelle's.
JB - You've been a big booster of space. Do you think that Science
Fiction, as a genre, has helped shape the space program?
Baen - I think it very definitely shaped the birth of the space
program, and is still an influence although not as great. It's now a
political football. Not to say anything bad about [NASA Director] Dan
Golden, who has done a great job.
JB - Within his constraints...
Baen - I just think that the space program reminds me of a government
agency.
JB - But surely it's better than no space program?
Baen - Well, it's all right. But what a pity... I can't think of a
stage where they didn't make the wrong choice. Way back in the
beginning, the X Program was on the verge of going into orbit with the
X-series, maybe by X-18. The X-15 was still breaking records up to the
day they told it to stop breaking records, because it was showing up
Spam in a Can.
JB - And for those who don't know that reference...
Baen - The Mercury program. The choice was a piloted vehicle that
could go up and return, vs. basically a missile that goes up and comes
down. The astronauts weren't really pilots, they were payload.
By 1970 the X Program would have had experimental planes in orbit
capable of return, but it was military [not NASA] and successful, so
NASA killed it. We still aren't back to where we would have been in
1970.
Then with Apollo we had two ways we could have gone. And for the sake
of gaining a year, or two, we gave up an entire space infrastructure
we could have had at no extra cost. We could have space station
Freedom in 1967 or 1968. Instead we saved a year or two, and got
nothing.
JB - You're not a big fan of the Space Shuttle program either.
Baen - The flying toilet bowl? When the shuttle became the designated
next goal of NASA, the powers that were at the time wanted to make
that decision irrevocable and static. So they went around looking for
anything that could be either an alternative or an upgrade, and killed
it. And they made it as expensive as possible to make changes to any
other launching system.
One mode of competition that was real obvious was the [the Apollo
Program's] Saturn launcher. So after all the money they had spent on
that, they drove a stake through its heart. Even ordered all the
blueprints destroyed, so that you would have to start from scratch to
ever do a heavy lift launcher again. There were other heavy lifters on
the drawing board at that time that also disappeared. There's a rumor
that one engineer kept a set of plans, rather than shred them as he
had been told. He kept them in his garage, against the day they might
be needed. This is still just a rumor, but I heard it from someone who
had reason to know.
JB - Many of your authors write SF with a military edge to it. SF
seems to fall into two camps: "There will be war" vs. "There won't be
war." How do you answer those who say that any technologically
advanced race that contacts us will be so advanced that they will have
long past given up such primitive nonsense as warfare?
Baen - [laughs] I think it will depend on the race. And the real
answer is, nobody knows.
I don't think you can argue from general principles to an absolute
conclusion, any more than we can argue whether life exists on other
planets. No matter how many positive statements of how "there must be
aliens races because of the vast number of planets and stars and suns
in the universe," the bottom line there is Fermi's paradox: "If they
gotta be there, why aren't they here?"
Maybe they aren't there. We could be, rather than the poor schlubs on
an undistinguished third planet, on the cutting edge of the life force
in this reality. It's a heady possibility, that the universe is urging
itself from pure energy to matter to living matter toward aware
matter. We're not very bright yet. We're an intermediate step. It
wasn't but an eyeblink ago that your typical hominid was a
chimp-headed clown-footed midget named Lucy. Given where we came from,
I think we're doing pretty well.
And our children will do better, and I believe our 20th power children
will have speciated. The way the tiny little mammals that ran under
the feet of the dinosaurs went on to fill the world after the last
great extinction event, I believe Homo Sapiens will become the mother
of species to the new universe. It's entirely reasonable to assume
that as we begin the great trek outward, humans will begin a set of
transformations. You can see one version of that in Larry Niven's
"Ringworld," or Wells' "Time Machine" with the Eloi and Morlocks.
JB - Somehow, I doubt that I would get onto these kind of subjects
talking with the average editor outside the genre...
Baen - I like to think you could talk to some of the editors IN the
genre and not get onto these kind of sub-jects.
You can only be interested in so many things in this life, and these
are the sorts of things that interest me, as opposed to I suppose
whatever it is that interest most editors.
JB - What else has interested you lately?
Baen - I very much enjoy shocking people with the true provenance of
the human species, which must have gone through an aquatic phase.
JB - As opposed to the now-discredited idea that humans arose in an
savanna environment?
Baen - Right. Lucy and Ramidus, two early human forebears, were both
adapted to a semi-aquatic environment in my opinion, and the opinion
of others. That's why you have body fat adhering to your integument
rather than to the torso; it's also why you have a diver's reflex, and
why you stand up, along with much else.
JB - But scientists can be slow to admit they were wrong - like the
anthropologists that belittled the idea that humans had entered North
America before the Clovis Culture of 11,000 years ago, and for years
refused to acknowledge any dating of sites from earlier than that, but
now they have finally given in to the weight of evidence.
Baen - I think of them as "the rice bowl crowd," because they have to
go begging for grants to fill up their bowls. They can't afford to
look stupid if they actually admitted missing something that, once you
see it, is obviously true.
I will exclude Professor Tobias of S. Africa, who did explode the
savanna theory of human provenance. He has admitted there is nothing
in the record that would exclude an aquatic phase.
Another idea I'm focusing on: How much money do you think we would
focus on building a time machine with one purpose: to go back in time
to preserve a whole tribe of the first men?
I say we should spend that money on the chimps. They are the first
men. Everything we need to know about our primitive selves is right
there.
We can know, for instance, that anything that a chimp can do was
within the powers of the first humans, and it turns out to be quite a
lot. We don't have to wonder whether some australopithecine was up to
something specific, if the chimps are already there. And we can learn
a lot about pre-human social interaction.
They are a cadet species; humans and chimps belong together in a
proper diagramming of the relationship of species. We twain are one:
they just took the wrong road about a week ago in evolutionary time.
In terms of evolutionary choices, you might say they took the NASA
route. They specieated into a small environment, and got stuck. Our
ancestors, on the other hand, were just chimps that got handed the
keys to the kingdom.
But the chimps, and also the bonobos, the so-called pygmy chimps, are
in danger of extinction. To keep them going would take, really, just a
pittance. While I am personally somewhat conservative and somewhat
libertarian in my political leanings, I do think that chimpanzees and
bonobos should have the same respect and rights as any primitives.
I'm beginning to feel quite strongly about it. It's a very
hard-bitten, down-to-earth caring. It's caring for our own. You look
at them and you look in your own eyes.
JB - In many regards you come off as being very cynical, yet in other
regards you seem to have an enormous respect for the possibilities
open to the human race, government screwups in the space program
aside.
Baen - We have become so technologically powerful that it takes more
and more work for governments to screw things up. Although somehow
they manage....
Life has, despite arguments to the contrary, evidenced a progression
from single celled animals to wonderful us, and there's really no
reason to suppose that this is some magic moment when a billion-year
trend is going to flat-line out.
Far more likely is the perspective that Vernor Vinge has, with his
idea of social singularity - that we are at the knee of an asymptotic
curve that before very long will point almost straight upward. The
sky's the limit, really.
_________________________________________________________________
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