Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Will Beback (talk | contribs) at 23:39, 28 February 2006 (unsourced POV). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

While statements like "By the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn't have sold an SF anthology into the North American market if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate." may be cute, they're not exactly neutral-sounding.

This article may not be remotely NPOV, but is it wrong? That's another question, I think. Anyway, it's a classic; if someone were to rewrite this article the older version should get a web page of its own somewhere. Gene Ward Smith 00:55, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the kind remarks. The sentence in question is mine. I've never had any personal interactions with Roger Elwood, and I doubt I'd recognize him if I saw him. The entry is as factual as I can make it. Parts of it are my own interpretations of known facts, but it's an area where I have a fair amount of expertise.

I'm a science fiction editor. I have in the past edited reference books, and I'm quite familiar with the NPOV convention. (In general I think it's a good thing, though I could wish more schoolchildren were taught that it's a literary convention, not evidence that they're hearing the Word from Olympus.)

Explaining publishing is tricky. The industry people imagine is much simpler, and seems far more logical, than the one which actually exists. Sometimes it's as important to exclude misapprehensions as it is to convey information.

There were several ways I could have described the state of the anthology market after Roger Elwood's binge. In my view, none of them were entirely satisfactory. My point was that the market had been artificially exhausted, and that bookbuyers and distributors had suffered a catastrophic loss of faith in the desirability and commercial viability of SF anthologies, such that anyone else who tried to put together and sell an anthology would almost certainly be rebuffed, no matter how good it was.

That explanation as I've just given it is much longer than the "Godiva chocolate" sentence. While it superficially explains more than my disputed sentence, the additional information doesn't help the reader understand the Roger Elwood anthology explosion and die-off. It just creates an unnecessary bunch of opportunities to misunderstand it. Compare the version above with the "made out of chocolate and priced at ten cents" passage. The latter is not going to be read literally. It conveys the necessary information. It doesn't drag in other issues and entities that don't need to be there.

It's a very clear explanation.

Are there objections to any of my other wording? If you'd like, I could poll other people in the professional SF community who are familiar with the episode, and ask them whether my language choices (bizarre, carelessly, squandered, wrecked, tanked, debacle, professed, lightly, peculiarly, neither good nor probable, never terribly good, hard to imagine a scenario that accounts for, no very creditable explanations, well below par) was inappropriate. I'm fairly sure they'd say it was descriptive, and nothing more. TNH 17:05, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Most of the assertions for this article don't seem to have any sources. All we know for sure is that he published a long list of books and articles. In addition, a large number of POV assertions are made about him. Have any articles or books been written about him? If not this article appears to be written entirely from the personal knowledge of some editors. That would violate our policy, Misplaced Pages:no original research. Unless we can find some sources, this article should be cut down to the verifiable facts, his publication history. -Will Beback 23:39, 28 February 2006 (UTC)