He saw a whole new genre to populate
October 7, 2023 7:29 AM Subscribe
Lester del Rey was a strange Minnesota farm kid with a wild imagination and a knack for business. He intuited that what millions wanted from a publishing industry urgently optimizing to keep up with capitalism was to escape the modern age into a world where capitalism and industry had never happened. There is magic in that. from The Man Who Invented Fantasy
Thanks for this post. Too bad Slate didn't write more or primarily about Judy-Lynn Del Rey's contributions to the sff genre. As a woman born with dwarfism in a time when either would be a serious challenge to success in the corporate publishing world, what she achieved was pretty remarkable. Lester always felt like too much of a huckster to me, and he never could have done what he did without her. Also, the award refusal was imho a shitty move.
posted by aught at 9:46 AM on October 7, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by aught at 9:46 AM on October 7, 2023 [7 favorites]
"He invented fantasy fiction as we know it." The last half of that sentence is doing some AWFULLY heavy lifting. You might say he invented Extruded Fantasy Product. But from Gothic thrillers and Arthurian revival to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne up through the age of the pulps, there was plenty of what we would today recognize as fantasy literature. Del Rey certainly further pioneered the commodification of it, but it's ridiculous to think that it didn't already exist as a popular genre.
posted by rikschell at 10:04 AM on October 7, 2023 [14 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 10:04 AM on October 7, 2023 [14 favorites]
This is a fascinating read, and I was one of the kids who tore through those fucking Xanth novels for a few years after I read The Hobbit/LoTR but before I discovered better options.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:05 AM on October 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:05 AM on October 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
When I hear his name it's hard SF that comes to mind, not Fantasy. He wrote several books for the Winston Science Fiction series, some under a pseudonym; I especially liked the stealth space program in Rockets To Nowhere and how they built the first great wheel of a space station in Step To The Stars.
posted by Rash at 10:11 AM on October 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Rash at 10:11 AM on October 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
I find it amazing that I'm actually older than the Del Ray imprint given the sheer volume of output it had in the late 70s and early 80sand when I started reading its Extruded Fantasy Product from their very beginning (the Star Wars novelization was the first book I ever bought at a school book fair when I was 7) and my father was tearing through both Sword of Shannara and the Thomas Covenant books at the same time. I would largely give up on reading fantasy in my mid-teens mainly because I had begun to see through Lester's (and other publishing house editors in his wake) commodification and that I was essentially reading the same "edgier" knockoff of Lord of The Rings over and over again.
Lester himself does not strike me as all that impressive a figure (both from TFA and what have I read elsewhere about him over the years): a huckster who rode Judy's willing offer of her coat tails to success. At this point, echoing what aught said in their comment, I would much rather learn more about Judy than Lester.
posted by KingEdRa at 10:46 AM on October 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
Lester himself does not strike me as all that impressive a figure (both from TFA and what have I read elsewhere about him over the years): a huckster who rode Judy's willing offer of her coat tails to success. At this point, echoing what aught said in their comment, I would much rather learn more about Judy than Lester.
posted by KingEdRa at 10:46 AM on October 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
I guess "The Man Who Invented Adult Fantasy As A Separate Genre Marketing Category Within The World Of U.S. Publishing And Was, To Be Fair, Wildly Successful At It, To The Extent That Readers And Writers Of English-Language Fantasy Are Still Living Under The Shadow Of The Rather Derivative, Uninspired Formula He Insisted Upon" was too long of a title.
posted by kyrademon at 10:52 AM on October 7, 2023 [17 favorites]
posted by kyrademon at 10:52 AM on October 7, 2023 [17 favorites]
Honestly, though, other than the inaccurate clickbaity title, the only part of this that annoyed me was:
"I always thought fantasy had existed forever. Elves and wizards were old. Stories about them must have been, too, drawn from deep history..."
It had! They were! I happen to just have read a 600-year-old poem which had, guess what? Elves and wizards in it! And it was based on even older stories.
You even mention that Tolkien was drawing inspiration from Beowulf and Icelandic sagas. So why are you winkingly implying here that elves and wizards were nary to be found pre-Tolkien? It's irritating.
posted by kyrademon at 10:57 AM on October 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
"I always thought fantasy had existed forever. Elves and wizards were old. Stories about them must have been, too, drawn from deep history..."
It had! They were! I happen to just have read a 600-year-old poem which had, guess what? Elves and wizards in it! And it was based on even older stories.
You even mention that Tolkien was drawing inspiration from Beowulf and Icelandic sagas. So why are you winkingly implying here that elves and wizards were nary to be found pre-Tolkien? It's irritating.
posted by kyrademon at 10:57 AM on October 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
If I’m reading the economic part of this correctly, we get Extruded Fantasy Product because you can’t rely on mass physical sales of anything but predictable product, yeah?
I’ve read most of the books in the slightly older, failed, imprint of serious fantasy and while I love or loved some of them, I hated plenty. Without extrusion, variability. With variability, unpredictable sales.
Note that high sales included lower advances to the actual authors.
posted by clew at 11:51 AM on October 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
I’ve read most of the books in the slightly older, failed, imprint of serious fantasy and while I love or loved some of them, I hated plenty. Without extrusion, variability. With variability, unpredictable sales.
Note that high sales included lower advances to the actual authors.
posted by clew at 11:51 AM on October 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
FWIW Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series began as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The article is right that Ballantine Adult Fantasy was "mostly" reprints, but that glides over this notable exception: Deryni Rising in 1970 was #19; Deryni Checkmate was #46 in 1972; High Deryni was #61 in 1973. The Deryni series began moving under the Del Rey imprint in 1977. Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain was another that moved under the Del Rey imprint in 1977. Anne McCaffrey's science fantasy Pern series was not a Ballantine Adult Fantasy release but it too moved under the Del Rey imprint in 1977 (the article gets backwards that "With such explosive growth in the market, there was room for writers like ... Anne McCaffrey"--her success came first).
Many responses to this article here and at Reddit go into how much fantasy there was before Shannara, but what I mean to highlight is this other original fantasy at the same publisher was already successful enough that by 1976 they had already published a Deryni boxed set. Crediting Lester del Rey with championing a category of Extruded Fantasy Product makes sense, but this article seems to be relying a lot on this NYT piece by David Hartwell, available in a longer form here in a book edited by Peter Beagle. In the same book's introduction, Peter Beagle puts more focus on Judy-Lynn del Rey quoting her repeatedly in her own words that she knew what she was doing with Shannara. I suspect there's a lot more to the story of how they both figured this out.
posted by Wobbuffet at 3:27 PM on October 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
Many responses to this article here and at Reddit go into how much fantasy there was before Shannara, but what I mean to highlight is this other original fantasy at the same publisher was already successful enough that by 1976 they had already published a Deryni boxed set. Crediting Lester del Rey with championing a category of Extruded Fantasy Product makes sense, but this article seems to be relying a lot on this NYT piece by David Hartwell, available in a longer form here in a book edited by Peter Beagle. In the same book's introduction, Peter Beagle puts more focus on Judy-Lynn del Rey quoting her repeatedly in her own words that she knew what she was doing with Shannara. I suspect there's a lot more to the story of how they both figured this out.
posted by Wobbuffet at 3:27 PM on October 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
Puts Lester del Rey in context as a classic American grifter.
All too plausible considering the 'product'. I read the first few Xanth books before my gorge rose and I just couldn’t. I blame The Magazine of F&SF for getting me started on Piers Anthony, but reading The Sword of Shanarra was like chewing sawdust from the first page.
posted by jamjam at 4:31 PM on October 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
All too plausible considering the 'product'. I read the first few Xanth books before my gorge rose and I just couldn’t. I blame The Magazine of F&SF for getting me started on Piers Anthony, but reading The Sword of Shanarra was like chewing sawdust from the first page.
posted by jamjam at 4:31 PM on October 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
Completely missing from this is that Ian Ballantine was the one who first brought The Lord of the Rings series to America, as bootleg publications. Which is what really started the entire fantasy boom, and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series was a response to that, publishing more pre-Tolkien fantasy.
By the time Del Rey started its fantasy imprint, McCaffrey's Dragonriders series had been a bestselling series for decades as well.
And while it's not the same kind of fantasy that the article talks about, the whole Conan boom of the early seventies should not be ignored either. That led to reprints and new work from authors like Leiber, DeCamp, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett etc.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:27 AM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
By the time Del Rey started its fantasy imprint, McCaffrey's Dragonriders series had been a bestselling series for decades as well.
And while it's not the same kind of fantasy that the article talks about, the whole Conan boom of the early seventies should not be ignored either. That led to reprints and new work from authors like Leiber, DeCamp, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett etc.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:27 AM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
Completely missing from this is that Ian Ballantine was the one who first brought The Lord of the Rings series to America, as bootleg publications.
My first contact with Lord of the Rings was an Ace Books version of The Two Towers published in the mid-60s, and I assumed that was the bootlegged version everyone was talking about later, but the reason such an edition was possible was a protectionist provision in US law that allowed any US publisher to print copies of an imported book that passed a certain threshold of imported copies.
So both Ballantine and Ace could have published pirated versions, but I also read a later version of Fellowship of the Ring which included a foreword by Tolkien himself which began something like 'Those who approve of courtesy to authors living or dead …' decrying pirated editions and endorsing the one I held in my hands, and before your comment, MartinWisse, I would have said that was a Ballantine paperback — which doesn’t necessarily contradict what you said, because Ballantine could have decided to mend its ways, and I could be misremembering.
posted by jamjam at 10:43 AM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
My first contact with Lord of the Rings was an Ace Books version of The Two Towers published in the mid-60s, and I assumed that was the bootlegged version everyone was talking about later, but the reason such an edition was possible was a protectionist provision in US law that allowed any US publisher to print copies of an imported book that passed a certain threshold of imported copies.
So both Ballantine and Ace could have published pirated versions, but I also read a later version of Fellowship of the Ring which included a foreword by Tolkien himself which began something like 'Those who approve of courtesy to authors living or dead …' decrying pirated editions and endorsing the one I held in my hands, and before your comment, MartinWisse, I would have said that was a Ballantine paperback — which doesn’t necessarily contradict what you said, because Ballantine could have decided to mend its ways, and I could be misremembering.
posted by jamjam at 10:43 AM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
I got a little suspicious when my copy had Gandalf say, "You shall not pass... up this opportunity to buy brand-new editions of these beloved fantasy classics from Ace(TM) Books!"
posted by kyrademon at 11:58 AM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by kyrademon at 11:58 AM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
Reading between the lines, it seems that a good chunk of Del Ray’s success was not just commodifying a nascent extruded fantasy product (I’m going to be repeating this phrase for days!) but also targeting an audience making the transition from Children’s Books to Adult. That certainly was my experience during my tween-teen years. The aforementioned Xanth novels were fun to read, could be consumed quickly, and had ready sequels. Shame about the abysmal sexual politics. In hindsight, yikes.
posted by Eikonaut at 3:42 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Eikonaut at 3:42 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
Reading between the lines, it seems that a good chunk of Del Ray’s success was not just commodifying a nascent extruded fantasy product (I’m going to be repeating this phrase for days!) but also targeting an audience making the transition from Children’s Books to Adult.
And I think that this was his real contribution; I get that "extruded fantasy product" is a cute phrase, but a few too many people have made a point of saying it in this thread to let that go by without comment. No one says "science fiction extruded product" or similar variations for Westerns or romances or any other genre where a fair degree of the published work is outright hackery. With almost the sole exception of LotR, when fantasy fans hit a certain age, they either flat-out stopped or sought out the very few adult-oriented fantasy books; if you didn't already know other fantasy readers, or stumbled across a fanzine, finding other fans wasn't easy. Not only did getting fantasy out to the mall bookstores help with fans finding these books, it helped them find other fans in those pre-social-media days. Maybe the only thing to rival not only building a fantasy market but also developing the fandom was Marvel putting Conan the Barbarian in spinner racks, and people finding each other through the letters pages, which would publish the letter writers' full names and mailing addresses. (I wrote exactly one letter to the comics--an issue of The Incredible Hulk, which featured a guest star who was a favorite of mine--and got a fanzine, unsolicited.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:02 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
And I think that this was his real contribution; I get that "extruded fantasy product" is a cute phrase, but a few too many people have made a point of saying it in this thread to let that go by without comment. No one says "science fiction extruded product" or similar variations for Westerns or romances or any other genre where a fair degree of the published work is outright hackery. With almost the sole exception of LotR, when fantasy fans hit a certain age, they either flat-out stopped or sought out the very few adult-oriented fantasy books; if you didn't already know other fantasy readers, or stumbled across a fanzine, finding other fans wasn't easy. Not only did getting fantasy out to the mall bookstores help with fans finding these books, it helped them find other fans in those pre-social-media days. Maybe the only thing to rival not only building a fantasy market but also developing the fandom was Marvel putting Conan the Barbarian in spinner racks, and people finding each other through the letters pages, which would publish the letter writers' full names and mailing addresses. (I wrote exactly one letter to the comics--an issue of The Incredible Hulk, which featured a guest star who was a favorite of mine--and got a fanzine, unsolicited.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:02 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
No one says "science fiction extruded product"
That's how I refer to most military SF.
posted by KingEdRa at 9:44 PM on October 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
That's how I refer to most military SF.
posted by KingEdRa at 9:44 PM on October 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's unfair to take away Lester del Rey's central position in modern commercial fantasy.
The fantasy imprints and lines that had tried to capitalize on Tolkien had low sales, and were largely defunct by the mid-70s.
He really put all the pieces together to make it a business.
He started off publishing the genre's foundational modern texts low-brow (Shanarra, Xanth) and high-brow (Covenant).
He figured out the distribution - and quickly got dozens of feet of shelf in mass market bookstores in every mall in the country which had maybe 2 feet before, rack jobbing to thousands of supermarkets and drug stores. He figured out the marketing. He figured out the COVERS! Those amazing Whalen and Sweet covers that moved product in ways no one had ever imagined. (That also worked remarkably well for fantasy adjacent SF like Anne McAffrey and Julian May both of whom got Whalen covers).
In 1976 there was something close to zero people making a living writing fantasy.
Ten years later there were dozens, and most of them were either Del Rey writers or working very closely in the Del Rey vein.
posted by MattD at 11:06 PM on October 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
The fantasy imprints and lines that had tried to capitalize on Tolkien had low sales, and were largely defunct by the mid-70s.
He really put all the pieces together to make it a business.
He started off publishing the genre's foundational modern texts low-brow (Shanarra, Xanth) and high-brow (Covenant).
He figured out the distribution - and quickly got dozens of feet of shelf in mass market bookstores in every mall in the country which had maybe 2 feet before, rack jobbing to thousands of supermarkets and drug stores. He figured out the marketing. He figured out the COVERS! Those amazing Whalen and Sweet covers that moved product in ways no one had ever imagined. (That also worked remarkably well for fantasy adjacent SF like Anne McAffrey and Julian May both of whom got Whalen covers).
In 1976 there was something close to zero people making a living writing fantasy.
Ten years later there were dozens, and most of them were either Del Rey writers or working very closely in the Del Rey vein.
posted by MattD at 11:06 PM on October 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
Lincoln Michel has an interesting interview with Dan Sinykin (the author of the FPP piece) on his substack.
posted by mittens at 8:46 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by mittens at 8:46 AM on October 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
This is the unauthorized Ace Books edition of The Two Towers I was referring to, now a bit of a collector’s item, apparently.
posted by jamjam at 6:40 AM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by jamjam at 6:40 AM on October 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Can we get links for the Slate and NYT articles for non-subscribers?
As someone who has read fantasy and SF for his entire lifetime, I knew immediately what extruded fantasy product is. I cut my teeth on Tolkien and Conan. When the "product" started hitting the bookstore/drugstore racks, I got burned out fast. I tried Donaldson when he broke through but Thomas the Rapist was such a whiny dick I tired of it. When I found Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series it was a revelation that someone could write fantasy that didn't seem a rehash of what had gone before. And then came all those dark and grim books that Hobbs and GRRM spawned. Now the genre is wide open and while I know fantasy product is out there, I keep finding enough original voices to allow me to ignore it.
posted by Ber at 11:25 AM on October 13, 2023
As someone who has read fantasy and SF for his entire lifetime, I knew immediately what extruded fantasy product is. I cut my teeth on Tolkien and Conan. When the "product" started hitting the bookstore/drugstore racks, I got burned out fast. I tried Donaldson when he broke through but Thomas the Rapist was such a whiny dick I tired of it. When I found Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series it was a revelation that someone could write fantasy that didn't seem a rehash of what had gone before. And then came all those dark and grim books that Hobbs and GRRM spawned. Now the genre is wide open and while I know fantasy product is out there, I keep finding enough original voices to allow me to ignore it.
posted by Ber at 11:25 AM on October 13, 2023
Even during the imitative explosion of late 70's and early 80's, I can recall finding and reading lots of great fantasy books. I remember great stuff that I'm pretty sure still holds up from, say, Robin McKinley, Barbara Hambly, Patricia McKillip, P. C. Hodgell, Tanith Lee...
OK, huh, there may be a pattern there.
posted by kyrademon at 4:04 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
OK, huh, there may be a pattern there.
posted by kyrademon at 4:04 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
One last note on Lester del Rey, he wrote a kids book called The Runaway Robot, anybody remember this? It's got a scene midway through where the robot's monochrome TV camera "eye" is replaced with a color, oh BTW why not, still memorable.
posted by Rash at 5:45 PM on October 26, 2023
posted by Rash at 5:45 PM on October 26, 2023
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