Are the Days of the Full-Time Novelist Numbered?
Robert Sawyer is one of the most successful speculative fiction writers on the planet, and certainly one of the most successful fiction writers in Canadian history. He has a talent for broaching very big ideas within a very accessible, fast-paced format (once in a while at the expense of the aesthetics of a more seasoned SF audience). I've read most of his books and outside of Kim Stanley Robinson, i'd have to credit Sawyer with fueling my intitial interest in what i think is the most exciting and important genre of writing we have. He keeps a blog that i visit once in a while and i thought this post about the end of the full-time novelist was interesting enough to share, in part because of the analogies one can make to the music industry, which is of course, also in free-fall. Generally, i think the music industry is getting what it deserves for producing so much utter garbage over the years that people simply aren't willing to front their hard-earned money for something that sounds exactly like 4000 other records that already exist and that as a matter of design, doesn't take the listener anywhere new, intellectually or spiritually. Still, his comments towards the end of the post concerning "lengthy, ambitious, complex works works that take years of full-time effort to produce" are worth thinking about.