Probe #208 (June 2026)
Tracking the Health of South African Speculative Fiction post COVID-19
“What do you think is happening with South African Publishing and Speculative Fiction publishing since COVID-19?”
by Donald Mullany
The strangest journeys often begin with a single question, and this has been one of those. A publisher asks an author the question: “What do you think is happening with South African Publishing and Speculative Fiction publishing since COVID-19?” because websites and online forums, Social media groups and a variety of contact updates all simply cease at the latest entry somewhere in 2020. Writers groups and organizations, authors and micro-publishers alike, over sectors and location. What’s the story behind this?
So the publisher in question is Silver Bark Books, and the author in question is Caldon Mull. After some engagement, and some answers… and some statements of “… but surely not?” an idea was born… and this article is the result of that idea. The next question was “Who else would be able to give a better answer?”. The closed-loop story was that Caldon Mull had emigrated to Finland, closed the eponymous Caldon Mull Publishing in South Africa and transferred those options to Silver Bark Books in Finland. But this was not the whole story. There was a larger story lurking behind this innocent curiosity; one of increasing fragility and vulnerability to external shocks from manifold direction.
Silver Bark Books (SBB going forwards) is a micro-publisher of Speculative Fiction based in Finland and is a consortium of authors, editors and Youtube content creators that unite episodically over shared projects of interest. There are few fixed roles in SBB, and for some disclosure purposes, I am their sites webmaster among other tasks, and I have South African roots; as do most in the consortium, at present.
While trying to answer the first question, other questions kept revealing themselves and so they started this journey by selecting the topics that they wanted to explore, and looking for respondents. SBB wanted a reasoned overview of the state of SFF literature, book publishing and the health of the Science-Fiction genre in South Africa, because it is a market they have interests in. They compiled a series of five (5) topical situations that their research highlighted and set several questions around them – to test some of these hypotheses. Caldon Mull (CM going forwards) was the most accessible to SBB, but probably not the best, most current source to satisfy all the cross-section criteria. They then tasked me with this project, and so I donned Dorothy’s ruby slippers and set about to work. The methodology was to identify the range of topics, and then pose a question to the respondents based on their current experiences.
To tell this story the best way, first we should introduce our cast, then provide their responses to the questions and finally close with the initial topics and observations that began our quest.
By way of introduction:
Caldon Mull (CM going forwards) is: a seasoned author, futurist and a keen analyst of the human condition. He appears in recommendations for wide variety of Awards such as the Nommo and Otherwise due to his slipstream narratives that lean heavily into his rural-African storytelling heritage. He is best known for his Speculative Fiction series the ‘Sol Senate Cycle; the Future History Part 1 and Diaspora Part 2’ volumes, also the surrealist Fantastika series ‘The Agency Tales’ and the various ‘Smithereens’ collections and anthologies, all receiving some acclaim.
Link to https://caliban.co.za/
Gail Jamieson (GJ going forwards) is: a lifelong science fiction fan, more recently a fantasy fan, also a very occasional writer of SF&F. A member of SFFSA since 1973, a frequent editor of the club magazine PROBE, and involved in the annual SFFSA Nova Award over the past 40-odd years. She loves the idea of the “what if?” in fiction and she is never without something to read.
Link to Probe: https://sites.google.com/view/sffsa-test/probe
Shanil Misra (SM going forwards) is: An author and futurist and author of the adventure High Fantasy series “Wizards of Light” and the YA Science Fiction “Simba Singh” series. He regularly engages in discussions on sci-fi, Afrofuturism, and African-inspired fantasy, highlighting the growing prominence of these genres in the South African literary scene.
Link to bio: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Shanil-Misra/author/B0GQR49GM8
Marius du Plessis (MP going forwards) is: Mirari Press is an independent literary house based in South Africa, championing speculative fiction that is bold, beautiful, and unrepentantly strange. Marius has spent almost two decades in the publishing industry, before establishing Mirari Press as a response to the dearth of Speculative Fiction historically being published in South Africa. Mirari Press is guided by a Triple Valours principle; building ethics and values into the business, from the ground up.
Link to bio: https://www.miraripress.com/about
Question 1: How does this South African general or national sales funnel effect the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre fiction in your experiences over the years, getting your books out into the world? How transactional do authors have to be to reach their target market without needing to ‘bookwhack’ the general public?
CM: It’s pretty much a closed shop for any new authors, but especially for SFF authors. I was taunted for decades by the local publishers who were happy to only receive submissions of ‘literary Science-Fiction’ because SA Publishers markets are primarily only academic or educational. Still is, I think, if you have a look at annual publishing reports. If your book doesn’t belong in a University or school curriculum, they won’t want it.
I resolved to self-publish first as those channels slowly became available through the late (20)00’s and early (20)10’s , then later seeking out traditional publishing shops more selectively once my author credentials became established through various Awards nominations and other recognition mechanisms in the (20)20’s.
I think I side-stepped everything that didn’t work for me up until then and just headed out with what did, eventually. In many ways going through these organic paths allowed me to track where to put the extra effort in, and wisened me to where to concentrate resources. As far as getting my books into the world, I don’t have to ambush potential readers who are not my target market. I work in-house through mailing lists, and pick up passenger traffic through a wide range of eBook stores. I am mainly interested in people who are already interested in my work.
GJ: As I am mainly an editor, my magazines go out to members and friends of our club. Some of whom are lecturers and Professors in English departments of Universities. But I have seen that some authors have been able to reach the publishing houses. One of who came to talk to us had created a whole on-line following who he was using to try to please his publisher.
SM: I went with a hybrid contract with a traditional publisher (50-50 split instead of offered royalties) and I found it a challenge to get my books out. Publishers don’t have much of a budget for marketing. Wading through the shark-infested waters of marketers and publishers is a harrowing experience. I saw this as paying my school fees for the industry. I made a clean exit from the publisher and have now gone Indie, and there are still many challenges. Book stores take at least 50% of the publishing cost, and after printing costs there is hardly any room for profit. I will probably target school events and Comic Con for the hard copies, and focus mainly on online e-Book sales. This requires paying a marketing company or trying to grow a social media presence. It is difficult.
MP: The educational funnel is the most honest explanation for why most South Africans don’t think of themselves as readers of fiction. They associate books with obligation — with curriculum, with being told what a text means, with examinations. That conditioning is extraordinarily difficult to undo. And genre fiction, which asks you to surrender to a story rather than extract an argument from it, is particularly poorly served by that foundation.
From a small press perspective at Mirari, we effectively operate outside the funnel entirely. We don’t expect bookstores to do the work for us, because for genre fiction, and particularly for South African genre fiction, they often can’t. The chain infrastructure isn’t built for it. A title that doesn’t move in thirty days on an Exclusive Books shelf gets pulled and returned. That’s not malice; it’s the economics of shelf space in a low-margin business. It does, however, mean that if you’re publishing speculative fiction in this country and your strategy is “get into bookstores and wait,” you will wait a very long time.
So yes – authors and publishers alike have to be transactional in ways that feel uncomfortable to people who got into books because they love stories. Direct sales, events, community-building, Substack, mailing lists. The discomfort is understandable. The alternative is invisibility. I’d rather be slightly uncomfortable and read than pure of heart and unread.
Question 2: How has the local social- or book clubs, libraries or societies shown to be a showcase for your books, or how do they facilitate as an enthusiastic driver for your own works from a literary perspective?
CM: Not really, the few book launches and book signing events that I have been a part of were moderately successful, and I’ve had a few engagements with donating issues to local libraries over the years in South Africa but with low turnouts. Up here in the EU, it’s a different experience. If your local SFF club hears that you have published a book, they expect you to talk about it at the next meeting, haggle for discounts and early release, it’s very social. You don’t really get that in South Africa.
GJ: Science fiction and Fantasy south Africa seems to be the only long-time club that encourages local authors from a specifically Speculative fiction genre. The only internationally published author that we can claim to have had his beginnings in our club and magazine is Dave Freer. We have been holding an annual short story competition for about 50 years. There are many small writing societies across the country but they cover fiction in general.
SM: Not much so far. There is a distributor that organizes events at malls and schools. These have proven to showcase my books, and get decent sales. I’ve also contacted book store managers directly for book signing events, but generally this is a waste of time. You have to be an established presence to get high sales, and therein lies the challenge.
MP: Honestly? In my experience, they’re better at building community than at moving books, and I think conflating those two things causes a lot of disappointment on both sides.
There’s a version of this question that assumes a book club recommends a book and then twenty people buy it. That sometimes happens. More often, the book gets discussed enthusiastically, everyone agrees it was wonderful, and three people already own it. Libraries present a different shape of the same problem – a library copy serves an entire community, which is genuinely valuable culturally, and also means the publisher sells one book where they might otherwise have sold twelve.
That said, I’ve found that the SFF-adjacent communities – the fan clubs, the convention circuits, the online communities that don’t map neatly onto traditional literary society structures – are more genuinely useful for genre publishers than the older institutional forms. Not because they’re larger necessarily, but because they contain concentrated audiences who have already self-selected into the reading of genre fiction. When a Mirari title gets picked up by someone with reach in those communities, the effect is tangible and rapid in a way that a library acquisition rarely is.
The honest answer is that no single club or library has been trans-formative for us. The accumulation of all of them, over time, contributes to something. That’s not a silver bullet. It’s just how slow this work actually is.
Question 3: Do you think a ‘world-literature’ can survive with a local flavour without all that flavour being washed out for blander international market preferences? Do you think the shift from literary clubs to fandom clubs diluted the banner for South African English-language literature?
CM: I guess I should define my response. To me, Science-Fiction is about having a conversation with future humans about their lives and what to expect of their opportunities in this future; and any pitfalls in this conversation. If it’s written in English-language, or patois, pidgin or creole, or another indigenous language, then fine. Hopefully, in a few hundred years time there is someone who wants to read a book, and hopefully they still can.
But I think a lot of balls have been dropped here over time, because rather than cultivating a local flavour of english language as specific and unique, various State Policies have isolated this process instead. We seem to have handed over our own validity in the language to elsewhere. South Africans need to write more, reassert ourselves and get it out there into the world. That’s what I think, anyway.
GJ: I’m not sure it can survive without losing the “South Africaness” that would need a glossary to explain a lot of ideas and words that have been incorporated into what I would call true South African flavour. We would like to think of SFFSA as both a literary and a fandom club.
SM: Strength in diversity, I say. If those authors want to have a presence, they would need to pay for translated copies. On the other hand, if English-speaking readers want to learn about other cultures, they would have to reach out to these authors to provide translations.
MP: I think the world literature question and the fandom question are actually pulling in opposite directions, and it’s worth separating them.
On local flavour: I don’t believe the international market is as allergic to specificity as we’ve been told. The books that travel furthest are often the most particular – Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is irreducibly Sri Lankan; it won the Booker anyway. Nnedi Okorafor’s work is deeply rooted in Igbo culture and cosmology. It’s not the specificity that kills international appeal – it’s the failure of nerve that makes writers sand off the very edges that would make their work irreplaceable.
When South African writers write for an imagined global reader rather than from their actual experience, the result is usually worse for everyone. The answer to the world-literature question is: be more specific, not less.
On fandom displacing literary culture: I think this framing is a little melancholy, and I’m not sure it holds. The shift from literary appreciation to fan activity isn’t necessarily a regression. Fandom is a genuine form of reader engagement; it’s often deeper and more sustained than the polite appreciation of a book club.
What it struggles to do is generate the kind of critical discourse that helps a literary culture develop and articulate its own standards. That’s the gap. We have plenty of enthusiasm. We’re still building the infrastructure for serious critical engagement with genre work in a South African context.
Question 4: How do you think modern AI-assisted authors writing in this arena could get seduced by this ‘formulaic perfection’ of paper mills? Where would the line be drawn in any art-form between a human author regurgitating formulaic work, and AI-slop doing the same? How secure is South African literature in a GenAI future? If GenAI output is considered un-copyright-able, what lasting legacy do they represent?
CM: I don’t see GenAI or other forms of AI-slop being enduring to any degree, there is just no human resonance. Only humans are able to Copyright their work, and under the same jurisprudence; only human authors are able to earn author royalties. While the legislation catches up with these aspects then; not being able to charge for a book that is generated in part, or in whole, by a GenAI; nor any AI Agent because it has no enduring copyright; nor cannot have royalties paid to it as a legal entity as human creation; should resolve this matter for good.
In trying to use it; I get American-tech responses from American-tech input prompts to satisfy American-tech output criteria. I cannot use any of this output for any other context. For example, with ‘South African literature’ or ‘africanfuturism’, nor can I apply any specificity or critique beyond this. It’s generally ‘use-less’ for me because it eradicates and overwrites any anticipated meaningfulness. So I do not see any social utility for it in current iteration. I also think that it’s a ruinously expensive folly right now, just like the Black Tulip mania. I have been writing about this sort of thing for decades; I’ve given it a lot more thought than most.
GJ: A difficult one to answer. I, personally, have not seen any AI assisted local type stories that present output that feels as if it has a true local flavour. As to how secure South African literature is in any future, I am concerned that the inclination to move towards “Americanization”, whether AI generated or not will leave the true South African story in a backwater with little appreciation.
SM: Whew. There is so much controversy and so much written about this, and high profile legal cases, that I don’t know how I could add value here except offer my opinion. There are people dead against it, and those who don’t see a problem at all. The nay-sayers are usually those who have toiled for years to churn out many works of their own and baulk at the mention of AI thievery. They would even go so far as to talk about environmental destruction. Those who all for AI usually fall in a newcomer or lazy category, wanting to use it to churn out covers and stories in record times – which is unscrupulous and disruptive.
I am somewhere in between. Once AI data centres go into space, the argument against the environment will be nullified. I think there’s nothing wrong with using AI as a tool to check your work for errors and make suggestions. 100% of your draft should be written by the human, then checked by an AI.
The future is AI churning out creative work with non-human knowledge. At this stage, AI will probably be regarded as lifeforms and may have their own rights and citizenship. Who is then to say that they can’t compete? Humans would also likely by cybernetic and neurologically enhanced, and would be able to compete with AI on a level playing field. I write about AI, and I am excited and optimistic about its future.
MP: I want to be careful here, because the paper mill framing can slide quickly into condescension toward romance writers and readers, and I don’t think that’s earned. Romance is a genre with genuine craft demands: emotional pacing, character interiority, the management of tension across a long arc toward a satisfying resolution. Doing that well, repeatedly, within conventions that readers know intimately and will notice you violating, is not easy. The writers who succeeded in that space weren’t succeeding by accident.
What the paper mill model does illuminate, though, is what happens when the commercial logic of a genre overrides everything else – when the template becomes the point rather than the scaffold. That’s not a romance problem specifically; it’s a publishing economics problem that romance happened to make visible first, at scale. And it’s exactly what GenAI is now doing to every genre simultaneously.
The seduction of formulaic perfection for AI-assisted authors is real precisely because the formula often works. It satisfies. It closes the loop. The question is whether satisfying a reader and genuinely moving them are the same thing, and I think most serious writers in any genre know they aren’t.
On copyright and legacy: I think the un-copyright-ability of GenAI output matters less than people assume in the short term, and more than people assume in the long term. In the short term, volume is volume and it will find readers. In the long term, what survives is what people return to: what accumulates meaning on re-reading, what could only have been made by this person, in this place, under these conditions. That test doesn’t care about the means of production. It just asks: is there anything here worth coming back to? That’s the question South African authors should be asking of their own work, and it’s a question GenAI cannot ask of itself.
Question 5: Is there any magic silver bullet to keep your work on the store bookshelves, is it even worthwhile to consider it? What is your strategy for local Library aggregators? Are you all simply clawing harder for a larger piece of an ever-shrinking pie?
CM: I’ve been an eBook author for the most part. While I still see Paperbacks and Hard Cover as valid formats, the path to market while I was trying to get published for all those years in South Africa certainly limited my choices with this medium. I now only offer print-on-demand copies through online retailers because it’s a slightly different market, for overlap. I think that I will stay a hybrid author, between traditionally published with small and micro publishers; and also indie- or self-published for the near future at least. There are hidden challenges to indie-publishing such as using ‘free’ ISBN issues that these platforms don’t highlight, like who actually controls, or benefits, from the use of that IP.
The darker side of online self-publishing is that, essentially, you are simply enriching the platform with your ‘content’. You are forced to feed the beast with cash top-ups constantly, or face being wiped out as your search-ability drops to zero.
The only way to avoid this is to keep moving forward, refreshing your publications regularly, renewing and improving your editions, changing publishers on occasion for new projects or series. South African authors are noticeably exposed to this type of extraction. Especially when you are just starting out, everything just piles on without any warning.
I think that more authors encourage more readers, and the more readers; the more demand there is for new authors. I don’t think it is a zero sum game, and I think the pie is only shrinking for a specific type of ‘book’ product format.
GJ: The ability of the paper copy to survive seems to be sadly fading. I think that the pie has already shrunk. As I am an editor my comments relate to magazines. More and more of what I see in the way of these have moved over to e-copies, and our local libraries are closing or combining, if this is what you mean by Library aggregators. Our own large club library is very much underused.
SM: Bookshelves have a limited life span. If you don’t sell well within two years, you will be removed forever. I think online sales should be considered over paper. I found out recently that local bookstores insist on 50% of the cut, and with printing and distribution costs, that leaves little to no profit. It’s a brutal industry and if there were a magic bullet, we would have all grabbed it with our teeth a long time ago. I think luck plays a large part, knowing the right people, and most of all – writing a book worthy of commercial success. Most have no idea how to do this.
MP: At Mirari, we publish in both formats and we’ve stopped having strong feelings about which a reader chooses. What we’ve noticed is that our eBook and print readers are often different populations with different discovery paths, and trying to convert one into the other is usually a waste of energy.
The library aggregator question is one I’m genuinely conflicted about. Services like OverDrive and Borrowbox offer discover-ability in principle. In practice, the royalty structures are often punishing for small presses, and the discover-ability is real only if the library is actively promoting genre work, which most South African public libraries are not resourced to do. So we participate selectively and don’t treat it as a primary channel.
On the shrinking pie: I reject the frame, mostly because I think it makes publishers passive. The pie isn’t fixed. When you look at industry information published by PASA (Publisher’s Association of South Africa), there’s actually an upward trend – more revenue and more units moved year on year for the trade industry.
Readership in South Africa, particularly readership of genre fiction, is genuinely underdeveloped relative to the appetite that’s there. I’ve seen what happens when you put the right book in front of the right reader who has never encountered South African speculative fiction before. The problem isn’t that there’s no appetite. The problem is that the infrastructure for connecting books to readers is genuinely poor, and small presses have to build their own. That’s harder, and slower, and more expensive than we’d like. But it’s not the same thing as a shrinking pie. It’s an unsolved distribution problem, which is a different kind of problem.
So, magic silver bullet? Absolutely not. Writing and publishing remain arcane, intuition-driven arts that defy the clean predictability of data and strategy and ROI and conversions. A good book doesn’t necessarily result in sales, and sales don’t necessarily mean a book is good.
So we keep doing the work, publishing authors and books we believe in, and persist because the alternative is not conceivable.
Thank you to all of our respondents, you have been most helpful. This story continues with SBB Summation of the current state and health of South African Speculative Fiction and Science-Fiction and Fantasy genre literature.
It is fair to suppose that the majority of focus for publishing has been funneling work from SAPA-aligned Publishing Houses to educational institutions like Universities and Schools. The South African Publishing Industry Survey 2023-2024 describes a 70% share of the total market from just these two sectors. This, in turn, affects the distribution medium because schools and universities cannot manage digital and eBooks (6% of total share) for their students. The type of print books available in the market is telling: 60% of all national product sold annually are Basic Education textbooks.
This leaves an incredibly narrow percentage of the books we are seeking to examine, adult fiction (South African-english language) print, and adult fiction (South African-english language) digital. All digital sales combined only account for 4% of national annual industry revenue, and includes (all ages) english language non-fiction digital book sales, and this is dominated by one single english-language product: the Bible.
This means that imported adult (english language) fiction print accounts for 0.183% of annual national revenue, of which Science-Fiction and Fantasy genres will comprise an average percentage of that figure. Locally produced adult print and digital (South African-english language) fiction combined – only accounts for 0.184% of total annual revenue. The market activity for these types of books are further reduced by the typical volume of sales percentages for which we would need to find some useful market breakdown figures. Typically, these figures are not transparent, nor tracked in publicly available locations.
For any breakdown indication of this, we will resort to use the Smashwords 2017 Survey dataset for eBooks where average volumes of genre-fiction as a total of all fiction are: Romance 73% of all sales, then Fantasy is 9% of all sales, finally Science-Fiction is 3% of the total volume of sales. These numbers are generic and industry-wide, but illustrative of a ten-year trend. These are also samples for eBooks only, so are not proscriptive of print books at all.
The english language portion is 78% of the total languages and declining, as more books in different local languages are moving the needle, but it is unclear if the volumes are proportional replacements towards the value of this decline. A single new bible in Setswana, and one other in Xitsonga would alter this statistic without altering the sales volumes of the languages. South African languages considered ‘African languages’ are supported and assisted by various State institutions as ‘local or indigenous languages’. South African english-language literary works were considered a ‘world language’ and left to its own devices, tossed into the Western World to fend for itself and claw itself its’ own niche.
This positioning of the english-language literary works is thus exposed and extremely vulnerable to international trends, fads and tastes. A declining relational portion of existing language patterns may also disguise an indicator of consumer withdrawal and market retraction. If local demand for these products is withering, then the pressure for international markets to pick up the heavy lifting becomes intensified. This can’t be stated with any certainty.
This will answer one of the first questions that started us on this journey because that means that South African-English language Science-Fiction sales are generally 0,0055 % of the total value of national annual sales of adult fiction by way of illustration.
This is a very fragile state for any publisher to find themselves in, there is precious little business value to be found in the activity. As SM, GJ and CM alluded to earlier in the interviews section, print book publishing is being priced out of existence in South Africa at a rapid pace. The high demand may remain ever as high as MP has detailed earlier; but the supply is now being threatened by cost shocks.
This low baseline does reveal a known structural access inequality – South Africa is not a ‘reading for pleasure culture’- for many reasons not discussed here; but this also exposes a largely untapped potential for high growth as MP has alluded to earlier. ‘Untapped potential’ is a perennial South African curse, simultaneously, a perennial South African opportunity.
The COVID-19 price shock on printing paper from the Chinese lock-down response has resulted on a year-on-year decrease of between 3 and 5.2% of the availability of pulp paper. This compounds on all printed material and squeezes all price margins for physical goods.
In the print and retailers domain, increased distribution cost, pricing and increased demand for higher rebate discounts translates to an average income earning of only between 10% and 13% of the sales price of a print copy of the book. Elsewhere in the world the average income nests between 25% and 35%, although this is wildly variant for numerous reasons. This is still a significant difference. South African english-language authors are structurally less profitable in local markets than authors elsewhere in the world in theirs, as SM and CM have attested to earlier. Local authors would be driven to export their books into external markets to realize their earnings.
South African State policy on purchasing is to drive any print book price to cost, and the constrained budgets of the national coffers means that the state has spent relatively less of library procurement and educational institution support every year, year-on-year since 2016. So pricing pressure on South African english-language non-fiction print copy is high, and is eroding profitability for potential authors nationally. This would have an equivalent effect for other english-language fiction print copy, including our focus for South African english-language SFF fiction print copy.
This structural, systemic State policy forces potential authors of South African english-language fiction into ‘a prisoners dilemma’ scenario. If the State doesn’t purchase the authors print copy work for Universities and Educational institutions, there are no national sales volumes for the author or publisher. If the State does purchase these, then it will gouge on price and reduce the profitability of authors and publishers; to drive the cost of these literature products. The State would not purchase eBooks from local authors because it is unable to distribute or utilize this medium.
The answer about the state of South African english-language literature is thus; stable but not healthy, and increasingly frail. Potential remains as high as ever, but actual access is constrained by structural and systemic barriers. While the State remains the purchasing arbiter of most types of print and digital South African english-language literature, then the inherited structural barrier to realizing potential will remain in place.
Book clubs, Fan Clubs, Social Clubs and literature-focused organizations in South Africa do not appear to drive book sales to the extent observed in other western societies. Many of the SFF genre-related activity for the last fifty (50) years in South Africa started initially as literature appreciation societies, (the Tolkien Society at UND; the Herman Charles Bosman Literary Society in Groot Marico; the various Totius Societies at Potchefstroom. Other National-level appreciation organizations such as the AWC, or the Amazwi Museum or the Killie Campbell Africana Library are included in this category) and then mutated from these literary-style appreciation clubs into fan-based and activity-based clubs around a central premise.
Most of the membership growth in these old-style literary Clubs over the last fifty (50) years has been generated from current fan-based activities. Many of these organizations are under duress with low recruitment engagement and have been for awhile. This is not unique to South Africa, but the withering of social values and activities are unhealthy for any society and inform the overall health of community. COVID-19 also fractured existing technologies and re-patterned existing social habits.
Many old-style HTTPS websites and blogs were abandoned for newer platform tools such as TikTok or Instagram, and the transfer in idiom is still in the process of catching up. The activities of these groups remain, but the discover-ability of these groups has shifted to the subscriber base of these platforms, not locally. As CM has alluded to earlier, local community is now being monetized into some other social media online platform, or another. Thus, an answer to any questions about the health of South African literature is: stable but fragile.
Finally, the shock of so-called ANI models (to attempt to distinguish between types of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) such as GenAI, machine learning (ML), or Large Language Models (LLM) is pointless) in the production of South African literature has been significant.
Historically, South African english-language authors have punched far above their weight in international markets, in the Smashwords 2017 Survey they accounted for 1% of International releases, the only African continental source to reach a percentage point.
This follows on from the earlier point that local authors would be forced to export their products to external markets because of the low royalty income within the national South African market conditions. CM, SM and MP have all indicated that by-passing internal market structural barriers is the clearest path to success.
Historically, many authors agree with this practice, and this International success has followed through a long local adaptation of the ‘Mills & Boon’ volume model, i.e. a robust pre-sales pipeline packing, a regular fortnightly-release schedule of predetermined (themed) titles with a 90-day availability of said title; finally the removal off-shelf and the destruction of any unsold copy at the expiry of this period.
To be clear, the Mills & Boon (and various re-branding through Harlequin, Silhouette, Mira and HQN) publishers have repeatedly denied there being a ‘template’ for their published product, their acceptance criterion simply was Quality, as defined in their guidelines. This discussion is on the phenomenology, and not the branded publishers, to be clear.
This is a business volume model first and foremost, not intended to be conflated with the literary genre it supported. This business model has been dominant in South Africa for decades, -close to a century-, and has cascaded into every corner of consumer fiction distribution and availability.
Unfortunately, these ‘tuppeny library’ business models no longer suits modern Print-on-Demand or eBook business models in other types of genre-fiction; nor arguably, does it encourage long-term public engagement with local South African english-literature; specifically and obviously with Speculative Fiction genres like SFF. The phenomonology of such a short release cycle combined with such a limited shelf-life does not compare to the marinade required in the public awareness of other types of literature, nor other genre-fiction such as SFF.
For all this time, local authors learned their craft with outcomes for tropes and plot beats, dialogue and character development directed towards a reliable, persistent quality product for the Mills & Boon submission criteria. This was human crafted and learned method first and foremost, taught and transferred through Writing groups and social clubs; who have in turn historically rallied around this model, refining and defining a suitable ‘template’ to deliver on the quality promise that the publisher had, for its product to its target market.
This process is where the ‘GenAI shock’ has disrupted hardest, where volume output criterion disrupts the conditions of what a successful South African author looks like. As discussed earlier with MP, where a commercial volume business model overrides and replaces the literary genre scaffold as a definition of success, then there is where problems are bound to appear.
The current inability of ANI models to adequately mimic certain genres, such as Speculative Fiction SFF or Africanfuturism at present, cannot guarantee to remain so incapable. A concerted effort to avoid learned helplessness in this ANI theater is required going forwards. Thus, an answer to questions about the future of South African literature is: stable, but flailing.
So that’s it! Thank you very much for joining me on this journey, and I can finally kick off these tiny Ruby slippers. I hope that it has been as enlightening for you, as it was for me.
The End