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ASFFQ : 1992

The year of the new authors! Indeed, 1992 is distinguished by new authors entering the Quebecois SF and F market en masse. Among the 136 writers who published at least one work of fiction in those genres, no less than 80 are first-timers. As for the well-known and established authors, their number (56) remains stable. This spectacular upsurge in the number of new writers is a striking rebuttal to my concern last year about the decreased interest among would-be authors for SF and F.
This abundant crop can be explained in part by the emergence of new publications, such as Le Polyscope and Brèves littéraires, but above all by the publication of several anthologies like Accostages (Éditions du Blé), Dès lors, la folie... (Association des écrivains du Centre du Québec) and Faudrait pas que la terre devienne plate... (Oxy-Jeunes/Fides).
In fact, and to add to the "record" for this year, it would have been more exact to speak of 11 new authors, since Le Lac disparu, by Reynald Cantin, a "gamebook" published by Québec/Amérique, was in fact written by the 31 students in his high school class! Here is a nice initiative by a teacher, which should be mentioned, although it is not included in our statistics!
The number of original novels published this year is 38, almost equalling the record of 39 established in 1989. The novel production is mostly the work of YA writers , with 28 novels the target a youth readership. Several of these works are inspired by Nintendo, so that they have a specific form, as in Isabelle Gélinas's Le Mystère du Marloland, and Danielle Simard's La Revanche du dragon. We can also observe that there is a sustained interest in Quebec for fantasy, a slowly building trend.
As for short stories, the output remains relatively stable (163). We should mention the resurgence of specialized magazines, whose market share is bigger, increasing from 22% to 34% of all published short stories. Still, as ever, fantasy is predominant with 96 works versus 71 for science fiction, with specialized magazines inevitably taking the lion's share with 52 % in the latter genre.
In the area of reissues and translations, 8 novels and a total of 42 short stories have been given a second life. SF wins hands down in the book category with 6 versus 2, but fantasy takes back its leading position in the republishing sector (which it had lost last year) in collections and anthologies with 26 stories versus 16.

Claude Janelle

Original Production	Science Fiction	Fantasy & Horror	Total
Novels	20	18	38
Short stories in...	71	92	163
a) collections & anthologies	19	50	69
b) specialized magazines	37	18	55
c) non-specialized magazines	15	24	39

Reissues and/or translations	Science Fiction	Fantasy & Horror	Total
Novels	6	2	8
Short stories in...	16	26	42
a) collections & anthologies	12	23	35
b) specialized magazines	1	1	2
c) non-specialized magazines	3	2	5

Combined production	Science Fiction	Fantasy & Horror	Total
Novels	26	20	46
Short stories in...	87	118	205
a) collections & anthologies	31	73	104
b) specialized magazines	38	19	57
c) non-specialized magazines	18	26	44