John Vornholt is probably best known for his media tie-in novels including Star Trek, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and several other popular properties. He is also an accomplished screenwriter, and has penned many original fiction novels in his over 30 years in the business. You can find John online at sff.net.

Please share your perceptions of F/SF from when you first entered the publishing industry vs. the present state of things. If you haven't noticed any major changes since your first work was published, could you touch on whether or not your perceptions of the genre(s) changed once you went from a genre fan to a contributor?

Almost everything you can say about F/SF applies to the book publishing business as a whole, especially in genre publishing, F/SF, mysteries, westerns, romances, etc.  When I got started in book publishing in the early 1980s, there were a lot more major publishing houses doing a lot more fiction books than there are now.  Publishers would promote midlist writers, hoping their sales numbers would increase modestly from book to book.  This farm league for novelists is almost gone now, plus publishers like to hold onto more rights than they used to.  In other words, it's gotten tougher for writers, except in the romance market, which is still going strong.

At the same time, there used to be more "serious" SF books than there are now, and more SF books in general were published twenty or thirty years ago. SF became a major action genre in TV and movies, making it much easier to find SF in other media, while Fantasy has risen in importance, aided by Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, sexy vampires, and so on.  So today you have once-serious SF writers putting out books about magic swords.  That's the way it is.  The writer is always torn between doing something very original or writing more sexy teenage vampire stories, and the market for leading-edge SF is kind of small. Logically, small presses are taking up the slack, and ebooks may finally get a large market share.

Who or what is missing, saturated, or underrepresented in F/SF today?

Perhaps the saddest things is that we no longer have any young adult SF like we had when I was a kid.  You know, Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt, and many old-timers, whose best work was considered YA at the time.  But today we have lots of YA fantasy, like Harry Potter.  Maybe this goes back to kids thinking that the proper place for SF is TV, movies, and video games, not a book.  Is hard to find much real science in science fiction.  Maybe we're a bit weary of science.  After all, we're not living on Mars now like we thought we would be in 1969. 
What are your favorite F/SF resources (books, websites, people)?

My local writing group with Dennis McKiernan and Frances Gross is very helpful.  An amateur astronomer named Rick Auerbach helps me get the science straight, and I also read astronomy magazines for ideas and science pointers.  I tend to interview experts when I really need to know enough about a topic to create some kind of verisimilitude. When I write fantasy, it's usually in a funny vein, like my Troll King books and Cupidity (under the penname Caroling Goode), so I just make up silly things.  Just reading the morning newspaper often gives me more ideas than I have time to nurture to maturity.

You've worked with both media tie-in novels and original fiction - what are the challenges and benefits of each? Do you prefer one to the other? Have sales of your original novels benefited from the publicity that comes with the media tie-ins?

There isn't as much media tie-in fiction now as there was twenty years ago, when every movie and sci-fi TV show had books to accompany it.  I used to write TV animation back in the day when every new toy had to have a cartoon series to go along with it.  Now the tie-in action is with video games.  Writing in somebody else's universe can be a dangerous job, fraught with pitfalls.  I've done it enough with 30-some Star Trek novels, plus other tie-in books and comics, that it doesn't seem too bizarre.  Eventually you have to concentrate on your own work, or you will go crazy, just from having good ideas that you never get to.

Tie-ins do have some advantages:  You can hit the ground running with a story, because the reader already knows the characters and setting.  Sales don't depend on the author's name, so it's more like writing nonfiction, where the subject matter is what grabs the reader.  On the down side, you have another layer of bureaucracy going through your book, the property owner, and they feel their job is quality control.  Plus writing in a shared universe is like borrowing your dad's car:  You can drive it off a cliff or through a river, but you'd better find some way to get it back to original condition before you return it.

Sometime a shared universe is a crazier place than I could have made up, especially when it's based on a game.  I'm thinking about my Primal Rage novel, The Avatars, from a few years back and my Magic, the Gathering novel, Curse of the Chain Veil, coming out in February 2010.  They are richly insane worlds that benefited from many hands being involved in their creation.

Has the mainstreaming of the internet changed your approach to promoting your work and connecting with fans? What changes, if any, have you seen in the publishing industry due to widespread internet usage?

My fax machine gets used once a year now instead of once a day.  It was a relief when book publishers went over to electronic submissions and email, because they were slow to adapt.  They liked, and still do, their paper trails, Post-it notes, and marked-up manuscripts.  Of course, it's easy now to research a given subject on the internet, but the information is both more plentiful and less reliable.  That's why I still prefer to call up an expert.

I remember when I was writing Dinotopia books, and I found out the theories about dinosaurs change daily.  Even with the internet, there is no way to keep up.  I just read today that large dinosaurs were probably tens of tons lighter in weight than what we've been telling school children for the last hundred years.  Maybe that's why I write fiction -- I don't have much faith in facts.