This post post will be a bit different from what I usually post. Rambling, more personal, maybe. Probably a bit weird. It’s a tribute, of sorts, for the late SF fan and editor Carl-Eddy Skovgaard.
I’ll be honest, it feels weird writing a tribute to a person I’ve only met once, where we chatted about books and authors for a handful of minutes. Though, as a Danish science fiction and fantasy author, it would feel weirder still not doing it at all, considering Carl-Eddy has meant so much for the Danish SF fandom and publishing of Danish SF especially.
It’s easy to become frustrated, submitting to English language SF&F magazines. Stacking up rejections until you run out of places to submit to. I’ve spent more than one evening cursing the fact that there are not more SF&F short fiction markets out there.
It’s also easy to forget, though, that the markets which do exists are only there because of some very dedicated, hardworking people. Often, these magazines never make a profit and only stay alive because the publishers and editors are willing to pour their time, energy, and money into them.
But that’s English language SF&F publishing. For a small market like the Danish one, the situation is much more extreme, much more dependent on a small group of people. This becomes very clear when looking at how the three children in the Danish branch of the speculative fiction family come across.
Horror, normally, the smallest member of the family, is doing relatively well in Denmark. Thanks to a small group of dedicated fans and publishers centered mostly around the city of Odense, we have both a horror festival and a couple of publishers more or less dedicated to the horror genre.
On the other hand, the big sister, fantasy, is looking sadly malnourished. There’s one publisher dedicated to the genre and another newer publisher focusing on the Weird off-spring genre somewhere between fantasy and horror.
Science fiction is, as always, the middle child. We have only one dedicated SF publisher in Denmark (SFC), which is actually a SF fan-organization more broadly. They have been around for 50 years, though, and been very active as publisher in the last couple of decades.
Of course, no man is an army, but a lot of those publications have been driven by Carl-Eddy. He has been the editor for SFC for around two decades. In that period, he has been involved with publishing more than 100 books.
In my opinion, though, his biggest contribution to Danish SF is the long running anthology series Right Beneath the Surface. For 19 years, the anthology (and, hence, Carl-Eddy) has ensured that there was always a short fiction market for Danish SF authors. A place where both new and established authors could test their skills and find readers.
Not all SF markets as small as the Danish are lucky enough to have that kind of steady publication for so many years. A lot of Danish SF authors (including me) owe a part of their publication success to Carl-Eddy.
I doubt Carl-Eddy is known in the fandom outside Denmark. He won’t have his own obituary in a magazine like Locus. He deserves to be recognized, though, for all the work he has done to keep the genre alive in Denmark. So, this is my little tribute to Carl-Eddy Skovgaard. RIP.
Toby Backman 