A Roundup, and a Readercon

I've been silent recently, but writing a lot. My SF Signal column has several new entries, including a two-parter on "The Death of Science Fiction." I did not write a new column this week, but I did pen a review of the VanderMeers' The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. I just submitted an article for publication, and as soon as I have more info on release I will post it. I am also still slogging away at my Clarion Write-a-Thon project, a bit behind at 11,100 words but working to catch up.

Today I am off to Readercon, and I will be posting assorted updates from there over the weekend. It should be a fun and thinky con.

A Few Notes on the Circulatory System of Books

I had mentioned earlier today on Twitter that my bookstore was becoming inundated with books. We always have a healthy influx of tomes (we are a large used bookstore), but in the past two weeks we have suffered an unrelenting avalanche of titles coming into us, 90% of which come from random people off the street. Some people bring one book, some bring one box, and others bring trunks and bins full of books. This spring we have received more books than I have seen in five years at the store.

There are several effects of this deluge: first, it means that our inventory swells mightily. As an ancillary effect of that increase in volume, the quality of books usually rises as we can pull and price down books that are in worse condition or stack a large backstock of a title on one of our sales tables and mark them down for quicker sale. We date all of our books and when a title has been on the shelf for too long we do something to get it sold, to make room for what will sell more quickly, which is the goal. We price all of our books competitively (and often lower) for our market and have no problem selling them for less after awhile if it gets them into someone's hands. This includes sometimes circulating books out to the Dollar Carts, several large wheeled bookcarts that we cram with all manner of books looking for a new home for what amounts to a small service charge for them.

Another effect of this surge of books is that we can be pickier and pickier about what we select and can price to buy with more discretion. So we can not only improve the general condition of our stock but vary it, and find both more popular and more obscure titles that we know sell. A side effect of this is that books that in lean times we would buy regardless of condition we pass on, because we either have it in better condition or can afford to wait for a better quality book to come in, and with many titles that is not a risky choice. When you work in a used bookstore and use your eyes you quickly get to know what people are looking for and a sense of what is moving and what is not. You buy more of what is moving and take fewer chances on what is not, unless the slow movers are something valuable or that you know someone is looking for.

An additional effect of this is that we often do not buy a portion of the boxes and bins and bags of books that come our way. Usually people take them back and keep them, or donate them to the Friends of the Library Book Sale's massive warehouse (where twice yearly they are sold in a bibliomaniacal bacchanal) or to Goodwill or to the Books Through Bars program (books for prisoners), whose base of operations is on the top floor of our building. Sometimes, the sellers do not want the books back, and if they so choose they can leave them with us to dispense of, which means that often the titles go out on our Dollar Carts. Also, one of the benefits of working at the bookstore is that we often get first crack (after the boss, of course) at what is left behind.

Today we received (not just bought) somewhere around 700 books, and about half of those were just left by the sellers. This amount of abandoned books is pretty rare, but it happens. This time of year the FotL are not accepting books because of their sale, students are moving, adjuncts are moving, and in the current economic climate regular folks are moving as well, and many do not want to haul the crates and tubs and satchels of books we could not buy with them, except maybe for the one that they realize was inscribed to them by their sister or Tomie de Paola or that tattered pocket of Dhalgren they scribbled all over in high school (all true stories, by the way). So they leave them. Sometimes we'll buy a few items personally (I bought a few titles from a friend who brought in five boxes of books today), but the rest need to be dealt with, and generally we try to not let them pile up.

This means that we have to decide what to do with the books quickly. In slower periods, unless they are seriously damaged, the books go right out to the Dollar Carts. But today, there were just too many, and despite the fact that we were selling $1 books quickly, it was not quick enough to keep from having a massive pileup of books. Also, the side effect of buying applies to the Dollar cart as well; the quality of condition and titles is pretty good on the carts. Packing them with old textbooks or tattered children's books makes no sense. Thus, a a decision has to be made to recycle some of them.

Usually one of my colleagues handles that task because I am the primary pricer and the specialty buyer, and I try to get in a lot of time at the register while pricing so that I see what is going out and get an idea of what's selling, what people are saying about prices, etc. This meant that I watched my co-worker going through stack after stack of books and creating boxes of books to recycle. But today, seeing some of what she was getting rid of (some of which she consulted with me about, to see if it should be saved, particularly fantastika, social science, and lit crit) I just couldn't take it anymore, and I undertook a book rescue. I salvaged 24 (EDIT: 32) books from the death pile (well, 22 books, 1 DVD, and a small blank book for my daughter) that I thought I could use and that I felt would either get recycled or get lost on the carts with the piles of similar titles.

The pictures above show you what I rescued, and it is quite a selection. Some were rejected because they had writing in them (we almost never buy any book that has more than an old price and someone's name in the book); others because they were determined to not be good enough for the shelf (my boss is quite biased against lit crit, for example, while I have little discernment for music books)or because we already had better copies, or because it might sell slowly, and in this business, books that stay on the shelf are pretty,but otherwise just taking the space of a title that might get scooped up quickly.

This is part of the circulatory system of books in a capitalist system. People buy books, read them, cherish them, display them, loan them, forget them on park benches, drop them in a puddle. . . books go through a cycle of consumption and ownership, and generally end up passing to another owner. Sometimes they get put in an old suitcase at a yard sale with a bright yellow "$1" sticker on them; other times they get passed to a friend. Often they get boxed up and brought to another part of the system - a library, a used bookstore, a charity - to be recirculated. This can happen many times in a book's life. I have seen books with as many as five different owner's names in them, held books nearly as old as the first printing press, and found everything from money to nude pictures to pages of handwritten poetry in books. The book as object is commodity, it is a transference and holder of symbolic capital, it is a culturally-constituted nexus of ideas and identity, pleasure and enlightenment(well, some are).

And our system produces a lot of them, so many that some of those characteristics get erased, or reconfigured. Yet some people still look stricken when they leave us books; others walk away or dismiss them with a ritualized "Well, I didn't like it that much anyway." But almost all of them ask if the books will still see some use, even the ones warped into curls by water damage, dotted with mold, or that have part of a honeycomb from a wild beehive attached to them. Few people want to hear that the books they brought in are going to be sent off with old newspapers and disposable coffee cups. Even the folks who bring in bulging plastic grocery bags of cheap mysteries want to know that the book will go to someone else, even if they hated reading it. The book is still a significant part of our economic circulatory system and our cultural system, even in the age of the Internet and e-books. That may be changing (and this rise in books coming to us may be a symptom of that), but these bound codices of glue and ink and rough flattened wood have some meaning to many people, especially me, and it is both sad and humbling to see this part of the circulatory system at work.

EDIT: This morning (5/22/11), being unraptured and all, I was cleaning out my courier bag and found that I had not taken books out of it last night. So I found 8 more rescued books:

The small soiled hardcover at the bottom is a copy of Bigsby's Dada and Surrealism (Critical Idiom). Not sure if I will read the Stross, or a few of the others (although I am already reading the Best European Fiction 2011). I have set aside a bag in the corner by my desk to start tossing in books that I can bring to Readercon this summer to distribute. Now trying to find room for them; it looks like winter sweaters will be put away and their shelf used to house books!

My Readercon pictures (tardy, poorly-lit, but funny)

So at last year's Readercon I brought my camera because when I attended in 2009 I took pictures with my phone and they were awful. So awful. The large meeting rooms are not well-lit and distances confounded my camera. So last July I brought my unipurpose camera. It can take good pictures, but it is several years old and thus is one-step removed from the albumen process in digital terms. Also, the screen is dead, so I can neither see what the camera sees nor know what the settings are, except for scrolling through choices until the edge of an identifiable symbol appears and I then count the number of clicks to get what I think is the proper configuration for the photo I want to take.

With this in mind I took many pictures at Readercon 21, about 225 of them, about 2/3rds of which were at the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition and involved me shifting about the room hoping to get enough light in the shot for it to not be a chaotic fuzz or nine shades of darkness. I went through them a few months ago and tossed over 85% of them, because, indeed, my camera betrayed me and most of them were unusable. Those that survived aren't fantastic, but they go give you a bit of the flavor of the con, so I offer them to you for a chuckle or, perhaps, a moment of wistful recollection.

---Peter Straub at a panel. He was the jolliest panelist of the convention, but sadly always dwelled in darkness:

---Samuel R. Delany at his reading. Note the casual attire!

---Mr. Delany again, minus his spectacles:

---Barry Longyear at the panel on anarchism and SF. Um, he REALLY does not like anarchism. All of my other photos are of him looking annoyed or leaning his cheek on his hand in exasperation:

---Contestants waiting to get called up for the Kirk Poland Memorial Bed Prose Competition: Mary Robinette Kowal, Yves Menard, Mike Allen, and Craig Shaw Gardner:

---Down to three. I selected this one because Mike Allen looked right at me with that "haven't you taken like 40 pictures of us standing here already?" smile. And I had.

---The contestants seated and ready to regale us with bad prose:

---The opening of the competition. The disk was really funny for some reason:

---Craig Shaw Gardner reading. I tried to think of a Jimmy Doohan look-alike joke that would not get me punched in the nose at the next con, but failed:

---Mary Robinette Kowal reading. She was the smilingest contestant I've ever seen:

---Yves Menard reading. Note the Halo of Inevitable Victory that surrounds him:

---Mike Allen is pleased with his hat:

---Eric Van, emcee and SF bon vivant. I've never seen someone so happy about tallying scores and doing math:

---Finally, a few photos of Rob Shearman at his reading. Incredible reader, animated and enthusiastic:

---No, REALLY:

I wish that more of them had come out. I apologize for the lack of photos of women; I took a bunch of panel pictures that just did not come out, and my camera batteries croaked at the start of Liz Hand's fabulous reading from Available Dark. But I hope to get a better camera before July so that I can get better pics this year.

Apex anew!

So, my blog post for Apex last month was just posted. Comments are encouraged.

Having just re-read it, I find myself wanting to explore this idea in more depth after some of the panels and conversations I engaged in at Readercon this past weekend. I will be writing more about that over the next week or so.

A Few Brief Meta-thoughts on Readercon

We've taken a break for a couple of hours and after a dinner of Guinness and carefully-selected bar food (including an astonishingly fresh salad of genuine mixed greens), we went back to our room to assess book finds, tomorrow's schedule, and our aching feet.

I am going to post more about the con specifically tonight, but something struck me this afternoon that I want to get down: a lot of the panels this year have spent more time questioning the topic, specifically the definition of the central term, than actually discussing the topic. That struck me strongly when Barry Malzberg, on a panel about unpleasantness in fiction, wanted to know if they were making it into a genre or something. He seemed quite displeased with a discussion of unpleasantness as a concept. And much of the conversation about the topic got bounced back to Peter Straub (who had some great comments on the idea of writing in an unhappy vein) and related to questions of genre. And I thought "so, when will they actually talk about the presence and tropes of unpleasantness in fiction?"

This happened even more forcefully in a panel on anarchy in speculative fiction earlier in the day. Two of the participants were so completely stuck on an idealized, overdetermined idea of anarchism that they spent the panel denigrating it and fighting almost any attempt to discuss it. I give a lot of credit to the panel leader for trying to keep people on-topic, and to Graham Sleight for consistently returning to the topic, the presence of the idea in speculative fiction, with actual books recommendations. And while at times the other participants came back to the general purpose of the panel, they would quickly go off on a tangent and go back to beating the dead horse of their very myopic definition of the term.

I saw this to some extent yesterday as well, although in the first panel I thought that John Clute and Michael Dirda did a fantastic job of critiquing and exploring the idea of interstitial fiction. But they were not just questioning or deriding the idea; they engaged it, and they contextualized it both as a term and as a literary strategy. They were neither dismissive or eliding; they took the notion seriously and tackled it head-on. I think that first panel has been the best I have attended thus far, because you learned something about the idea and its usage in literary production and you came away with a lot of thoughts to ponder.

I think this is a good topic for my next Apex post.

I also wanted to say that the readings I have attended thus far have been stellar. Liz Hand read the beginning to her new Cass Neary novel Available Dark last night, and it was creepy and compelling. Around lunchtime today Robert Shearman (Shirley Jackson Award nominee) gave a delightful and funny reading of a new story. I went to this reading based solely on his hilarious performance on the Bookaholics panel last night,and was not disappointed. I have not read any of his work, but this reading made me want to find his books immediately. Sadly, none were to be found in the Bookshop.

I want to read some of his plays also, because I think I could glean a lot from his sense of pacing and timing.

Readercon XXI: Friday, Part the First

Exhausted, mostly because I am full of ideas and other people's words. I had a good first day atReadercon. We got there without getting lost for the first year ever (their address foiled GPS in the past) and got set up in our room and registered quite smoothly.

The panels were not all fantastic, but mostly solid. The first panel was "Interstitial Then, Genre Now" which had some heavyweight critics in the panel. John Clute and Michael Dirda seriously interrogated the idea of interstitial fiction, while Peter Dubé, attending his first SF convention, provided some fresh thoughts to how to strategize and envision the idea of writing between genres. Theodora Goss, a participant in the Interstitial Arts Foundation and co-editor of the firstInterfictions anthology, guided the discussion but had to think fast to deal with the depth of the panel's critique of the idea. I am going to do a much fuller, reflective write-up of this panel later.

The next panel, "History & Memory in Historical & Spec. Fic," ended up being a much more personal discussion by the panelists than I had anticipated. Howard Waldrop told a great story about an ancestor who fought in the Confederate War, N. K. Jemisin talked at length about her preacher grandfather and his influence on her work, and David Anthony Durham discussed how he projected feelings about the father-son relationship into his portrayal of Hannibal in Pride of Carthage. The anecdotes were compelling, but were much more linked to individual history than ideas of history in fiction. I had hoped to hear about both during the hour, about how personal memory/history and larger ideas of the historical are channeled into an author's work.

I was pretty excited about the next panel: "New England: At Home to the Unheimlich?" Another stellar group of panelists were on hand to discuss the peculiar resonance of the region to horror and the uncanny. Everyone on the panel contributed to the discussion, but I wanted to hear about more than how Stephen King influenced everyone and how the change of seasons is significant to fiction set in the region. I appreciated how people kept coming back to the deep, peculiar history of New England, and I loved the idea of Cotton Mather as the first regional horror writer, and there were a number of moments where you could see how region and genre interacted, how this setting influences a number of tropes and can be both rote and surprising.

The last panel I attended before taking a break was "Non-Western Cultures in Fantasy." Theodora Goss once again led a spirited discussion about respect, cultural appropriation, and getting a feel f0r walking around in other people's skins. There was some tension in the discussion of owning people's stories and a rather unreflective take on the idea of universalism, but Cat Valente did a smashing job of reformulating the idea of borrowing with the metaphor of renting/leasing stories. Nalo Hopkinson provided some strong advice on writing about other cultures, including the need for writers to realize that regardless of who the subject is, you cannot write about "the other" without creating some friction, and it is important to have not just respect, but a moral compass when deciding how to write about things outside of your personal experience.

It was a thought-provoking morning. I had a lot to digest as I headed to the Bookshop.

More tomorrow!

Aetheric Ephemera: Horny Werewolf Day Edition

1) I'll let Warren Ellis tell you succinctly why today is Horny Werewolf Day. I can also provide you with a longer explanation. My wife and I, in the spirit of syncretism, kinda celebrate both. Neither of us are big fans of Valentine's Day, but it's an excuse to be even sillier with each other than usual. If you are looking for a quick e-card for that special someone, Chris Sims has just the thing to stimulate geek love. . . .

2) While linking to Ellis' Lupercalia statement, I found this link. Sweet canary conniptions! We have finally arrived at non-Animatronic robotic performers! Well, South Korea has. Given the review of this thespian's performance, and proclivity to knock stuff over on stage, I do not foresee a musical revival of RUR coming to Broadway anytime soon. Well, maybe with Keanu Reeves as the star. . . .

3) I am all signed up for Readercon. I don't see Chip Delany or Paul Park on the guest list yet, but I hope one or both of them can make it. The highlight of the con for me last year was talking to Mr. Delany and thanking him for the inspiration he has given me as a writer. I'm happy to see Lucius Shepard on the list for this year; I definitely want to meet him, since he is another one of my inspirations.

4) A taste of courtship in 2015, courtesy of Paleo-Future.

5) io9 has a great piece on PKD's The Man in the High Castle, which is also about the tension between the idea of the genre as showcase for the future and an author writing in and about the present. It could be a bit more in-depth, but the authors gets points for slipping in an Ezra Pound invocation (Degree of Difficulty: 7.8). I've been thinking about alternate history a lot today, partly due to Jay Lake mentioning his novella "America, Such as She Is," and partly due to me then reading some reviews and discussion about it, and partly because I got an idea for an alternate history story that goes somewhere neither Lake nor Jo Walton in her excellent Half a Crown trilogy venture to in their explorations of WWII What Ifs. But it would require a Super Star Destroyer load of research, so I'm just putting some notes in a folder for later.

If you have never read Dick's take on alternate history, best go read it. The idea that is invokes of "how nebulous reality was about to become" is certainly a central concern in many of Dick's novels, but this particular approach to it has neither the dizzy paranoia of, say, Valis, nor the "are they or are they not human" question behind Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It's about questioning the solidity of reality, the malleability of the future. It is provocative on multiple levels, and oddly inspiring in how it deals with historical turning points.

6) Finally tonight, John Scalzi brings together both the Great E-Book Kerfuffle and authors giving out advice in one blog post. I found the linkage so compelling that I then wrote a response nearly as long as his post, one which was completely ignored by all other commenters. I think I have to learn to either be more interesting, or be pithier and more controversial. But I thought my point, which was that the situation would impact new writers in a number of ways, and thus the way they received and used advice from more established writers, seemed salient. But please note, I will NOT be writing about that for either my FoG or Apex blogs. I kinda want to, but I need to move on.

Currently, I am trying to put The City & The City down, partly as an example for my next Apex column, which is going to be about how authors portray and use "worlds within/parallel to worlds." It will make more sense when I write it, but the examples will be Mieville's book and Star Trek's Mirror Universe.a sort of "When Unfamiliar Worlds Collide." Really, it'll make sense.

Back

I have returned from Readercon (and survived the day after which was a heinously busy day at work!). It was great. I attended some fine panels (and a few less-than-fine), met two of my literary heroes, and absorbed a lot about SF and writing. A more detailed summary will appear [soon!], and I am considering what to focus on for a Forces of Geek column. I think I will have a better idea of what I want to delve into after I write up a report.

Highlights of the con were four in number:

1) Met Samuel R. Delany and Gene Wolfe. I went to their respective Kaffeeklatsches and got to thank them both for their influence on my writing. I got to chat with Mr. Delany more than Mr. Wolfe, and also got him to sign my copy of Nova and a copy of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. I even got a picture (as seen above)!

2) The Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition. It was even funnier than last year, perhaps because this year it was a Tournament of Champions. I love how writers can be both creative and silly simultaneously in this format, and Eric Van is a great MC.

3) Books! There were values galore in the Bookshop this year, and a fair number of freebie books as well. I got some great stuff; not a lot of collector's items, but a pile of good books. Going around the Bookshop is like traveling through a museum, a carnival, a networking node, and a bazaar at the same time.

4) Cousin. I went with my cousin Frank, which made for a relaxing, funny, sometimes snarky weekend. It was fun to spend time with him and to do things like cruise the Bookshop. It was also fun to get yelled at by him for not getting Howard Waldrop to sign a book he gave me :-).

Given the above, I have done very little writing since Wednesday. But I will be back to it tomorrow. The novel beckons, as does a short story, and of course a Readercon report.

A sad note: Charles Brown died on his way home from Readercon. The guiding hand of Locus
was an important influence on the field, and I wish I had done more than just say "Hi Mr. Brown!" the last time that I saw him.