Just a quick post today as both a public service announcement and to clear out some cobwebs. We want you, our loyal reading public, to know that Cornellbooksellers.com world headquarters is still staffed and operational over the summer—though our capacity for deep thought might be a bit diminished.

On to the PSA portion of our program: this Saturday, the 28th of August, 2010 is the celebration of the first annual International Read a Comic in Public Day. IRCIPD is designed to draw attention to the literary and artistic merit of the comics medium through a brazen public display of affection.

I’m both thrilled with the idea and slightly chagrined. Does this event even need to exist in places like Japan and Europe where people openly read comics every day on the commute to work? Probably not. Still, it’s good to show the general public in North America that comics is a thriving artistic endeavour, outside of content generation for Hollywood.

Show your solidarity on Saturday—comix to the people.

The inimitable William Gibson has provided New York Magazine with a wonderful recommended reading list (via SF Signal).

Coincidentally, I discussed the first book on Mr. Gibson’s list, The Stars My Destination, just this past weekend with Richard and my son Harry. It’s a book I promote relentlessly as one of the best science fiction novels of all time; and I often characterize it as proto-cyberpunk. So, I was extremely gratified to see that it not only topped Mr. Gibson’s list, but that he baldly stated that …”I doubt I’d have written without having read it…” The Stars My Destination remains remarkably fresh and engaging and is a must-read for any serious SF fan.

As for the rest of Mr. Gibson’s list The Forever War and Holy Fire are also faovurites of mine and The Crystal World has been on my “to-read” list for a long time. The rest are unknown and intriguing except for Dhalgren, which I have gamely attempted to read—to a hundred pages or more—and then put down both times. In a foreword to the the novel, Mr. Gibson wrote: “I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it…Dhalgren is not there to be finally understood. I believe its “riddle” was never meant to be “solved.”"

Harlan Ellison has also, famously, had a lot to say about Dhalgren: “When Dhalgren came out, I thought it was awful, still do… I was supposed to review it for the L.A. Times, got 200 pages into it and threw it against a wall.”

My own reaction was more muted than that—I just got bored. I can’t completely condemn Dhalgren. I just think it’s self-indulgent in a particularly “sixties” kind of way—endless digressive navel gazing by the characters is meant to be profound. I think Dhalgren is a failed experiment. What’s interesting to me is to compare Dhalgren’s experimentalism with the formal and typographic experiments in The Stars My Destination. Where Dhalgren’s endlessly wandering prose becomes soporific for me, Bester’s attempts to convey his main character’s cosmic aphasia are surprisingly effective and don’t throw the reader out of the narrative.

I’m intrigued by literary experiments, but I like authors who understand the value of constraint: The Stars My Destination is a lean, mean 232 pages and Dhalgren a bloated 879. You can try to mess with my mind, but I’m only willing to give you so many pages then I’m moving on.

I‘ve mentioned my nerdly hero Alberto Manguel in passing here several times before. Mr. Manguel is a writer, translator, editor, anthologist and—above all else—a great critical reader and lover of books. One of the most repeated facts of Mr. Manguel’s life is that, as an adolescent in Buenos Aires, he had the privilege of being one of the chosen few who read to the blind Borges in the twilight of the great man’s years. It doesn’t take much insight to see that this time spent with Borges was the formative experience of Mr. Manguel’s life and shaped his relationship to the world of the written word.

Recently, I stumbled on an archive of articles Mr. Manguel has written for the Canadian arts and culture magazine Geist.

Two of my favourites are “In the Shadow of the Castle”—which is a classic grumpy old man rant about computers that would usually irritate me but is so wonderfully expressed that it makes me smile—and “My Friendship with Rat and Mole”. “Rat & Mole” is both a loving tribute to The Wind in the Willows and a consideration of the value of rereading books. I spoke to my sister about this recently as Willows is also a book that she rereads every year.

The books that we return to over and over again, year after year, reveal something about both our world-view and about the stories that comfort us. I think it’s probably quite rare for someone’s year-after-year book to be something grim and challenging like Blood Meridian. For myself, the books I’ve reread the most are probably the first three of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. There are other books I’ve reread a number of times including Heart of Darkness, Dune and Invisible Cities; but Hitchhiker’s will always be like a security blanket for me. Hitchhiker’s is both hysterically funny and grandly, cosmically melancholy—it cheers me at the same time that it makes my mind wander through the greatest questions there have ever been about our place in the universe. I think it comforts me because I believe that these questions are both worth exploring and that the only sane response to our place in the universe is to laugh.

What about you people out there? I know there are still quite a few readers dropping by this place, I get the stats. Send me some comments: what do you reread every year?

P.S. On Mr. Manguel’s website you can also download a list of his 100 favourite books, which is definitely worth checking out. I was particularly thrilled to see some of my favourite science fiction titles on his list including Solaris, Neuromancer, I Robot, Martian Chronicles and More Than Human.

As part of my ongoing attempt to become more literate in classic science fiction I recently finished a couple of books by quirky legend Philip José Farmer: the seminal To Your Scattered Bodies Go and the odd but charming Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.

TYSBG is the first in Farmer’s Riverworld books. In it, we follow famed Victorian adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton—translator of 1001 Nights, “discoverer” of the source of the Nile and the first Westerner to visit Mecca (disguised as a Dervish no less…seriously)—who wakes to find himself reincarnated after death on a strange planet that is earthlike, but seems to consist of only one enormous river valley. He gradually comes to realize that all humans, from all ages, have been reincarnated on the banks of the river. Their basic need for food is met every day through anonymous mechanisms. If they die again, all are reincarnated somewhere else along the river. So, of course, humans do what they always do: establish tribes and villages and fight with each other.

Farmer worshiped the early pulp heroes like Burroughs’ John Carter—he even wrote a biography of Tarzan. This love of the pulps deeply informs Farmer’s writing, but he goes off in interesting directions from this starting point. The central conceit of Riverworld allows Farmer to appropriate any historical figure or race and set them against each other like toy soldiers—which he does again and again with great, violent glee. But imagine pulp stories filtered through 1970s era psychotherapy and you arrive at something like Farmer’s worldview. Burton’s fate becomes intertwined with that of Nazi monster Hermann Göring. Farmer uses Riverworld’s reincarnation trope to examine the psychological underpinnings of Burton’s wanderlust (endless escapes from himself and his past mistakes) and the possibility of redemption for a figure as reviled as Göring—which remains essentially unattainable throughout the book, as Göring eventually descends into self-loathing and addiction after every reincarnation. This is challenging stuff despite the pulpy surface.

Farmer even attempts to examine gender and sexual mores through the only significant female character, Alice Liddell—the real-life inspiration for the fictional Alice. Unfortunately, Farmer fails here—I wouldn’t call him a misogynist, but he never really rises above the sexism of his pulp influences. Other than Alice, all of the women in TYSBG are cardboard representations of desire or domesticity. Alice is more interesting in that, even though her Victorian values are mocked as antiquated and ill-fitting on Riverworld, she represents the importance of civil society—almost as an unobtainable ideal. If only she could have had a little more page-time. In his Doc Savage biography, Farmer returns often to the idea that Doc’s only real weakness is his inability to understand women. I suspect Farmer struggled with the same issue.

Despite the sexism, I would still recommend TYSBG. Farmer’s action scenes are so good, I can almost recommend TYSBG strictly as a continuation of the pulp action style. Fortunately, Farmer also wants to collide so many big ideas and creative SF power chords that TYSBG rises above its murky origins to become something more.

Farmer’s Doc Savage bio is an altogether trickier beast. It’s a weird but engaging concept: a detailed literary biography of a fictional character that pretends its subject was a real person—and then goes on to link that person through distant relations to various other fictional and historical figures. With his Tarzan bio, Farmer introduced a family tree for the Wold Newton clan, which he expands in the Doc Savage book. In Farmer’s universe, Doc is related by blood to Tarzan, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Fu Manchu, Nero Wolfe and a host of others—all the descendants of people exposed to a radioactive meteorite. Farmer organizes his bio by the iconic parts of Doc’s world: Doc, his partners, his gadgets, etcetera. The exhaustive nature of his approach almost lost me during the Empire State Building chapter. Farmer spends an inordinate amount of time justifying the discrepancies between the real ESB and the conflicting descriptions provided in various Doc Savage books by various writers of Doc’s base of operations. He leans most heavily on the books by Lester Dent as “authoritative” sources, but then has to justify Dent’s own sloppiness in terms of keeping the details of Doc’s world straight. At first, Farmer’s justifications and explanations are charming. Pages later, I wanted to scream “Phil, for godssake, we know Doc wasn’t REAL!” Once I got past the ESB chapter though, things starting moving along again.

I can’t really recommend Farmer’s Doc Savage unless you’re either a fan of the character or otherwise interested in the history of pulp literature. However, my excursion into Farmerphillia has made me think about these shared world experiments. The Wold Newton family was obviously influential on people like Stephen King and Alan Moore. I think part of the appeal of these interconnected shared worlds is that they mirror the experience of reading in general. Reading Farmer’s TYSBG led me to look up Sir Richard Francis Burton and go out and buy some of his writing (about his trip to Mecca), which greatly enhanced my enjoyment of TYSBG and was hugely entertaining in its own right.

Eccentric iconoclast Ted Nelson’s hypertext dreams were born in the same place. Reading widely leads inevitably to making connections between various texts. These revelatory moments take two forms: the secret-club knowledge of an obscure reference and the explorer’s appreciation of something new to chase down—both equally enjoyable—the latter perhaps being the most intellectually rewarding. The writer drawn to these shared world models seems to want to add another level of meta-appreciation to his or her work—to force additional connections. When successful, these deliberate tangling of mythologies and backstories ping around the mind adding real or imagined significance to a given text. The big pitfall of the shared world has the same effect as an overload of hypertext: exhaustion—all web and no spider.

My top ten favourite books of this year (including a few comics):

#10

Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

The fascinating original saga is elegantly formed and intriguing to read. Which is why it is #10.

#9

Tyrant #4, Dreams and Bones, by Steve Bissette

A gritty walking with dinosaurs is the best way to describe Steve Bissette’s amazing Tyrant series. He was set up to do life-to-death of his character Tyrant; unfortunately he only got to when the character (a T-rex) hatches! The fantastic art and narration makes Dreams and Bones #9.

#8

Louis Riel, by Chester Brown

A comic biography of the controversial figure of Louis Riel, Chester Brown’s graphic novel is laid out in a strict 6 panel grid and a plain mid range view so as to suck readers in by story alone.

#7

The Penultimate Truth, by Philip K. Dick

I love the writing style and killer plot, even though I saw it coming, and enjoyed the book start to finish. ‘Nuff said.

#6

Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb

A Tolkein-like high fantasy novel that’s completely original! A nice change from the typical, unoriginal Tolkein–like rip-off. The plot is different and interesting, the characters are believable and the fantasy aspect is original too!

#5

The Dying Earth, by Jack Vance

This book is really good and I enjoyed it immensely. It is also very, very weird. I think this has something to do with why I like it so much; the out-there wackiness of the whole thing is too crazy to not enjoy. It’s also well written on top of the crazy giant heads and eyeball robes and tentacled robots.

#4

Animal Farm, George Orwell

I liked this book a lot because of the fable-like style that loosely covers the dark fetid gloom of the story, a winning combination. It is well written and a crazy page-turner.

#3

I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov

This book is so amazingly clever. I couldn’t stop telling people about the problematic robots and the genius solutions that I probably got a little annoying, but it was all so clever! I kept thinking (after I read the problem and solution) that it was so obvious I should have thought of it, and yet I never predicted the story!

#2

Dune, by Frank Herbert

This book is amazing all the way through. It has incredible world building, character depth enough to drown in, and a fantastic plot. Dune is a book that is cool from start to finish. Read it!

#1

The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

An incredible collection of short stories, though a little depressing. Bradbury’s ability to plunge you into their emotions is amazing.

5 Runner-ups:

15 Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume 1, by Alan Moore

14 Little Brother, Cory Doctorow

13 The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

12 The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde 2, adapted to comic form by P. Craig Russell

11 The Raven, Fine Press Edition, by Edgar Allen Poe

I love lists because they are an arbitrary yet rewarding way to pick an intellectual argument that is, simultaneously, engaging and inconsequential.

I particularly love end-of-the-year, retrospective lists. I enjoy the fond look back—the gentle nostalgia—of reminding myself of things that moved me in the recent past.

In that spirit, here is a list of my favourite books, in reverse order of personal importance, that I read this past decade. I have wilfully included books not actually written in the past decade, but rather, encountered by me in that time. However, I have tried to lean into the past ten years as much as I can, given my reading habits. I have also chosen not to include truly excellent books, like Dune, that I re-read—preferring to stick to fresh experiences.

“Personal importance” is the principle criterion for this list. This list and its order are in no way meant to convey the absolute qualitative value of a given book in my mind. Coetzee’s Disgrace is certainly one of the best books I read in the past ten years, but it was also kind of a drag. There has to be something about the book that really moved me and sometimes books that are ostensibly just out to entertain can also be enlightening. If nothing else, one’s personal reactions to a given piece of entertainment can help to illuminate interesting corners of your own psyche. All of which is to say: these books are my favourites, but not necessarily the best.

I encourage anyone who might be out there reading this post to argue vehemently in the comments for or against any of these choices. But, take note, I reserve the right to point out to everyone just how damn wrong you might be.

Without further ado, here is my list of personal, decade’s-best, top-10 books:

#10

The Steel Remains, Richard Morgan

Can I respect myself for including a book as pulpy as this in my top-10? Apparently! The Steel Remains is a hardcore noir-influenced high-fantasy barnburner—jam packed with graphic violence, sex and profanity. Morgan distils his Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock influences in an even more noirish crucible than either master could have created. Remains is shamelessly entertaining and the story exists in such a successfully realized universe that you come away feeling splattered by its various unmentionable fluids. And despite the ruthlessness of its execution and bleakness of its worldview, it is still somehow moving. Its high fantasy façade also conceals a stealthy but rewarding core of science fiction conceits.

#9

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers

I hesitated to include this choice on the list at all, but I can’t deny this book its due. In the wake of AHWOSG, an entire generation of hipster imitators has emerged, almost swamping the original in a wave of trite poseur-product. However, this book is really as stated: a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It succeeds in touching the reader through carefully detailed observation of the human condition rather than sentimentality. And while this book is often mistaken for ironic, it is really something else. AHWOSG is bitingly funny, but honest. Its meta-fictional games are actually about the challenges of approaching a sentimental, personal subject in a clear-eyed and truthful manner—“truthful” in impact and emotion rather than factual detail. AHWOSG is messy in the way that life is messy. As Anthony Burgess once wrote: “…all fiction is autobiographical and all autobiography is fictional…”…I think…more or less…I’m too lazy to look it up, but it was in Earthly Powers. Anyway, nothing Eggers has done since comes close.

#8

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

Gaiman is a borrower. When people go on about Neil Gaiman they most often describe him as a storyteller—conjuring images of old-timey troubadours and fireside ghost stories. This is mostly crap. While he is an excellent storyteller, particularly live, this image of him is too parochial and backwards. I think his real strength as an artist lies in straight-up, post-modern appropriation and recontextualization; masquerading as folksy tale spinning. There’s a bit of the punk-rocker in NG. His stories contain all the goblins and werewolves and Grendels of antiquity, but there are hard edges and revisionism on every page. This feeling for the ennui and strangeness inherent in contemporary life informs all his best work—and American Gods reflects a high point in his maturation as an artist. It also represents a seminal work in the development of the urban fantasy subgenre (even though large chunks of the book occur in open spaces and small town USA) as practiced most effectively by Charles de Lint. There is something incredibly sticky about the possibility of turning a corner and bumping into Woden or Spider Anansi in a local dive-bar—the idea that our mundane everyday could be haunted by the gods and monsters of the ancient world is thrilling. But NG goes the logical step further and imagines a world in which humans create those gods and monsters out of our imaginations and then drag them around, all over the world with us. This conceit allows him to create characters that are simultaneously grounded and relatable and yet representative of broad philosophical and metaphysical questions: death, lust, chaos, time and more.

#7

Accelerando, Charles Stross

I have a soft spot for the classic SF “fix-up”—a book that began as short stories and was later Frankensteined into a novel. It’s a concept that is common to classic SF, due to the fact that the genre emerged from pulp magazine roots, which were the province of short stories and serials. (Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Sturgeon’s More Than Human are two of the most famous examples of successful fix-ups—and personal favourites of mine). I’m not sure why I enjoy the fix-up so much. Something about the way in which the shifts in tone and approach from story to story can’t be entirely smoothed over appeals to me on a gut level. Accelerando is the perfect fix-up for the 21^st Century. Using black plastic nerd glasses as a metaphor for posthumanism is only the first of a long line of brilliant devices littered throughout the book’s ramshackle tour of our immediate, near-term and far-flung futures. Stross bombards the reader with so many—at least to me—new and radical concepts about the future of economics, technology, identity and intelligence that he almost overwhelms. What saves Accelerando from being too didactic is its whirlwind approach to pacing and its endearing sense of humour. The musical term “accelerando” is the perfect title: the book moves faster and faster into and beyond the singularity—rushing past the point in which our whole solar system is inhospitable to old fashioned humans. Accelerando was the first book I ever read that employed the “rapture of the nerds” concept of the singularity, and I haven’t looked at any technology the same way since. Accelerando’s starting point is: what does a real post-scarcity economy look like? And it finishes deep in the mists of a post-human, post-everything futurescape—using the through-line of a single family to keep us on the rails—gutsy and brilliant.

#6

Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks

Early in 2000 I read Banks’ fantastic Look to Windward and was so hooked on his Culture that I quickly read four more of his SF books and one of his non-genre offerings—all of which were excellent—but Weapons is the one that I find most sticky. It kind of has it all: a galaxy-spanning utopian technocracy that clashes with more primitive civilizations at its edge; a CIA-like espionage organization; quirky AI concepts; page-turning action and adventure and gripping confrontation between different sets of ethics and moral frameworks concerning the cost of violence. All of which becomes secondary as you work your way through two parallel narratives running backward and forward through time. Narratives that begin to show the unreliability of the narrator and that culminate in a shocking ending. Weapons is a grand space opera filtered through the lens of a gritty personal psychodrama.

#5

Perdido Street Station, China Miéville

China is one of my new geek heroes—along with Brian Eno and Alberto Manguel—for several reasons. First, China is a fellow devotee of the great H.P. Lovecraft, but his work rises so far beyond simple pastiche that it seems almost revolutionary—an exquisite mix of Lovecraft, steampunk and deep world-building. Second, let’s talk about that world-building: I read an interview with China where he described his technique as something close to gaming; wherein he assigns attributes to characters and makes maps and designs systems. Third—even though I don’t share his politics—he is a vocal Marxist—it’s just refreshing to read genre fiction that’s so thoroughly informed by a political worldview that also completely resists devolving into didacticism. Lastly, he is almost single-handled responsible for the emergence of the wonderful New Weird subgenre. PSS is the perfect representation of the disparate elements of China’s approach to fiction. It’s a lushly rendered urban dreamscape full of monsters living side-by-side with common humanity. China’s fictional city-state of New Crobuzon feels so real you can almost taste the soot in the air. A subtext of transformation runs throughout the book—personal, political and genetic—that is expressed in a variety of literal and metaphoric ways. If PSS is about any one thing it might be expressed as: change is painful but necessary…or at least inevitable. China’s remade, particularly the monstrous, Lovecraftian bad guy of PSS, serve, in part, as metaphors for the way cities are continuously re-imagined by new immigrants. New Crobuzon and its inhabitants constantly roil, merging and parting facets of each other—like all of China’s fiction with its wild and weird influences and antecedents.

#4

Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell

This book snuck up on me. I had picked up a cheap paperback copy on a whim having read a mention of its portrait of restaurant life in the Paris of the late 1920s. Cooking is a hobby of mine and I’ve had several friends in the industry. I’ve always been intrigued by the life of a chef. (Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential would have definitely made this list if I had confined myself to books actually published in the last 10 years—but, you know, he’s no Cormac McCarthy.) But DAOIPAL knocked me flat. It’s the most unsentimental examination of the grind of poverty I’ve ever read. Orwell’s observations of the Felliniesque characters he mingles with in his race to the bottom are brilliantly evocative. In fact, “Felliniesque” does Orwell a disservice. Orwell’s book is full of obviously real, flesh-and-blood humans in difficult circumstances. DAOIPAL is not a sideshow or a Hallmark special, but rather an unparalleled paean for social justice—“unparalleled” in my experience by being so plainspoken and direct, without a hint of sermonizing. DAOIPAL becomes a very tense read, somewhat like a thriller, because you begin to worry about every new person who enters Orwell’s narrative: where is their next meal coming from? How can people live like this?

#3

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

I’ve written about Lonesome Dove here before and my admiration for it is undiminished. If you had told me at the beginning of this decade that not one, but two westerns would be on my top-10 list I would have questioned your sanity, but here we are. McMurty’s ability to put you into the heads of all of his carefully realized cowboys and Indians and farmers and gamblers and prostitutes is remarkable. And his willingness to then put them all through the wringer verges on nihilism. He denies us easy resolutions for any plot thread and we ultimately thank him for it—a great book.

#2

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

An SF riff on The Count of Monte Cristo; a precursor to cyberpunk; a stylistically ambitious 1950’s-era modernist experiment; and an Arthur C. Clarke-style cosmic freak-out about the evolution of man—The Stars My Destination is all of these and more. An initially despicable lump of a protagonist who evolves first into the perfect case study for the limits and costs of revenge and then moves beyond that into something completely different: Gully Foyle becomes a stand-in for mankind on the brink of real change. A breathlessly fast and hugely entertaining book—stop reading this right now and acquire a copy. Trust me.

…and finally, the #1 book I read this past decade….

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

“In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.” In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy created one of the greatest literary villains ever conceived: the Judge—the personification of violent, immoral conflict: “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be….War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.” If the judge was the only good thing about Blood Meridian it would still be worth reading, but there is so much more. As with most great works of art, many people dislike Blood Meridian and I can sympathize with them. It’s a brutally violent and darkly nihilistic book, but similar to McCarthy’s The Road, there is a tiny, pale core of something hopeful about it. The main character of “the kid” seems like such a cypher for so much of the book, it’s easy to dismiss Blood Meridian as a whole, but the point—at least to me—is the gradual building up of the kid into a real character, piece by piece. The tiny bit of light Cormac throws us is the possibility that even someone born into inhuman brutality and neglect can eventually evolve into something slightly better. And that that evolution is an end in itself. I think the obscure coda at the conclusion of the book is akin to Camus—it might be worth just going through the motions. But broad philosophizing aside, Blood Meridian is built from exquisite prose, detailed historical research and an unparalleled glimpse into the depths of the void of human depravity—a masterpiece by any measure.

Honourable mentions (i.e. “the next 10”):

11. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
12. Ravelstein, Saul Bellow
13. The Pale Blue Eye, Louis Bayard
14. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
15. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Michael Chabon
16. Look to Windward, Iain M. Banks
17. The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett
18. Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
19. Battle Royale, Koushun Takami
20. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

I felt compelled to share—particularly in light of this recent diatribe by SF author Kim Stanley Robinson against the Booker judges, which has lately done the blog rounds. I have to admit that I’ve never read any Robinson, but, based on how completely bang-on I think he is here, I’m going to make the time.

In response, according to the Guardian, Man Booker judge John Mullan is quoted as saying:

…that he “was not aware of science fiction,” arguing that science fiction has become a “self-enclosed world”.

“When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres,” he said, but now “it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”

…which is an appallingly ignorant statement about all literary genres, let alone those cherished by Fandom. Does Mullan really think that mysteries and westerns and romance novels and spy-thrillers and true crime potboilers and alternate histories all receive the same due as literary novels in the minds of the Man Booker judges? I feel I must rise to the defence of nerds and geeks everywhere: for I have met the enemy and truly they are us.

The reason SF, fantasy & horror fans have “special weird things they go to and meet each other” is not (generally) because of some kind of self-imposed exile, it’s the result of years of mainstream neglect, indifference and scorn. In its early days, SF was seen as the exclusive province of children or arrested adolescents. This golden age of acceptance that Mullan refers to never happened. At best, mainstream success came to SF/fantasy writers by virtue of their not being included in genre ghettos in the public’s perception.

Margaret Atwood has been nominated for the Man Booker five times in part because she steadfastly refuses to be labelled a science fiction writer, despite having spent years and years now writing science fiction.

SF fans, longing for acceptance and camaraderie, created Fandom organically as a means to celebrate the artistic achievement of creators who are often ignored by the mainstream—and more power to them.

I was extremely pleased with the overall impact of our stand and received lots of great compliments from passers-by. Here’s a photo of Richard and my son Harry in front of the display:

Inviting isn’t it? And on closer inspection, you see the high-quality of our offerings:

Speaking of which, I’m far behind on my online listings, but check back at Cornellbooksellers.com over the coming weeks—I’m finally going to start listing some of the more interesting items: Bradbury, Lovecraft, Howard, et al.

I also want to share this photo of Richard’s wares, which complimented our stock perfectly:

Finally, I want to give a shout-out to my oldest friend Michael Hind, who took some time out of a truly hectic schedule to drop by the stand to visit with us:

It was a real pleasure to see a familiar face at the event and his visit brought back memories of the last con Mike and I attended—the now mythical Maplecon in Ottawa—when we were maybe 13 or 15…long, long ago…

Mike recently had his first graphic novel published, The Undertaking, which is truly excellent and I urge everyone reading this post to go and buy 2 copies each so that he can continue to produce many more wonderful works.

Now, I promise this is the last Worldcon post—I think—and I’ll move to other topics after this.

The table next to us at Worldcon was occupied by the writers and publishers of ChiZine Publications. Of the small presses represented at Worldcon, ChiZine had, hands-down, the best looking collection of books. ChiZine seems to have really made an effort to develop all their materials—books, flyers, cards, magazines, ads—with really strong and consistent design work. As a bit of a graphic design geek myself—in one of my previous careers, I dabbled with desktop publishing and bits and pieces of layout and design work—I was really drawn to the quality of their offerings.

I also had a few very pleasant exchanges with one of the ChiZine writers Daniel A. Rabuzzi and his charming wife Deborah Mills.

Daniel has written a really interesting looking YA-oriented fantasy novel, The Choir Boats, which includes illustrations and cover designs by Deborah (a fantastic wood carver and artist).

The Choir Boats is, in some ways, a very traditional fantasy novel. Daniel has received a great deal of inspiration from Tolkien and Nordic mythology—he has even studied Old Norse—but he seems to want to spin those influences through a slightly weirder lens than the Professor. I haven’t read the novel yet, but it’s been added to my urgent stack and I’ll report back on my findings.

One of the most engaging parts of my chat with Daniel concerned his academic background. I’m always fascinated by the struggles of book-lovers inside of post-modern, post-historical academia—partly as a result of exposure to my sister’s working life as a Professor of English Literature (no comment and the less said the better etc.)—and partly out of my own experiences with what seemed to be a turning away from post-modernism in the fine arts school I attended in 1989. Daniel seemed to agree with me that even Barthes didn’t mean that we should give up the Moliere, or Shakespeare, as qualitative equal to anything else…but I digress…

Daniel has moved on from academia to bigger and better things with the publication of his first novel and I wish him all the best. You can also catch up with him at his blog: Lobster & Canary .

a photo of David Kyle's map of the Hyborian Age

One of the most interesting encounters I had at Worldcon was with David Kyle who, despite being in his 90s, is still active in science fiction and fantasy fandom and was keen to discuss our books.

Mr. Kyle co-founded Gnome Press in 1947 and was responsible for the first hard cover editions of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories—several of which we had on display. Mr. Kyle commented that they were “in the best condition I’ve seen in years”, which was a better compliment than I could have wished for. It was a huge pleasure to talk with someone who has been part of the SF community essentially throughout its existence.

We spoke a bit about the map you see a photograph of at the top of this post (taken of the Gnome first edition of Conan the Conqueror). Mr. Kyle was the first artist to recreate a map of the Hyborian Age based on roughs and notes created by Howard. According to Mr. Kyle, his version of the map started appearing almost immediately in other publications with his name erased. We also talked about the impact of this map in general. I’ve lived with the map of the Hyborian Age since I was 10 years old. It is so familiar that, for most of my life, the Hyborian Age has almost felt like a real place I could go and visit.

This conversation brought to my mind Alberto Manguel’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. A fully realized imaginary world—one of the hallmarks of really good science fiction and fantasy—is often stickier than real places we’ve visited that held little interest for us. In some ways, SF fandom—despite its sometimes overwhelming eccentricities—is like a big, open-hearted club of frequent travelers to imaginary places.

Certainly the Masquerade couldn’t have been real, could it?