It thus counts as a crossover. In four ways: from folk to blues; from protest to blues; from Popular Front propaganda to blues; from the Jewish experience to the black experience.*

* Granted, some of us automatically do the last.

Absolutely totally awesome.

And yeah, that tendency to look at the "cool kids over there" and wish you were part of the group also means missing the fact that you're "alone" over here with a huge number of friends who somehow showed up when you weren't looking, and accepted you or you accepted them or something, and who you enjoy when you're not doing all that angsty naval gazing.

From the Luminescent Explicarium:

The Gnomish Lowlands are not so much a country, as a collective of territories which lie lower than their surrounds, and are thus prone to drainage and runoff (See also: fen, delta, landfill, and primary debate), resulting in the accumulation of the of detritus, effluvium and marginalia. The lowlands are usually poor places with few resources of their own, partly due to their natural composition, and partly due to the fouling of the environment that occurs when the surrounding areas allow their varied effluvium to run naturally to its lowest point.

To make matters worse, the Lowlands are fraught with quickmires, labyrinths, and intellectual dishonesty which tend, once something has entered their environs, to hold it fast, suck it in, and hinder or prevent attempts to repair, restore, or improve the environment.

The leaders of these areas, often designated as "Their Gnomish Lownesses" have, of necessity, become scavengers and hoarders, considering anything which falls into their territory their property and seeking anything which may be used as a resource. It is claimed they find URLs and grammatical errors particularly valuable for their contradictory nature, being simultaneously stable and ephemeral.

Once something has come into the property of the Lownesses, it takes a special person called a Moderator to seek out and recover these items. Moderators are well trained in the seeking out of pearls among swine, the recognition and discovery of needles in haystacks, and are skilled in utilizing Occam's razor to cut through bovine effluvium and find the true path.

Hey, I wasn't that popular at school*!

I have an occasional rant about how "SF should be taken seriously by [someone or other, but usually the literary establishment, whoever they are]" and "SF is special and needs to be marketed/read differently to [mainstream literature]" are often being argued at the same time without acknowledging the contradictions. Good work in showing SF the contradictions.

* Also I don't sell insurance any more.

Also: given mention of "The Cruel Sister," I recommend for any who haven't read them already Deborah Grabien's Murder Ballads series of mysteries--there's Cruel Sister, Matty Groves, The Famous Flower of Serving Men and a couple of others.

The issue is the cynical emo pose--and the fact that, frankly, all of your friends (meaning the critical establishment and readers and other writers) have all been encouraging it by taking it way too seriously when you take yourself way too seriously.

I just want you to put a little punk back in your goth, is all. Punk looks good on you. And I don't mean hyphenated-punk, either.

I'm not sure those necessarily contradict. It depends if the first part means "SF should change to be more appealing to the literary establishment" or "the literary establishment should change so that it appreciates SF." Like any genre (including mainstream literature) SF has a range of quality, from the really crappy stuff that I love anyway because it hits my narrative buttons up to the amazing stuff that I can convince my non-SF-loving friends to enjoy; they have a different experience reading those works than I do, because it's outside the genre context, but they still appreciate them.

Or, to put it another way, mainstream literature is special and needs to be marketed in a particular way, and that doesn't mean nobody but mainstream literature fans can take it seriously.

Anyway, yes, wonderful post; thanks.

My own connection with SF began in childhood; that's had a major effect on my personality, my view of the universe, and my way of approaching life and its problems. This is probably true for a lot of the people reading this, and the SF community in general. I doubt that turning away from SF or even trying to make SF more like the "popular" lits is really possible for us without wrenching changes to ourselves. It's true that childhood friendships rarely last through life, but when they do, they're the deepest friendships there are and should be treasured as such.

This is good stuff, Abi. Thank you.

It's felt like Science Fiction has lost that sense of hope for the future and Fantasy has lost the joy in the past (both real and mythical) that are a large part of why I love both genres. I hope that SF rediscovers both.

Rob, #10: It's even more interesting that as those themes have edged over into the mainstream, there has been a determined effort to file the SF serial numbers off them. Urban vampires? Not SF. Killer robots? Not SF. Post-apocalyptic dystopia? Not SF. Time travel? Not SF (although there are still people who push back on that one).

As far as I can tell, the primary reason for this is that there are a lot of people who like these things but are convinced that they "hate SF" -- so, of course, these things can't possibly be SF because they like them!

Oh, thank God. It wasn't just me (though I was a little more than five).

And I was sorta surprised that Kurt Vonnegut was not mentioned as one of those who dissed SF after succeeding mightily. Let us never forget Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan.

Huh--I figured "goram" was Chinese...

I took it as TV-speak for a blaspheme, related to gol-durn and gosh-darn.

Hilarious thread! I came to a(nother) full stop at Pedantic Peasant's fen, delta, landfill, and primary debate.

And yes, Lee, the "SF isn't good, so anything that's good isn't SF" is still a common bit of circular reasoning. I propose we call it Atwooding.

the fat balding insurance salesmen who make reunions such a chore

...could we add that kind of thing to the list of things up with which we will not put? I'm pretty sure some man using, say, "frumpy middle-aged office manager" as a signifier of inherently-tedious-person would not be welcomed here.

You can define genres purely in terms of content; or you can define them in terms of traditions and communities and expectations. If you do it the second way, it will be true that some books with otherworldly and futuristic content are not SF. This is not surprising: not every book which features a murder is Crime, and not every book in which two people fall in love is Romance. It may be the case that some people are just convinced that they 'hate SF'. But it's equally possible that they genuinely don't like the stuff sold as SF because it's packaged in a particular way, building on knowledge and expectations which they don't share, and are happier with SFnal content when it's packaged in a way they find more accessible.

Well, SF was the mainstream for a long time, but since that ceased to be true...really? Can you give any examples between, say, 1900 and 1980 (and I won't quibble about the edges of that) of a novel in the literary mainstream (that is, not considered "genre" and taken seriously as "literature" by stuffy professors of English) that had alternative history as a major theme? Post-apocalyptic living? Killer robots?

I think I must have misunderstood your point. I can't think of a single "mainstream" novel where killer robots were a central plot element.

Well, on the one hand, what I meant was "that subset of [fat balding insurance salesmen] who make reunions such a bore."

But on the other hand, that's not what I wrote. I apologize. I'll rewrite that section of the post.

Not even ICBMs with thermonuclear warheads?

Lord of the Flies, William Golding

The Aerodrome, Rex Warner

No, I can't think of any killer robots either.

*Yes, I thought of Lord of The Flies too - which is certainly SF, broadly construed, if you go by content - but while it begins with a nuclear war it's not clear how central that is to the plot.
**And if we are just thinking of 'not-SF', I can think of several alternate histories sold as crime or spy stories.

For fantasy, Cabell wasn't treated as anything other than mainstream when it was coming out, and was looked at seriously as literature. The people writing reviews for Tolkien included major literary people (ISTR Auden wrote a very positive review, and the pre-publication blurbs [printed originally on the back flap of the eighth printing of The Hobbit and the front flap of Fellowship] were by C. S. Lewis, Naomi Mitchison and Richard Hughes -- not totally a genre group).

There's a lot more than you think out there.

I love you just the way you are. Always have.

In the last little while I have read Yves Meynard's _Chrysanthe_ (fantasy), Karl Schroeder's _Ashes of Candesce_ (SF), Mary Robinette Kowal's _Glamour in Glass_ (fantasy), C.J. Cherryh's _Intruder_ (SF) and I'm about half way through Samuel Delany's _Valley of the Nest of Spiders_ (SF). I'm also really looking forward to James Corey's _Caliban's War_ (SF) and Daniel Abraham's _The King's Blood_ (fantasy) which are due out really soon.

I think you're awesome, and in really wonderful shape this year.

all my love always,

Jo

P.S. Also, the Hugo nominees? Best *ever*.

In some ways, Gulliver's Travels is science fiction. Many tropes came from it - the very large, the very small, the flying island.

And I got this all from surfing Wikipedia for a little while. Genre is a relatively new g/h/e/t/t/o marketing tool.

["marketing tool" did it. Filter adjusted so that only "marketing-tool" with a hyphen will trip it. -- JDM]

So the spam filters assume that anything coming from some marketing-tool must be spam?

Criticism done well requires developing a deep familiarity with the area you're working in, as well as the toolkit to analyze and discuss it. They're not familiar with it, and may resent having to put in additional time to get to that point; their toolkit doesn't have what they need in it--it's like trying to do roofing work with the tools for installing hardwood floors. Instead of saying "I'm not set up for this", they get pissy about it, as if the book was to blame for what they aren't in a position to do well.

But the point is it got me to think about the nature of SF enough so that I was actually able to distill something that I felt for a long time but never specifically stated, and then in that mad rush of inspiration to actually state it. And that's the kind of great thing about these kinds of posts. It inspires people to talk, and, you know, decide things.

So I'm satisfied that we're just using different definitions, and that mine is based on the idea that if there's substantial speculation in the fiction, it's speculative fiction. Therefore ANYTHING that speculates about "what if the CSA had won the Civil War" or "what will life be like after a devastating nuclear war" is by definition speculative fiction.

Maybe that's circular; it seems self-evident to me. But that's why I tried to put in the bit about being accepted by the snoots who insist that "literary" fiction is not a genre and stuff like that.

Webstores usually have some sort of "similar products" tab. I was just looking at a product that Bruce Schneier mentioned on his blog: a flash drive shaped like a tampon. I looked at the sales listing for it, noticed the "Similar Products" tab, and clicked it with some trepidation...

*or most anything else!

Jack London's The Scarlet Plague is set in San Francisco after an epidemic has wiped out most of humanity. If Kurt Vonnegut counts as mainstream Cat's Cradle is apocalyptic, though there isn't much post- in it.

Not a novel, but the anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise came out in 1930. Many of the essays were written by historians (and one by Winston Churchill), and a number of them were written as narratives. Churchill's had the clever structure of an alternate history essay about the Union winning the Civil War from an alternate universe where the Confederacy won the Civil War.

R.U.R. has already been mentioned. On the one hand it was a play written in Czech, and not a novel written in English. On the other hand, not only does it have the first robots, they are killer robots.

Yea, even unto B**** J****, who had gone from being a sadistic and doltish thug to a still-somewhat-doltish decent ordinary guy. If I'd had access to firearms when I was in 8th grade, B**** would not have lived out the year, and I would have spent a couple of decades (at least) in prison. But after the reunion...I honestly and truly ceased to bear him any ill will at all.

It was great. I had no particular need to see those people again, though. They were affable strangers.

I've told this one before: James Joyce's Ulysses in the Biographies section, in a Barnes & Noble.

"Why'd you put that there, kid?"

"We read Homer in senior year, sir, so I thought it was about an old Greek guy."

Manager: "Kid, Ulysses is Latin!"

Clerk: "But sir, it's still Ancient!"

My personal breakpoint was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: fiction or biography?

Great, another crack at this! There were other people at the reunion?

Harlequin @14 Or, to put it another way, mainstream literature is special and needs to be marketed in a particular way, and that doesn't mean nobody but mainstream literature fans can take it seriously.

It's certainly possible to navigate a course between the two points I made. Maybe SF thinks people don't take her seriously for wearing a T-shirt with a rocketship on and changes into a black shirt and leather jacket. The anti-rocketship people are still going to clear off when they get invited in for coffee and realise that SF lives in a converted rocketship[1].

Or to put it another way I talked to an SF dilettante about a book and thought I was talking about a novel about Norse culture, honour, cross-cultural communication, sacrifice for what you love and pushing some fantasy tropes to logical limits. She heard that it was about trolls, and elves or maybe dwarves, and the hero had an animal companion[2]. I invite people into the territory that their map says "Here be Dragons" and say "Look at the landscape, the people, the crafts," and they're all like "Their are dragons. EVERYWHERE," and I say "Sure, but what's fascinating is the links between.." "DRAGONS!"

Some of them fall in love with the dragons. Some don't. Maybe they were bitten by one as a child. My metaphor has got out of control so I should probably stop and have a coffee.

[1] They will never find out that it's not converted at all and can blast off at any moment.
[2] Have we fought and died in vain?

(My brother, whose home library is significantly larger than mine, has gone to the trouble of cataloguing it. I think he also shelves non-fiction separately, because I remember him once telling me he'd decided Moby-Dick was best categorised as a non-fiction book about whaling that happened to include illustrative passages of fiction.)

I've been thinking about organization schemes. The genre fiction (SF, mystery, romance) will be all together by author because it makes no sense to separate them (which of those 3 gets the J.D. Robb books?). The science & engineering reference books are already all shelved together. There needs to be a separate section on religion & spirituality because that's the category currently giving me the worst "Somewhere in the house we have a copy of..." problem. I think the rest of the nonfiction will get a loose topical grouping - writing & language, foreign language, travel, history & politics, popular science (distinguishable from reference), things relevant to special education & kids with disabilities. A catchall "other" section.

Thankfully, my husband likes E books now.

SF, we seem to be finding it harder to agree on something to do together these days. You were always my go-to friend, and we still share good times, but I think we need to go our separate ways part of the time. We don't have as much in common as we used to. I'm changing - I'm more of a homebody, less willing to take off into totally unknown territory where I don't speak the language, don't know the customs, and have to take a lot of time figuring out what's going on. I have a low tolerance for violence and betrayal. I'm more interested in the quiet aspects of a life well lived, and that's always bored you.

You're changing, too. Probably you always had obsessions and I just didn't notice them before, but now? You're way more into dystopia and grimdark than I care to go. And the vampires and zombies? Just, no. Oh, I know that's not all that you are, and I continue to enjoy the more hopeful parts of you when they are showing. But I'm going to be a little more choosy about which trips I take with you, and which ones I wave you off and am happy to see you when you get back.

But let's stay in touch. We go way back, and I don't ever want to lose that.

Shouldn't the question be 'religion or DIY'? (I'd always assumed it was a novel written in autobiographical form, rather than a true story.)

I'm not sure I can keep up a Housman pastiche up for the full five stanzas - at least not today - but while I enjoyed both the OP and the post by Elizabeth Bear that prompted it, those who know the original will see that I incline to Jo Walton's sode of the question.

*not necessarily by me

There's something odd about how the boys describe the plane at the start of Lord of the Flies; they refer to a passenger tube and seem to think the passenger tube got dropped by the rest of the plane. They might just not understand how the plane works, but it seems we're supposed to be in a nuclear war with future planes. I still wouldn't classify it as SF, but I might stand there thinking with it in my hand for 3 or 4 seconds.

It took talking to three different librarians on visits that spanned a month before I was able to convince the librarians at Columbus Public that Drawing Down the Moon by Marot Adler was non-fiction. I kept finding it in the Fiction...

Oh, they were also shelving McCaffrey's Pern books in the Fantasy section. That battle took several months. (But it's about DRAGONS!) I had to make them read the prologue.

An awful lot of this is judgment calls, or just a feeling on my part that "this book belongs in that group". Anyone who was looking for a specific book on my shelves, outside of the major categories, would probably have a very hard time finding it. I wish we had enough space to devote one room to being a library, rather than just shoehorning in bookcases wherever we can.

But even an imperfect organization will beat what we have now. "It could be here or it could be there" beats the heck out of "It's here somewhere."

Re finding pagan books in the fiction section, this is sadly not uncommon; I've encountered it at bookstores with labeled "Religion" sections. Some people are really unwilling to admit that there is more than one religion in the world.

My manager laughed like a drain when I showed her. We were so charmed that we left it that way for three days.

It's never really occurred to me to split the fiction up into genres -- there are enough authors that write in multiple genres (Andre Norton wrote science fiction, fantasy, westerns and romance, for example) to render it annoying to have to search all over for one particular author's works.

Separating our fiction by genre sounds profoundly unsettling, although I find it useful in stores. Too many edge cases, too many multi-genre authors, and the potential for embarrassment. (Do we own more books by Laurell K. Hamilton than from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries combined? It's not impossible, and I'm not sure I want to know.)

As for high school reunions, I went to my fifth, which was utterly unnecessary and dull, although I did at least get to show a handful of classmates that since high school I'd lost weight, dyed my hair pink, and become able to get a date. I skipped the tenth. Facebook does remove a lot of the curiosity about what people are doing.

I understand that portions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are substantially factual. They're not necessarily the same portions as the ones that are true.

That puts it pretty solidly in the "autobiography" camp, albeit somewhat novelized.

We periodically recatalog our library with LibraryThing. The bulk of it fills the walls of part of our living room, though there's overspill into a number of areas in the house, notably the Bob Shaw collection in the bedroom (Martin's a fan) and the technical and bookbinding books that congregate near our desks.

Of course, since books are also input to one of my hobbies, we have some that should be classed less as literature than as raw materials, at least until they've passed through the bindery. Which may take some time.

This year's project is carving out my extraneous possessions, and setting up my life, which includes bookshelves.

So exciting! (Seriously, I find this exciting!)

O magnificent master-gnome, please do not let my unseemly excitement prejudice you against my comment!

It is so rare to have anyone actually delighted to make our acquaintance. I hope that you enjoyed the biscuits and conversation as much as we did.

If you can manage it without resorting to such vulgar tactics as bad grammar or advertising medications, we would be delighted to have your company again in the future.

(The proximate cause of your visit to us was the verb that you used to describe your activities with regard to your extraneous possessions. I am certain it will bemuse you as much as it has us to know how much spam we receive on the subject of sculpting fruit. Honestly, sometimes people baffle me.)

I had a brief brain glitch, wherein I interpreted CSA as Community Supported Agriculture, and that made this question extra strange.

Imagine how I feel every time someone says "I joined my local CSA this year."

The instructions seem to imply that if you want to cover more than 30" laterally with them, you should make multiple completely independent units and mount them.

This, it seems to me, leaves you with a lot of doubled vertical members, wasting a book or so's space each time you do it.

I have a 10' (laterally) wall that I wish to completely cover in Book-Eaters. Is there another way to design it so that (a) I can still get to the sides of the shelves to screw them in and (b) I don't have doubled vertical members regularly?

The two suggestions that come to mind are covering the doubling-point with a decorative piece of wood (still wastes the space, but pretty) or offsetting the shelves a half-shelf-depth apart every other unit and having scalloped top and bottom edges of the unit as a whole.

*****

C'mon, guys, the way to shelve everything is by the color of the spines. Then you only have to decide which of three ways to run the rainbow.

That basically sums up how I approach literary criticism. Awesome.

The Sagulator is a great way to check the amount of sag that you're likely to get with various shelf materials, spans and weights.

Geoff's Woodwork has a nice page about bits and pieces you might care to know, with the most interesting bit being the weight of books section at the bottom.

An approximate summary would be "You're looking at somewhere between 10-80lbs/foot, depending on the type of book".

This pdf about Shelving for Libraries is also an interesting read both for general information, and for things to consider when building bookshelves -- p26 gives standard dimensions for (commercial) wooden bookshelves in libraries, and the entire thing seems to suggest that a standard width for (purpose built, industrial/library strength) shelves is 36". I'd be pretty unlikely to go that wide myself.

This, it seems to me, leaves you with a lot of doubled vertical members, wasting a book or so's space each time you do it.

Depending on the strength of the materials in question, it's necessity, not waste.

I have a 10' (laterally) wall that I wish to completely cover in Book-Eaters. Is there another way to design it so that (a) I can still get to the sides of the shelves to screw them in and (b) I don't have doubled vertical members regularly?

Build the verticals with heavier/stronger vertical members?

Er... what do you mean "get to the sides of the shelves to screw them in?" I'm rather hoping that you don't mean using screws through the sides into shelves, to fix them in place...

The two suggestions that come to mind are covering the doubling-point with a decorative piece of wood (still wastes the space, but pretty) or offsetting the shelves a half-shelf-depth apart every other unit and having scalloped top and bottom edges of the unit as a whole.

I'd just add a face frame to your bookshelves, myself. It's probably much easier to build the casework as separate box carcasses, rather than trying to do something funky and interdependent.

Beyond that (and likely to get me gnomed...), some bookshelf porn...

The Blog on the Bookshelf
Bookshelf porn
Bookshelves Tumblr

[It was more than seven links. No words of power. -- Penniflux Arbiter, Duty Gnome]

That's how our gracious hostess' Book-Eating Bookshelves are designed (and I don't intend ever to move the shelves; they'll be sized for mmpbs or my hardcovers and they'll stay that way). If I use a single vertical member between sets of horizontals, I can't screw the second unit's shelves into place (because the screwdriver needs to be inside the shelf on the other side).

At the bookstore I work in, it's shelved with Philosophy. ;-)

You'd better believe we have categorization issues, aggravated by cramped quarters. Some of the results are... idiosyncratic. Notably, most authors get all their work (and usually their biographies) collected in whichever section "people expect" to find them in, as determined by the owner.

Yet another reason to steamroller all genres and just go by author, I think.

Remember that "Atomic Robo" is *not* fiction.

It is, however, image-heavy and sits (protectively bagged, because they're thin books) with the graphic novels. Whose fictional status is not examined, or I'll have to make a judgment call on Flight of Dragons ;-)

I got more organized in the apartment, sorting nonfiction by the first digit of the Dewey Decimal Classification. This works out neatly for ten shelves, except the non-computer part of 0 got crowded down with the meager philosophy/psychology section. Fiction was all by author, with MMPB on one set of shelves and larger volumes on another.

Since the move into the new house, most of the books are still boxed. The Better Half has decreed that no steel shelves will go up except in the basement. Once the old house sells, we will buy nice wooden shelves for the new livingroom. The few small wooden shelves we already have are taken up by the collectible authors* and by whatever books were used as filler in boxes that had partly been occupied by other things.

* Tolkien, Pangborn, Bradley, Deitz, Swann, Biggle, Rowling, and David Mason, plus in YA literature, Julian F. Thompson and Gary Paulsen.

Ah :) I'd probably use something like dados, or dado and rabbets instead. That way I'd be sure that the weight was being evenly distributed across all of the joint, rather than at the screws.

That said, I'm clearly committing a Norm Abrams[0], and presuming the availability of both the requisite tools (of which there are a variety of options, of varying costs) and the inclination towards doing so.

[0] Notorious for saying the equivalent of "and with this specialized and expensive tool, it's simple to do ... "

[I was hoping that if I brought you in for a cup of tea and a biscuit you might commit a few more Norm Abramses. Ahem. Also, your URL, while singular, used a syntax more commonly employed by spammers. -- Evangeline Gertrude Allopeciata, duty gnome.]

[Evangeline, we need to talk about your Norm Abrams fetish. When you have a moment. -- Roquat Rufus, Rex Gnomi]

Indeed it did.

Rudyard Kipling's "Easy as A.B.C." is a charming story, but wrong in almost all its particulars. I give him half-credit for two items:
1) He depicted airships navigating by "cloudbreakers", insanely powerful lighthouses beaming straight up (not unlike radar, with visible light)
2: He mentioned a monument to the victims of lynching which was undeniably beautiful, but so horrific that it could only be unveiled briefly once a year. The only thing he got wrong was to make it a sculpture rather than a song.