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I just think that sci fi needs to be together. In large bookstores fantasy is fine to throw in but Horror, no. I also think the sci-fi channel should only show sci fi and not even fantasy or horror as it has want to do.
I respectfully disagree. Sometimes "sci-fi" is just a convenient shorthand for SF/fantasy/horror. Plus, a nonstop diet of nothing but "pure" SF is probably too narrow a focus for most viewers. You need more variety than that..
Granted, there are surely some fans who only like straight-up SF and shun fantasy and horror, but I suspect that most of us are more omnivorous than that.
A battle I lost years ago: When I edited a line of all-new ZORRO, I really wanted them shelved in the SF/Fantasy section on the grounds that Zorro was a superhero . . like Batman. But I was overruled on the grounds that the Zorro books were technically historical adventure stories with no fantastic elements in them, so they were banished to general Fiction, where they went unnoticed and pretty much disappeared. I still wish I had fought harder to have them classified as SF/Fantasy, since that's where superhero tie-ins usually go . . . and where the target audience would have had a better chance of finding them.
Yea but there is never really an equal balance. I just feel horror needs to be with the murder mysteries and the like. I classify Star Wars say as sci-fi because it is predominantly about space ship battles and robots and I don't see the real distinction between space opera and sci fi per se.
If I was running a bookstore, they would all go under fiction. All books would just be under fiction. Mystery, fantasy, literary, just put it all under fiction.
Why shouldn't Bradbury and Hemingway by on the same shelf? Le Guin, Gaiman and Rushdie?
It's one of those things that bugs me when I go into a Barnes and Noble. They'll put Crichton in their Literary Section but Gaiman in Science Fiction. Why is Andromeda Strain more literary than American Gods? Bleh.
So you'd run a bookstore and wonder why people with definite preferences or collectors walked in, looked around, and walked back out.
There's a second-hand bookstore here that's somewhat like that. The proprietor refuses to separate the historical fiction from the contemporary fiction. I told her I'd buy more books from her if I knew where to find the historical fiction, since I don't have an hour or two to wander the place with my head at an angle, trying to guess if the title sounds like it might be that of a historical novel rather than something else.
Maybe some day I'll figure out how to take a picture and post it online. People might be surprised at how eclectic my personal library is. There are SF collectors who collect a lot of other things, as well. Just the other day I was ecstatic to find a hardcover copy of one of the earlier Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators novels - a juvenile mystery series I've been collecting since 1974.
Just the other day I was ecstatic to find a hardcover copy of one of the earlier Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators novels - a juvenile mystery series I've been collecting since 1974.
^^^
Since it's set on an alien world with an alien culture which has FTL technology. (and strictly scientifically speaking) no alien world has been discovered with intelligent life - nor has FTL travel been proven as doable/survivable...sorry, it's firmly in the Sci-Fantasy realm. Nothing borderline here.
Technically yes, but most of what we see is barely different from contemporary Earth, and while they have FTL we never see them traveling through space, and they only leave Caprica once.
Yep. Wouldn't want those as my customers anyway.
And sense this is an imaginary bookstore, I can run it how I see fit and not lose a dime.
Maybe some day I'll figure out how to take a picture and post it online. People might be surprised at how eclectic my personal library is. There are SF collectors who collect a lot of other things, as well. Just the other day I was ecstatic to find a hardcover copy of one of the earlier Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators novels - a juvenile mystery series I've been collecting since 1974.
Yea but there is never really an equal balance. I just feel horror needs to be with the murder mysteries and the like. I classify Star Wars say as sci-fi because it is predominantly about space ship battles and robots and I don't see the real distinction between space opera and sci fi per se.
Depends on what kind of horror, maybe. There may be a fine line between a crime thriller and slasher flick, but once you start getting into werewolves and demons and mad scientists and reanimated corpses, you're pretty much crossing into SF/fantasy territory. Freddy Krueger stalking people through their dreams, or vampires waging war against lycans in the Underworld movies, are not exactly the stuff of mainstream murder mysteries--and would seem a good fit for Syfy.
There's a Yahoo! group dedicated to these books. Last year somebody wrote an original fan novel and released one chapter per week. It was a decent novel, the characterization was excellent, and I remember looking forward to every Thursday evening when the new chapter came out.
Evidently there were dozens more novels published in Germany (which I can't read since I don't read German), but those ones are more modern.
The hardcover I ordered is the first one I ever read - The Mystery of the Talking Skull. The school librarian read it to us back in 1972, and after I read it for myself, I got hooked. In 1974 I persuaded my dad that it was time to stop with the Nancy Drew stuff and give me Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators books for birthdays and Christmas.
One of the people in the Yahoo! group mentioned that somebody wrote more Brains Benton novels, as well; I'd thought there were only the 6 of them. I still have a few Tom Swift hardcovers to go to complete that collection.
And yes, I still read this stuff. It's a change from the other reading material (I'm currently working my way through the Outlander novels, though at a few pages per night it'll take a long time).
I used to work in a library, so I like my books a bit more... organized. I've been doing some reorganizing lately and am currently putting the juvenile mysteries and SF in order.
Wasn't it specifically under a pile of junk? There was a secret door or something?
Headquarters was a mobile home that had so much junk piled over and around it that Jupiter's aunt and uncle had forgotten it was there. There were several secret doors into both Headquarters and the salvage yard itself: Red Gate Rover, Green Gate One, Tunnel Two, Easy Three, and Secret Four.
Categorize all you want, but recognize that the boundaries between them can be, and are, rather fuzzy. And that there are writers who work those fuzzy areas pretty well.
Exactly. It's easy to point to the extremes and say that LORD OF THE RINGS is fantasy and RINGWORLD is SF, but things can get pretty mushy in the middle. I have on occasion stumbled onto bookstores that tried to maintain separate sections for fantasy and SF; it's usually an unholy mess with no consistency or logic to it whatsoever. Where do you file Andre Norton or Poul Anderson or Gordon Dickson or Anne McCaffrey or Orson Scott Card or Ursula K. Le Guin or whomever? Is THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU sf or horror? What about THE INVISIBLE MAN?
I used to work at a used bookstore. Jules Verne was filed under literary fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle was obviously under mystery thanks to Sherlock Holmes but it also meant that his non-mystery books would end up there, like The Exploits & Adventures of Brigadier Gerard (a collection of semi-comedic short stories about a bumbling officer in Napoleon's army). Michael Crichton was under sci-fi/fantasy even though Rising Sun is a straight-up murder mystery. We had a horror section that included all of the works of Stephen King, even his non-horror works like The Running Man & The Shawshank Redemption. Horror was also the home of all of Anne Rice's books, even Christ the Lord!
Of course, since we didn't have a computer system, sometimes something would get misfiled by a well-meaning employee who just didn't know what they were doing. My favorite was when I was looking in the British TV section and I found the movie London filed in there when it's not even remotely British. "London" is just the name of the main character's ex-girlfriend! (BTW, it's a really terrible movie. Chris Evans plays a whiny pipsqueak who just spends the entire movie hanging out in the bathroom doing coke and bemoaning the fact that Jessica Biel dumped him. The only saving grace is Jason Statham, who's so inherently badass that he even looks cool while playing an impotent middle-aged divorcee flirting with 18-year-olds.)
Funky bookstore filing has actually been a bit of a pain in the ass for me recently. I recently got into a series called 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith. Now, he's mostly known for writing mysteries like the Isabel Dalhousie series or The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. But 44 Scotland Street isn't a mystery series. It's just a lightly comedic slice of life series of misadventures surrounding a group of people living in Edinburgh. There's no mystery aspect to it at all! (Although, if someone could get around to murdering Irene Pollock, it would make the series a bajillion times better! ) But some bookstores file the series under literary fiction and others just lump it with all of the rest of his books in the mystery section. So if I'm looking for one particular book in the series, I inevitably have to check both sections.
Excession featured an intelligence with technology beyond that of the Culture. The representatives of the Culture were in a position similar to African tribesmen confronted by European colonizers-they were very much over matched. There was little that the Culture could do to cope with the situation.
Excession featured a spatial anomaly that suddenly mysteriously appeared, confused everybody while they scrambled over each other to possess it, then just as suddenly & mysteriously vanished. Presumably, there was an intelligence behind it but not one that ever revealed itself or its intentions. While there was little that the Culture could do to cope with the situation, there was ultimately nothing that they needed to do because the anomaly just appeared & disappeared of its own accord and never made any attempts to harm or even interact with anyone. As I recall, people who attacked it had their own attacks reflected back at them and the ships that flew into it disappeared and were never seen again in our universe. But in the end, the main impact that the anomaly seemed to have was that its presence made everyone else fight over it, which ended up being pointless because it just suddenly disappeared at the end anyway. Again, a Culture novel that ends in futility but with a relatively happy ending, at least by the standards of this series.
True story: The main reason Tor invented its "Forge" imprint was because too many stores would automatically file any and all Tor books in the SF section, even if it was a crime thriller, a western, or a historical romance!
Yea but there is never really an equal balance. I just feel horror needs to be with the murder mysteries and the like. I classify Star Wars say as sci-fi because it is predominantly about space ship battles and robots and I don't see the real distinction between space opera and sci fi per se.
True story: The main reason Tor invented its "Forge" imprint was because too many stores would automatically file any and all Tor books in the SF section, even if it was a crime thriller, a western, or a historical romance!
I get a lot of books a library sales too and the way some of those folks sort is not to be believed. The "Left Behind" series is usually placed in SF even though the people who see it there won't want it and the people who might want it won't see it there. But sometimes that works to your advantage. I found a signed copy of Thomas Stafford's "We Have Capture" in SF. (It has a spaceship on the cover.)
McCaffry tried to create a world that looked like a high fantasy setting at first glance but was scientifically plausible. Her "Dragons" were really just large flying reptiles who could breathe fire only because of a potion made by the riders... something like that. It was 1992 when I read the books so forgive me if I don't remember all the details right off the bat.
It's a change from the other reading material (I'm currently working my way through the Outlander novels, though at a few pages per night it'll take a long time).
(BTW, it's a really terrible movie. Chris Evans plays a whiny pipsqueak who just spends the entire movie hanging out in the bathroom doing coke and bemoaning the fact that Jessica Biel dumped him. The only saving grace is Jason Statham, who's so inherently badass that he even looks cool while playing an impotent middle-aged divorcee flirting with 18-year-olds.)
