For three years in Korea, the only English bookstore we had was a scrappy little store in Seoul called Whatthebook. Its prices were a bit steep, for used and new alike, and its sorting system was so haphazard as to be almost useless; Terry Pratchett would be filed under “Fiction” in the new book section, but under “Fantasy/Scifi” in the used books. Neal Stephenson, the opposite. So the lines were a little blurry.

Now I’ve been hitting all the old bookstore-haunts pretty hard: both Half Prices in town, the Book Rack (a sprawling derelict paperback depository in the poor part of town, the old lady captain going down with the ship), a new used bookstore with no name and a worse selection and today, finally, the Barnes & Noble megalith. We had a gift card, so we went.

While perusing all the used stores I was thinking, “I want to buy Book X; it isn’t here; it’ll probably be at B&N, albeit at a higher price.” I built my mental checklist, and in the process, I think I elevated B&N’s inventory to impossible standards, for they turned out to have very little indeed. I’m talking about big names, big important titles in genre lit: Urth of the New Sun - any of the New Sun/Long Sun books! Only China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books, no King Rat or The City & The City - only two or three Lois McMaster Bujold titles, and not a one of them a Vorkosigan book. What the hell? These are the heavy hitters of modern genre fiction. Bujold has more freaking Hugo awards than anyone other than Heinlein. Yet, almost nothing.

Gad, that made me despair. As a novelist, I hope to one day have a fraction of Bujold’s success. Does that mean my books won’t be on shelves at all?

I don’t know - I’m sure authors and actual industry people can tell you - but how many sales come from people perusing shelves and thinking, “This looks good” and picking it up? And how many sales come from fans seeking out an author’s book and ordering it off Amazon? The latter is fine for an author if they’ve already got an audience; but how far can you expand your audience if you aren’t on store shelves? I do not know! But it worries me.

Anyway, it reminded me of the argument of the validity of the F/SF “ghetto”. Heinlein is often described as the author who did the most to lift the genre out of the “genre ghetto” and give it credibility. Sure, okay. And I remember reading an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, about his (fanfreakingtastic) The Years of Rice and Salt, which is a fairly straightforward alternate history that could pass for nongenre fiction. The interviewer asked if he’d maybe like to step outside the genre and start writing mainstream fiction. His response was basically, “Why the fuck would I want to do that? I’m a scifi titan, I don’t want to be surrounded by shitty pretentious mainstream titles in the pursuit of the literati’s idea of credibility. I have an audience and plenty of fans in the ghetto, thank you.” And KSR is probably the most “literary” SF writer alive. There’s no doubt that he could succeed in the mainstream, but he’s not interested.

So I am often caught between wanting the mainstream to recognize the validity of the art form in which I work, and learning to be satisfied with doing what I do. I wouldn’t want to be in the mainstream section of the bookstore, for sure. I wouldn’t want my fans to have to sift through fifty copies of Shopaholic Contemplates Suicide to find my books. I’m sick of literati and academics who turn their noses at a work because it has spaceships, or tentacles, or tentacled spaceships; I just need to remind myself of their irrelevance.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Anomalous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.