Rant: Elitism

There is a problem in science fiction: a current of righteous, exclusivist superiority. The sf community considers itself enlightened in a way that the rest of the world may never attain. It's true that most new technologies have been written about in sf for decades, so the questions they pose do not take any sf fan by surprise. E.g., the ethical implications of cloning were explored in myriad stories, long before cloning became a reality.

That should not cause sf fans to feel smugly superior. The sf community is not better than the rest of the world. It is neither at the forefront of technological breakthroughs nor a driving force for social change. It is a niche literary genre that is fast developing an insular, ivory-tower elitism--an elitism just as destructive and self-defeating as the elitism of the literary fiction that sf writers and fans so often sneer at. It may be too late. sf is no longer relevant, if indeed it ever was.

Rant: Out of print

Books should never go out of print. There's no excuse for it anymore. Technology is advanced enough that every book should be print-on-demand. Publishers could still print up big batches of best-sellers. But for those that aren't, they should go to print-on-demand and be available from online sellers. Forever. I hate not being able to find a copy of an old out-of-print book. The publishing industry should reorganize itself to serve me.

Rant: Advertisements

I got an old paperback in an eBay auction. It's not very good. Below average, I'd say. But it's interesting. It's interesting because right in the middle it has a two-page full color advertisement for cigarettes. They look like good cigarettes, but if I were a smoker, I'd probably smoke clove cigarettes, so I don't know about these ones in the ad.

Anyway. I haven't seen ads in any recent books. It's a good idea. We have ads in magazines all the time, why not in fiction books? It might bring the price down. Maybe. Then again, publishing is so cut-throat, margins are so thin, that it probably wouldn't.

Still, I'd like to see more ads.

Rant: Page headers

Books should have meaningful page headers. I'm reading an omnibus edition of Tales of the Dying Earth right now, and it has no page headers at all. It's a burden. There are four novels crammed into those pages, with no visual cues on the pages. There's a table of contents, sure. It gives the starting page number of each novel. But when I'm flipping through the book, all I see are page numbers. Ideally, the name of the novel should appear on the top of each page. Even better, the novel name should be on each right-hand page, and chapter names on the left-hand pages. Is that too much to ask?

Most books do this already. It's especially important for collections, anthologies, and omnibus editions. I'm disappointed that Orb has neglected this crucial feature in its edition of Tales of the Dying Earth.

Rant: Scrolls

Who decided that books are the culmination of reading technology? Scrolls have some real advantages. You can spread out a scroll and see large parts of the text all at once. You can't do that with a book.

I'd like to see more novels for sale in scroll form. I'd buy them. I checked into publishing my own scrolls. You can get novelty scrolls. Wedding or party invitations, for example. Graduation announcements. But nothing substantial.

That's a shame.

Rant: Stupid cover art

Designing an effective book cover is an art. You have only a scant few seconds to interest a potential buyer. The cover should entice one to read the book while also communicating vital information such as author and title. There are myriad ways to poorly design a book cover, but here are some of the more common ones.

BIG NAME, BIG TITLE
Forget artwork, we don't need artwork! This author's name alone sells books, so slap that name on in big bold letters and watch the books jump off the shelves. Meanwhile the public hopes against hope that the book is not as dull and uninspired as the cover art.

Sleight of Hand
Let's use another author's name to sell our book. This is confusing at best, and deceptive fraud at worst. It should be illegal to put another writer's name in larger type than the author's name.

Look, I won an award!
Novels that win awards often tout that success on the covers. But sometimes one can go overboard. Such as, for example, claiming to have won an award which the book didn't actually win. The Robert Silverberg story Sailing to Byzantium (see the above link) did win the Nebula Award in 1985 as the cover states, but did not win the Hugo, which the cover art claims it did. Shame on whoever designed that cover.

Rant: Too long

I hate reading long books. A good story can and should be told without an excessesive word count. A reasonable length for a novel is between 160 pages and 300 pages. Very occasionally a story will take longer to tell. Most long novels that I've read would be better if an editor had insisted on cutting a hundred pages.

Rant: Useless hardbacks

What good is a hardback novel? None. A paperback is better is every way.

Too big
It's bigger and bulkier than a paperback, making it harder to carry it around; a paperback will fit nicely into a pocket in my laptop bag. A hardback won't.

Too many sizes
Paperbacks are all roughly the same size. I have shelves and shelves full of paperbacks, all neatly sitting on the shelves. It's a beautiful thing. My few dozen hardbacks are eyesores. Each is a different size. Put them all together on one shelf and you don't get a nice neat row, you get a mish-mash of sizes, with no rhyme or reason. It's ugly. And don't even bother trying to pack them neatly if you have to move. Paperbacks, being of uniform size, can be easily and neatly boxed up. You might as well throw your hardbacks away as try to box them up; it's like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with no solution.

Dust jackets
Then there's the useless invention known as a dust jacket. They were invented because somebody noticed that books, being made in one piece, are too easy to read. "What can we do to make reading more difficult?" they asked. Dust jackets fall off, get torn, and generally get in the way of the reading experience. There are no such problems with paperbacks.

Shoddy quality
Hardback novels today are crummy pieces of junk that fall apart after a few readings. (The exceptions are books designed as collectors items, but those aren't really books, those are collectibles. Real books are designed for reading, not for setting on a collector's shelf as a trophy.) So if you're looking for a good quality book that will last a century, today's hardbacks will disappoint.

And why should a novel last a hundred years, anyway? If the novel has any merit, it will still be in print next century. If it's not any good, nobody is going to read it then anyway. Some books need to last a long time--dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, and other reference books--but there's not much use for a forgotten novel of last century.

Price
Hardback novels are more expensive than paperbacks. You can't get a hardback for much less then $25, whereas a paperback rarely costs more than $11. Why would I want to pay extra for a book that is bulkier, does not come in a standard size, has an annoying dust jacket, and is just a shoddily constructed as a paperback? I can't think of a single reason.

Conclusion
The Reader of Books says: Only a paperback novel is worth my money. Hardbacks are worthless.

Rant: Retitling

I don't know who decided books needed titles, but it's become a tradition. The problems start when books have more than one title. Sometimes this happens because publishers are retarded: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone became Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in America because the US publisher was afraid the American public would confuse it with a philosophy textbook. David Brin's Kil'n People became Kiln People in America because, well, the publisher thought the American public was too stupid to understand the double meaning in the British title. (Do you see the pattern?)

And how shall we explain that Alfred Bester's Tyger, Tyger became The Stars My Destination, or how Fred Pohl's Demon in the Skull was renamed A Plague of Pythons? Can we stick with just one name, please? Is that too much to ask?

The most egregious renaming error may have been committed by the Vance Integral Project. When they republished his masterpiece The Dying Earth, they decided to call it Mazirian the Magician. Mazirian the Magician!? Are you kidding me? The Dying Earth is a perfect title. It perfectly evokes the sense of grand decay that permeates the book. But Mazirian the Magician sounds like a crummy second-rate piece of fantasy garbage.

The Reader of Books commands: No book shall have more than one title. Ever. Especially if the second title is stupid.

Rant: Out of order

Life is not always neat and orderly, but fiction should be. I don't tolerate chaos when I read fiction. The Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs is neat and orderly. There are eleven books, each follows after the other, in chronological order. There's no debate.

What's not neat and orderly is Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic series. There are seven or eight books, but they aren't in any straightforward order. They're all mixed up. If you read the books in order of publication, the internal chronology is all shot to hell. And you can't read them in order of internal chronology, because the chronology is so confusing it's impossible to figure out. To make matters worse, some of the books are collections of short stories--and the stories span all sorts of different time frames. It's enough to make a serious fan crazy.

Another example of a series gone wrong is The Chronicles of Narnia. It started out fine, with seven books by C.S. Lewis, numbered in order of publication. But some blockhead decided that just wouldn't do. "Readers are too stupid to comprehend anything that isn't in chrono-linear. We must renumbers the books in order of internal chronology." Never mind that you won't appreciate The Magician's Nephew until you've finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Silver Chair. Now you can't buy a set that's numbered correctly.

In summary, today's commandment is: The only correct way to read a series is in order of original publication. Anything else is a sin.