thebitterguy

Hi there,

I visit Ottawa about once a year, and I'm afraid I never heard of this SF specialty bookstore. If I had, I probably would have visited and perhaps may have even purchased something, like I do when I visit Bakka Books in Toronto. But such specialty stores face a great deal of competition.

Take a look at (shudder) your local Chapter's box store. SF and Fantasy are *mainstream* items now. When I was very young, I recall purchasing SF for 75 cents a paperback...but had to rummage around a small half shelf next to the soft porn and the Westerns at the very back of the story. Back when I was younger, a place like *Basilisk Dream* would have been heaven. Nowadays, the amount of SF and fantasy immediately available in commercial chain bookstores has expanded greatly, and you don't need a specialty store to get that SF fix. There may be three or four shelves of Fantasy & SF, these in direct competition to some place like Basilisk Dream.

[Big aside here...but of those at least one shelf is devoted to Tolkien, another to schlock D&D and computer game oriented fantasy, another shelf devoted to Star Trek and Star Wars, and then perhaps one shelf left over. If you look at that one shelf, you'll see that perhaps 1/2 the books are reprints of well established authors now out in new editions. Which means only a few measly new titles appearing each month, and most of those from established writers. Multiply all those box stores (90% of books are sold in the big chains) with the same few new titles, and things are rather depressing for someone interested in *something* new.]



But perhaps the reason that *Basilisk Dream* went out of business the the malaise that seems to infect most of literary SF these days.

In other words, where has all the good SF gone?

Most of what passes for SF is merely an adventure story with SF window dressing. The entire "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" pantheon falls into this category. Mindless "Space Fantasy", in other words, with nary a suggestion of speculation or even thoughtful science. Of those works that still fit the label of SF, most fall into established and somewhat conventional sub-genres; military SF, parallel world travel, time travel, and, well that's about it (nb. Fantasy is even worse; you got airy-fairy Tolkien rip-offs, Arthurian rip-offs, and Vampires and their icky fans).

Throw out other media franchises, things are rather sketchy pickings. Even as a compulsive SF reader I'm finding far fewer books I want ot read or purchase. I've gone from buying 30-40 SF books a year to purchasing 10, and of those 10 over half are "re-discovered" SF authors whose works first appeared from the 1950s to 1970s (ie. authors like Alan E. Nourse, Christopher Anvil, and Hal Clement) and whom I somehow missed the first time.

Has the real world "caught up" with all those fevered SF visions of miniaturized computers, travels (via robots) to other worlds, world-wide communication networks, medical marvels and the like? Or has real science put the kibosh to such SF staples as FTL travel, time travel, medical immortality and the like? Or has the time lag between a "neat idea" and "real world application of that idea" shrunk so small and the spreading of such ideas expanded so widely that by the time a would be SF writer tries to play that game of "what if?" it's already old hat to the pundits on slashdot and other WWW discussion fora?

Is SF as a genre of fiction as "dead" as the fiction created in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s?

If anyone can list some good SF recommendations, I'd be happy to hear them!



::Brian::