I have a problem with books. The major symptom of this problem is I have too many. I love the feel of them, everything about them. I have a disease — it’s called bibliophilia.
But I’m learning to cope with it. Slowly I have learned to differentiate between the words on the page and the pages themselves. There are writers I love to read (Gene Wolfe, I’m looking at you) and books I love to hold (leather-bound Lord of the Rings) but at least I’ve now managed to convince myself that the sets are not identical. Gene Wolfe is still Gene Wolfe, even if the words are formed by excited particles on a screen instead of ink on paper. I still fear it must be illegal for anyone to write that addictively well.
But now I have another problem.
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It occurred to me as I was wandering through a local bookshop that was undergoing a management change: the local bookstores have decided, apparently, that I’m no longer a customer worth having.
They were in the process of selling off all the old inventory of the former owner, soon to be replaced with “books we think will sell here,” and I got a sinking feeling in my heart. I suspect I know the kind of books the new owner is going to put there, so I took one last stroll around the place, to say good-bye. Oh, I’ll come back to check out the new inventory, but past history tells me that will be the last time I do.
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I always view personality tests with a jaundiced eye. They remind me of the story of the college professor who told his students he would like to write their horoscope for them: he took their information and the next time class met, he handed out the workups he’d done for each of them. He asked the class how many thought he’d been very accurate and captured them well: every student raised their hand. Then he asked if one of them would read what he’d given them out loud. The entire class broke out laughing as they realized he’d written the exact same text for each one of them.
Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman contains a test, intended to show you how optimistic or pessimistic you are. It gives you 48 questions, which you then score in 6 categories, and then use those category scores to calculate three other scores.
I took the test, and saw my scores fall all over the place, ranging from wildly optimistic to extremely pessimistic. I’m both average and very pessimistic in the permanence categories, while I am both very optimistic and very pessimistic in the pervasiveness categories, and have moderately high or average self-esteem, depending upon which score you accept there. I score as moderately hopeful yet on the subtotals I score as both moderately optimistic and extremely pessimistic (I’d have to more than double that subtotal to even get out of the “Great Pessimism” category). And the total score shows me as very pessimistic.
Does that mean I’m a complex person, filled with contradictions, or rather that the test is flawed?
As a whole, the book is good, but the question nags me: Do we really need 300+ pages just to say Vince Lombardi was right?
“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re probably right.”
Just read in Locus about the death of Algis Budrys. Ruined what was promising to be a perfectly good day.
Some will write about how good of an editor he was. And there will the obligatory homages to Rogue Moon and Who?, his classics in the genre. All of that will be covered by others who will do it much better than I, so I will leave them to it.
Instead I’ll talk about Michaelmas, a flawed book with a conventional alien invasion plot, but with a more personal meaning. It was the novel that brought me into the computer industry. Besides being a forerunner to (and better than 99% of) the cyberpunk subgenre in science fiction, it was the first novel to explore the potential of human/computer teams, without making either one the slave of the other. Oh, there was no doubt who was in charge (Michaelmas, the human). But he listened to and often accepted the advice of the computer (Domino) and in general treated Domino as he might a human member of his staff.
That was what excited me. It made real to me the possibilities of computers not as calculators, but as assistants in the real meaning of the term: as things to assist us in what we do best. It was the synergy between Domino and Michaelmas that excited me. I wanted to make that happen in real life.
I was happily on my way to becoming a chemist when I read that book. It was a life-altering experience. Call him cranky, curmudgeonly, call him whatever you want. Just remember it takes a whale of a writer to reach into someone’s life like that.
I never knew Budrys the man, but that doesn’t matter. My world is a little darker today for his absence. And for the umpteenth time, I’m going to re-read Michaelmas.
Picked up an old book in my library last night, and a bunch of memories came flooding back. The book was Marked Man by Harry Carmichael, a mystery, and I thought of Bengta Wu.
Bengta Wu was a bookseller. I never met the person, so I can’t tell you anything about him or her, but Bengta Wu was my own personal “84 Charring Cross Road.” We corresponded about books, and I bought most of my early library that way.
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