Sci-Fi and Fantasy "Rooms" on Abe
Our friends over at Abe have created two new "rooms," one for Science Fiction and one for Fantasy. Both sport a modest but low-key and engaging grab-bag of content. Notable among them are an interview with Elizabeth Bear (also a LibraryThing author), info on Sci-Fi and Fantasy award winners—something LibraryThing should do—and a list of the most expensive Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Sold in 2006. A $8,258.40 copy of 1984 tops the list.Classifying 1984 as Science Fiction rubs me the wrong way, but I shouldn't complain too hard. Three hundred thirty-eight LibraryThing users also see it that way, and tagged it so. Even so it falls low on the tag page for Science Fiction, because it has a relatively low "tag salience"—it's tagged Science Fiction a lot, but not compared to the book or the tag's popularity overall. By contrast, 1984 heads up the dystopia tag, which makes a lot of sense, I think.
Lastly, the pricey books page has a sidebar with the most expensive sci-fi and fantasy books listed on Abe. The winner is a $75,000 copy of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, inscribed to Tim Powers, "the warmest, the most witty, the most human & least android person I know, the best friend I have ever had." That does sound like a remarkably find (and no, we're not getting a cut for saying it).
posted by Tim at 3:45 PM
9 Comments:
For some people, science fiction and speculative fiction are used interchangeably. I would classify 1984 as speculative fiction as well as dystopian.
Science Fiction and Dystopia aren't mutually exclusive catagories. In fact, there are many science fiction works that are also dystopias.
It's set in the future, so even if it is an allegory or political argument about now (1948), it still uses a science fictional form to tell its story. Just because it is other things doesn't mean it isn't also science fiction.
I don't own it, but I'd tag it science fiction. And dystopian.
Part of what LibraryThing is about is the emergence of a statistical answer to such questions. If I ran the LibraryThingofCongress, it would not be classed under Science Fiction. But I don't. Where it's classed is all about (1) what you think and (2) a statistics of meaning which allows books to be ranked against terms. In this case, while some consider it Science Fiction, it's not one of the books you'd point to as the prototype of the genre. Just as a few people on LibraryThing consider _Pride and Prejudice_ to be "chick lit." Again, some could argue it, but the statistics put it at the very bottom of any "chick lit" list.
All of this relates to the Thingology post about David Weinberger, incidentally.
Well the only reason that I don't consider 1984 a prototype of the genre is because it was predated by Brave New World and We.
I think with science fiction we have a particular problem between in-group and out-group usages. The general populace sees science fiction as Star Trek, Star Wars, and all that flashy stuff at the movies and on TV. When intelligent SF gets made as films a number of critics proclaim that it isn't SF because it is good. For example, Caryn James's discussion of PD James's "The Children Of Men" in the New York Times.
I forget the author who said it - I want to say Brian Aldiss - "science fiction is whatever we call it". I'm sure I misquoted but you get the gist.
Hi Tim,
Firstly, thanks for mentioning the new "rooms". We're happy to have launched them and make them available to all the sf & f readers.
Secondly, about 1984/85 ... the thread here so far reflects a lot of the conversations we had when we working on creating the Not-Book. We shot around a lot of ideas -- lots were stupid, lots we didn't think people would understand, etc etc. We eventually came to Orwell's book beacuse we felt it was science fiction-y enough to fit in with genre and represent it well. Also, 1984 is considered a classic by many readers and a book that a number of people know about (even if they haven't read it). With this in mind we felt it was a strong fit for what AbeBooks is about.
Nevertheless, if it gets people into sci-fi then that's not such a bad thing...
If I ran the LibraryThingofCongress
Only a matter of time, my friend.
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