The Days When You Could Read Everything

Image captured from Amazon

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Periodically, I get emails from Reactor Magazine. I must have signed up for them once upon a time. I usually scan the article titles and then delete the email unless something especially captures my attention. After all, so much of science fiction and fantasy targets an audience other than me.

But today, I saw the article When Did SFF Get Too Big?. The subtitle is, “Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when readers stopped being able to keep up with their favorite genres?”

I didn’t know this had ever been an expectation. That is, I hadn’t realized that lovers of science fiction and fantasy were supposed to read each and every title produced in the genre in a given year. Especially if you’re talking about reading all these books just as they’re published (brand new), that’s a lot of money to shell out (maybe some will end up in the “New Titles” section of the public library, but still…). How do you know you’re going to like each and every book? What if you know that some authors generally produce dreck but keep getting published anyway?

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The Dragon’s Library

library

Image found at “Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie.” No image credit listed.

It was a dream come true. Somehow, along with all of the children, a library had been brought from her world into the dragon city in the trees. Nine-year-old Paris walked inside with a solemnness usually reserved for a holy place, like the synagogue her parents took her to in Prague when she was six.

The library had merged with the forest. Trees were growing inside and bursting through the ceiling, and grasses were taking over the floorboards. She wondered where and when it came from. The globe in the corner didn’t look modern, but most of the books she could see seemed recent.

Then she realized only some of them were in English, and about only half were written in any human language.

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