There are two kinds of books in this world.
So I find this book on the science fiction shelves of a middlin’ bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, and my interest is immediately piqued. (Look at the cover. Does that look like science fiction to you?) (And yes: that sort of snap judgment does indeed kick over a can of worms. Nasty, divisive business, those genres. But: think of “science fiction” less as a much-maligned, ghettoized idiom whose ability to address the human condition with a much wider than usual array of metaphor and imagery has been grotesquely overlooked by narrow-minded Philistines, and more as a commercial classification which overworked booksellers use to quickly categorize product for easy sales—think of it like that, and you’ll see what I mean when I say a book like this on those shelves in a store like that is going to catch your eye.) (I mean, geeze, next thing you know you’ll be putting Canopus in Argos in between Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Harpy’s Flight.) (Actually, Powell’s shelves half of Canopus in Literature and half in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Which doubles your chances of stumbling across it, I guess, but makes it a bit difficult to pick up the whole set at one go.)
Where was I?
Ah, yes. Saw this book a year ago, finally just got around to picking it up, have now begun reading it, pure curiosity and no real expectations (though Anthony Burgess does go on about how it’s Scotland’s shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom), so it wasn’t until I got to this passage—
Lanark did not wish to be an artist but he felt increasingly the need to do some kind of work, and a writer needed only pen and paper to begin. Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to write the second kind of book.
—that I smiled to myself and settled in; I’m in good hands with this one. (It gets rather rapidly weird and strange. Science fiction? No. But a dark fantasy, thus far. In the modern idiom, of course.)
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