Crying Nerd Babies

I’ve just spent close to an hour reading much of the posts and comments responding to International Science Fiction Reshelving Day (11/18/09 – go there for details), and I must say that I am a bit bemused and befuddled by the energy that so many seem to have devoted to dissing a group of people (so-called SciFi Nerds) who are, as the posters claim, easily dismissed.

If they’re so easily dismissed, a sentence or two would have sufficed. Instead – full-on columns devoted to emotional screeds making the case against not only the day and the concept, but the group of people who the dissenters perceive as being responsible.

Early on I said that I loved the idea. I love the IDEA.

The idea is not actually reshelving the books in the store so much as it is getting folks to think about the classification of books and how such artificial divides affect public perception. In that respect ISFRD has already succeeded, as the volume of postings and comments on the subject attest.

It has also served to illustrate that a goodly percentage of the blogosphere still perceives the partisans of genre as nerds.  This despite the supposed “win” of genre fiction over the mainstream, as was so eloquently and humorously pointed out yesterday by John Scalzi here.  (Note that Scalzi uses the word geek in its now widely accepted non-pejorative sense.  Not Nerd.)

I think that Scalzi is mostly right.  Folks who want to make money will now turn to genre properties as readily (or slightly more so) as they do to mainstream properties, and they’ll make their billions back, which will encourage them to do even more of the same and, as a consequence, more and more aspects of  geekdom will slip into mainstream culture (like Obama and the Vulcan ‘Live Long and Prosper’ sign).

The battle that hasn’t been won yet though is the acknowledgment that these things ARE drawn from genre fiction, owe their success to the early adopters (nerds) and continue to thrive because of that fan base.

If that battle had been won, Atwood et al would not need to be marketed as general fiction and Atwood et al would not need to keep on defending their ‘not me’ position.

The war is still going on though because there still remains a major inequity: the “mainstream” is still allowed to borrow and use the works of the genre without acknowledgement, or attribution or acceptance of the wider world to which it belongs.  This situation is similar in many ways to that which took place in the early years of rock-n-roll music.  The originators – mostly black artists – could not get airtime on white radio stations. It took the unacknowledged adoption of the new forms by white artists for rock to become successful.

Like  I said, I like the idea of ISFRD.  I think that the bookmark concept (putting a ‘this is really SF and if you want to find more of the same, go to the genre shelves’ bookmark inside selected works) proposal is a nice compromise and I’d say this to those who have been contemptuous of the idea:

schedule your own damned reshelving day for November 19th – call it something like “Eradicate the Influence of Nerds in Literature Reshelving Day” -  go to the bookstores to undo the work of the crybaby nerds and help continue the perpetuation of the myth that science fiction (genre fiction) isn’t worth any real attention unless some marketing type happens to think it could make oodles of money and calls it something other than what it really is.

While you’re at it, pick up a copy of 1984 from the general literature section  and give it a re-read.