A Confession

No, not mine.

Wendell Potter is interviewed by Bill Moyers through this link. The interview is 30 minutes long, so if you don't have time to watch it all, let me sum up:

Michael Moore was absolutely correct on Sicko.

Mr. Potter is a former healthcare executive. On the PR side of things.

If you haven't seen Sicko, you should go rent it, because now we know what the industry did to cast Moore as radical crazy person and suppress his message which is basically: we shouldn't fear government involvement in healthcare.

There are a few talking points that are addressed that everyone should have now have counterpoints for:

• Michael Moore is a radical leftist. No, he's a guy that asked around the world and then recorded the answers. It's the CEOs that are the radicals, trying to remove your ability to know what's going on in your healthcare system.
• Michael Moore is part of the Hollywood elite. No, he's from Flint, MI. He started making documentaries after he saw how GM treated its employees.
• Government should stay out of healthcare. In the countries where there is government involved healthcare the people like their healthcare more than we do. Germany, especially.
• Getting government involved in healthcare would mean a beaureacrat between you and your doctor. Right now there's a CEO between you and your doctors. At least you could vote to replace the government beaureacrat.
  
• Beaureacrats would be prescribing treatment, not doctors. Again, what we have now is corporate beaureacrats prescribing, not doctors. And what's worse, they have a bottom line to maintain.
  
• Delayed care is denied care. Sort of like how people can't go to the doctor for a cough that may become pneumonia under the current system because it costs them too much out of pocket? That's denied care.
  
• Medical services would be rationed! None of the proposals under consideration for the U.S. would stop someone from using private insurance or even themselves from paying out of pocket for services that they might need. If they can pay for it, more power to them.

I think one of the silliest things is that insurance might be able to make money from a government run system with less emphasis on "medical loss ratios" because the government would be paying for more of the normal services! Insurance would still be a good idea but the companies could afford to limit themselves to the least likely to get hurt and thus the least likely to need expensive proceedures but people more likely to get sick would still get the care that they need.

Maybe instead of a medical loss ratio of 77%, they'd start seeing medical loss ratios of 50% and people that need lifesaving treatment could still afford it.

(Interview via)

Heads by Greg Bear

I just finished the Novella "Heads" by Greg Bear.

It was pretty good, the characterization could have been better and the end was sort of predictable but it had me worrying there for a while.

You see, it's been a while since I picked it up from the bookstore. Even then all I knew about it was that it was a Hugo winner. If I knew anything more than that about it, I'd forgotten it so it was a blank slate to me.

As I was headed into the last few pages (*cough*) I couldn't tell if it was going to be a ringing endorsement of Scientology or a scathing denouncement.

It is definitely about Scientology though. It's so thinly veiled that it's beyond gauzy and into the realm of body paint. Thierry is Hubbard.

I don't know much about Greg Bear. He could have been a convert, for all I know. He could have had some other reason to want to ingratiate himself with the Church or want to support them.

But he didn't. Instead, he shows in a novella why Hubbard should be disregarded. It might be a fictional work, but so's Dianetics.

Hate Crimes Challenge

Here's a challenge for American Elephant or Renaissance Guy:

What is a hate crime?

Use your own words to describe what hate crimes legislation does, what effects it is intended to prevent or create and why we need them.

I may have to ask clarifying questions to determine if you've actually got the right idea.

Rescission

Companies and governments have different priorities. They have to.

Companies are in it for the money, which is no more apparent than in the practice of "rescission" as seen here.

Governments have to worry about ethics though. At least in a marginal, theoretical manner. It wouldn't be ethical or possible for the government to do that. They have to worry about protecting everyone, not just the people that are willing to give them money because too many people getting dumped will hurt public perception and possibly votes.

The weird thing is, that protects us, somewhat. Anyone that thinks that we should let economics, the market, a company or anything like that govern us is abrogating the responsibility to maintain an ethical and publicly tolerable state.

Torture, eavesdropping, rescission. Who cares, when the drive is toward squeezing out the last little dollar?

Noird and Sushi

On June 3 in Cambridge I got to hear China Miéville speak about his new book The City and The City, during which he let fly with the created word "noird." He was content to let it live in the wild: he refused to define it himself except for in the most general terms and refused to speculate on other authors that it may describe. (If you're interested, the first reference to it is here and Why Mice Sing delves into it here.)

During the signing, he told me that I should spread #noird, so I guess I'll have to go sign up for Twitter. China Miéville told me too.

I asked Ben to talk about his thoughts about noird, because he's substantially brighter than I am and more apt to clearly express interesting ideas. He said:

I went to see China Mieville give a reading and question and answer session last week, in which he declared that his most recent book 'The City and the City' is a member of the noir and new weird portmanteau: noird subgenre. Upon declaring this new subgenre, Mieville started the question and answer session. I fired off the first question: 'Who else would you put in the subgenre of Noird? For me, Richard K Morgan immediately springs to mind, but what do you think?' Mieville demurred and suggesting that we need to identify the authors for ourselves. To wit, I start with a modest proposal for what Mieville is defining.

Noird is a fusion of Noir and New Weird - Noir is fairly straightforward: hard-boiled detective/crime/police procedural story - I always thing of Raymond Chandler and Chinatown. New Weird is a bit more amorphous - presumably, this encompasses the new science fiction approaches, the speculative fiction which Neal Stephenson defines so cleanly here. There is certainly a current/modern component to this, so Golden and Silver Age of sci-fi/fantasy should probably be excluded.

On the author/book list (as Mieville implied that not all his work is Noird, but 'The City and the City' most certainly is) I suggest the following:

• Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) series by Richard K. Morgan
• The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
• Something by Neil Gaiman [not sure what, but he's certainly New Weird, and there's got to be detective elements to some of what he's done]
• Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde
• Halting State by Charles Stross [possible others like Glasshouse have references along those lines]
• The da Vinci Code/Angels and Demons by Dan Brown [possibly too mainstream to be new weird, but there's certainly elements that map onto this construct - stylistically, the noir component falls short here--there's not a lot of that hard-boiled feeling]
• Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami [though others from Murakami fits into this as well]

In many ways, I feel like Philip K Dick was a major founding influence in this Noird genre - looking at works such as Do Androids Dream, A Scanner Darkly, which wiki calls "a bleak mixture of science fiction and police procedural novels;" possibly may be the founding work. That being said, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is a worthy contender as well, with the heavy influence of the classic Noir style.

Obviously, there are other and further choices, but this is certainly a reasonable sub-genre which captures many works which sort of defy classification.

Personally, I'm not convinced that when Ben wrote this, his definition of New Weird was correct. I asked if he'd looked New Weird up on Wikipedia and found that he hadn't. Some of the works that Ben takes for granted as New Weird aren't necessarily part of that movement and some of them predate it by decades.

So, New Weird "subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy" and invents complex and believable worlds in which the plots are set in a more realistic and not particularly utopian setting. Basically it's fantasy set in a world that extends beyond the boundaries of the story that exhibits the traits of the real world.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is on the Library Thing list above and both Ben and I agree that it deserves it's place on that list. Ben, having just finished the Chalion series by Bujold, thinks that those books belong to that movement as well and I can't necessarily disagree. I would add George R. R. Martin's ASOIAF to the movement as well. His books are subversions of a romanticized fantasy setting.

Possibly Harry Potter by J. Rowling belongs to this movement as well. It's certainly an expansive world that belongs to a world with a past and future that exists regardless of the actions of Harry. It does push the limit on the "realistic" front though, although I would argue that the later books show that the world in which Harry lives is not the typical utopian fantasy setting. The Minister of Magic is voted out, isn't he? Characters related to the main characters die. Not everyone lives happily ever after and if we're defining this movement by expansive worlds and a step away from utopianism, then I would argue that it does fit.

Ben would point out somewhere in here that J. Rowling would never describe herself as "New Weird." Considering her separation from the mainline fantasy movement I would question though whether she'd even accept the term "fantasy," so why does it matter?

It matters because China is spreading New Weird himself, as sort of a self-promotional/sales technique. That doesn't mean that it isn't a valid sub-sub-genre but it does make me question how correct the pushed definition is to the way that people use it. And since Noird is a sub-category of New Weird, how specific are we willing to get?

There are only a few examples of Noird, but Ben feels (and I would agree) that the are categorical, there are ways to parse out the differences between New Weird and Noird. Figuring out what those were led me to at least one more subset that Noird must be distinct from: Victorianeird (pronouced with a hard e at the end).

Victorianeird is that part of the New Weird that adapts the literary conventions, styles and sometimes setting and characters of Victorian England. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is the obvious genre defining work, but there are others. Brust's Viscount of Adrilankha series is probably another. Although I haven't read them I would guess that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Graham-Smith (and Jane Austen, of course), the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik probably fit into that category as well.

So yeah, Noird and Victorianeird. If I have any more thoughts, I'll have to do a follow-up post.

Moving on to the sushi part of this post: Cafe Sushi on Mass Ave in Cambridge is excellent. Really, really good. I guess they've changed management recently but they're much better now than they used to be. So, if you happen to be looking for excellent sushi in the Cambridge area, I heartily recommend them.

Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson

Written October 8, 2008 while I waited for the book to get published:

I got lucky again. I stopped by Tor when I got to New York to drop off a get well soon card for Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Patrick just happened to be there and he offered me a free book.

You should have seen my face light up.

The problem was, I was still staying with Jay at this point, and everything I owned was in two suitcases and a backpack, all stuffed to the point of bulging seams. I had nowhere to put another book, not even a free one.

But he popped back into his office and came back with an ARC, an advance reader copy, of book by Hugo Award winner Robert Charles Wilson. I'd already read Spin and I happened to have the sequel Axis in my backpack. (PNH pointed out that the final novel in the trilogy, Vortex, is currently being written.)

A free book I could turn down, but this was more than a free book. It was . . . special? Using that word seems forced and it implies things that I don't intend but it still comes closest to conveying what I'm trying to get at. I like having connections with the books I read. I like reading signed copies, I like reading books by friends or acquaintances. And I like advance copies.

This is supposed to be a review though, so I suppose I'll move on to the book.

Spoilers Galore

Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century by Robert Charles Wilson is a future history. That is, it's a novel about the future written from the perspective of someone that is recalling it as history. In this case it's a biography of Julian Comstock by his good friend Adam Hazzard.

Julian is the nephew of the President of the United States, Deklan Comstock, and the presidency has become something of a monarchy. There are still elections but there are little more than a formality. Senate seats have become hereditary. Still, things are not quite stable. Julian's father is declared a traitor and executed when he starts to rival his brother's popularity and Julian is sent away to what used to be Canada for protection from his uncle (I'm pretty sure that the place where he grows up, William's Ford in the Athabasca region of Alberta, is a reference to William Gibson who went to Athabasca University, but tons of the references went flying over my head so I may have gotten this completely wrong).

Adam's mother works at the Comstock estate and eventually Adam and Julian become friends and so when Julian is forced to leave home due to the machinations of his Uncle, Adam leaves with him.

This isn't the stereotypical science fiction novel. Instead of living in world where technology has progressed the characters live in a world that is much more like the late 18th century that the 21st. Oil has Effloresced, and combined with plagues and "the false Tribulation" the world has returned to what we would consider simpler times: horse drawn carriages and ships are the primary forms of transport, digital technology is lost, and conservative Christianity has fufilled its Dominionist dreams and taken over most people's daily lives and infiltrated the government. The sector of power that they've created is even referred to as the "Dominion" and is based in Colorado Springs.

Since this does take place in the future though, it's interesting to see what has been made of past by people that have trouble believing in things like cars, traveling to the moon, or flying to Europe in eight hours.

This is in some sense a bildungroman, and I suspect that aside from the modern in jokes it would have fit in well with literature from the 18th century. The level of technology, the overt Christianity and the greater emphasis on propriety and decorum through the reassertion of conservative value systems over an entire society are all more closely related to Gone With the Wind than 1984.

As such, this isn't the sort of book that I'd normally read. I like space ships and aliens and computers and that sort of thing, and I probably wouldn't have picked it up off a self as something that was required reading. However, I can say that it was engaging, entertaining and well-written.

The characters are for the most part three dimensional, especially Adam as narrator and Sam Godwin the Jewish bodyguard of Julian (I suspect his name is another subtle joking reference, this time to the internet meme). The plot is believable, and the setting is beautifully described from Alberta to British Columbia to New York City.

In order to do an honest critique, the rest of the review contains even more spoilers. Unless you've already read this book, aren't planning on reading it, or don't care about spoilers stop reading here.

My main quibble with the books is from one major element that is clearly implied in nearly every chapter of the book about Julian but isn't ever directly addressed. He's gay. There are several major jokes based on this throughout the novel, including one in the last few pages that is intended to endear the audience to Adam.

Trying to rationalize this from an authors perspective, I have problems coming up with something that I would agree justifies this. First, it's implied at the end that Adam never figures this out. On the contrary, several people have suggested this directly to him and he says as much in the first chapter. So he seems to have considered it and dismissed it.

Second, if Adam had attempted to hide his friend's sexual orientation, there are sections that would be differently written or completely left out. Considering that he describes the book as "a true and authentic portrait of [...] Julian Comstock" and in every other manner seems to hold to this seem to suggest that Adam didn't intentionally cover it up, he just didn't consider it.

But this doesn't make any sense. Considering Adam's issues with Christianity, he never shows discomfort with his friend's presence. Pardon my language, but bull crap. Given his reaction to finding out that Godwin is a Jew, he should have a significant discomfort or insecurity or curiosity about homosexuality and there is absolutely no justification for why he doesn't.

So, as a twenty first book written by a person writing as another, I have to ask: What the crap is so special about homosexuality that it's danced around?

It's obviously relevant to the story. Chekov's gun. But why write around it and pretend that it's not there? To be honest, this significantly bothers me to a large degree. Our society currently has enough problems being forthright about homosexuality. Look at Clay Aiken, who just came out of the closet (and Adam Lambert, who hasn't -- ST May, 2009), not to mention Ted Haggard and hundreds of others.

It can't pretend to address this though, because it's never explicitly addressed. It would be like writing a book in which one of the characters is implied to be Jewish and then claiming that it addresses the way that Jews pass in modern society. No. If the problem is that gay people can't be open or honest then a book that isn't honest is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

And it is a problem. Do you know how many (human) homosexual characters I can think of in science fiction? Maybe ten, and almost all of them are minor characters. If I want to identify with a romantic situation in a science fiction book, I usually have to pretend that I'm the girl, or that the text says "he" instead of "she."

So here you have a central character (his name is on the cover, notice) that's gay. Julian is already a rebel in a situation where homosexuality is a crime and the most homophobic sections of our society have become the law of the land. Further, this is a book about how the character becomes a man and learns about life. What better situation is there to write about a gay character dealing with homosexuality in a world of conservative Christianity?

So why isn't a major part of his life addressed?

At some point I feel that I'm blowing this out of proportion but I can't emphasize how empty I felt at the end of the book when I got to the big homosexuality joke about men and their wives. Usually I can just laugh this stuff off, but this particular point has been festering for a couple of weeks now. I'm used to comments like the end joke from people that deride homosexuality, I guess I just don't feel like I need to take it from someone that is comfortable with gay people.

Yarg. Now it sounds like I didn't like this book. I did. I thought it was great. I enjoyed reading it, and carried it around the NYC subway with me for days, marveling at the Wilson's amazing ability to take us back and forward in time at once. I just had an issue with that one specific little part of it.

Anyway, despite the issues that I had with it, I recommend it, especially if you tend to like 17th and 18th century historicals or historical fantasies.

It's available for pre-order through Amazon here.

Expectations vs. Reality

As more of my favorite writers desperately try to lower expectations about writers as a whole based on the case of GRRM, I suddenly realized that I really wanted to respond to something that Gaiman said as part of his "[GRRM] is not your bitch" post:

"Yes, it's unrealistic of you to think George is 'letting you down[.]'"

Which brings me to this graph I created in about ten seconds:


As we can plainly see, the reality of the situation is that George R.R. Martin isn't meeting expectations. So yes, people are unrealistic when they're expecting GRRM to live up to the expectations that he and his publishers created.

A couple of things should be obvious by now to anyone looking forward to the next book in Martin's series:

1. Martin's word can't be trusted. Even if he announced the book was on it's way to publication he's lied before and we shouldn't get out hopes up.
2. The editors who are paying GRRM apparently don't care or have given up on trying to push to finish the book.
   
3. If the measure of success of a writer is the ability to write, then George R.R. Martin is a failure.

From his online persona I would expect Scalzi to point to this as an example of one of GRRM's pissy fans.

Well, I'm not a fan any more. I don't remember the characters anymore, or really even their names. I have no idea what they're doing or where they started. I haven't read a GRRM book in years and I know that I won't be buying the latest book when it comes out because it would require me to reread the series and to be honest I just don't have the time. Who cares about the book? If GRRM would just admit that he's not going to finish it maybe everyone else could all move the f*** on?

So, the next question is, why do I still care about this? Specifically, why to I care that Gaiman, Scalzi, West and Stross are all faithfully defending George Martin as though he has men with knives at the throats of their children?

Because they're defending someone without honor.

Perhaps I'm slowly going nuts while reading Starship & Haiku by Somtow Sucharitkul or something but nobody likes being jerked around. Here in the west, honor seems to equal trust that now that's out the window lots and lots of people feel jerked around by George R.R. Martin and now they're treating him like crap.

That's what happens. Welcome to real life. I'm surprised you haven't noticed how it works before.

I realize that by defending him they're in essence defending themselves: they see something of themselves in Mr. Martin and they're afraid of what might ever happen if they're ever in his unenviable position. Still, it's sad to see them try because for the most part none of them really empathizes with the end user. "We know he sucks but look, this isn't the way to treat a person" would probably go a lot farther to defuse the situation than "Anyone who got personally invested in the characters is and idiot and anyone who thought that there is an implied agreement for an author to finish a series is doubly so."

So to all of the GRRM fans out there waiting for A Dance of Dragons: give up and leave the man alone. It's not going to happen and we need to move on and return to the authors that can still produce new works.

But at the same time to all of the writers out there considering defending GRRM without acknowledging that people feel screwed over for at least semi-legitimate reasons: don't. You can't empathize and therefore it's unlikely that you'll be able to make things better.

Last One to the Train Wreck

I've got a job here in Boston and I'm not sure how well it's going. Most of the people that I work with are polite, nice people put in a bad situation by a company that cares nothing for them.

It's a lot like some of the other hotels that I've worked for in my life and so I've been having issues with one of my bosses in particular. I recognize that I'm not perfect but I have enough experience now to recognize a bad situation when I'm walking into it.

The focus on the company seems to be on the employee's interaction with the guest rather than technical training. Service, in the hospitality industry, is important. Especially if you want to maintain a high quality hotel.

But you can't ignore technical training. Computer skills at the desk are vitally important to the job. You need to have a working understanding of the hotel layout, the answers to common questions and know what you can do to resolve a problem as well.

This hotel took days to train me in any of that. I didn't even have a chance to see a guest room until my fourth day and only because I actively tagged along with a manager.

They're not particularly excited about me doing the job that the hired me to do, either. I still haven't started training for that job. Instead, I'm training for positions that I won't do and don't challenge me.

But it is a job.

Otherwise, the last week has been insane. I've been working to the point of exhaustion, of course, but I've also had a birthday and met my boyfriend's mom. And I've been trying to spend time with my boyfriend. I guess I never really truly realized what a massive time commitment a boyfriend is. I've been enjoying reading on the T though. It's everything that I imagined that it could be when I moved to a big city and gave up driving. Hallelujah.

OSC Joins NOM

I don't usually offer responses on news stories. I figure that you've probably gotten your fill from the bajillion other sources out there. I do, so presumably you have your choice sites like Digg and Fark and GoogleNews that hunt down and tag stories for your pleasant engorgement.

I did almost miss this, for the most part though. Orson Scott Card is now on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, which is that group that created the oft mocked "Gathering Storm" video.

That doesn't surprise me, really. OSC's views on gay marriage are fairly well known. He's Mormon, after all, and he has that long running column over in the Mormon Times where his opinion has been made explicitly clear.

My first reaction to all of this was almost instinctual at this point: I remind myself that there's a reason that I don't buy his books new any more. Granted, it was Empire that spurred that more than his politics but the revelation of his beliefs certainly provided that last little FU that kept me from turning back.

Buying them used is fine, of course. No money goes to him or his publisher from that.

Then I reminded myself that it doesn't really matter whether I buy his books. He's trying to get a movie made of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow and he's going to be filthy rich and tithing loads of cash to an organization that hates me anyway.

But the movie has been floating around and hasn't been made yet. It's always in the works but never in production, seemingly.

Using this neat little writer's trick I learned somewhere, I imagined that I was a cappucino and coke snorting secular capitalist movie producer drone. Would I, as aforementioned mindless drone, want to make this movie still? Yeah, the book won some awards that I'm not familiar with and all my assistants assure me that it has a huge following but I also know that if I make this movie now I'm probably going to have to end up explaining to the gay director, star, and four fifths of the production staff why this author's position on gay marriage is not reflected by the production company.

With all of the crap that's been thrown, sometimes litterally, at the Mormons over Prop 8, there could even be protests. Protests with A-list stars speaking out against this movie just because author is in the news right now.

So, even though this property may eventually make me, the cappucino and coke snorting mindless secular capitalist movie producer drone, lots of money in the future, right now it would probably be a good time to quietly renew the movie rights and hope that gay marriage is decided soon so that this author can market his work for us rather than against us.

(Just found this, might be interesting to some)

1111 Books

So, today I picked up a few books at a science fiction used book sale and after putting them in my incredibly geeky spreadsheet I discovered that I have one thousand, one hundred and eleven books. I'm not a numerologist, but it's still very pretty to look at so I decided to write a bit about it here.

If you want to know what books I have specifically, you can check them out over at library thing, which I've kept updated. However, it is missing a few text books and obscure books so the library thing count is only 1065.

Because of the obsessively anal way that I keep track of my books, I have a bit more statistics than even appear in my library thing profile. Especially since I don't use library thing to keep track of which books I've read or not.

Here are some random numbers that should be as boring as all get out to anyone else:

Of those 1111 books, I've read 575 or 52%. Some of those volumes contain more than one book, and if you count those, I've read 685.

732 of those books are paperback, 187 are trade paperback, and 146 are hardcover. 46 are textbook sized or larger. 30 are signed (13 are just signed, 13 are personalized, and 4 are personalized first edition hardcovers).

The best represented publisher is TOR/ORB with 144 books. In second place is Del Rey with 121. Third is a near tie between ACE (88) and Bantam (87).

444 of those books are fantasy and 519 are science fiction. Altogether my speculative/strange/sf/f collection is 989 books. Interestingly, while the ratio of fantasy to science fiction is around 77/90 I've read a lot more fantasy. The ratio of sci-fi to fantasy that I've actually read is around 41/73.

The average number of pages per book is 384, the median is 339. I've read 197,440 pages of fiction in my library and I have 166,443 to go. The total number of pages is 427,013. I would guess that the average words per book is around 86,479. That means I've probably read about 44, 424,000 words from the books I own.

My collection contains 168 Hugo Award nominees and 48 Hugo winners. It also contains 84 Nebula Award nominees and 34 Nebula winners. 15 have won both awards. I've read 31 of the Hugo winners and 19 of the Nebula winners (but as I mentioned, 15 of those have won both award). I've also read 40 of the Hugo nominees and 33 of the Nebula nominees.

I also track the Locus Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, World Fantasy Award, James Tiptree Jr. Award, Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and Lambda Literary Award. Usually good books will collect more than one award, so of 1111 books, 307 have won or been nominated for one or more of these awards. Of those, I've read 104, or around 34%.

If you were me, you'd be wondering what the most honored book in my little library is. Well, that depends. If you just go counting awards and nominations then China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh is by far the top with six. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula, won the Locus for best first novel, the Tiptree and Lambda Litterary and garnered special recognition from the Gaylactic Spectrum folk.

If your a writer and you ever wonder if anyone has sold a novel through the slush pile, then be aware that during a Boskone panel, the editor of China Mountain Zhang pointed out that it was a slush pile submission. Also, if you've never read it and you like exceedingly intellectual science fiction, then I highly recommend it as one of the best novels that I've ever read.

You'll notice that it only was nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula though, so you're probably also wondering what the biggest winner is, then I have a way of weighting books as well. I give a point for a win and a half point for a nomination (actually, it's more complicated than that, but I don't feel like explaining right now). If looked at that way then Shadow & Claw, the first half of the Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe is ranked highest. This is a omnibus edition of Shadow of the Torturer and Claw of the Conciliator. Between these two books this volume has one Hugo nomination, one Nebula win and one nomination, one Campbell nomination, one WFA win and one nomination and it won the Locus for best fantasy novel.

Alright, so what's the most recognized single volume work? Including the gay sci-fi awards, that's still China Mountain Zhang. If you discount those though, it's a tie between Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and Gateway by Fredrick Pohl both of which achieved the quad win: Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Campbell.

Here's a few other weird things that I know about my collection. 83% of it is in boxes right now because of my move out east. For every movie on VHS or DVD that I own, I own 18 (almost 19) books. Finally, if I read a book per week, it would take me more than 13 years to get to the number of books read that I have. Which is actually a little embarassing to me, considering that I've been reading novels a lot longer than that. It means that some weeks I've been slacking (or stuck on a particular book).

I have no idea why I so obsessively and compulsively keep track of my books. It's just this thing that I do, and sometimes it helps me keep track of things and sometimes it annoys the crap out of me (like just now, when I discovered that The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon did not win the Campbell and I had to go back and fix it and this post, grrrrr).