“[Pete cracks his knuckles, starts typing]
Before you read this review, if you want to read this book, do that first. It’s short, it’s cheap, and the less you know about it, the better. The synopsis kinda spoils a significant portion, if you ask me, so ignore that shit.
Everyone else who’s still with me:
First thing, I’d like to say the librarian/library-lover response to this story is pretty disappointing. I thought my fellow librarians were tough, free-thinking people who could take a little criticism here and there. I mean, this isn’t like an ill-conceived article about Amazon running libraries or something. This is a thought-out, science-fiction tale from a master.
Speaking of, Connie Willis is no enemy of libraries. Doomsday Book is dedicated to a former head librarian at the library where I now work. Connie’s name is on a donor wall at the library where I now work. She’s been very generous with her time, speaking at staff days, library events, and doing an interview with us, all of which she refused to be paid for. She’s a good person, and just generally a delight, and I don’t appreciate all the bad-mouthing going on here. If you want to talk bad about this story, go right ahead, but if you want to talk bad about Connie Willis, go right ahead and fuck yourself.
*Spoilers Ahoy!*
The basic premise here is this dude stumbles upon a book depository, a bookstore or library, which turns out to be a holding place for every last copy of something that’s been eliminated one way or another. The ending is interesting, because although you, as a reader, figure out what’s happening before the protagonist, you don’t quite know that this is essentially a book graveyard, a book purgatory, from which it seems the titles will never emerge.
Throughout the story, a character is giving a sort of tour to our protagonist, and she’s explaining where all these books come from. And she has some unkind things to say about libraries, that they’re all tossing books willy-nilly, and that libraries trashing books is one of the bigger sources of titles in this book hellscape (I’ve already upgraded from “purgatory” to “hellscape”).
And if we step back from all this, she (the tour guide) makes some good points.
For one, yes, we soften the language a lot. We don’t call it trashing books or throwing them out. We call it “weeding” or “pruning the collection” or the very technical, bloodless “de-accessioning.” Maybe that allows us to keep a distance from what we’re doing, like we’re taking Old Yeller out to “Help him over the rainbow bridge.” The truth is, sometimes your dog gets rabies, and sometimes you gotta put him down, and sometimes a book has to go in the garbage.
I also happen to know that Connie Willis wrote a blog post about some libraries engaging in weeding practices where the weeding lists were all set by machines. Numbers of checkouts and so on were calculated, but none of this stuff was really examined by humans, or the humans working there were forbidden from going “off list.” I suspect a lot of the impetus for this story came from that, and I think this is bad practice and deserves to be shit-talked a little.
Also, there’s a good point made about the shortcomings of digitization. Digitization works great for the big guys, the classics, and so on, and it works for the very small stuff (a thesis, local history, etc.), but it misses a lot of the niche, middleground stuff out there. You can fill in the title of a book or a movie or a TV show here. Take your time.
This story’s readers, you all, need to lighten up a little. Take a little criticism, consider what is and is not applicable, and move on with your lives.
More to the point, I don’t mean to talk down to everyone here about what sci-fi can do, but what sci-fi can do is to take a real-life situation, amplify it, and then show us what out world looks like with the volume turned up to 11. That way, after we leave the story, we can still see some of the ridiculous things about our world as being truly ridiculous.
The story presents an all-or-nothing proposition: keep everything or keep nothing. I think the story presents this as an all-or-nothing proposition because that makes an interesting story, and goddammnit, isn’t that what a story is supposed to do? Be interesting?
The literal interpretation of this story is that there’s a tragic thing happening, which is that books are being lost at an alarming pace. That’s what you read when you read the surface of the book. However, I think it’s most likely a mis-reading of sci-fi when we take away the most literal version of what happens.
The thing this book is trying to say, in my estimation, is that we should find ways to be more thoughtful about what we eliminate to make room for new things. “