Shelfies #24: Paul Graham Raven

As an immigrant, one develops little routines: riffs from the larger narrative of one's arrival that you can just spin out for the right sort of audience. For the bookish people I've met since I moved to Malmö in 2020 (last week of February, just before You Know What kicked off), my standard response to being asked if it was difficult to uproot myself and move to a new country has been to say "oh yes, very harrowing: I had to leave half my library behind." Oh, how terrible, they'll say. "It certainly was," I reply; "I could only afford to bring a thousand of them with me."

(According to my catalogue, I have bought or otherwise acquired over four hundred books since arriving, so at this rate I should be back to where I was by the end of the decade.)

Anyway, I don't really have a "favourite" shelf, because I'm a former library worker, and I shelve by category and format — albeit much more loosely than I used to. These are a few rows from my pocket-format paperback genre fiction shelves, the one section of the collection which is (pretty much) alphabetised. I was tempted to rig the game and plant some of my favourite books in this section — how could I miss out the tatty first-issue paperback of Bruce Sterling's Involution Ocean, randomly found in the "get them out of our sight" basket of one of those basement places that you used to be able to find along the Tottenham Court Road?! But it would have been too obvious... and anyway I think it's more fun to see what stories can be found in any given section. 

So, here are five such:

Top, far left: An autographed copy of John Clute's (only) novel Appleseed, which I tracked down at a dealer's room (presumably at an Eastercon) during the period when I identified most strongly as a science fiction critic---so, 2011, maybe 2012? Maybe a bit earlier? Appleseed doesn't indulge the linguistic maximalism of Clute's critical writing style so much as leave it choking in a dust-plume of ornate adjectival excess... I remember someone telling me that it can be read as an absurdly detailed metaphor for the sexual act, but I've never yet managed to psyche myself up for the second read that it would take to confirm or deny that reading.

Middle, far left: the first three William Gibson trilogies in paperback. I'd read them in the mid-Nineties by borrowing them from friends, but the gloriously ugly run of the Sprawl trilogy we see here is wearing what I assume to be its late-Nineties cyber-collage livery. I must have bought them in the very early Noughties, because that copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive bears the considerable scarring of being the only book I took on my three-month wander around Mexico in 2003 that I couldn't bear to leave in a hostel for someone else to read. (There was never anything worthy of the trade, just countless underlined copies of The Alchemist and The Celestine Prophecy... though I do recall spending a difficult five days in Campeche, spent reading Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and wondering when my guts would be back to normal.)

Middle, center-right: Anima is an (out of print) paperback bundling of M. John Harrison's Nineties novels Signs of Life and The Course of the Heart. This is probably another Eastercon dealer's room find, given that there's a dedication on the flyleaf for an unnamed person's birthday in 2007 from a Julian (plus love from Lara): "This book — the first one, at least — is wonderful", notes Julian; in fact, both novels are wonderful. I'd gotten into Mike Harrison's work in the early Noughties, as I tail-ended the whole New Space Opera thing; Light made it plain he was a titan among sf writers, but these two novels made me reassess what I wanted from fiction of any genre. (And then they reissued Climbers in the early Teens, and I reassessed once again, and forever.)

Middle, a little further right: my copy of Matt Hill's The Folded Man was given to me by the author, who I am very pleased to count as a friend — one of the very few writer-friends I've managed to accumulate over the years, in fact. (My embarrassing lifetime habit of trying too hard may have put off most of the others, and I wouldn't blame them.) Matt's dedication says "hope you enjoy it (if that's quite the word)", and that's not (just) self-deprecation on his part: this debut, and all his books that have followed, feature a very northern-English bleakness and lonely self-loathing characters, which seems odd given he's such a pleasant and well-adjusted chap. It's a crying shame he's not better known... but he's not interested in writing the consolatory stuff that the genre publishers are putting out right now. Selah.

Bottom, middle: K W Jeter's Noir was one of the many books that I hoovered up from the second-hand bookstores along Albert Road in Southsea in the late Noughties — which, in hindsight, was the twilight of the golden era of such stores, before Amazon and eBay and all the rest spoiled the fun. I have many fond memories of spending Saturday afternoons, my brain a-blur from last night's lingering chemistry experiments, sat on the floor among dusty and/or mildewed shelves of paperbacks, so spoiled for choice that I'd sometimes read a chapter from half a dozen books before picking which one or two to actually exchange for my one pound sterling. I used to take my own cushion to sit on! I recall Noir mostly because I think it was the first novel I remember reading where I realised the author had placed a metafictional version of himself among the characters: said character's name is Turbiner (see what he did there?), and I vaguely recall it having something to do with ultra-high-fidelity cables, like for hi-fi separates... but for souls? Anyway, having been educated as an engineer, I missed out on that whole po-mo thing when it was a thing; this was perhaps where I first encountered it head-on. (And look how that ended up.)

As is probably obvious, I keep books either because I haven't read them yet and fully intend to, or because I have read them already, and intend eventually to read them again. This exercise has made me realise that the latter category is necessarily growing faster than the former, which means I should probably stop buying books (an extremely expensive habit in Sweden) and catch up on my re-reads.

(Like that's gonna happen any time soon.)

Dr. Paul Graham Raven is a writer, researcher and critical futures consultant, whose work is concerned with how the stories we tell about times to come can shape the lives we end up living. Paul is also an author and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, and a collaborator with designers and artists. He currently lives in Malmö with a cat, some guitars, and too many books.

Professional stuff (and a fairly complete list of pubications) can be found at paulgrahamraven.com. You can follow his work at his online research journal, Worldbuilding.Agency; or you can wade into the turbid ramblings of his two-decades-vintage personal blog at velcro-city.co.uk.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.