By that, I mean very busy, and not playing very much either.
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| Card's getting to the point where she'll have some of her pre-raid gear on her, such as the Frostweave gear (the purple tunic) that provide a pretty good bonus to Frost spells. Although the screencap was taken today this was the status as of Thursday, October 30th. |
First there was the weekend trip up to visit my oldest and her partner, which included a stop at a coffee shop built in the building that once housed a pumping station for the Milwaukee River...
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| It was a chilly morning or we'd have sat outside. |
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| And here you go, proof that there is a coffee shop inside. (I had green tea as I'd already had coffee.) At the Collectivo Coffee Lakefront in Milwaukee. |
And an additional visit to the Milwaukee Public Museum...
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| Including a rebuilt saloon/taproom. Not sure if the topless statues were added for effect or not, but I did make a few snarky comments to my wife. |
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| And you can't visit a museum gift shop without seeing rocks for sale. |
And a small restaurant next to an old train depot. Which of course brought out the train fanatic in me...
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| It's not a depot any longer, although the train tracks are nearby. |
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| Next to the depot was a statue of Czech immigrants coming to this part of Milwaukee. The irony of seeing this in our current political climate wasn't lost on me. |
On Tuesday, I spent some time over at my mom's house because her hot water heater has begun leaking, which is a good sign that the 20 year old heater has finally rusted through and needs replacement. I've had to argue with her about the immediate need to call a plumber to get this replaced ASAP, because you don't want a catastrophic failure and have 40 gallons of water on your floor.
Then, yesterday I attended the funeral of one of my brother's in-laws.* It rather understandably got me thinking quite a bit about mortality afterward.
It also brought up the very real question about what happens to our games and our characters when we die. I have a few boardgames that are difficult to find these days, such as Avalon Hill's old Civilization (and Advanced Civilization) game, and I've taken care of the game to make sure it doesn't fall apart. But what happens to it when I die? Will it end up in a landfill somewhere, like what happened to my grandfather's stamp collection?**
Or in terms of video games, who gains access to them when I'm gone? More than likely they'll vanish as well, given that someone else would have to take ownership of my Steam account (and other accounts, such as my Battle.net account).
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| Orcish Army Knife may be gone, but Rades' old toons are still present in Puggers Anonymous as of October 31, 2025. |
As you can see above, I logged into OG Balthan just to check to make sure Rades' old toons are present. I guess they'll remain until Microsoft purges accounts from Battle.net for inactivity, but I'm certainly not removing them.
Another reason for thinking about mortality and what happens to things after you die is all of those books that came out decades ago but are no longer published. The most obvious example I can think of David Eddings' Belgariad, which I never see anymore, but there's also other authors who published books in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that are now hard to find. I'm thinking of works by Barbara Hambly, Janny Wurts, Katherine Kerr, and Katherine Kurtz. Even older classics such as Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books are long out of print. I suppose you could go the ebook route, but you don't actually own those books and ebook publishers have shown an inclination to simply yank books away from you whenever they feel like it.
Oh well. Just another thing to brood on, I guess.
*He died of a brain tumor at the relatively young age of 44.
**My mom and her siblings thought it would be worth something, but after consulting with a couple of experts on the collection the result was that the collection wasn't worth much of anything. It was merely my grandfather's obsession, and that was all it was really worth.
All the David Eddings series are in print and widely available. We usually keep the first of the Belgariad and Mallorean in stock, which is what we do with most series. I just checked online and we have a copy at the store I work in right now. A quick check shows box sets of Belgariad, Mallorean, Tamuli and Elenium all in stock on Amazon UK. Eddings is still a standard range author in Fantasy for most bookshops over here.
ReplyDeleteBarbara Hambly, it surprised me to learn, isn't just still around but still writing and still getting published. She has a long-running series featuring a character called Benjamin January, the 21st of which came out last July in paperback and she has a historical series called Silver Screen, the fourth of which is due out in hardback in the New Year. Proper mainstream publishers, too. She's written a lot and some of it is sure to be OP but she's very far from obscure or hard to get these days.
Wurts and Kerr have lots of in print titles immediately available on Amazon in paperback. I never read either of them so I'm not familiar with their catalogs but they look pretty easy to get to me.
Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are in print in two Lankhmar collections under Orion's Fantasy Masterworks banner. Where I work, we can get you those in a couple of days.
The only author you mention that seems to be generally hard to get is Katherine Kurtz and even for her, a few titles are still in print.
Sorry for the unecessary detail but it is what I do for a living. I can generally say even before I look it up whether a genre author like those is likely to be in print and as soon as I saw your list I thought "Well, I reckon I could get you most of those without much trouble..." Might be different where you are although given they're pretty much all American writers I kind of doubt it.
I was hoping you'd chime in, because you have experience on the other side of the counter whereas I can only speak of what I see when browsing.
DeleteI've seen none of those authors in any of the bookstores I've visited over the past 2-3 years, which is why I brought them up. Zip, nothing, nada. And yes, in the case of Eddings I've also checked the Young Adult section (where The Belgariad could easily fit these days) and nothing shows up there either. I suspect that it's a difference between being in the UK versus over here in the US --or even from bookstore to bookstore-- where you can't easily find them on a shelf; you have to know about them and actively look for them and/or be recommended to them to order them here in the US, and they simply seem to not be on enough of anyone's radar for their old titles to show up on the shelves in a bookstore over here. If I'm browsing somewhere, it seems that I'm not going to see their old stuff, only new or recent titles they might have.
To be honest, I haven't seen a Ben Bova, Fred Pohl, Arthur C. Clarke, or Ray Bradbury book on the stacks in ages either. Nor Robert Heinlein, although for him I'm not exactly sad to see him go, as his books aged very poorly.
I didn't put Michael Moorcock on this list, because although I haven't seen his old Eternal Champion stuff (Elric, Corum, etc.) in ages, he does have a new book out that I've found in the wild.
Pohl, Clarke and Bradbury we'd always have something on the shelves. Bradbury is usually on a table with Fahrenheit 451, which would be a key SF title. Mostly it will be whatever is in the various Masterworks type series the big SF publishers maintain but we have very pro-active buyers in our store and we generally like to keep some less obvious titles from the big names on hand.
ReplyDeleteBen Bova, though... was he ever a big name? If I remember, I'll have a look tomorrow but I doubt we'd have anything by him. I couldn't name a single title by him myself.
It should be said, though, that Science fiction is a dying genre. Fantasy has been much bigger for a long time and now Romantasy is taking over there too. We recently split SF and Fantasy and Fantasy is double the size. SF is mostly the province of men in their 50s and above now, not least because most new books that would have been shelved in SF twenty years ago are now seen as mainstream fiction and promoted as such by the publishers. Almost all the familiar SF tropes from space travel to aliens to time travel to psychic abilities are completely standard and unremarkable in "straight" non-genre fiction now. All that gets published as "SF" is the real hard science stuff that hardly anyone is interested outside of the clique. Most of our SF section is "classics".
Oh yes, I forgot: Fahrenheit 451 is actually there at bookstores, but typically it's in the "Summer Reading" section. (Summer Reading is for kids/teens who have a "Summer Reading" requirement for school over the summertime.) It's usually nestled in with Dune, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. That's usually the only place you'll find Bradbury.
DeleteSF is kind of "out there" in spots (Three Body Problem anybody?), but there's branches of it around, such as the Wayfarers books by Becky Chambers and The Martian by Andy Weir. There's a metric ton of Military SF out there at bookstores here, but the Mil SF books I've read tend to have some very thinly veiled right wing political angles to them. Starship Troopers is their godfather, from that perspective. Not all of them have right wing angles, to be sure, but enough of them do that I tend to unfairly judge the subgenre by those stories.
I also think that SF isn't doing so well these days because of the backlash from the Sad Puppies campaign to take over the Hugo Awards back in the mid-2010s. That campaign, while ultimately unsuccessful, damaged the SF brand quite a bit. It's kind of like how the conspiracy nuts who used to get on shortwave radio in the US back in the 90s and 00s gave a lot of shortwave listeners a bad name.
Finally, you can't talk about SF without Analog, whose Hard SF bent seems to be determined to sacrifice character development on the altar of scientific accuracy. Yes, that's my personal opinion, but Analog has more misses than hits whenever I pick up a copy. Mainly it seems that the stories fall short on creating characters that are more three dimensional than just cardboard cutouts.