I thought we should take some time to review some of the reactions to our little project, not all of which has been good. Such is life.

• The Crotchety Old Fan form Rimworlds: “I love this idea!”

  Thanks!

• James Bloomer at Big Dumb Object: “Here’s a bit of mischief that made me chuckle.”

  Enjoy!

• Paul Constant who writes the SLOG for the Stranger wrote a piece with the title “Please Don’t Do This, Nerds,” in which he describes our effort as “an asshole move.”

  Okay, this one takes a bit more of a reply. Mr. Constant has two complaints. The first is that our efforts will cause undue work for bookstore workers and will make it hard for consumers to find the books. The point of the protest is to draw attention to a problem and this does so for both the booksellers and the consumers.

  His second complaint is that he thought we wanted all SF books rolled into one comprehensive fiction section. I suppose there may be SF readers who want this, but I certainly do not. There are times I want to read a mainstream book and times I want to read SF and I like being able to find the one I want.

  I don’t think having a separate section “makes the genre books look cheap.” If you believe that “genre” is literary code for “crap,” perhaps it does. SF is only a ghetto if people think it is. The “Mystery” section of most bookstores is not seen as a dark and murky place, so why should SF? [That said, many of the covers on Baen books would look cheap no matter where they were shelved.]

  It is unfortunate as well that Mr. Constant resorts to name calling. Referring to SF readers as nerds just reinforces the snobbery against which we are protesting. If he thought of us as readers of Atwood, Hoffman, Chabon, Murakami, and Updike, he would probably not grasp at the nerd stereotype, and yet some of those authors’ most enduring works are SF.

• AbeBooks continued the “nerd” meme with both a title claiming “The Nerds are Coming” and a Simpsons picture of, I assume, nerds. This covers much of the same ground as the SLOG post.

• Martin Lewis of Everything Is Nice mentioned us offhandedly as an example of “genretards.” I’ve seen that epithet before, but I still don’t think it works as well as its users think. In the noun “retard,” the first syllabyl contains an accented long e sound, which doesn’t match at all with the unaccented schwa at the end of “genre.” The above comments about the word “nerd” apply here as well.

• Nick (ajr on LiveJournal) wrote a couple of negative pieces: Hey, preacher, leave those books alone! and Kicking a dead horse. The former complains about the inconvenience we may cause, and then goes on a somewhat directionless rant about how people do not browse bookstores and many are just looking for bargains. What a depressing view of book readers.

  In his second post, having complained about the idea of moving books, Nick complains about the unintrusive alternatives, calling them “shit ideas.” He then goes the same way as Mr. Constant, arguing that we should want SF moved to the general section rather than the other way around, as the SF section is a ghetto. Sigh. See above for counterargument.

• John DeNardo at SFSignal was kind enough to give us a mention, and left it to his readers to decide it our idea is good or bad. I didn’t count them, but I’d say there were more comments against the reshelving than for it, although some of it was mucked up by a bizarre anti-library/pro-library debate spurred by someone named Joshua Corning.

• Charles Tan compared ISFRD to terrorism, which seems a bit over the top.

• Brendan from Balancing Frogs wrote a very well thought out piece including discussion of whether “Gay” and “African American” work as genres. He ends up favoring the one-fiction-section approach, with which I disagree, but he gets there in a reasonable fashion.

• The SLOG article begat an article at Magers & Quinn which begat one at I Will Dare in which the author calles “SciFi nerds a defensive bunch of crybabies.” Sigh.

There are a few more, but those are the bulk of them. I’ll try to get to the others tomorrow, along with a couple of exciting Tweets to report.