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1. In honor of National Library Week: Does anyone have recommendations for SFF-ish stories in which the main characters are Hero Librarians (you know the type, Magical Librarians or Librarians in Space or Secret Agent Librarians or Ghost Librarians or whatever) in which what the librarians do is actual librarianing?

Because it seems like, in at least 90% of what I've found, what the Hero Librarians have as their mission is keep information away from people, which is, like, the opposite of a librarian? Librarians are supposed to increase access (all sorts of access), not lock stuff away.

But it seems like in genre fiction, librarians always end up locking it away instead. I even read a book by someone who works in my library system! and should know better! about Librarians in Space, and yet it still ended in them destroying the Space Library because the information was too dangerous to make it freely available.

Augh. Those stories can be super-fun but That Is The Opposite Of Good Librarianing. Not that RL librarians have always lived up to the ideal of increasing access, but they haven't always failed it, either, and in SFF it seems like they always do.

You occasionally get secondary-character librarians who are all about increasing access to information and resources (although even then you're just as likely to end up with Madam Pince, or an overprotective ~~monkey~~ape, as you are someone helpful). And sometimes you get stories where their Librarian status is basically just a cover for being a secret agent or something. But I want stories where the librarians are heroes and the heroing they do is about being librarians.

I want to find stories where librarians are the main characters and use their Special Librarian Powers to help people get the information (or other access) they want, not to gatekeep. Librarians should be the anti-gatekeepers. Librarians should be fighting the gatekeepers with all the eldritch powers at their command. Librarians should be traveling through time and space, not to find and lock away a dangerous book, but to get the patron those g-d-damned-job-creation statistics if they have to go to HELL to do it. Librarians should be having open teen programs in the large meeting room on how to fight the shadow-creatures of the dark, not having secret initiations for the elite.

Anyone have recs?

2. If you were interested in the population-in-worldbuilding stuff I posted last week, that entry now contains long comment clarifications on societies where kids don't necessarily have two genetic parents, societies where everybody does not inevitably die exactly once, and why 'average family size' and 'average number of siblings' do not mean the same thing.

Also: I tried my best to keep my language non-cis-centric in that post, but it was. hard. Partly because, in terms of the population-level statistics, even when demographers are theoretically using the numbers to mean "people with the physical capability to get pregnant", what they are actually counting is "people the society classes as women". Because they are including women who do not have the physical capability to bear children in that number, and do not distinguish them from women who don't bear any children for any other reason, usually with no particular effort to class trans women differently from any other women who do not have the physical capability to bear children, as long as their data source includes them as women.

(Obviously this fucks things up in the opposite direction in terms of there being a nonzero number of men who bear children. And nb people aren't really. included much. by population demographers who work with humans. which sucks. But it's how the numbers are counted.)

Anyway, I tried to use "women" only when I meant "people a given society classes as women," and use "people with the hypothetical ability to bear children" when the reproductive anatomy was what was actually relevant, but I realize I probably failed in multiple ways, so suggestions on how to do better when talking about this kind of thing are welcome. :/

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societies where everybody does not inevitably die exactly once,

I now really want to speculate about Dragaera...except I don't know if you've read Dragaera, so that might be a really short conversation!

I have not, so it would not be much of a conversation, but you are still welcome to speculate in my general direction!

I enjoyed the Invisible Library series, but as the title suggests, the library is not accessible to the wider public. Less of a vibe of taking books from other people than say the Jim Hines library series, but still secret agenting, mostly.

If you do come up with a rec list, I'd be happy to see it.

I remember really liking the comic Rex Libris, where iirc he is mostly trying to get overdue items returned, which is at least somewhat about letting other people access them, although I don't remember the access part being a major aspect of the story. (I should find some more trades and finish reading that.)

Invisible Library sounds fun! But they do sound more like archivists than librarians. (Sorry to hear about the Jim Hines series! I didn't know anything about the plot and was hoping it would turn out to be what I wanted.)

Rex Lebris sounds fun. I'll keep an eye out for the trades.

To be fair to Jim Hines, I noped out of the first book about a 1/3rd of the way in, so maybe it got more librariany, but as far as I read, it was about protecting the public from dangerous books.

Invisible library is more archivist stuff, though the main character really would just like to spend all her time reading and rolling around in a giant pile of books, and damn those spy shenanigans anyway.

Dare I ask why you noped out of the Jim Hines (I haven't read anything by him, but he sounds like the kind of guy who might write stuff I'd like...)

I actually really liked his Princess series, especially the second and third books, but this one idk. Part of it was the librarian thing, where he was hiding knowledge instead of sharing it, and part of it was the heroine was sort of a sexy nymph (albeit a plus-size desi sexy nymph), but mostly the hero was just really, really boring. Like, REALLY boring, and too much of a special snowflake for me. It wasn't awful, it just had enough things that minor annoyed me that I gave up. Which I feel bad about, as it's a signed ARC.

Oh, I remember hearing about the sexy plus-size desi nymph now! Yeah that sounded like it could be good but could also be a bit grinding.

Edited 2016-04-15 15:45 (UTC)

I mostly wanted him to subvert harder. Or sooner, or something.

Library has both Rex Libris trades.

Oh, and as far as Librarians being Librarians go, have you read Vinge's Snow Queen? Because while it's a sort of minor plot, [MAJOR SPOILERS] are doing their best to be good librarians, i think.

I have not! It's been on my to-read pile for a long time, though, since I really liked the one series of hers that I have read (the Psion books).

Maybe David Drake's Lt. Leary series? At least at the beginning, the heroine is trying to build/organize/fix an actual library, though I can't remember how much she stays a librarian later on, vs purely becoming a spy.

Oh! And *definitely* Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series, which I highly, highly recommend. Freedom of information is a huge overall theme, though not always books. And the first part of the third is all about organizing a library.

Hrm, yeah, the heroine of Sex Criminals is also theoretically trying to get a library rebuilt, but as far as I've read in it anyway, the library seems to be mostly serving as a motivational MacGuffin and we don't really see her being a librarian much.

But ooh! Maybe that'll actually motivate me to read Steerswoman finally!

I wasn't even going to bother to rec Steerswoman, because it is so intensely the sort of thing that you would read (judging based on your journal) that I just assumed you already had.

You'd think! I'ts been on my to-read list for years but my SF to-read list is literally decades behind at this point. So. And it's not a thing that turns up at used book sales (probably it's so good that people hoard copies?) and it's old enough that it would've been out of the local libraries by the time I started devouring SF, so I missed it in my read-ten-sf-books-a-week days.

Same! But yes, 100% agreed about the librarianing and commitment to open access to information from the Steerswomen.

Seconded. I love Drake's RCN series. After the first book, what Adele does is more in the nature of information finder/organizer/analyst with few physical books involved, but it's the same skillset, and arguably from a certain point of view, the same job. For cultural reasons, Adele is a deadshot, but her ability to find and synthesize information is literally far more dangerous.

TLDR, a coup in space causes a young spaceship captain and a topnotch but moderately anti-social librarian to realize they make a good team and become best friends for life. Stuff happens and in subsequent books, she's hired on to his crew as his "Communications Officer" but basically their very own one-woman intelligence unit. Adventures and lifelong friendship ensue.

On another interesting note, Adele is asexual and this is handled in a way that's matter of face but definitely informs her worldview. And that isn't used as, the way it is in a lot of fiction, shorthand for "doesn't have emotions" or "doesn't understand emotions". She and Daniel have an incredibly tight bond, and while they're both very work-centric people, they're the center of each other's emotional worlds and everyone who knows them understands them and gets that.

Basically, this series gives lots of space adventure and repressed people having intense friendships emotion-porn with a sprinkling of exploration of ethics of war and international politics, plus a bit of alien archaeology. I love it so, so much.

I'm not sure how well "public librarian" tracks with "intelligence officer" in terms of information access ethics, but that still sounds fun!

Well, she's all about more information instead of destroying information, and typically she cleverly uses and analyzes publicly accessible information to draw useful and actionable conclusions? Basically, she's an information science person who has moved into a different information science job and uses the transferable skillset.

I will add my enthusiastic vote to the Steerswoman series. In some sense the Steerswomen are not just librarians but actual libraries, for people who otherwise have no access to information about the world.

I wanted to rec the Steerswoman series for the theme of information sharing, I'd forgotten that there is even an actual library in book 3! A library with a one-person-interface, kind of. Anyone could read the books I'm sure, but they all seem to prefer asking.

+whatevering the Steerswoman series! Came immediately to mind and is a terrific read.

Judging by my dw circle, there is exactly one story that does this, and it's the Steerswoman series. :D

I have no recs but I hope you will post the results of your survey, because this is Relevant to My Interests.

I hope I get enough results to do a recs post!

It's been ages since I read it, but I sort of remember the library being important in "Something Wicked This Way Comes?" Vaguely? And for all I know, I'm getting it mixed up with the Disney movie adaptation, but I remember Will and Jim being able to go to the library and just find information about Mr. Dark's carnival.

Hmm, interesting. Yeah, boys going to the library and finding everything they need actually does sound very Bradbury in his more Disneyish moments.

Well, it was bugging me enough that I went and read the book's Wikipedia page. What I mostly remember is a lot of descriptions of a fantastically 1950s library where the protagonists spent a lot of time, and maybe sort of used as a base while they tried to figure out what was going on. It turns out that the father of one of them, Will, is a janitor at the library. When they get him on their side that weird stuff is going on, he just goes and finds them old news clippings about other times in the past that the carnival had been through their town. Apparently the film just goes ahead and makes him the town librarian, though I haven't seen the whole thing nor read the book within the last five years, so I can't say whether the library is more important to the film or not.

One of the things I was sort-of-remembering earlier is that there's a really intense scene in the library where they hide from Mr. Dark while he tries to coerce Will's dad into telling where they are. It was made around the same time as "Watcher in the Woods," or whatever the name was of that creepy live-action movie they put out in the early/mid-80s, and it has a lot of the same dark, eerie vibe. What stuck in my head is Jonathan Pryce being all sinister and just-this-side-of=hammy as he removes Will-Dad's memories of years of his life, represented by him tearing pages out of a book Will-Dad had been using to research the carnival. I think I remembered it because it is pretty effectively suspenseful and atmospheric. But when I think about it, it's interesting to me that not only is the librarian helping the protagonists with information freely available in the public library, one of the scenes where the previously subtly evil villain first really tips his hand is a scene where he destroys it.

Still a secondary character, but the librarian in Nick O'Donohoe's Crossroads trilogy (out of print, sadly -- it is SO GOOD) is very good at librarianing. The protagonist (a final year vet student whose professor has unexpectedly invited her to go on a secret rotation where they treat mythical beings) shows up at the library of the University of Western Virginia and asks the librarian (a normal, non-supernatural librarian) for practical medical information on unicorns. So she helps the protagonist with the catalogue, and they find some information.

Later on for plot related reasons she really does have to take out the library's only copy of a very rare book and give it to someone who she knows will not be giving it back (implication: because it will be destroyed[*]) and while she does it, she also has the sort of crisis of conscience about it that normally in TV and books you get to see doctors or lawyers having about betraying the ideals of their profession, not librarians. That was very good.

(Also there was a nice averted trope thing where the protagonist (who in fairness has been faced with a lot of actually supernatural or non-human people in plain sight, asks the librarian if she's a dwarf, i.e. the fantasy race, and the librarian, who is a human with dwarfism, very politely makes it awkward for the protagonist.)

[*] Not because the information in it is too dangerous, but because it's the only weapon that can defeat the baddie.

Edited 2016-04-15 01:40 (UTC)

That's another thing the stories get wrong! Actual public librarians are the most cavalier people about books getting destroyed that I have ever met. I tell civilians how many books we just shrug and throw in the recycling every single day, even if they're the last copy we own, and they *cringe*. :P And I'm still way less desensitized to that than most of the staff.

/me adds a gleeful book-destroying scene to current librarian-based WIP

(But people at academic libraries that have special collections are in a slightly different situation, it's true.)

I want this:

Librarians should be fighting the gatekeepers with all the eldritch powers at their command. Librarians should be traveling through time and space, not to find and lock away a dangerous book, but to get the patron those g-d-damned-job-creation statistics if they have to go to HELL to do it. Librarians should be having open teen programs in the large meeting room on how to fight the shadow-creatures of the dark, not having secret initiations for the elite.

on a wall somewhere.

It's not like that would be less exciting than the other way! So much possibility for adventure while spreading knowledge.

Hmm, it features a book store rather than a library, but you might appreciate Door to Lost Pages by Claude Lalumiere (and maybe Objects of Worship, in which Lost Pages sometimes shows up). Lost Pages is a bookstore that exists in a sort of dimensional hub, so the proprietor can get people books that don't exist in their universe. Sometimes that part's secondary to other plot points, though, so you could shunt this to the bottom of your list.

http://claudepages.info/books/

Oh, interesting! Actually that reminds me of Kingyo Used Books, my favorite manga, which is about the staff at a used manga store with the ability to get every customer the manga they need to read right then, whether they know it or not. Reader's Advisory powers!

Fourth/fifth/sixthed or whatever it is by this point for the Steerswoman books, but I DESPERATELY WANT MORE OF THIS. I remember seeing someone on DW talking about how the Librarians show really should have been about a bunch of librarians guarding word-altering knowledge who are MORALLY OBLIGATED to share it with everyone, even evil galactic overlords, and, like, yes, 100% I want that show!

(...and I'm not even a librarian, I'm an archivist! ARCHIVISTS DO THIS TOO THOUGH. Like we're more worried about long-term preservation, but the thing I hear most often in archives circles is 'preservation without access is meaningless.')

I think I remember seeing that post too, and if I did, I agreed with it wholeheartedly. That would be a MUCH more interesting show!

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