(no subject)

[melannen]

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 monkeyape, 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. :/

Comments

[muccamukk]

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.

[melannen]

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.)

[muccamukk]

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.

[melannen]

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...)

[muccamukk]

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.

[melannen]

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.

[muccamukk]

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

Library has both Rex Libris trades.