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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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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/

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.')