On Errantry

Boing Boing: Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens

Cory Doctorow comments on an anthology of science fiction intended for teens that he has just read, and also how the Great Age of Geek appears to be on the decline, since Kids These Days just don't want to pick up a gawddamn book. Okay, maybe he didn't say that, but still.

Speaking as a seventeen-year-old closet scifi geek (I've got a tape of last Friday's Scifi channel finales sitting in Dad's VCR that I'm dying to go get), I think the problem is cover art. Frankly, I'm unwilling to indulge my geekish tendencies in public if I run the risk of being caught with an overdrawn picture of fire-breathing dragons or scantily clad damsels-in-distress in plain view (I am not a twelve-year-old boy to whom that stuff is so freakin' cool, man. They have no shame). Yes, I know that there are *hrmph* "adult" aimed covers for stuff like Harry Potter (I seriously haven't read that yet. Put it on the to-read list...), but the bad-cover-art phenomena appears to be near universal in scifi paperbacks, which is why I tend to favor jacketed hardbacks -- you can strip 'em down, and barring someone peering at the spine, nobody will ever know you're reading something horribly horribly embarassing.

Tor Fantasy, I'm talking to you.