I hang my head in shame and admit that there is, in fact, one thing that the current administration has done for DC that doesn't make me want to man the barricades. Oof, just saying that makes me vaguely queasy. But it's true: Laura Bush helped get the Library of Congress National Book Festival off the ground, and since 2001 it's been a regular event on the Mall. Pavilions for different genres are scattered across the grounds, with authors speaking and signing and shilling and generally getting out to see the fans, and the paths are busy with people scrambling to catch sight of their favorite writers.
For reasons that I wot not of, it wasn't until 2004 that the festival offered an official science fiction and fantasy section or invited SFF authors. Once the penny dropped, though, they started with a bang: Connie Willis! Neil Gaiman! Frederick Pohl! Neal Stephenson! All introduced by a visibly thrilled Michael Dirda! Yow. To nobody's surprise except possibly the organizers', the SFF pavilion drew by far the biggest crowds, and the line in front of Neil Gaiman's signing table started forming hours before the festival officially opened.
Since that watershed year, maybe to keep the disparity in crowd sizes from looking too great, they've folded SFF into a broader "Fiction and Fantasy" group. I disagree with the name, which implies that fiction as a genre somehow excludes fantasy, and with setting "Mysteries and Thrillers" as another group altogether, but what the hell, at least authors I like are being invited.
This year, happy sigh, they've gotten Terry Pratchett to headline the fiction crew, which is great both because he's a wonderful speaker (a few years ago he appalled and amused Serial Karma by opening a speech with a joke about invading Czechoslovakia) and because it means that it's that time of year again: He's got another book coming out. Making Money, drop date September 1, follows Moist Von Lipwig's attempts to establish a paper currency in Ankh Morpork. I will be shocked if there's not at least one Nobby/Colon conversation about trying to track down a floating incorporeal hand. Break out the Strawberry Wobblers!
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A few weeks ago at the Heathrow Borders, or one of them, the entire shelf where Discworld paperbacks usually are was empty save for a few copies of _Hogsfather_. Pity for I am sometimes tempted to buy a U.K. release. It seems that the release date for Pratchett novels is now the same for both the U.S. and the U.K. Does anyone know if this has been the case for a while? I don't remember this being so when I first started reading Pratchett many many years ago.
It's been that way for about five years, give or take. I think that it was right around Fifth Elephant or Night Watch. He's slooowly becoming more widely popular in the States; at the signing I went to at Olsson's, he was surprised to hear that an American bookstore had completely sold out of his books, even the older ones. My father has taken to giving Where's My Cow as a christening gift.
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