Notes from a DVD Geek

by Jeremy Lassen

As an independent bookstore, Borderlands definitely likes to support independent home video distributors, who bring us some of the weirder and more obscure films that would otherwise never find their way to home video.

I’ve talked in the past about the DVDs from Lurker Home Video, but I wanted to focus on them again, as they’ve recently released volume 4 of their consistently good H. P. Lovecraft Collection DVD series.  The mad man behind Lurker home video is Andrew Migliore, who is also one of the authors of the recent Lovecraft film encyclopedia, THE LURKER IN THE LOBBY.  He also, in copious spare time, has been running the annual H. P. Lovecraft International Film Festival for 11 years.  If there is anybody who knows obscure and quality filmic adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft, it’s Andrew.

June Bestsellers

Hardcovers
1. Kushiel's Justice by Jacqueline Carey
2. Thirteen by Richard Morgan
3. Precious Dragon by Liz Williams
4. The Spirit Stone by Katharine Kerr
5. The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
6. The Harlequin by Laurel K. Hamilton
    tie
    Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
7. Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson
    tie
    The Last Colony by John Scalzi
8. Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
9. Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
10. World War Z by Max Brooks

Mass Market Paperbacks
1. Kushiel's Scion by Jacqueline Carey
2. The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy
3. The Bonehunters by Steven Erikson
4. Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
5. Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
6. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
7. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
8. Accelerando by Charles Stross
9. Tithe by Holly Black
10. Kushiel's Avatar by Jacqueline Carey

Trade Paperbacks
1. Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson
2. Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
3. Snake Agent by Liz Williams
4. The Demon and the City by Liz Williams
5. Grey by Jon Armstrong
    tie
    9 Tail Fox by John Courtenay Grimwood

Origin of the Bookstore, Part the Ninth - Sidelines

For the next four months we'll be doing a special feature each month in honor of Borderlands' upcoming 10th Anniversary (November 3rd, 2007). We'll share some stories about what Borderlands is and how it got that way.

by Jude Feldman

"How hard can it be to find a stupid bike messenger bag?!"  I threw up my hands in frustration.  I'd been looking for days; sending out email queries, flipping through catalogs, staring at low-resolution pictures on-line until my eyes stung and my contact lenses felt glued in place.  I felt like the Goldilocks of bike-messenger-bag seekers, except that there was no sign of the "Just Right" one yet, and there seemed to be about 48,000 bears' beds to choose from.  This bag was too large, and that one too small.  This one was made of cheap nylon and looked flimsy, that one appeared to be made of Kevlar and, if the cost was any indication, it darn well better have stopped bullets, too.  That type would be great, except it only came in an eye-offending orange or Army green, and all 53 of those looked too much like computer bags.  And I still had to find pens, and pint glasses, and coffee mugs and stickers.

Welcome to the wonderful world of sidelines.  What's a sideline, anyway?  Other than someplace in sports where you sit when you're not in the game?  A sideline, in retail-speak, is a line of products that you sell in your store that is outside your main purview.  So Borderlands carries a handful of sidelines; essentially everything in the store that isn't a book.

So that covers greeting cards and Ripley postcards, our cool wooden boxes, all the dragon and skull tchotchke, blank books, jewelry, art prints, sculptures and our Borderlands branded gak.  Before starting my career in retail lo these many years ago, it never occurred to me to wonder where stores bought their stuff.   I never would have suspected that there were such things as "Gift Fairs," or that they could possibly fill the whole of Moscone Center.  (Google "San Francisco International Gift Fair" if you're interested.)  I just knew that Alan wanted the sideline items that Borderlands carries to fit with the feel and personality of the store.  Some of those items were no-brainers.  Cary and I both have a weakness for beautiful boxes, so those were easy, and we ended up with Ripley postcards by customer request.  Most of the other stuff we'd seen and admired elsewhere, and it fit right in to the store.

Notes from a DVD Geek

by Jeremy Lassen

Having just returned from the Feminist Science Fiction Convention in Madison Wisconsin, where they presented the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, I figured it was appropriate to lead off this column with a Tiptree-related item:  The Masters of Horror Season Two episode from Joe Dante is called "The Screwfly Solution," and is based on her short story of the same name.  For those of you who haven’t read it, it is included in the Tachyon collection HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER, or you can check it out at SciFi.com’s “classics” archive:  <http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheldon/sheldon1.html>.  There’s also a very useful bio and bibliography there.

Having just read the story, now you are ready to see the cinematic adaptation of this film, which is out on DVD this month.  It’s directed by Joe Dante, and stars Jason Priestly and Elliot Gould.  This one is pretty good.

Two years ago, in the first Masters of Horror Season, Joe Dante stirred conservative feathers with his zombie political allegory,  "Homecoming," which was also very good.  And just recently, a classic from his filmography was re-released: 1980's film of teen/monster mayhem, "Gremlins".  This one is in fact as good as you remember it being.

May Bestsellers

Hardcovers
1. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction edited by Jeff Prucher
    tie
    Last Colony by John Scalzi
2. Ironside by Holly Black
3. City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
4. Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson
5. Brasyl by Ian McDonald
6. Mathematicians in Love by Rudy Rucker
7. World War Z by Max Brooks
    tie
    Nobody's Princess by Esther Friesner
8. Wizards edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
9. Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
10. Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker

Mass Market Paperbacks
1. The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
2. The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy
3. Old Man's War by John Scalzi
4. Tithe by Holly Black
5. Bonehunters by Steven Erikson
6. Light by M. John Harrison
7. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
8. Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
9. Helix by Eric Brown
    tie
    Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
    tie
    Red Lightning by John Varley
10. Beguilment by Lois McMaster Bujold
    tie
    Undead and Unpopular by Mary Janice Davidson

Trade Paperbacks
1. Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson
2. Overclocked by Cory Doctorow
3. James Tiptree Memorial Award Anthology vol. 3 edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith
    tie
    Snake Agent by Liz Williams
4. Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages
5. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

Origin of the Bookstore, Part the Eighth - Inventory

For the next five months we'll be doing a special feature each month in honor of Borderlands' upcoming 10th Anniversary (November 3rd, 2007). We'll share some stories about what Borderlands is and how it got that way.

by Alan Beatts

Being obsessive-compulsive and reasonably technically apt has its upsides and its downsides.  Both sides were demonstrated during the first inventory at Borderlands.

When I decided to open the shop, one important part of my business plan was to sell books online.  Today, that's a pretty simple matter but at that time it was not.  In November of 1997, I had no idea how I was going to sell books online but I did know one thing -- if I was going to, I'd need an accurate database of all the books in the store.

So, in what was going to become my typical dammit-I'll-just-learn-it-myself business model, I decided to brush up on a program called FileMaker (which I had used years previously for databases in, it makes me blush to admit, . . . role-playing games) and set up an inventory myself.  It was easy to do, after all, what do you need to keep track of with books?  Title, author's name, cover price, selling price, cost, and that should do it.  Right?  Oh yeah, I figured that I'd better add the date it was published and if it's a first printing, since I guessed that there were some people who cared about that.  And, there was this ten digit number on a lot of these books, so I added that too.  But beyond that, what else should I need?

(Ten years later:  No, that's not quite enough.  At this point there are over 50 separate pieces of data we keep about used books.  And more than that for new books.)

Notes from a DVD Geek

by Jeremy Lassen

Hello movie fans.  This month I wanted to touch on a range of things.

First up is the latest K-Horror epic, "Arang," which hit Korean theaters last year.  This better-than-average Asian horror film mixes elements of detective drama, ghost story, and Korean folk tale, with some very stylish setups and direction by first-time feature film director Ahn Sang-hoon.  This one is just what the doctor ordered if you need some creepy ghosts, serial killers and desperate detectives on said killer’s trail.

Moving over to Japan, cult classic, and Tarantino inspiration “Female Prisoner #701” hits DVD in a collection gathering all three influential 70’s Japanese cult exploitation films.  These films feature the wrongly-convicted-but-out-for-vengeance Lady Snowbird.  With names like "Scorpion," "Beast Stable," and "Grudge Song," how could you not want to own these films on DVD?

April Bestsellers

Hardcovers
1.The Last Colony by John Scalzi
2. The Lees of Laughter's End by Steven Erikson
3. The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Softspoken by Lucius Shepard
5. Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson
6. You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Latop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing by John Scalzi
7 The Android's Dream by John Scalzi
8. Into a Dark Realm by Raymond Feist
9. 1634: The Baltic War by David Weber and Eric Flint
10. You Suck! A Love Story by Christopher Moore

Mass Market Paperbacks
1. Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge
2. Old Man's War by John Scalzi
3. Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton
4. Armies of Memory by John Barnes
5. Accidents Waiting to Happen by Simon Wood
6. Flight of the Nighthawks by Raymond Feist
7. Night Life by Ray Garton
8. Ally by Karen Traviss
9. Beguilement: The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold
10. Light by M. John Harrison

Trade Paperbacks
1. Ancestor by Scott Silger
2. Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages
3. September Snow by Robert Balmanno
4. Hardwired by Walter John Williams
5. A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

Origin of the Bookstore, Part the Seventh - 10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Borderlands Books

For the next six months we'll be doing a special feature each month in honor of Borderlands' upcoming 10th Anniversary (November 3rd, 2007). We'll share some stories about what Borderlands is and how it got that way.

by Jude Feldman

The origin of the store piece this month is shorter than usual, because I've been so terribly busy building ornate little castles with my writer's blocks!

10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Borderlands Books:

1. Borderlands has a dress code, and it consists of a single rule.  You can email office@borderlands-books.com if you want to know what the rule is.

2. The combined age of all six Borderlands employees is 226, and between us we have approximately 43 years of book selling experience, 21 piercings and 14 tattoos.

3. The Borderlands staff includes people who have been: a nightclub DJ, a go-go dancer, a bike messenger, a high school teacher, an accountant, a beef-jerky salesperson, a microelectronics assembly engineer, an Emergency Medical Technician, a Dead-Head, a floppy-disk assembly line operator, an Information Technology professional, a stage manager, voice-over/television/movie actors (2), and hotel maids (2).

4. There are currently 1,177 books in the store that cost $1.75 or less.

5. Ripley has been filmed for 2 documentaries, 1 independent film and a cable-access show.

6. The store backs up to the Mission Playground, and an average of once a day someone on the staff has to toss a soccer ball back over the 18 foot high fence.

7. More than half the staff have been homeless at some point in their lives, and more than half the staff have worked at higher-education institutions.

8. In three years, Borderlands has donated over 4000 books to the guests at Martin de Poores House of Hospitality, a free restaurant that serves meals to those in need.  You can find out more about the good work that Martin's is doing here: <http://www.martindeporres.org/>.

9. Borderlands does an average of 50 in-store author events a year.

10. We have had author and/or artist guests in the store who: accidentally broke chairs, smoked marijuana before their readings, left what they were going to read at home and had to improvise, praised the store for "not having s**t all over it," incorporated employees into their novels or artwork, drew Ripley with Ren and Stimpy, and had such a good time they promised they'd be back "until forcibly prevented".

What I'm Reading

by Alan Beatts

Happy May everyone!  Weather's getting lovely and this is my favorite time of the year so I'm just in a hell of a good mood.  And you wanna' know something else that's making me so happy?  Two great books.  Just finished one and I'm halfway through the other.

Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan - I got an advance copy of this and pretty much jumped right into it.  I've really enjoyed Richard's other novels (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Market Forces, and Woken Furies) and, after an unexpected meeting at the shop that turned into a two-hour chat followed by dinner and several other too-short meetings, I consider him a friend.  Though many of his other readers prefer the Takeshi Kovacs novels, Market Forces is my personal favorite.  Richard once commented that people tell him that they don't like Market Forces because it's so grim.  He went on to say with a wry smile, "Did they really read Altered Carbon?"

It's true, Richard's novels are grim . . . but they have to be.  It's just my opinion but, of all the writers currently working in the SF field, I think that Richard's work is the best example of SF at its finest.  One of the pinnacles of SF achievement (please note that I say, "one" not "the only") is to write a compelling, readable and entertaining story that causes readers to ask themselves where our current path, be it social, technological, or scientific, is taking us and whether we're going to like the final destination.  This is one of the most notable of Richard's achievements and in it he's the best in the business.  And these days that makes for a grim story.

I think that's why I like Market Forces so much.  Unlike the Kovacs books, it lacks much of the Science Fiction set dressing that allows readers to put a comfortable distance between themselves and the ugly situations and choices that our future could bring.  That's the same thing that makes lots of other readers think that Market Forces is grimmer and darker than the Kovacs books -- it's not darker, it's just closer.

And then there was Thirteen, or Black Man (to give its original title, which Richard's British publisher wasn't afraid to keep).  Though Market Forces takes on the ethics and economics of world wide finance and investment banking in a hell-bent, kill-the-competition-before-they-get-to-the-meeting, nightmare style there is a certain genteel British reserve to it (bloody baseball bats aside).  But Thirteen . . . Thirteen is ready to _really_ get in your face.  Especially if you live in the good ole' U.S. of A.

Carl Marsalis is a product of genetic engineering called a "variant thirteen".  He was bred to be a throw-back to the pre-civilized human that existed before cooperation was a pro-survival trait.  Thirteens in general are violent, borderline sociopathic, and were almost all killed, deported, or interred years ago.  In the early years of the 22nd century Carl has managed to carve out a niche for himself as a bounty hunter specializing in tracking and apprehending other Thirteens who have escaped the interment camps.  Until one evening, while staying overnight in the Southern Republic of a balkanized United States, a small act of kindness lands him in prison.  Held without charges and facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life as a convict in this poor, backward, Christian-dominated fragment of a nation, he's offered release in exchange for helping representatives of the most powerful corporation in the world catch a serial murderer who is also a Thirteen.

The plot sounds like a great action-adventure thriller with elements of a police procedural.  And it is.  But it's also a very complex investigation of bigotry, fundamentalist religious intolerance (both Christian and Muslim), the power of corporations, and the price of violence.  It's not often that I read a novel that both makes me think about where the world and my country are going and at the same time engages and entertains me completely.  Thus far this year, it's only happened once.  And this was the book that did it.

Thirteen will be published in July of this year and I highly recommend that you get a copy.

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman - I'm only half-way though this one and so it might not live up to its promise, but in that case I'll be damn surprised.  First off, despite the title, this is not a funny book.  Granted, there are some bits that are amusing and even worth a laugh but it's not a funny book.  In both meanings of the term.

You see, it's about super-heroes and super-villains.

When I was a kid I loved comics.  Not to the obsessive, completist degree that many of my friends did, but I liked them.  And then they got a bit too simple for me and I stopped reading them.  Later I discovered a series of shared-world anthologies edited by George R. R. Martin (of A Game of Thrones fame) called Wild Cards.  They were about super-heroes but with a large dose of the real world thrown in.  The characters had ended up in real-world situations and had to deal with real-world problems.  It was good.  Not great but really very good.  Later I would run across a comic called The Watchmen written by Alan Moore.  It also took on the gritty reality of what it might be like for super-heroes.  It was also good.  Very good.  It seems that, over the years, the image of costumed heroes with super-powers has steadily grown richer and more complex -- keeping step with the aging of the generations who were strongly affected by them.

Perhaps it's a function not only of aging of the original readers but some alchemy rising from maturity -- not of the people who were first touched by Superman but the children of those people.  Children who were never told that comic books were crap and not to be read by any serious adult but children who were instead _given_ comics by serious adults (their parents) and told, "This is great.  You'll love it.  I know I did."

But, whatever the reason, comics have grown up a very great deal but that maturity has only rarely made it outside of comics or "illustrated narratives" and into prose fiction.  In Soon I Will Be Invincible it has done so and in spades.  It's a very mature novel with profoundly complex and motivated characters that retains the awe and wonder of comic books.  From the very first two chapters I was hooked and, at the half-way mark, I'm still hooked.  The writing is stylish without being self-conscious and very tight.  As I mentioned, the characters are believable and complex with motivations that you can not only believe but feel.  It's great.  Not good but great.

And you don't have to wait 'till July to get it.  It's be out in June!  And it's looking like we'll be able to host the author for a signing sometime in July.

I hope you enjoyed these two sneak peeks at books that are on their way.  I'm sorry that we don't have them for you yet but now you've seen one of the great truisms about booksellers -- we're usually either reading something that isn't out yet or we're reading something that's been out for a while.  Late or early but never on time, it's story of my life.

Have a great spring!