Beyond the Library as Utopia: Conditional Belonging, Representative Collections and Science Fiction Librarianship
Gina Bastone and Adriana Cásarez
Introduction
When we tell strangers or new acquaintances that we are librarians, we hear reactions like “Oh, how wonderful that you get to read books all day!” Sometimes, we might get the response, “You’re doing such important work. The public library changed my life as a kid!”
While we much prefer the latter response, both reflect a stereotype of libraries as utopian institutions necessary for a healthy democracy and immune from criticism. Some people even hold libraries in holy regard, comparing librarians to clergy with a vocational calling, as Fobazi Ettarh notes in her groundbreaking article on vocational awe.[1] For many readers and SF fans, the library is a sacred place where knowledge is preserved and where they have treasured memories of encountering their favorite books for the first time or discovering their favorite SF authors.
We share a love for books, particularly SF stories, but we have a realistic view of libraries beyond these utopian visions. Margaret Atwood discusses the paradoxical nature of a similar utopia/dystopia binary in her book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. She says, “[W]ithin each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia a concealed utopia. …”[2] It is from this tension that we draw similarities in libraries. Our idealized values of unfettered, egalitarian access to information and strong nostalgia for the love of books have a shadow side, especially when interrogated around white supremacy and patriarchy.
In her article “Concealing White Supremacy through Fantasies of the Library: Economies of Affect at Work”, Michele R. Santamaria describes “The Library” as “a fantasy space that denies its role in white supremacy.”[3] Santamaria builds on Gina Schlesselman-Tarango’s work on the concept of cuteness and how it insidiously reinforces the status quo in libraries. Schlesselman-Tarango says,
“By promising safety through gesturing to a pre-technological past, books preclude exposure to and engagement with the nasty realities of contemporary society. Inasmuch as they are associated with books, libraries too might be understood to provide an outlet for this sentimental yearning. …”[4]
We see library nostalgia as a crucial underpinning to the romanticized utopian stereotype of libraries, yet Santamaria, Schlessleman-Tarango, and Ettarh all point to the dystopian shadow side of our shared profession. We will explore this further as we unpack our collecting philosophy.
Additionally, Santamaria’s use of “The Library” denotes a sense of institutional authority and is a direct reference to librarian, writer, and poet Jorge Luis Borges’ concept of the “library as a universe”.[5] In particular, Borges’ famous short story The Library of Babel comes to mind. The Library of Babel has dystopian elements, such as meaningless books that are never accessed, used, or even seen by the librarians doomed to wander its endless halls.[6] This Borgesian “library as universe” may seem the product of a dark fantasy far from the reality of working in libraries, but it is a helpful metaphor for challenging the equally unrealistic stereotypes underpinning library nostalgia and vocational awe.
Additionally, SF fan communities come with their own tensions around who belongs, what work is privileged, and what constitutes expertise in the genre. For instance, Neta Yodovich’s work about women-identified fans of SF franchises was especially helpful for us. Yodavich defines women fans’ acceptance in SF fandoms as “conditional belonging”, or “a social, liminal state in which individuals are required to demonstrate conformity to the community they wish to join.”[7] We both identify with this concept around belonging in SF fan communities, especially as we don’t have a love from childhood for many of the “canonical” SF authors (who overwhelmingly are cishet, white men). We will explore how this dissonance between our identities as librarians responsible for our institution’s SF collection intersects with our personal expressions of fandom, which may not look like the traditional SF fan’s.
About the Collection
The University of Texas (UT) Libraries, founded in 1884, have collected science fiction alongside other popular genre fiction, such as mysteries, westerns and romances since the early 20th century. In the 1970s, Harold W. Billings became the Director of the UT Libraries. An SF fan and writer, Billings took a personal interest in the library’s SF collections and managed a customized SF approval plan.[8] This work is usually tasked to a librarian, not a high-level administrator, so Billings’s direct involvement with the SF collection was highly unusual. He had a great deal of influence over the content of the collection for many years. Billings retired in 2003, and UT librarians continued to acquire SF books and films. However, these efforts were more general and often in response to student requests for leisure reading than with serious intention.
Currently, the collection contains about 7,100 volumes (including ebooks, DVDs, and streaming film). Based on an informal analysis of bibliometric data we pulled from our library management system, we found that our SF collection is distributed across four library branches and two storage facilities. As such, there is no “science fiction section,” because our books are cataloged according to the Library of Congress classification system. Therefore, online discovery via our catalog is paramount for users to find and use the collection. Despite this broad, dispersed physicality, the collection has high circulation, especially among undergraduate students.
Spaces Between: Collecting Other Worlds in the Genre
In 2016, I (Gina) was hired as the librarian for English Literature and Women’s & Gender Studies, a position that includes managing the library’s fiction collections, including SF. After a 13 year break from an intentional collections strategy for SF, the genre had evolved and changed significantly. My early efforts were modest. I recruited some of the library’s Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) interested in collection development to do small selection projects, usually based on award winners and author diversity, as well as to identify missing/lost books that we needed to replace. By 2018, these efforts had led to a light refresh to the collection, and I was offered a large gift of SF paperbacks from the 1950s-1980s. Adriana will discuss this significant project, and on top of supervising it, I was also expanding the collection according to my own interests and expertise in science fiction and adjacent genres.
As the librarian for English literature, I intentionally seek out fiction, essay, poetry, and literary works by local authors from Austin and greater Texas, as well as books by UT Austin alumni. I discovered a unique community of writers in Central Texas writing “weird fiction”. As writer Jeff Vandermeer defines it, “[weird fiction] is the realm of the uncanny, sometimes known as the weird tale, or literature of the strange. A country with no border, found in the spaces between. …”[9] Work in this genre blends horror, fantasy, and SF, to the point where it no longer feels like any of those traditional genres – it truly feels like it exists in the “spaces between”. In my discoveries of local writers, I noticed that much of their work engages with the mythologies of Texas and the Southwest, as well as Chicano and Mexican folklore. Plots center mythological creatures like La Llorona and the chupacabra.[10] Vandermeer points out that weird fiction writers have long been outsider artists who are marginalized in multiple ways and often do not earn much money from their writing. Collecting work by Chicana/o “weird fiction” writers for the UT Libraries offers these independent writers some exposure and financial support through library acquisitions. And we are preserving their work. According to WorldCat, most of these books are held by 40 or fewer libraries, and most of those holding libraries are public libraries that don’t collect for preservation.
Our work hasn’t been limited to local publishing. By 2017, we discovered major gaps in our collections from science fiction publishers, especially books by LGBTQ+ authors. We targeted Lamda Award nominees and winners, and sought out independently published books from presses like Lethe Press and Microcosm Publishing. A common question we get from students is where they can find books by trans authors. Now, we can point to several anthologies of SF and speculative fiction by transgender and non-binary authors.
Our acquisitions strategy has a global reach, too. Dale Knickerbocker says in his introduction to Lingua Cosmica that the genre has long ignored SF from countries outside the Anglophone world in awards and conventions. He calls this “cultural chauvinism” and points out the irony of the SF genre often including themes of exploring other places and having encounters with the other.[11] The UT Libraries, however, have long been collecting science fiction published outside of the Anglophone countries that dominate the genre. In 2021, we had the opportunity to partner with colleagues from our library’s Global Studies team to highlight the SF they had already collected. These librarians take annual buying trips to countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, Peru, South Korea, and Israel, where they purchase a wide variety of books and materials not available in the United States. We have also noticed a growing scholarly interest in global SF and, through our collaborative efforts, have ensured UT Libraries acquire key anthologies and scholarly monographs on SF from outside the U.S. and Western Europe.
As a research institution, collecting scholarship about SF is a priority. Authors such as Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany are having something of “a moment” in the culture at large, and scholars from a variety of fields are paying attention to their work and other previously understudied SF writers.[12] Locally at UT Austin, the interdisciplinary research initiative Bridging Barriers: Good Systems brings together faculty from across campus to envision ethical human-AI systems. Good Systems includes English professors with research interests in how SF about robotics and AI grapple with ethical questions.[13] We’ve also seen an increase in novels like Parable of the Sower and Oryx and Crake on syllabi, even for classes that do not explicitly cover SF. All of this suggests that including SF scholarship in our collections practice has value to our students and the larger scholarly community at UT Austin.
2018: A Collections Odyssey
An influential collections project began in 2018 with a gift of 446 SF books from a professor emeritus in Physics. Along with the potential expansion of our SF collections, this gift provided an opportunity for two library Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) to learn about collection development and gift processing. One of us, Adriana, was particularly interested in gaining collection development experience. Understanding how librarians decide what was worthy of inclusion in a collection was a fascinating process, but not something taught in our MSIS program at the time. This gift project was a promising way to learn how librarians made those decisions and what tools or questions guided their practice.
The first step in the process was to go through the boxes of paperbacks, inventory the donated collection and check titles against our current holdings. During this necessary but tedious step, the GRAs often ended up passionately discussing the most visually intriguing element of the books: their covers. We were eager to note in the inventory what stood out to us as interesting and bizarre in the title summaries, cover art and excerpts. Outside of the formal process, we were also keen to talk about what was missing from the gifted collection – namely works authored by women, people of color and works that didn’t actively marginalize the marginalized (we see you, John Norman!) The gaps in the donated collection spurred us to wonder if there were similar voids reflected in our greater library science fiction collection. More generally, we wondered how libraries have perpetuated those gaps and who has the authority to change the situation. If the previous collecting philosophy of a Library Director did not prioritize diverse authorship in SF, how would a canon-ignorant library intern have the authority to challenge that?
I (Adriana) am grateful to Gina and my fellow GRA who helped me think through these questions and see the utility of approaching these issues around collections with a critical eye, even without expansive subject expertise. These considerations led to the idea of exploring the diverse literary tradition in science fiction through a 2018 exhibit entitled Traversing Dimensions: An Exploration of Diversity in Science Fiction. Creating this exhibit allowed us to focus on filling the gaps of the perspectives missing from our collection, and demonstrated to our campus communities how our collections practice was intent on expanding beyond the scope of traditional western science fiction canon.
Research on science fiction exposed me to authors who used science fiction as a conduit to discuss topics that posed real challenges to everyday life as a marginalized person in society. Titles like Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction, The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction and The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers provided me with starting points on notable titles that presented alternative viewpoints to the historically western, white male-dominated SF genre. This scholarship also helped me frame sections of the exhibit to contextualize influential authors of SF like Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ alongside contemporaries such as N.K Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Ernest Hogan and Charlie Jane Anders.
Designing the exhibit as I was teaching myself about the vast landscape of science fiction literature was challenging, but I was motivated to learn and also looked outside of academia. I began having more in-depth conversations about science fiction with friends who were deeply entrenched in online SF fandoms and who had worked to build their own personal collections of niche science fiction works. One friend had an entire Instagram page dedicated to explicit and strange science fiction covers, which prompted a conversation about the especially heinous act of whitening characters through book cover art. As much as the frequent breasty depiction of women in SF cover art elicited an eye roll, the knowledge that Octavia E. Butler’s Black characters were depicted as white men in the Patternmaster cover art struck a particular chord of outrage in both of us as Latines. It became clear that it was not just an issue of gaps in representation – even when there was representation, it could be glossed over in these subtle yet pernicious ways.
I was fortunate to partner with that friend, an artist, who saw the recreation of Octavia E. Butler’s Patternmaster cover art as a creative opportunity to correct the record. His artwork also became such a striking centerpoint of our promotional items around the exhibit, that I expanded the discussion of problematic cover art as a section in the exhibition. It was a compelling addition to the exhibit’s discourse on important authors excluded from the SF canon, and on how diverse authors and creatives are engaging with historically excluded perspectives today.
Thinking back on our 2018 initiatives, it is difficult to assess the success of the exhibit and SF collection development sparked from the initial donation. Staff engagement seemed high, a few friends outside of academia made the trek to campus for the exhibit, and Gina and I were proud of the work. However, how does one exhibit featuring diverse science fiction works and authors stack up to decades of collecting that centered and celebrated what librarian Jessie Loyer calls, “a colonial impulse: a singular, white man’s joy”?[14] Loyer notes how easy it is to perpetuate these colonial collecting practices in our inheritance of these collections, and how important it is to recognize the violence and ask, “whom do our collections belong to, beyond a singular view of provenance, authority, and ownership?”[15] Our job as librarians is to reject a utopian vision of a perfect collection as the ultimate goal, and recognize that a critical eye to one’s own work is necessary to build a collection just as dynamic and ever-changing as the campus communities to whom our SF collection belongs.
Conclusion
As we reflect on the last 5 years of our work on the UT Libraries science fiction collection, we see how much confidence, expertise, and knowledge we have worked to develop. Our jobs as subject liaison librarians are demanding, incorporating a wide variety of responsibilities ranging from research support to event planning to instruction, and we provide this support for several academic disciplines. Working on the SF collection is an intentional choice – it isn’t core to our responsibilities. We dedicate time and attention because we are passionate about the genre and our community’s use of it. Through this reflection, we have resolved some of the initial dissonance we felt about our role in comparison to our expertise. In our own small way, we are interrupting the gatekeeping entrenched in SF communities and not allowing it to disrupt our approach to the complexities of collection development.
Schlesselman-Tarango’s approach to library neutrality is another helpful lens as we further develop our collection practice around SF. Library neutrality was once thought of a pillar of the profession. However, many current LIS scholars and librarians have questioned this value, including Santamaria and Ettarh. Of library neutrality, Schesselman-Tarongo cautions, “We must remember that not noticing, rejecting engagement with the present, refusing to see difference, calling upon nostalgic sentimentality, and the like all do something. All such acts are far from neutral.” We hope to bring this philosophy to our work as we make decisions about the SF collection, one we hold dear as we do the egalitarian values of our profession. But as we continue to build this 50 year old collection, we aim to hold our own authority in check and recognize when library nostalgia and utopian ideals about libraries creep into our practice. We hope to engage with the present, and value a critical approach to our SF collecting. We don’t need libraries to be utopias – but we can build collections that imagine better worlds and more fully, and vibrantly, represent everyone in this world.
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Library of Babel. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Boston: David R. Godine, 2000.
Ettarh, Fobazi. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.
“Good Systems | Bridging Barriers.” Accessed October 23, 2023. https://bridgingbarriers.utexas.edu/good-systems.
Knickerbocker, Dale, ed. “Introduction.” In Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
Loyer, Jessie. “Collections Are Our Relatives: Disrupting the Singular, White Man’s Joy That Shaped Collections.” In The Collector and the Collected: Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship, edited by Megan Browndorf, Erin Pappas, and Anna Arays, 1. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2021.
Roo, James. Patternmaster Redux. 2018.
Santamaria, Michele R. “Concealing White Supremacy through Fantasies of the Library: Economies of Affect at Work.” Library Trends 68, no. 3 (2020): 431–49. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2020.0000.
Schlesselman-Tarango, Gina. “How Cute! Race, Gender, and Neutrality in Libraries.” Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research 12, no. 1 (August 22, 2017). https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v12i1.3850.
VanderMeer, Jeff. “The Uncanny Power of Weird Fiction.” The Atlantic, October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/uncanny-fiction-beautiful-and-bizarre/381794/.
Yodovich, Neta. “Defining Conditional Belonging: The Case of Female Science Fiction Fans.” Sociology 55, no. 5 (October 1, 2021): 871–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520949848.
[1]Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.
[2]Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), 85.
[3]Michele R. Santamaria, “Concealing White Supremacy through Fantasies of the Library: Economies of Affect at Work,” Library Trends 68, no. 3 (2020): 431–49, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2020.0000.
[4]Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, “How Cute! Race, Gender, and Neutrality in Libraries,” Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research 12, no. 1 (August 22, 2017): 8, https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v12i1.3850.
[5]Santamaria, “Concealing White Supremacy through Fantasies of the Library”, 431.
[6]Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, trans. Andrew Hurley (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000).
[7] Neta Yodovich, “Defining Conditional Belonging: The Case of Female Science Fiction Fans,” Sociology 55, no. 5 (October 1, 2021): 871–87, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520949848.
[8] Merry Burlingham, personal communication regarding the history of the UT Libraries’ Science Fiction Collection, March 5, 2019. Libraries create approval plans with books vendors to ensure they receive books based on predetermined criteria such as author or publisher.
[9] Jeff VanderMeer, “The Uncanny Power of Weird Fiction,” The Atlantic, October 30, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/uncanny-fiction-beautiful-and-bizarre/381794/.
[10] Examples of “weird fiction” from small Texas publishers with elements of Mexican and Chicano folklore include Coyote Songs: A Barrio Noir by Gabino Iglesias, Itzá by Rios de la Luz, and Chupacabra Vengeance by David Bowles.
[11] Dale Knickerbocker, ed., “Introduction,” in Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around the World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
[12] For further discussions of renewed cultural interest, see Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press, 2015); Julian Lucas, “How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City,” The New Yorker, July 3, 2023, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/samuel-r-delany-profile; Salamishah Tillet, “Apocalypse Nowish: Singing the Prophetic Warnings of Octavia Butler,” The New York Times, July 12, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/arts/music/toshi-reagon-parable-of-the-sower-lincoln-center-opera.html.
[13] “Good Systems | Bridging Barriers,” accessed October 23, 2023, https://bridgingbarriers.utexas.edu/good-systems.
[14] Jessie Loyer, “Collections Are Our Relatives: Disrupting the Singular, White Man’s Joy That Shaped Collections” in The Collector and the Collected: Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship, ed. Megan Browndorf, Erin Pappas, and Anna Arays (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2021), 3.
[15] Jessie Loyer, “Collections Are Our Relatives: Disrupting the Singular, White Man’s Joy That Shaped Collections”, 16
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