Actually, I Quite Like Splitting Books by Genre

The two main spurs for my blog posts here (apart from obituaries) are podcasts I've listened to or articles I've read in the Guardian. Among the latter, my hunting ground is typically in the football section, but this time it was a piece in the culture section, musing on whether we should abolish literary genres. My first thought on reading the headline was that it would be about getting rid of genre shelves in bookstores, but it turns out rather to be a discussion of books that don't fit neatly into a single genre - or what the writer imagines those genres to be.

They don't disparage any of the commercial genres, and indeed get closer to disparaging the whole concept of "literary fiction", which I can't help but agree with. But I'm always a little uncomfortable with the idea of getting rid of different sections in bookstores, or of discounting genres, mainly because I feel that the genres I like would get strangled out. 

As far as Alex Clark's argument, it boils down to the idea that books are hard to categorize when they include concepts that you'd find in thrillers or horror or speculative fiction. In Clark's defense, those elements used to appear in lots of kinds of stories which we don't consider to be "genre" - Hamlet and MacBeth and A Christmas Carol all feature ghosts, for example, and yet they don't get shelved with Stephen King or Ramsay Campbell.

There's also the Sandra Bullock film Gravity, which I've had many arguments about, concerning whether it's science fiction. Some people I've spoken to said it was, because it takes place in space; I said it wasn't, because it all involves technology that currently exists. The film's Wikipedia page calls it SF but quotes its director Alfonso Cuarón as saying that he doesn't consider it SF. The difficult thing is that it would indeed have been speculative a few decades ago.

Unspoken in Clark's article in the Guardian is the question of what line demarcates genre fiction from the stuff you'd shelve at the front of the store. Clark doesn't say it, but there's clearly an issue of quality - horror and crime and SF were traditionally dashed off quickly to be published in crappy magazines. This perception persists when someone like Margaret Atwood insists that the Handmaid's Tale can't be science fiction because science fiction consists of lasers and talking squid in space.

This leads me into my concern about collapsing the literary and genre shelves together in bookstores. No less a luminary than George RR Martin has called for this, but I don't think he's thought through the implications of it. I'm speaking from experience, because I once encountered a WH Smiths in Liverpool Street Station that lumped all its fiction together.

The upshot was that I couldn't find anything I wanted to read there, both because looking for SF books meant poring through every single shelf, and because the only genre books were the best-known ones. Realistically, if you have only one shelf for fiction, you're not going to waste space on unknown or low-selling authors of any specific genre, you're going to place people like Martin or JRR Tolkien for SFF, or Raymond Chandler and John le Carré for crime and thrillers, or Stephen King for horror.

Maybe it's just how I browse, but when I go to the SF section of a bookstore, but I like spreading out from the authors I already know to find new authors whose books promise something similar. That kind of discovery is impossible if a bookstore is only stocking the sure bets.

It's perhaps unfair to single out a crappy bookstore in a train station, where people just want something to help them while away the time they'll waste on inevitable train delays and signal failures (I still have PTSD from several brutal delays in and around London), but this example is also relevant to non-fiction books. There are two bookstores near where I live, one of which categorizes its history shelf by country and region (Ancient history, world history, Asian history, European, US, WWI, etc), while the other just lumps all its history books together, categorized alphabetically by author.

I can more reliably find something to read at Bookstore A, which separates history books out, than at Bookstore B, where I have to pore through the entire shelf to make sure I haven't missed something I'd find interesting. At Bookstore A, if I'm in the mood for a book on Ancient Rome, I just go to the section reserved for ancient history and see what they have; at Bookstore B, the process takes longer and is more annoying.

Coming back to fiction, the point where I'd agree with the Guardian article that prompted this blog is in the case of authors who write in different genres. George RR Martin himself is a good example: he's best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, which is high fantasy, but he's also written science fiction and horror, the latter of which typically gets shelved separately from his other stories. But if you're looking for more of his specific back catalog, you might never even hear of Fevre Dream if you never look at the horror section. This might be why many authors use pseudonyms when writing in a new genre.

It's an imperfect system, the one we use to categorize books, but I think it's still better than all the other possibilities. Switching from physical media to digital TV and music and movies has made it harder to find new stuff, and the same generally applies to e-books - serendipitous discoveries are still more likely in physical bookstores, and if it means ghettoizing all the science fiction in one place for me to find the best new SFF stories, I'm willing to make that sacrifice.

After all, having that smaller shelf also means it's easier to ignore the type of SFF books that I don't care about.

RIP Terry Venables

The big news out of the world of English football this weekend was the death of Terry Venables, the former England, Barcelona and Tottenham Hotspur manager. While those are the ones that I've heard bandied about most in the couple of days since his passing was announced, they're possibly the most high-profile among a long series of jobs starting back in 1976.

Venables wasn't the most successful English manager around, nor the one about whom I had the most knowledge. But he was the manager of the English national team during Euro 96, which was one of the formative experiences of my football fandom, and was the last manager to lead England to a tournament semifinal until Gareth Southgate in 2018.

I think like every fan who was there to watch that tournament, I've built up a mythology about the team he brought to Euro 96. Despite the so-called Golden Generation of later tournaments, that squad was full of big names, not just 80s and 90s icons like Tony Adams, Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne, but also upcoming stars like Gary Neville and Sol Campbell. Up front he had Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham, who are also names to conjure with.

What I remember about them is their athleticism and doggedness, two qualities that I don't think were present in later England squads (though the 1998 World Cup quarterfinal against Argentina also stands out as an epic England performance). They were a good canvas on which to project the nation's hopes and fears, to say nothing of the tournament song, Three Lions.

I know less about his time at Barcelona, but ironically that's where he had his greatest success, helping them win their first title since 1974 and reach the final of the European Cup for the first time since 1961. He also brought in English striker Gary Lineker, who had three great seasons for the club, before joining Venables at Spurs.

There are two interesting aspects to Venables's time in Spain: the first is that he got the job based on his performance managing Crystal Palace and Queens Park Rangers - two teams that weren't even in the top-flight when he took them over. You can't really imagine Barcelona hiring an English manager on that kind of record these days.

The other interesting aspect is just the fact that Venables was English. These days you don't see a lot of English managers abroad, and certainly not in the highest-profile teams... or in the highest-profile teams in England, for that matter (other than Frank Lampard walking with misplaced confidence into the Chelsea job). The 80s were a difficult time for English football, because of crowd violence that culminated in the 1985 Heysel disaster and led to English teams being banned from European competition until the 90s.

Venables represented another aspect to the English game, and a path not taken - he and Bobby Robson and Roy Hodgson are the biggest names to have managed abroad, but it seems a shame that more English managers didn't get the chance to pick up the tricks of the trade from the other big leagues. That ban likely made it more difficult for promising English managers to get hired for the big jobs, which has to have set them back years.

England isn't the only team whose players don't travel well - Italian players are famous for not doing well abroad, and the ones who do rarely get picked for the Italian national team. But this lack of managerial experience abroad has been particularly bad for the English, since no Englishman has won the top-flight of English football since 1992, the year before the Premier League began. While most of those titles were won by a Scot, Sir Alex Ferguson, no British manager has won the top-flight since he retired in 2013.

So Venables stands as one of the most successful English managers in history, and one of the few to have won a title abroad. He never had as high-profile a gig in the UK after Euro 96, but he always remained an eminence grise in the game, even recording the odd England theme single from time to time. It's a shame that more English managers didn't follow in his footsteps, but it's telling that one of the players he consoled after the loss in 1996 is Gareth Southgate, who replaced him as the most successful England manager since 1966.

Thoughts on 10 Years of Living in the US

This milestone has been coming for a while, but it's finally upon me: as of Christmas, it'll be 10 years since I moved back to the US after spending most of my 20s in the UK. The moment it truly hit me was a week or so ago, when Facebook sent me one of its periodic reminders of old posts. In this case it was harking back 10 years to the day I posted I'd just bought my last monthly travelcard for the Tube.

That got me thinking about how I've spent that time, and whether it's been a good decision. While it may be a mixed bag, I would say that overall moving here was the right choice.

So what's the good, and what's the bad from this last decade? To answer that I have to separate out the things in my own life from what's been happening to the world more widely. I also have to present a picture of what life was like in London at the time that I made the decision to come back here.

The first thing to say about London in 2013 is that things were a mixed bag there, too. I finally had a good job, that I was doing well at and getting recognized for, which I think has eluded me ever since. I was also in the world's greatest city for publishing, and in that final year that I lived there, I got to experience some of it for myself by going to publishing events and the World Fantasy Con in Brighton, which remains one of the high points of my life. More generally, I also loved being in a city that had so much culture, and access to the rest of Europe and the rest of the world.

On the negative side, life was getting more expensive. I'd spent several years living in East London but when the 2012 Olympics came I found myself priced out and having to take increasingly grim accommodations with increasingly grim flatmates. This was partly my doing, because I insisted on living in Zone 2, but that wasn't an unthinking choice: the farther out I lived, the longer and more complicated my commute would be. Personally as well, my social life was withering a bit as my friends got married, had kids and moved out of London to increasingly remote suburbs. At the same time, there was a feeling of not finding someone to be with there in London, which also hastened my desire to come back here.

By contrast, California, and the Bay Area in particular, looked like it had all the stuff I wanted. Good weather, good food, my family, and a large core group of friends, as well as the sense of being more of an adult: in London, my life was bounded by the city, which meant anything I wanted to do outside of it meant figuring out public transportation. If I wanted to go someplace that public transit didn't reach, then I didn't go there. Whereas I reasoned that here in the US, I'd have a car and I'd be able to go pretty much wherever I wanted.

My timing was also good. When I started a new job in July of 2011, I met a sales rep who lived out here and who expressed a desire to have an analyst based in California to take advantage of the tech scene here. I bided my time, doing good work, and in 2013 resolved that this would be the year I moved back, so I put it to my company, and worked with our head of research to make it work. By the end of the year, another part of our company was setting up an outpost in the Bay Area, just 20 minutes from my house, and so the writing was on the wall.

Of course, there was a big adjustment coming to live here permanently again. I always described myself as never having been a grownup here in the US, and this past decade has been eye-opening in terms of learning how to navigate life in this country. Company benefits, especially healthcare, have been a never-ending source of frustration, but at least I feel like I've figured them out; same for taxes, though I still miss the simplicity of the UK system, where I got a P60 every April that told me how much tax I'd paid, and that was it.

On the work front, there have been ups and downs. I stayed with the company that transferred me here for four years before being laid off and having to take a three-month contract job back in London. I then found myself at State Farm for almost three years, before landing at my current gig. Once I got out of my old company, my pay jumped to levels I'd never even considered, which has made life so much better - I currently make more than twice as much as I did before getting laid off, and probably three or four times more than what I earned in London.

Dating has been generally better here, though it took a while to really take off. I did find myself going on more first dates than I had in London, but I went on way fewer second or third dates. That changed over a few years, but finally in 2019 I met someone for the first time who I really liked, and equally importantly, who liked me. That came to an end thanks to the pressures of the pandemic, but it was good while it lasted, so I'm grateful that she came into my life when she did. It also feels like I've had a little more dating luck since then, so hopefully I'll have more good news to report here soon...

My friend group has stayed pretty constant in this past decade, even despite them all getting married and having kids. I even managed one of those most difficult achievements, and made a new friend in my 30s. I also have a couple of good friends (one a former London flatmate) whom I see when I'm doing in Southern California, so it's nice to have someone else to hang out with down there.

The one aspect of my life that hasn't been as good has been health. I've gained so much weight in the years I've been here, compared with London, and it's only recently that I've been properly tackling it. I've already lamented the food culture here, but a thought I had in Munich back in September was telling: everybody smoked there, but their life expectancy is still higher than here, both because of the wider availability of healthcare and the fact that the Germans, despite eating a sausage and potato-based diet, don't cram themselves with the worst foods in huge quantities all the time.

My writing has also taken a bit of a hit, but that's not because of my distance from the world of London publishing (or not only). I suffered lulls there too, but at least here, I've learned to schedule my writing time and guard it jealously. Still, it'd be nice to be able to encounter SFF writers at the pub randomly, like I used to in London.

On the other hand, my dream of getting out into nature and areas not served by public transit has come true. I have my own car, so I can leave town pretty much whenever I want without worrying about train or bus timetables. I also have a built-in road trip partner in the form of my dad, with whom I've gone to the mountains here in California almost every summer since I moved back. Those have been some great trips, and of course it's a privilege to be able to spend time with him as he gets older.

At the macro-level, i.e. federal and global politics, it feels generally clear that I made the right decision to move here, but it hasn't been a bed of roses, by any means. When I arrived at the end of 2013, the shooting of Trayvon Martin had happened, as had the Sandy Hook massacre and the Citizens United decision at the US Supreme Court. But the Black Lives Matter movement came to prominence in 2014, after the Michael Brown shooting and various other police/state crimes against Black people, and in response the right wing has gone increasingly crazy, to the point of electing Donald Trump as president in 2016.

I spent most of the George W Bush years abroad, so maybe I haven't internalized how grim it was here, but the Trump years and the craziness since have been on another level entirely. I've talked about the parallels with Ancient Rome, but it's depressing that I'm fully expecting a Viktor Orban style illiberal "democracy" to be instituted here in my lifetime. I don't know what I'll do if that happens, or where I'll go, because the far right has coordinated itself everywhere, including back in Britain.

The thing that makes me most grateful to have moved here was, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. Hearing my sister's experiences in London, and contrasting them with my isolated but mostly okay existence here, I honestly think I might not have survived it if I'd stayed there. At the very least, I'd expect to have caught it once prior to the vaccines being available, which would have been pretty serious. The UK and US both botched their responses, but at least here in California I was in a place that took it seriously, and lived separately enough from others that I was able to isolate, including working from home. Working from my increasingly tiny and grim flats in London during a global pandemic, with flatmates, and with stricter restrictions than any we had here in the US, doesn't bear thinking about.

So overall, yes, I'd say the move here was a good thing. Unlike when I left the UK at the end of 2004, to go to grad school, I don't feel like I missed out on as much by leaving in 2013. Indeed, that time I was back in the UK in less than two years, whereas now, Brexit notwithstanding (and an abiding regret is that I didn't pick up a British passport when I could have) I haven't felt a particular pull to move back permanently, other than wanting to see my friends and visit the cultural spots in Britain.

In the final summation, London never felt like home. There were, and are, many things I liked about the rhythms of living there, but I feel like my existence is so much better here, that going back would involve too many compromises that I no longer want to make. I hope my days of traveling and living abroad aren't over, but overall I'm happy to say that coming back to California was the right choice.

Now, let's see how the next 10 years go.

Newsflash: People in Palo Alto Buy a Lot of Teslas

This headline is up there with "Trump Indicted" and "Dog Bites Man" for predictability, but it's worth exploring for a moment, because there are some trends underlying the popularity of EVs, especially here in places like Palo Alto. The main one is that they do primarily seem to be Teslas, and not other brands like Polestar or Rivian; the other is that, being Teslas, they're on the more expensive end, though I'll admit I'd find it hard to identify the electric versions of normal cars as I run past. The upshot, though, is that on my run this morning, I counted 96 American-made cars, and 49 of those were Teslas.

Taking a step back, this is one of the things I think about when I'm running (another prominent one being the Roman Empire, of course). I don't listen to music or podcasts when I run, because I want to be able to hear cars or bikes behind me, so I either think about history or I conduct little ad-hoc market research projects by counting certain types of cars.

I've been doing it for ten years now, and I've been running in the same neighborhood, so I've got a general sense of car buying trends, at least for that section of South Palo Alto. There might be a different picture if I crossed Oregon and/or Middlefield, but that'll have to wait for when I start training for marathons again.

Sometimes I count SUVs or Priuses, other times I count by country of manufacture, i.e. the US, Japan, Germany, Europe (counting British, Italian, Swedish cars, for example) and South Korea. Sometimes I'll count by manufacturer, and sometimes by sub-brand, though I have a better sense of that for Japanese cars, rather than all the brands that sit under GM, for example.

The trend I've discovered in previous years is that Japanese brands are the most common here, and not by a small margin: on a run a few years ago I counted over a hundred Toyotas alone, and a slightly smaller number of Hondas, with a few other brands here and there. Next most popular were German cars, predominantly Mercedes and BMW, with a few Audis but not many VWs. Lagging behind them were American cars, and on one of my runs I calculated that Teslas accounted for about one-quarter of the total.

As you can imagine, that number's been going up in recent years. I like to joke that Palo Alto has an obscure law requiring that a Tesla (previously a Prius) be visible at all times in public, but the truth is that even Teslas lag behind Japanese cars and SUVs. Still, this was the first time that Teslas accounted for more than half of US brands parked in South Palo Alto driveways.

I've been seeing a lot of talk online recently about the reasons people buy EVs, and environmental reasons are low on that list. One former grad school classmate proudly said that she got hers five years ago to avoid gas stations, and friends who own a Tesla have also said that's a benefit.

There's also an element of conspicuous consumption: the reason I can count how many Teslas there are in my neighborhood is that no one covers them up. I remember laughing about how one house had two cars in the driveway, but the non-Tesla was covered up and the Tesla wasn't. Even when someone does put a car cover over their Tesla, it's helpfully branded so that everyone passing by can see what car it is.

Conspicuous consumption is probably why I don't see a lot of Chevy Bolts/Volts or other brands. To put it another way, the supply of cheap EVs is limited anyway, but if the average Palo Alto buyer was price-conscious, you'd see more of them (I wasn't counting Fiat 500s this morning, electric or gas-powered, but I'd have certainly noticed if there were any around).

On the other hand, Tesla sure does have advantages over other EV brands, premium or "cheap". The first one is brand recognition, since it's been selling cars for a lot longer - I've been seeing Teslas on my route since 2014. That first-mover advantage means that Tesla has had time to build more cars, and time to build more factories to increase supply even further. Contrast that with Rivian, which may make better cars than Tesla, or it may not, but it simply hasn't had the time to build out its manufacturing capacity; whatever the factor, I didn't see a single Rivian truck or SUV on today's run.

The other advantage Tesla has is its charging network, which is more widespread than rivals' networks and is also more reliable. The Biden administration has proposed rules to get uptime of non-Tesla chargers up to 97%, but Tesla's availability is better than that right now. As a result, a lot of EV makers are making their cars compatible with Tesla's network (which has also been politely asked to open up to other brands) and providing adapters.

Coming back to the conspicuous consumption thing for a moment, it's frustrating that the options for EVs seem to boil down to Tesla, Rivian, Polestar, and the only moderately affordable options are the Chevy Bolt/Volt and Nissan Leaf. I've read that the EV market is a lot more widespread in China, in part because you can find EVs for under $35,000 dollars.

It's great that a bunch of people with single-family homes in Palo Alto can afford to buy Teslas, but none of the dedicated EV brands seems to be doing anything for the next segment of consumers. Rivian is helpfully making a less expensive version of their SUV, but it's set to cost $40,000, which isn't exactly mass market pricing. Similarly, Tesla's cheapest Model 3 costs about $43,000, and that's without any add-ons like increased range and fast charging.

EV makers aren't the only ones at fault here, by the way. The availability of chargers is a crucial part too, because who wants to buy a car that they can't refuel/recharge? The Biden plan for chargers may address rules for how well they work, but they're still being built the same way as traditional gas stations: they are being placed in parking lots and other designated places that don't cater to people who live in higher-density housing.

One of the things that impressed me on my trip to Munich was seeing curbside chargers on the street, where you'd normally see parking meters. The US (and other countries) will have to place chargers similarly to cater to all the people who live in condos or urban areas and can't just plug their EVs in at their own garages. 

These thoughts are all a little far away from the number of Teslas I see on my morning runs, but this is where my mind goes when I start counting them like this. Regardless of how I feel about certain people associated with Tesla, or generally about Tesla owners' driving abilities and regrettable license plate choices, I'd love to see more EVs around - particularly because on today's run I got to drink in a cloud of particularly smelly diesel from a pickup by a building site. I just fear that if the EV companies only cater to the type of people who'd buy Teslas or Rivians, they'll have trouble making cars for people who want Civics and Camrys.