well honestly, one of my favoritememories of a library was - i used to work at one. i used to work atuniversity of denver's library and the best thing about working in auniversity library is that undergraduates never check out any books. and so,
The Process Android Process Acore Has Stopped, when i was doing research to write my novels,it meant that i could go into the stacks and i could check out entire sections. and so everything about shondheim in the 1920s, i could check it all out,i could take it home and i could read all these books
that i could never have access to any other way. and that informed my writing it informed my understandingof the world around me, and you know, it's too bad the undegrads didn't know that theywere missing. but that is actually one of the thingsthat i remember most clearly about libraries was having access to vast amounts of information and havingaccess to it without having to buy it. we have a public library in my verysmall town
and either through interlibrary loan orthrough the books that are already on the shelves that means that my son has access to books, it meansthat students, my wife students, my wife is a teacher, and her students have access tobooks, huge numbers of books and we are not rich there. and so to say that each one of thesestudents should buy, for example, a copy of my book, might be fabulous becauseit would make me so rich and famous,
but in reality i want to see my books on the shelves, because i want them to have access to thoseideas. and one of the things that i think isreally important about us living in a democracy is we need infomedpeople, and we need informed people regardless of their their economic status. and so one of the things that i really, really value aboutlibraries is i feel like they are a core part of the democratization processand are making us a better society.
now it is a resource for me and my familyand i can take my son there and he can go through all these different books. he pulls out all these different books. he's a drawer. he really likes to draw. and so he'll pull out all these picture bookswith the different styles that he likes. he's exposed to all of these different,wonderful styles and he can sort of select those. honestly, i feel like we're hitting a decision point for ourselves as a society, where we're deciding what we value and what we don't value in our world.
and we're perfectly happy to spend a greatdeal of money bombing places we never even knew thenames of home, but we aren't so interested in spending the relatively small amount ofmoney it takes to actually maintain educate our citizenry. i'm a science fiction writer. what i do is i extrapolate. and so when i look at data points like that, when i see us deciding not to find our education, not tofund our libraries,
to say that, well if you have accessinformation, you have to pay for it, you have to be wealthy. what that looks like to me is thebeginning of an oligarchy. and where not only wealth concentrated in thehands of the few, but also information is concentrated in the hands of a few. and that doesn't look like a good road fordemocracy to go down. what most concerns me about people tryingto ban books is the assumption that
i know best for youover here is the beginning of a cascade of events and a kind of a group think that i don't think is a good thing in any society. the societies that i'm familiar with,i used to spend a lot of time over in china they control a lot of informationover there and they control what gets blogged about,they control what gets published, they control all sorts of things and
what it means is that the publicdiscussion, the public debate is always askew. it's not reflective of the realities around us, theholistic set of realities. and when a group of people decide that this is the only pieceof reality that you get to connect to, this is the only piece of information you getconnect to... we don't want to talk about kidswho are gay. we don't want to talk about sex in books, we don't want to talk about globalwarming. whatever those things are. you can choose any number of things.
we don't like this book because we call it racist.whatever those things are , i feel like we as a peopleare better off being able to see and touch all of the the world rather than pretending that part of itdoesn't exist and that's, i think, the thing that's really of most concern about banning books, isthat idea that we shouldn't look at the world. my latest project is actually called "thedrowned cities."it's a follow-up book to "shipbreaker." it's all about children who aregrowing up in an area torn
by perpetual war. and broadly the thing that was most interestingto me about was the idea of thinking about what happens when politicsbecomes so divisive and so destructive that that we vilify one another and destroy one another.
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