And they all pack in little boxes and they all look just the same

Gosh, what a lot of '70s SF anthologies I do have, to be sure.

And I'm fairly sure that half of them replicate half the same stories, because that used to happen back then, that between the magazines and the single-author collections and the best-of anthos and the yearly anthos, you could end up with three or four copies of the same story quite easily. Nevertheless, they're all coming. These are the books that pretty much defined my notion of what SF was and ought to be: the Asimov/Silverberg/Sturgeon/Zelazny axis, with Ellison as a dominant outlier. This is the heartwood, my golden age - and much as I love novels and always have done, it's the short stories that seemed to matter more, in terms of shaping what the genre was, what it did and where it went. Even this late, into the '70s. I don't think it's true any longer, but the genre has become so diverse and there is so much of it, I'm not sure anything shapes it any longer, I think it just sprouts tendrils and tumours and keeps growing in a dozen different directions at once. [When I was a kid, you could pretty much have read everything, if you worked at it; certainly you could keep abreast of everything published new in the UK, and a whole lot of imports on the side. Not now. Even Clute can't read everything now.]

Actually, I'm a little shocked by how much paperback SF I have in general. I am filtering, and even so: I've filled 15 boxes and I haven't finished yet. I knew it was the collection I was most proud of, it has a coherent sense of itself, but even so. That's a lot of boxes.

And talking of magazines...

I dunno. Does one take random back issues of F & SF and Analogs and so forth? And if not, what does one do with them? It's not like I have a run or anything, just a few dozen individual issues, mostly from the '70s and '80s. Funny, I'm more anxious about their eventual rehoming than I am about the books I leave behind; I suppose I tend to feel that books will find their home, but magazines are more likely to be chucked. And there must be someone who wants these, or a lot of scattered someones who'd like to pick through them. Or I could keep 'em. One more box, what's that? And there's lots of first-appearance stories by the writers I most value, so I guess they're valuable to me at least...

*hesitates*

Oh frabjous (time of) day!

Yippee, it's 5.00pm. This means I can fling down my brush, cry "Bother spring-cleaning book-packing!", open a bottle of wine and write fiction instead.

Which is just as well, because I have just terrified myself with the book-packing. This house appears to contain crypto-bookshelves of which I knew nothing, or else more books are oozing up from underground as the pressure above is relieved. Today, the task just looks impossible. Maybe I'll just give up altogether, take the teddy bear and leave everything else to my heirs and graces...

Besides which, the book's actually going quite well today. I've written, oh, 1700 words or so already, and am obviously hoping to ping over 2K. Forth Eorlingas!