I truly appreciate your innovation of moving the entire Science Fiction section away from where it was humanly accessible to make way for the romance section. Putting the entire SF/F selection from its former revolving cabinets, and cramming it into only four shelves in a closet in a disguised lavatory behind a sign "Beware of the Zebra" was probably the best way you knew how to make it more accessible to the public.

I realize of course that romance novels are an important field of literature, and I am sure there are many notable authors represented in it, such as "Guy who shamefacedly wrote the one about the woman with a shirtless pirate" and "Woman who channels her unhappy marriage into tale of the one who got away". Still I would like to make a few suggestions to you about the Science Fiction Section in Exile.

Roughly speaking your selection of Science Fiction and Fantasy books consist of the following categories.

1. Media merchandising novels bought in bulk. This covers everything from Warhammer 40,000, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files and assorted other novelizations. Or as I like to call them, "Look here to make Isaac Asimov cry."

Now I'll be the first to admit that media merchandising novels have their place, albeit in a merrily crackling bonfire, but you might want to tamp down your media novels so that they're not the majority of what's on the shelf. Otherwise you might as well cover the whole thing in a red curtain.

2. Novels about SciFi\Fantasy PI's. Okay, I'll grant you that this is more a symptom of the general crappiness of the field, but still it looks like most of the section is filled with books about hardboiled PI's in a fantasy, SciFi setting. Between Jim Butcher, Simon R. Green, Laurell K. Hamilton and everyone, it's about enough of this already.

3. Octavia Butler, Ursulla LeGuin. This part I get. I'm sure their books are well reviewed, but no one here actually reads them. And I mean no one. I have never seen any of their books taken out, which is probably because modern LeGuin novels are annoying and unreadable, and Octavia Butler was annoying and unreadable all along.

It's ridiculous that no copy of Lord of the Rings, or a Philip K. Dick novel is available anywhere in the library. King's Gunslinger is nowhere to be found. Pullman is stuck in the kiddie section downstairs. Ian Banks and Vernon Vinge, forget about it. Larry Niven, who's that? But we'll always have the Octavia Butler and Usrulla LeGuin tomes, not to mention hardcover Marge Piercey and of course Sherri S. Tepper, to tell us how hopeless our phallocentric technocratic civilization is.

4. Short Story Collections - Whether it's by elder anthology statements Marty Greenberg or some lesser collection, particularly Solaris, or one of those inevitable BEST OF THE YEAR SF, that features anything that Kage Baker, Haldeman or Charlie Stross scrawls on a piece of paper, or a theme collection IMAGINARY FRIENDS, STRANGE BICYCLES or STORIES INVOLVING MYSTERIOUS PUMPKINS, how about shelving this bunch of reprint spam, and actually devoting the shelf space to original fiction?

5. It's Science Fiction. Not Sceince Fiction. The I goes before the E, except after C.

Thank you that will be all.

Sincerely.

Me.