Scribbles and Bits

Rogan: Con went well, but three days is a lot. By con end Sunday, all I wanted was to relax, so I went to the sci-fi library to paw through and label some boxes of donations, pulling books that jumped out at me as non-genre, obvious duplicates, or things I absolutely KNEW we did/didn’t have. (If any of you have been dying to get your hands on works by Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, or C. J. Cherryh, please let me know. We have so many in the book sale, some in triplicate. Please save us.) One of the exciting moments was the finding of a rare Spider Robinson book I’d never even gotten to SEE, never mind touch or read, so naturally I devoured it on the spot. (I’m a librarian! I get DIBS!) In it, he mentioned being contractually obligated to write an intro he clearly didn’t want to, asking what was even the point of such things. I decided to poll my bookshelf and find out!

My bookshelf is mostly divided by prose fiction, nonfiction, and comics (both fiction and non). Here is the number of intros in each category:

• Zines: 0
• Comics: 7 (5 fiction, 2 nonfiction)
• Prose fiction: 12
• Prose nonfiction: 27

Comics HATE giving intros. Zines hate doing so even more, presumably because every page must be paid and accounted for and what’s the point in introducing a short floppy? There also may be the issue of, intros are all WRITTEN, thus clashing with a graphic work. (A comics intro would take longer, be more work, and have to be formatted to the print size from step one. Of course we’ve never seen a comics intro.)

Despite the vast difference in number of intros between categories, the intros themselves were of similar types:

• “Read it! It’s good!” (The absolute worst intros, all written by someone else. I hate these. At their absolute best, I get to read some kind fluffy words from a different creator I like. At their worst, you get shit like Robert Crumb stroking his neurosis boner about how hot he found young Phoebe Gloeckner in “Diary of a Young Girl” or Neil Gaiman carefully avoiding all discussion of sexual abuse in “Tale of One Bad Rat.” Those intros undercut the work they’re introducing. Don’t.)
• Creator credentials, AKA “why you should listen to me.” (Very similar to “read it, it’s good,” usually.)
• Analysis of the work, done by someone else. (These may or may not be memorable, but at least they have substance!)
• Historical/cultural context around the author or the book’s creation. (VERY useful for older works or works from different cultures. I wouldn’t have enjoyed “Sultana’s Dream” half as much without the intro explaining the context of purdah, who Hossain was, and why she cared! These tend to be, on average, the most solid and useful. Thumbs up!)
• Personal context, usually “why/how I made this book,” done by the author. (Can range from skippable meh to hilariously entertaining—we still think of Spider Robinson’s original intro to Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon about how he wrote to get out of the sewer.) (This category blurs a lot with the historical context one.)

Regardless of type, an intro to a comic or work of fiction is almost always unnecessary (unless it gives context for something really opaque to the here-and-now reader) and always added after the fact. Lydia Kwa and Dorothy Allison’s “introduction as added story” are rare exceptions. Allison’s personal context intros in her books of short stories are basically just another story, while Kwa played a SIX YEAR LONG CON tying the intro of her first book to the setting of the third. Delightful! Sadly, they’re the only ones we’ve seen do this.

Nonfiction works can have intros of all the bullet-pointed types, but they also have ones singular to them. Unlike the fictional types (except for Kwa and Allison), nonfiction intros are way more likely to be unskippable, an integral part of the work. Fiction rarely NEEDS introduction, but nonfiction regularly uses intros to explain what they’re about and what they’re NOT about (“this is a book about spirit marriage, no I will not treat it as symbolic or metaphorical”), define jargon (contour line, gutter), outline arguments and chapter layouts (“chapter 2 goes into the arguments of my opponents, and chapter 3 is why they’re all full of shit”), why this work was necessary and important (“I painstakingly wrote this book over the course of fifteen years JUST TO DEBUNK THIS ONE GUY”), how to use a book unique in form or layout, and discuss translation choices or editing choices. Norman Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook had FOUR prefatory chapters, one a skippable “read it, it’s good,” one a VITAL explanation on the book’s layout, use, limitations, and why it needed to be made, then one totally separate chapter about Charles Bliss’s work on what would become Blissymbols, which is so fascinating that I don’t even mind it’s there, and another about Otto Neurath’s work on isotypes, which is also interesting. Wow!

Having now spent a couple hours looking over the portions of books I usually read the least, I feel pretty sure that much nonfiction requires introduction, most fiction does not, and if I never read another “read it, it’s good” intro, it’ll still be too late. They’re a waste of good page count, delaying the reader’s descent into the work itself, which will prove its own merit (or not); only ONCE has one of those ever been worth it to me. (It was Stephen Gallagher’s intro to the first edition of “Tale of One Bad Rat,” which talks about the mythic baggage of rats, tying it to the stigma of abused children. I have no idea who Gallagher is, but I photocopied that intro and kept it after ripping out Gaiman’s.) Historical/cultural context intros, on the other hand, are almost always worthwhile. Analysis and personal context ones are all over the map but have the potential to be great, and more fiction authors, should they CHOOSE to add intros, should consider making it another layer of the story itself, like Allison and Kwa.

In fiction, I am way more accepting of author commentary and context IN-BETWEEN or AFTER stories. “Antinomy” is one of my favorite Robinson short story collections, despite its messiness, because of its little jokes, doodles, context, and music in between the stories. It’s fun, and none are so long as to distract. At the end is where I put notes and extras in my books! People who don’t want it can just stop, missing nothing.

Nonfiction, though, likely is smart keeping its stuff up front in intros and prefaces. Depending on the book, its back might already be crammed with footnotes, bibliography, AND index pages; god knows I have trouble not getting lost there! (Please, do what Gould does and have footnotes with non-citation content in the margins, only citations in the back.)