Uncle Hugo's is Minnesota's Authentic American Experience

Via File 770

My favorite local bookstore, Uncle Hugo's, has been featured on Time.com's listing of 50 Authentic American Experiences. The author, Reed Tucker, selected Uncle Hugo's as Minnesota's Authentic American Experience.

In this age of the world-devouring chains, an independent bookstore is as rare a sight as a first edition of Harry Potter. An independent bookstore devoted to science fiction is even rarer still. But since 1974, Uncle Hugo's in Minneapolis has been stocking its shelves with a huge variety of new and used sci-fi books and earning a national rep among fans of the genre.

Awesome!

I am a big fan of browsing the used shelves of Uncle Hugo's and seeing what I can find. I've picked up more than a few C.J. Cherryh novels in book club edition hardcovers, the early Steven Brust Vlad Taltos novels, and my greatest discovery (for which I need to give credit to Etoile9 for making sure I didn't miss it)...nearly the entire set of Wild Cards novels in paperback. 13 of them, all at once. And other stuff, of course.

Used Book Haul

I picked up a crazy number of books this weekend. See, Dreamhaven Books was having a garage sale, so I had to check that out. Though - from reading that post, I didn't actually see a garage. There were extra books set up inside the main store, so I wonder if I missed something. Hmm!

From Dreamhaven
Electric Velocipede #4
Duck-Footed, by Joe R. Lansdale (I thought this was out of print, but apparently not)

Then, because that's how I roll and I wanted to show off the delights of the Used Book section of Uncle Hugo's, I stopped there, figuring I'd get one or two books.

Forty Thousand in Gehenna, by C.J. Cherryh
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
Jhereg, by Steven Brust
Wild Cards, by George R. R. Martin

That's where I thought I was going to stop. The Cherryh and Wild Cards was book club edition hardcovers. Jhereg was a well read mmpb. But, since anytime I go to Uncle Hugos I check to see if they've got any Wild Cards books in stock (the HC was just a bonus). For the first time in about a year of bi-monthly visits, they did. I bought them all. Except for book five, which I already own.

Jokers Wild (3)
Aces Abroad (4)
Ace in the Hole (6)
Dead Man's Hand (7)
One Eyed Jacks (8)
Jokertown Shuffle (9)
Double Solitaire (10)
Dealer's Choice (11)
Turn of the Cards (12)
Card Sharks (13)
Marked Cards (14)
Black Trump (15)

So, now I own copies of all the Wild Cards novels except Aces High (2), Dueces Down (16), Death Draws Five (17) and Inside Straight (18). I expect to pick up a copy of Inside Straight soonish. The crazy thing is that when Tor starts reissuing the original series with new editions, I'll probably pick those up, too.

It's more than I planned to buy, but the odds of my finding all those books in one place again and almost completing the full set were quite small.

Liavek!

Yesterday I made my first trek over to Uncle Hugo’s bookstore, which, like any good bookstore, is wall to wall filled with books. Ahh, but Uncle Hugos is a SFF bookstore, so it is wall to wall with nothing but SFF. New and Used. It is a delightful place to which I am definitely going to return.

As soon as I walked in past the back issues of Asimov’s and F&SF I knew I was in one of the local branches of heaven. I wanted to look for a copy of Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival and the fifth Wild Cards volume. I was in the store for ten minutes before I remembered what I wanted to look for. I never did remember Wild Cards, but I saw the Bear and decided not to pick it up this time. Almost picked up Caine Black Knife and Fast Forward 2, but I kept browsing, kept remembering stuff.

And then I saw it. Liavek.

It’s nothing I was ever looking for, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had to get it. Liavek is a shared universe anthology created and edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull and was published back in 1985. I know nothing about the world, except that it is from Shetterly and Bull. Including tax, it only cost me $2.15, so you can’t beat that!

Here’s the contributor list:
Emma Bull
Gene Wolfe
Patricia C. Wrede
Nancy Kress
Steven Brust
Jane Yolen
Kara Dalky
Pamela Dean
Megan Lindholm (later known as Robin Hobb)
Will Shetterly
Barry B. Longyear

Not bad. There’s a couple of writers I’ve never heard of, and some I have heard of but haven’t read, but given that Bull only had one previous publication credit (a short story – she was two years away from publishing War for the Oaks), and Shetterly’s first novel Cats Have No Lord came out that same year, it’s a solid lineup of writers who would go on to have successful careers. According to Wikipedia, six of the contributers were part of the same Minnesota writers group, the Scribblies (Bull, Wrede, Brust, Dalky, Dean, Shetterly)