Writing and working in a London book shop
Published by Oxford University Press
My mother sees it quite differently. When she saw Coyne’s book, she shook her head in disbelief and said Those bastards. My parents think that there are an unknown amount of these ‘bastards’ who, like gremlins, do their best to mess things up for the rest of us, especially when things are going well.
Those bastards include every author who gets attention instead of me, and this week includes Sebastian Faulks, Nick Hornby, Margaret Atwood and William Boyd. All bastards according to my mother. Dan Brown is the biggest bastard of all . His books are taking up all of the space in the front of bookshops so there’s no room for mine.
For my mother, it’s a moral issue. My book is the nicest book – it’s written by me. Other books are written by horrid people and are much less nice. But looking at Jerry A Coyne’s book I can’t help but see something Darwinian in this struggle for space and attention. What I hope is that there’s enough space for every breed of author and we all survive. Even the bastards.
As Coyne will tell you, this is an example of convergent evolution, where two books filling the same niche (which is “the good book niche”) evolve the same characteristics to make people pick them up.
Alternatively it’s an example of Mullerian mimicry, where, like in bees and wasps, two unrelated species of dangerous books evolve to look the same as each other in order to warn the same set of readers not to eat them.
Personally I think it’s the former, on the basis of the fact that After the Fire is an extremely good book.
One further option: Batesian mimicry – as in hoverflies looking like bees – Coyne’s book has evolved to look like your book in order to reap the same “good book” benefits as your book (birds don’t eat hoverflies because they think they have stings like bees).
Both the covers are a little bit like this one
http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Word-Search-Origins-Language/dp/0670034908
(my copy is the same nice yellowish colour, not pink like it looks on Amazon..) Maybe you can get all three together, Evie, and observe the effects of the cross-genre-pollination.
Jack, where does Ms Wyld come in the ecology you’re describing? An originator of one of the species, she is also allowed to have a hand in their competition by positioning them together in the bookshop. Deeply problematic!
Just wanted to say congrats and great on the fact that you are grad from Goldsmiths College. I now wished I’d signed up there instead to do a MA instead of Manchester M. I look forward to reading your book.