2007/04/23

No, I can't read them

This is just a quick little post about a shopping trip I made yesterday. I walked to Wangfujing Street, which is one of Beijing's major shopping areas. I had a mission: to visit the gigantic bookstore and try to find Chinese editions of books by Robert Silverberg. I have to play the part of the definitive authority (or is that obsessive collector?) and keep the web site as comprehensive as possible. I'll spare you all the details of my search. It's a huge store, but the sections have signs in both Chinese and English, so it wasn't too hard to find FOREIGN SCIENCE FICTION on the fourth floor (or was it fifth?). Then I simply pulled every book off the shelf and looked at it. The section was small enough to make that a practical method. Oh, sorry. I said I would spare you the details, and there I went and typed them anyway.

On to the results, which will be added onto the Quasi-Official site as soon as I figure out how to do them.
This is Thorns, with cover art not resembling anything I remember from the story. The painting actually looks familiar, as if I've seen it on some other book.
And this is Lord Valentine's Castle, divided into two volumes (shang and xia) because they don't seem to like thick books, at least in the SF section.
The inside of LVC features some familiar artwork.
The interior layout is rather nice looking, with graphics on every page. All the other SF titles I saw had similar features.

I took quite a lot of pictures on my walk. It will take me a while to sort through them and make a proper post out of them, but for the Silverberg fans out there, I wanted to get this part taken care of.

4 comments:

  1. That is a very unique (at least for the US residents) find. I must admit that I have not read anything by Silverberg. Can you make a recomendation on a good book to start with?

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  2. Lord Valentine's Castle is probably a good choice. It should appeal to people who like both science fiction and fantasy, but is not geeky or techie on the SF side or silly (like copying the Lord of the Rings) on the fantasy side. Plus it's easy to find copies of, especially in English!

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  3. interesting books. did you find anything that you could read. was it a big store? covers look scary to me, but then sci fi challenges my imagination too much. sounds like fun.

    RW

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  4. Is it a big store?

    OK, wait till Chinese Time Machine #3. I have a picture of the outside of the store. It's about 7 floors of a whole building.

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