For my birthday this year I headed out to Barnes & Noble with my son Lucas for an afternoon of browsing books and drinking coffee. Lucas, being about 5 months old at the time, was enthusiastic about the outing, as only a baby can be, smiling, gurgling and generally looking forward to flirting with every woman he could see at the bookstore.

I arrived with short list of books I was hoping to find, including The Star Faction by Ken MacLeod, The Stars Are Also Fire by Poul Anderson and Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge. Mainstream bookstores being what they are, and the Long Tail being what it is, I was unable to find any of these books on the shelf. I was forced to fall back on my secondary choices, and left the store with Ken MacLeod's novel of alien first contact Learning the World, William Gibson and Bruce Sterlings' steampunk novel The Difference Engine and Terry Goodkind's objectivist fantasy Wizard's First Rule.