New York I: Singularity.

Captain America:  "You got heart, kid. Where are you from?"
Spider-Man:  "Queens."
Captain America:  "Brooklyn!"

Captain American: Civil War

On Monday morning, Karli and I are leaving for a nine day vacation in New York - I haven't been to the city that never sleeps just as a tourist for about 30 years, and Karli has never been, so we're both really looking forward to the trip.

At the start of the planning process, Karli decided that she wanted to get more of a physical understanding of where things were in relation to each other, so I printed out a large map of south Manhattan, which she put on a cork board and proceeded to annotate with push pins indicating sightseeing destinations, dining locations, and shopping opportunities. We've since transferred the results to an iOS app* for the trip, but Karli's push pin planning process was the perfect starting point - it gave us a feel for locations and combined opportunities that we would never have gotten from an LCD screen.

If you look at the resulting map, there's a lonely unlabelled black pin in Brooklyn, just at the end of the Manhattan Bridge in the fashionable DUMBO** neighbourhood.  It's not so much a destination as a memorial: that pin marks the location of Singularity and Co., a Kickstarter™-funded science fiction bookstore that opened its doors in 2012 - and closed them at some point in the last year or so, as far as I can tell. Their Facebook™ page confidently says that they're open right now, but Yelp reports them as permanently closed (as do some Facebook™ comments), and their online shop has gone dark.

 

It always makes me sad when I see that a bookstore has gone under, especially a science fiction bookstore. I realize that the future will be digital, which makes Singularity and Co.'s original Kickstarter™ mandate of converting lost texts a commendable one, but like a fan of vinyl albums, I can't let go of my attachment to the physical media - and physical bookstores. The majority of my book shopping is for older books - for me, the yellow-paged paperbacks from the 50s and 60s, with their classic covers and their lurid teasers*** represent science fiction and fantasy as I first discovered it, and because of that I treasure the older books in my collection.

Our final planning list has a pretty good selection of New York bookstores that will undoubtedly provide me with a wide selection of genre shopping , but I'm disappointed that Singularity and Co. isn't one of them. However, I haven't completely given up hope. I'm hoping that, as with Mark Twain, the reports of their death are greatly exaggerated. We'll probably be crossing the Brooklyn Bridge regardless, and once there, it's only a short detour to just check on that DUMBO storefront location - as they say, hope springs eternal, and that pin is still in the map.

- Sid

* An unpaid product endorsement: if you're going to New York and want to plan your trip in a format that you can access offline, I strongly recommend the New York Travel Guide and Offline City Map app from Ulmon. It's done everything we wanted and needed for planning our trip, and it was free.

** Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass - no, really.

*** I could probably do a blog posting just on classic science fiction and fantasy teaser lines and their complete reliance on exclamation points:
"Trapped in the graveyard of lost spaceships!"
"Duel of the Cosmic Magicians!"
"The Galaxy Master - planets and women were his pawns!"
"Cosmic peril in a lost world!"