Free infinities by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Scott Nicholson, Garry Kilworth, Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Kaitlin Queen, Iain Rowan, Linda Nagata, Keith Brooke Page B

movies – never occurred to me that the university library must contain scores if not hundreds of books on the cinema in which I might revel between one Monday afternoon and the next. I suppose the truth is that I was at the stage of being merely a fan; my awakening as a student of the cinema was for some reason delayed. Or maybe it was the subconscious notion that, the moment I began to take my devotion more seriously, as symbolized by my starting to search out books on the subject, would also be the moment I had to confront the fact that my interest in veterinary science, to which I had sacrificed nearly a decade of my young life, had ebbed to such a degree that all that was left was a darkening of the sand.
    Whatever the reason, it wasn't until sometime in the late spring or early summer of the following year that I located the Performing Arts section of the university library and then, embedded within it, the long shelves dedicated to books on the cinema. I strolled backwards and forwards in front of those shelves for several minutes, I recall, reluctant to take the final step of actually pulling a book down and opening it. There were books about individual directors, actors, studios ... even individual movies. There were histories of Hollywood in general, and of specific genres; this was the first time that I realized, for example, that animation was something more than kids' stuff but was worthy of serious consideration by grown-up human beings – a significant discovery, as it was to prove, because animation has become one of my major obsessions within the broader field of cinema studies. There were books on the philosophy of the movies, books on the silents, books on series like those starring Tarzan or Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy or Batman, books on the technologies of cinematography and special effects, encyclopedias and movie guides, how-to books for wannabe screenwriters ... There was a whole world contained within those books, and I had been doing nothing more than looking at the outside of one of its aspects. They presented a challenge starkly before me: if I wanted, I could turn and leave the building and forget all about them, become a vet who enjoyed watching the movies whenever he had the spare time; otherwise, I was going to start an exploration that would likely remain incomplete even if I dedicated the rest of my life to it.
    Knowing exactly the import of what I was doing, I eventually reached out a slightly shaking hand and took by the spine a copy of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema . I carried it over to a desk and opened it. I saw in a blur two pages jammed full of small print. It was an encyclopedic listing of movies – over 20,000 of them, according to the splashline on the cover. Once I got my eyes to focus properly, I could see that the movies were listed alphabetically, each with basic details such as year of release, running time, director and stars, plus a short synopsis. The spread I had open in front of me contained these brief descriptions of movies like Four Men and a Prayer , The Four Musketeers , The Four-Poster , Four Sided Triangle , Four's a Crowd , The Fox and the Hound , Fragment of Fear , The Franchise Affair , Francis of Assisi ... Reading the summaries – none was longer than a couple of sentences – was a tantalizing and soon frustrating experience: I began to salivate at the prospect of all these movies still waiting in the future for me to watch, but what I really wanted was to watch them now – and all of them at once.
    Brunner's Companion to the Cinema bore a bold blue REFERENCE stamp, so all I could do was look at it there – I wasn't going to be able to take it home with me and browse through it late into the night. I looked at the price on the cover and realized glumly that it would be a long time, no matter how much I scrimped, before I could save up enough money from my allowance to buy a copy of my own. But there were other books on the shelves which I was allowed