Alan Beatts is the owner of Borderlands, a San Francisco-based bookstore dedicated to science fiction and fantasy titles.

How do you feel generally about the state of science fiction and fantasy?  Are you optimistic about the genre's future?

In general I think that SF and fantasy are doing as well now as they have at anytime in the past ten years.

Near future SF seems to be less common, probably due to the problem of making any sort of half-way credible extrapolation of society in the near term. Technology is changing at such an accelerated rate that most SF writers I know are concerned that something set twenty-five or fifty years from now with be rife with anachronisms before it even sees publication.  On the flip side, post computational singularity stories (i.e. Glasshouse by Stross or Implied Spaces by Williams) and "new" space opera (i.e. House of Suns by Reynolds or Shadow of the Scorpion by Asher) are both going strong so there hasn't really been any loss overall.

Fantasy is experiencing a renaissance with the popularity of gritty, confrontational work (as opposed to the escapist, conciliatory work of the last three decades).  People like Joe Abercrombie (Best Served Cold), Richard K. Morgan (The Steel Remains) and Steven Erikson (Toll the Hounds) are all seeing huge success by presenting worlds that are just as complicated and messy as our own.

Finally, the sub-genre of "urban fantasy" as typified by Kim Harrison (White Witch, Black Curse), Tony Richards (Dark Rain), and Simon Green (The Spy Who Haunted Me) continues to grow in popularity and sales.

Are there any types of books you wish you saw in the new release catalogs that aren't?  Are there subjects you're tired of?

No, not really.  I suppose I'm a bit tired of vampires but, among booksellers and publishers, that's a common feeling in my field but not one shared by the readership.

How do you feel a store like yours helps serves the fan in an age of fewer and fewer independent book retailers?

We serve readers in the same way that any independent bookstore does -- we have a huge amount of information about the books in our field and we share it with our customers.  Specifically, we can make suggestions about what a customer might enjoy based on what they've liked in the past.  It may seem like a little thing but one of the hardest things to find is an accurate source for recommendations in our field.

The other big thing that we offer our customers is a venue where they can meet and talk with authors.  Borderlands hosts over 50 author events a year and, for many of those attending, they are the only way that one is likely to be able to actually meet those authors.

I saw the guidelines for submitted books on the website....could you tell me more about what you're seeing from authors who bring in books that way?  Have you had successes with that process?

To be honest, that process has not been very successful at all.  In ten years, I think that we've received only two or three books that we ended up stocking at the store.  What we typically get sent are self-published works that meet neither our standards in terms of production quality or writing quality.  But, I do want to keep the door open and so the policy stands.  I could go into what I think are the reasons for this at great length, but time and space don't permit.  The short version is this - a professional writer will sell their work to a publisher.  If a work doesn't sell, a pro will start working on something that will sell.  So that means that self-published work is generally not of professional quality.  And work that isn't self-published usually draws the attention of our buyer pretty early in the publication process.