Entering China, I was prepared to be polite to cops, show my passport as necessary, and explain as best I could just why I was walking around sewage treatment plants with camera and binoculars. To my surprise I never had to. The simple fact is that I could walk absolutely anywhere I felt like in Beijing without being hassled by anyone. I was technically supposed to carry my passport with me, but only the hotel and the airport asked to see it. I didn’t have to present I.D. anywhere else the entire trip. Outside the usual security checkpoints at the airport, I was never once stopped by a cop or security guard for anything, even though I stuck out like a sore thumb almost everywhere I went, and was usually snapping photos of anything and everything. There were surveillance cameras, but fewer than in the U.S. or London. Getting on the subway, no one wanted to look inside my bags. All transactions were cash.

I initially thought there were soldiers everywhere, but I eventually realized that most of them were just security guards who wear somewhat more military uniforms in Beijing than those in the U.S. do. They also tend to stand at attention at their posts which makes them look more military (unless it’s raining, in which case they go inside a little booth and read the newspaper or talk on their cell phone, like any private security guard elsewhere on the planet). Everybody just walked right past them wherever they were going without showing any form of ID, usually without even saying Nihao.

There were quite a few real soldiers near my hotel, but that’s because we were effectively on top of a military base. The hotel we were staying at was actually the “Number 3 Hotel of the General Armaments Division”, was down the block from another military hotel, and was next door to some sort of barracks. Otherwise I think the only actual soldiers I saw around town were at Tian’anmen Square.

Internet-wise, I was blocked occasionally by the Great Firewall of China, especially on any subject related to Tibet. However I surfed the entire time through an unsecured wireless connection at the hotel. I never had to provide ID to use the Internet as I thought I would.

It wasn’t just me either. I saw fewer traffic stops, arrests, and police actions against other citizens than I do in a typical week in the states. In fact, I think I saw a grand total of two, both related to car accidents; and neither looked very serious.

Somehow I thought a one-party, authoritarian state would be more oppressive than this. At least in the capital, Beijing compares favorably to major U.S. cities. To be honest, that doesn’t speak well for the U.S. If we can’t be less of a police state than a one-party, nominally Communist nation like China, then something has gone seriously wrong.

The man’s pushing 80. He may not have that many years left. Can’t we get him one before it’s too late? Surely if Nobels can go to Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, there’s room for an Updike?

Personally I’ve always been fascinated by series that follow characters through a life, especially a modern life, and Tales of the City is very much like that. You see characters not just in individual stories but evolving over time.

Recently I discovered the Up Series on DVD. My wife couldn’t stand it, but I couldn’t stop watching it. To this American, the obsession with the British class system seemed a little silly (it probably seemed more relevant in 1963 when the series started) but watching these people grow up was entrancing.

Probably the first such series I read in which the characters actually grew up would have been Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy books from the turn of the last century. I probably would have liked Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, but somehow the TV show put me off them (though I did enjoy Farmer Boy). There were also the Beverly Cleary books with Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins, but although they grew up slowly, they didn’t grow nearly as fast as I did, and certainly never reached adulthood. Last I checked, thirty years later, Ramona was now 9. By contrast, Betsy Ray managed to go from first grade to young adulthood in the course of a roughly a dozen novels I finished by about sixth grade. I suspect discovering the series after it’s already complete is part of the fascination, so I can digest it in compressed form. Series I’ve grown up with and that aged at roughly the same rate I did such as Doonesbury and many television shows don’t have the same appeal.

But I digress. I first discovered Tales of the City about 10 years ago, shortly after I moved to Brooklyn, and devoured all six books. I even wove some references to it into the XML Bible. I’ve read all of Maupin’s work since then, and enjoyed all three television series. His later books have been good, but I didn’t feel connected to them in the same way. I didn’t feel like these characters were friends I knew, rather than simply people I was reading about. There are connections between Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener and Tales of the City, but not significant ones. Still my absolute favorite part of the Night Listener was when I realized just who the narrator’s assistant really was. It felt like unexpectedly encountering a friend you haven’t seen for twenty years; and I felt really glad to see that she’d grown up and done OK.

Maupin said he was going to stop writing Tales of the City books because he didn’t want to write Michael Tolliver’s death scene. Personally I hope he still hasn’t done that; and I’m glad he keeps going back to that well. Of course we’ll see Michael Tolliver one more time, and Mrs. Madrigal is still going strong at 85. Some of the children have grown up and become characters in their own right. I’m not sure who else we’ll see. At this point one book is not nearly enough to cover all the characters who’ve weaved in and out of the stories over the years, and Maupin does tend to lose track of people from book to book. Mona more or less vanished in the middle of the series but reappeared toward the putative end, and even Mrs. Madrigal faded into the background in the last couple of books. I’d like to see more of her this time around, and perhaps Mary Ann Singleton. I can’t wait for June 1.

Oh, and if you think Dumbledore’s really dead, can I talk to you about this bridge I have for sale down at the end of Adams Street? Cheap.

Watchmen was the only graphic novel to make the list. I would have added Sandman as well, though it’s arguably not a novel. (That might well have made the list if it had been included in the initial survey). I might have added Gravity’s Rainbow and Starship Troopers too. Stranger in a Strange Land was a choice in the survey, but I don’t think it’s as much of a geek novel as Starship Troopers. Ringworld was also an obvious omission.

Rick Cook’s Wizard’s Bane may not be as famous as the other selections (or, in all honesty, as well written) but it does have the distinction of being the only novel ever written about the Forth programming language. If that doesn’t qualify it as a geek book, I don’t know what does. Also omitted but worthy of mention is a straight, non-sci fi novel: Ellen Ullman’s The Bug, probably the only novel ever written (or that ever will be written) about a fencepost error.

I’ve already read 16 or 17 of the 20. I’m not sure whether or not I’ve read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It sounds vaguely familiar. Possibly I read it when I was too young to understand or appreciate it. In either case, I promptly logged into the Brooklyn Public Library to reserve the three or four I hadn’t read.