5 “Vocational Travelogue” is a very shorthand way of acknowledging that for a long time one reason people used to read fiction was for a kind of imaginative tourism to places and cultures they’d never get to really see; that modernity’s jetliners, TV, etc. have pretty well obsoleted this function; but that modern tech has also created such extreme vocational specialization that few people anymore are in a position to know much about any professional field but their own; and thus that a certain amount of fiction’s “touristic” function now consists in giving readers dramatized access to the nuts and bolts of different professional disciplines and specialties. It is not an accident that the first important Vocational Travelogues, novels like Hailey’s Airport and Hotel and Ed McBain’s “police procedurals,” began appearing in the late ’50s and early ’60s.