L.E. Modesitt, Jr. – The Official Website

Home

The Books

Welcome

Like most authors, I want my readers to have as much background information as possible, particularly about recently released books, and books that will be published in the months ahead. But it’s equally important for new readers to learn about the books already out there. Those are some of the purposes of this site.

Another reason for the site is to acquaint you all with the range of my books. Just because you liked one of my fantasies doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that you will like one of my “hard” SF novels. I’d hope that you would, but another point of this site is to give you more information so that you know more about what I’m writing and what I have written.

Thanks again for reading my work, for supporting me, and for keeping the written word alive and well!

—L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

“More Plot and Less Politics”
September 26, 2022

Every so often I get a comment like that, more often lately in the books of “The Grand Illusion,” and I just want to shake my head. In fact, sometimes I do. I feel the same way when someone makes comments about just wanting to get rid of politicians and politics.

What many of these people fail to understand is that, like it or not, politics are responsible for all the achievements of the human race, and that the declines of past great civilizations largely resulted from the failure of politics.

Why do I say that?

Because individuals acting alone are limited in what they can do. Cooperative effort is what enables technology pretty much anywhere above late stone age, and cooperative effort requires social organization. Social organization falls apart without a political structure of some sort. While some theorists will claim that a market system trumps politics, even market systems need politics to function above the stone age.

Regardless of which is more important, there have never been any societies with a technology at or above the bronze age without some form of unified political and economic system.

Now, I understand the need for entertainment in fiction. If a fiction book doesn’t entertain a reader, it’s generally a failure. But just as non-stop action is totally unrealistic, as I pointed out in an earlier blog, so are societies without at least plausible economic and political structures.

You can’t maintain an autocratic kingdom or even high-tech society without enforcers of some sort, and a set of enforcers, whether a military-police structure or a secret police, requires organization and structure, which in any system involving human beings requires politics. Non-autocratic technological societies have differing structures and differing politics, but politics remain necessary.

I could ask the question of why at least some “action-oriented” readers readily accept the impossibility of non-stop action and reject the impossibility of societies without workable politics, but the answer is most likely that, because they don’t see or understand that politics can be as deadly, and often more deadly, than military or other action, they find direct violence and action more emotionally satisfying. That lack of understanding on a larger scale in society is why autocrats like Putin, Hitler, Mussolini, Orban, and more than a few others gained power through political means, rather than by direct military force.

Shades of Gray
September 23, 2022

One of the biggest rationalizations/copouts in politics today is one used by far too many voters, usually when someone makes an observation about one politician’s unethical or potentially illegal behavior or the politician’s blatant falsehoods. Those who want to support the politician, despite that behavior or those lies, all too often say, “All politicians are crooks” or “They all lie.”

To begin with, every single human being who reaches adulthood has lied. That’s not the question. The question is what kind of lies they told and to whom. Were they white lies to spare someone’s feelings? Or lies to excuse their own failures, like claiming they were late to work because an accident backed up traffic when they really overslept because they were hung over. Or were they lies like those told by former President Trump? The other question is how often and how blatant the lies.

When we deal with acquaintances, most people weigh the “shades of gray” in judging people, but when they deal with politicians, from what I’ve seen, the smallest fault in a politician one doesn’t like or who’s of the “wrong” party is enough to justify voting for a politician with far greater faults who comes from the “right” party. People shy away from dealing with shady merchants or car dealers, but they don’t show the same reluctance when a shady politician from their own party spouts blatant falsehoods.

And usually, neither candidate is perfectly pure. When that happens, a large segment of each party tends to justify staying with the party candidate by magnifying the sins of the opposition candidate, rather than by comparing their actions and statements of the two [now, most people say they do this, but it’s clear from election results that many don’t].

Sometimes, voters believe that the principles a politician opposes or supports justify voting for that politician, despite his or her flaws, but how large do the flaws have to be before voters turn away from a flawed politician? How outrageous do the falsehoods and lies have to get before voters reject a politician from their own party?

Some voters never do, and that was how the Germans ended up with Hitler, the Italians with Mussolini, the Russians with Putin, and why Trump believes he can run and win a second term.

Misleading Statistics
September 19, 2022

The other day, I got an email cartoon listing nineteen goods/categories whose prices have increased 10% or more over the past year. Nine were grocery products and one was men’s suits. The others were categories: gasoline, airline tickets, used cars, gas utilities, hotels, delivery costs, electricity, furniture, and cleaning products. The bottom line caption was: So how is inflation only 8.6%?

I checked the numbers against the latest CPI-U, and some were exaggerated. The email said used car prices were up 35%, but the CPI lists the annual inflation at 7.8% The email also listed gasoline increases at 49%, when the actual was 29%.

But the most misleading aspect is that all of the items listed by the email together comprise less than 30% of all the items that comprise the CPI-U. All food items comprise only 14%. Eggs [up 44%] only amount to 1/10 of one percent.

Overall food prices (comprising 14% of the CPI-U) increased 11.4%, but all commodity prices, excluding food and energy, only rose 6.3% over the last year.

Now neither 8.6% nor 6.3% is good, but citing huge price spikes in small segments of the economy is definitely misleading. It’s also politically effective. People don’t notice the prices that don’t rise or rise more slowly. They notice that gasoline and egg prices are way up, or that used cars are getting pricy.

Yet, I’d be willing to be that the majority of people who received that email or saw the original posting of the cartoon and its statistics will have the reaction that the government is grossly “cooking the statistics.”

And the government has been “readjusting” the statistics for years, but in little ways, such as reducing the impact of food and energy costs on the CPI, but its figures aren’t “readjusted” by the two and three-fold magnitudes suggested by the cartoon.

This statistical “discrepancy” also illustrates one of the biggest problems faced by a democratic high technology society, that fewer and fewer of the people who vote really understand either the technology or the economy underlying their society, and that lack of understanding becomes fertile ground for demagogues who offer falsified/incorrect facts, gross exaggerations, and beguiling simple (but unworkable) “solutions” to complex problems.