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

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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.

“Realistic” Dialogue
July 22, 2021

Dialogue is a key component of the vast majority of fiction, and certainly of the kind of books that I read and write. While readers and writers can have distinctively different views on dialogue, often what readers, and even some editors, think is “realistic” dialogue is nothing of the sort.

Over the years a small number of readers have occasionally complained that my dialogue is too formal. And compared to the way many people talk today, it probably is, but throughout history, the educated and professional classes in any society have used more formal dialogue. Some languages even had “high” and “low” versions. Ideally, dialogue should be specific to the characters and their culture, not to what’s comfortable or familiar to editors, but in writing there has to be compromise. I’m not about to write in the equivalent of high German, but the word choice of those who would be speaking in that fashion should suggest formality.

What many Americans, in particular, fail to understand is that most cultures have far tighter social customs and restrictions, as did an earlier United States, than the U.S. does at present. The January 6th attempted “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol reflects this. In no earlier U.S. period would that many Americans ever thought it proper to storm the Capitol. It wasn’t “the way” things were done. And certain phrases and terms just weren’t used in “polite society.” What tends to be forgotten is that in most societies and times, the equivalent of “polite society” is where the power lies.

In practice, that means less formal dialogue belongs to the outsiders, not the insiders. It also means, even in fantasy and science fiction cultures, if they’re to be realistic, that there should be unlegislated or customary restrictions on what is proper to be said in public, and in private, and on what actions are “beyond the pale.” Obviously, customs change over time in any culture, but history has shown that societies without unspoken restrictions seldom endure, while enduring societies have more unspoken restrictive customs and speech patterns than are obvious to the casual or careless observer.

Unconscious Hypocrisy
July 19, 2021

Over the weekend, I read a letter to the editor in the “local” paper (it’s mainly about St. George, but includes regional news and some stories about Cedar City). The writer was deeply concerned about the rapid and uncontrolled growth in St. George, and how the pleasant and friendly town had changed into a small city with traffic and rude drivers, growing air pollution, runaway building that would lead to water shortages, and other urban problems.

Then the writer went on to describe how the same process had occurred in the Los Angeles in which he’d grown up.

Now, the writer was totally accurate, possibly even understating how much St. George has grown in the past twenty years, but it didn’t even seem to occur to him that he represented the reason why St. George has grown so much. In both Cedar City and St. George, the “immigration” numbers from California are staggering.

When we moved here from New Hampshire twenty-eight years ago, the reasons were purely economic and professional – the only full-time job in her field that my wife could find (after massive cutbacks in the New Hampshire higher education system) was here. Writers are portable, female soprano opera directors not nearly so much. At that time, the move was far from ideal, but there weren’t any other feasible options. We bought an existing house [which we slowly spent twenty years repairing and upgrading] on a street where only one other family happened to be “immigrants” – and he was another academic from the east coast.

For the first fifteen years after we arrived, only three houses in the two block stretch in our area changed hands. Since then, more than half the homes have been sold, and every one of them, except possibly one, has been bought by a family from California, most of them retirees.

This is happening all across the southwestern corner of Utah. I understand why people want to leave California, particularly retirees who can sell homes in California for ridiculously inflated prices and buy a retirement house in Utah (often larger) for far less, but it does mystify me that those who come here don’t seem to understand that, when so many of them descend upon a largely rural and arid area, they’ve become part of the problem, particularly when a good percentage of them oppose local government controls on growth, but then complain about uncontrolled growth.

Useless?
July 15, 2021

When I was a teenager, all too many years ago, I knew a few other “guys” [how else can I refer to males of that indeterminate age too old to be teenagers and too immature to be adults] who doted on their cars. Now, I’ve always liked cars, but I never obsessed over them. I once thought I wanted a Jaguar XKE, that is, until I drove one and discovered that its only redeeming quality was the speed it could attain, and that its handling left a great deal to be desired.

And until I was much older, my cars were all used, and, frankly, their original owners had bought them for practicality, except for the cherry red Corvair, and I have no idea why the grandmother who owned it previously had bought it. I got it because it was affordable.

But back in the late 1950s, the car guys all seemed obsessed with lowering and/or raking their vehicles and then replacing their mufflers with glass-packs, which apparently, in those days, met the legal definition of mufflers. The result was, predictably, that you could hear those vehicles coming from blocks away, possibly for a good mile in the then-exurban area where I grew up.

I thought that era was gone, and it seemed to be, except in the last year or so I’ve begun to see giant trucks with lifted suspensions. I can also hear them a good half mile away because they’re even louder than the 1950s vehicles equipped with glass-packs. They vibrate the double pane windows in the house, and set every dog on the street either to barking at the intrusion or whining in terror, depending on age and breed of the canine and the temperament of the owner. These are not old clunkers driven by post-teens, nor are they driven by men of my age and older trying to relive a misspent youth. They’re usually massive late-model shiny pickup trucks, usually either gleaming white with lots of chrome or jet black… and occasionally metallic red. What they pick up is another question, because some of them have a truck bed so high that it would require a cherry-picker or forklift to load it. Oh, and the worst of them belch black smoke.

Now, I can understand the need for hauling things. We have two vehicles. One is an economical 21 year old Toyota RAV, and the other is an 11 year old Tahoe, necessary for hauling such things as opera props, stage furniture and the like, but I still can’t figure out the appeal of the monsters that roar up the hill on which we live… or what else they’re useful for… and for that matter, how they’re even legal under current emissions and noise standards.

I couldn’t see the appeal when I was a teenager, and I still can’t… unless it’s the desire to be as assertively and ostentatiously obnoxious as possible.