Improbable events occur in real life. We all know they do. One of our sons met his wife in Georgetown pub where they’d both taken refuge from a violent downpour. There was no other possible point of contact, no mutual acquaintances, no job interrelation, and neither frequented such establishments or Georgetown. It just happened to be the closest refuge. They’ve been married more than twenty years.

Everyday life is filled with improbabilities – or seeming improbabilities, and such improbabilities often aren’t life-threatening or world-saving. By the same token, at times the seeming improbabilities are only improbable to those who aren’t aware of the situation.

The fact that Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger successfully landed a powerless Airbus A320 in the Hudson River in 2009 with no fatalities and only a few minor injuries seems improbable at first sight. But the real improbability wasn’t that Sullenberger made the landing. He was a former fighter pilot who had been an airline pilot since leaving the United States Air Force in 1980, who had logged 19,663 total flight hours, including 4,765 in an A320. He was also a glider pilot and expert on aviation safety.

The improbability was that he was in command when the aircraft suffered a massive bird-strike that took out both engines simultaneously. In fiction, that kind of improbability, where only the protagonist has the skills to pull off the seeming impossibility, is often hard for readers and editors to swallow.

One way to deal with it is to point out that many senior pilots have those skills, and that’s one of the reasons why they’re in command. That turns the situation into a “best of the best,” rather than “the only one who could.” It’s also based on the fact that there’s a system for developing such pilots and their skills.

As many of my readers can likely point out, I tend to feature protagonists who take a long time developing skills, if sometimes improbable ones. And once in a while, such as with Natural Ordermage, I show just how much trouble someone can get into by ignoring schooling and systems.

It’s not that you can’t present the improbable, but that you have to learn how to present the improbable so that it doesn’t seem impossible.

Corporations have been in the news for the wrong reasons for some time, but more often recently, it seems, between Boeing, Tesla, United Healthcare, PG&E, and more than a few others.

In almost all cases, the “troubles” they face/faced resulted from the excessive pursuit of profit, “excessive” being defined as profits gained at the expenses and/or deaths foisted off on others.

In the case of United Healthcare, profits were boosted by denying coverage/claims at roughly twice the rate of any other health insurer – and other health insurance executives were outraged at the assassination of Brian Thompson, with apparently no real understanding of public perception of the health insurance industry.

Boeing tried to shortcut development procedures and effectively lied to the FAA about the changes in the flight control systems for the 737 Max.

And for too many corporations, pursuit of profit with no regard for life appears to be an endemic way of life, as exemplified by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).

In the past, I’ve mentioned the sins of PG&E, which are considerable. From what I can discover and extract from various accounts, by 2018, PG&E was legally responsible for over $30 billion in damages caused by fires created by various equipment failures, which pushed PG&E into filing for bankruptcy. But more PG&E-caused fires followed, including the Kinkaid Fire and the Camp Fire, which was the largest fire in California history, burning 18,000 structures and 153,336 acres, killing at least 85 people, displacing 50,000, and resulting in over $16 billion in damages, bringing the total damages owed by PG&E to nearly $50 billion. PG&E also faced over 500 counts of criminal involuntary manslaughter.

Needless to say, PG&E filed for bankruptcy, and the CEO resigned in 2019. But in March 2020, PG&E asked a federal court to approve $454 million in executive bonuses just days after asking another federal judge, who was overseeing PG&E’s criminal probation related to the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion) not to force the utility to hire more tree trimmers. And in January 2020, PG&E transferred $100 million from its safety budget to partly fund the executive bonuses.

PG&E only paid $13.5 billion out of roughly $50 billion in damages and raised some of those funds by increasing the permanent monthly rate base of each of its 5.6 million customers by $5, and as part of the settlement, all charges of involuntary manslaughter were dropped.

A last footnote: In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy offered PG&E a $15 billion loan, to “expand hydropower generation and battery storage, upgrade transmission capacity through reconductoring and grid enhancing technologies, and enable virtual power plants throughout PG&E’s service area.”

In the past 10 years, typical CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased by more than $4 million, to an average of $17.7 million in 2023. Meanwhile, the average U.S. worker saw a wage increase of 3% a year, $18,240 over the past decade, earning on average just $65,470 in 2023.

And what I’ve pointed out here is just the tip of the iceberg.

Trump has made no secret of the fact that he’s vindictive, and recent events continue to illustrate that, but they also suggest that he’s also biased and sexist.

In firing the Chief of Naval Operations (Admiral Lisa Franchetti), the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant (Admiral Linda Fagan) U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, Trump removed the most senior women in the U.S. Military. He also removed General C.Q. Brown, Jr. (who is black) as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Trump then fired General Tim Haugh, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, as well as Haugh’s civilian deputy, Wendy Noble.

The way matters are going, it appears likely that all will be replaced by white males.

Trump has also renewed his attacks on Chris Krebs, former Director of the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), because Krebs had the temerity to say that the 2020 election was fair and free and not stolen. Trump’s latest attack on Krebs consists of removing his security clearance – as well as the clearances of all the employees at SentinelOne, where Krebs is now the CIO — and then issuing an executive order launching an investigation of Krebs.

This follows Trump’s removal of Secret Service protection for Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, former high officials in his first term, for being insufficiently supportive of him, i.e., failing to applaud his every move.

Yet Trumpists follow their Fuhrer like sheep, seemingly unaware that sheep always get shorn or slaughtered.

There’s been a great deal of furor and discussion about the case of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil Kahlil, whom the Justice Department is trying to deport because he spoke out for the rights of Palestinians in Gaza. The Justice Department has so far been unable to find that Kahlil committed anything even resembling a crime, but the head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has declared that Kahlil should be deported because he spoke out, even though he is in the United States legally.

Then there’s the case Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly arrested and deported to a Salvadoran prison, again for no reason. Unlike Kahlil, Garcia not only did nothing illegal, but made no public statements, and was working as a sheet metal apprentice. And now, Trump’s DOJ is claiming that the President’s prerogatives as implementer of foreign policy outweigh civic protections stated in the Constitution and that Trump can effectively ignore those inconvenient rights.

Unhappily, the furor over those cases is overshadowing the far greater harm that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security are creating with their handling of student visas. My wife the university professor has several foreign students studying voice and opera. Just because they’re on student visas, they’ve received notice that their visas may be revoked, as have all the other foreign students at the university.

This makes no sense. So far as anyone can tell, none of these students have been involved in even speaking out publicly, but they don’t know if they’ll be deported just because they’re on student visas. They don’t know whether, if they go home to spend the summer with their parents, they’ll be allowed to re-enter the United States to continue their studies. They’re all students who’ve complied fully with the law, yet the Justice Department is going after them, rather than concentrating on illegal immigrants and immigrants who’ve broken the law.

And, on a more practical level, foreign students pay the university more than in-state students, and they spend money to live here, which definitely helps the U.S. trade balance. There’s also the fact that by threatening deportation or actually deporting students who’ve done nothing wrong, the United States is undermining its own image as a land of laws and freedom.

This approach is likely illegal, at least according to the Constitution that the Trumpists are doing their best to ignore, not to mention both wrong-headed and counterproductive, and yet neither DOJ nor Homeland Security seems to see or understand that.

Recent research suggests that science fiction is less improbable than many scientists and those outside the genre think.

First, astronomical observations have discovered the existence of chemical compounds in deep space that are the precursors of amino acids, which suggests a greater likelihood of a wider spread of organic life throughout the universe.

Second, observations here on earth have discovered a range of animal behaviors that resemble transmissible cultures, and even examples of “shared” culture/relations between differing species.

Third, exploratory ventures and observations have discovered water in places that were once thought improbable for having water.

Fourth, astronomers are finding more and more planetoids in the Oort Cloud.

All of this suggests that there is life elsewhere, especially given the size of the universe.

But… getting there is another question.

For humans to travel anywhere outside the expanded Solar System (or even to send probes that can return in any useful time period) is looking less and less practical, given the time and massive energy costs required. The fastest-moving object ever built by humans is the Parker Solar Probe, which reached a speed of 394,736 miles per hour (or 110 miles per second) on its dash to the sun in 2023.

Even to reach Pluto from Earth at the maximum speed of the Parker Solar Probe would take 386 days – not counting the time to decelerate.

The nearest star to earth is Proxima Centauri, a small, red dwarf star about 4.24 light-years away. A spaceship traveling at the speed of the Parker Solar Probe would take roughly 7,200 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

But that offers an upside of sorts. Aliens, friendly or unfriendly, aren’t likely to be arriving any time soon, either to destroy and/or enslave us… or to rescue us from ourselves.

Is that glass half-empty, or half-full?

The other day, while reading a decent but not great SF novel written more than a decade ago, I got to thinking about plotting and plots.

While there are exceptions, I tend to write “straight-line” plots, in the sense that the protagonist is attempting to get from point A to point B. Sometimes, he or she gets there. Sometimes, they get to another end that they didn’t anticipate. There are obstacles, from nature, social and government structures, and from others with conflicting or hostile objectives. Some of those obstacles the protagonist doesn’t even think about until having to confront them, but the obstacles are part of the world or worlds the protagonist must negotiate. It’s not easy, sometimes almost impossible, and the cost is never negligible.

But that’s certainly not the only way to plot. There’s the daisy chain plot, where one thing leads to another, and the protagonist is led and/or misled until he or she figures the way out. Or “the universe is against me” plot, where the protagonist has to smash everything in order to merely survive. Or “the chosen one” plot, featuring generally a less obstacle-ridden version of the hero’s journey.

Whatever the basic plot structure, an accomplished writer can generally make it work out in a believable fashion, but the more elaborate the underlying plot structure, the greater the possibility that a less accomplished author will undermine the believability of the story and the world. But then, in certain types of books or movies, particularly those featuring “massive” superheroes, the plot isn’t the point at all – displaying the powers and skills of the hero is the primary goal of the movie/book.

One thing I have noticed in real life is that there’s almost always someone smarter, stronger, faster, and more capable – and when there’s not, people band together to keep powerful people in line… or become their slaves.

For every George Washington or Cincinnatus, who gave up power willingly, there are scores of would-be dictators who can’t or won’t – and that’s another plot.

After more than fifty years of writing professionally, I find it interesting and amusing to read reviews of my books and others, especially when I see readers and reviewers disputing how good or how “realistic” a novel is.

Part of the sense of reality perceived by readers lies in the ability of the writer to convey actions, images, allusions, illusions, and facts in a way that effectively creates a believable world and narrative, but part lies in the knowledge and perceptions of the individual reader.

We all have our bête noires, those factual errors or internal irreconcilable inconsistencies perpetrated by an author that degrade or destroy our enjoyment of the work. Years ago, I wrote a review of a moderately successful SF novel, set in the then-present in the Washington, D.C., area. I wrote that the book was decent and moderately entertaining, but that the numerous factual errors kept it from being better, and I gave examples. The editor begged to differ and said he wouldn’t publish the review unless I removed the examples. I demurred, and the review was never published. The book was a moderate bestseller and was adapted into a movie, which received mixed reviews.

I wasn’t wrong about the errors, but readers unfamiliar with the Washington, D.C., area and culture wouldn’t have known the difference, although some other errors were factual. For some readers, those kinds of errors can destroy the enjoyment of a novel. For others, the errors don’t even register. My father was an attorney and an avid reader, but he couldn’t stand most legal representations in movies, television, or novels, which he found not only unrealistic, but totally unbelievable.

As a writer, I do my best to avoid such errors and inconsistencies, but some authors dismiss any “reality” that gets in the way of the action or blood and gore, and they’re likely correct that too much “reality” can kill the story for those who don’t know the facts or don’t care.

In 2015, Tor published my very hard SF novel, Solar Express, which, as a “semi-joint” project with NASA, was read by several NASA scientists who agreed that I handled the science accurately. There were quite a number of one star reader reviews, with comments about it being too technical and dull, as well as five-star reviews from readers citing the accuracy, with a lot of reviews in the middle saying that they liked my other work better.

The bottom line, from what I’ve seen, is that every reader has his or her view of what’s realistic in fiction, and fiction that’s “excessively” realistic appeals to comparatively few readers, and that’s been true as far back as Jane Austen, few of whose female protagonists would have snared their male in any truly accurate portrayal of the reality of that time in history.