As mentioned elsewhere, I’ve agreed to write a story for a military science fiction and fantasy anthology entitled The Razor’s Edge, which is one of three anthologies to be published by the small press Zombies Need Brains and being funded by a kickstarter.

The Razor’s Edge explores the thin line between being a rebel and an insurgent in military SF&F, while Guilds & Glaives features slashing blades and dark magic. The third anthology – Second Round — allows readers to travel through time with Gilgamesh in a time-traveling bar.

If you’d like to help bring these themes to life, you can back the Kickstarter at www.tinyurl.com/insurgenturbar and find out more about the small press at http:www.zombiesneedbrains.com!

“Does it make sense?” That sounds like a simple enough question that can be applied to a business proposition, an invention, a novel or story, or even a proposed law. Then… why do we see so many impractical business ideas, inventions that never pan out, stories that are ludicrous, and laws that seem to us to make the situation worse?

At the same time, I’ve seen ideas that I’ve thought were preposterous result in millions of dollars in sales of one sort or another. Back when I was a teenager, there was the hula-hoop craze. Why would anyone want to gyrate around so that they could keep a plastic ring some three feet in diameter continuously whirling around their mid-section?

And then there were – and still are – lava lamps, in which a glob of gloop in a sealed and lighted glass container gets heated, expands and rises, then cools and falls. There must have been thousands of different combinations of colored liquid and differently colored gloop, all so people could either sit and watch gloop or not watch gloop but have it for background visuals. Exactly why has never made sense to me.

I even question the popularity of golf. Why would any sane individual really want to whack a round hard ball across 7,000 odd yards of grass, sand, and water… merely to see who wins by whacking it the fewest times between eighteen holes in the ground. Now… being somewhat commercial, I can see why professional golfers do it. There’s a LOT of money there when you’re whacking for money, but three to four hours of solid masochism for pleasure?

I also can’t say I understand the spectator side of NASCAR racing. Sitting in the sun or rain or whatever watching cars go around in a circle for hours on end, while drinking too much beer [but then, maybe that’s part of the “enjoyment”] makes little sense to me.

But that’s not really the question. The better question is not whether something makes sense, but to whom it makes sense, or to whom it appeals.

A law requiring sloped curb cuts makes little sense to a healthy individual, but a four inch curb to someone in the wheelchair is as much of a barrier to them as a ten foot fence is to someone healthy. For many disabled individuals, stairs are not a way to the next floor but a barrier to them.

Golf may not make sense to me, but it was my father’s exercise [he carried his own bag and walked], relaxation, and escape. I, obviously, love fantasy and science fiction. F&SF never made sense to him.

And those are some of the reasons why “Does it make sense?” can be incredibly misleading.

For what little it’s worth, I’ve now posted over 1,000 entries just in the “Blog Entry” section, the first one being in March of 2007. That doesn’t count the less frequent entries in the other sections of the website. For the most part, that’s meant writing a post of at least 400 words, and often over 1,000 words, twice a week for over ten years. At a minimum, that’s well over half a million words, or roughly the equivalent of 2.8 “average” Modesitt novels.

I don’t have any intention of stopping soon, since we live in “interesting times,” and that means there is always something to speculate about, whether it’s why such diverse fields as hard science, computer technology, history, and Fortune 500 CEOs are far more misogynistic [in general] than other fields, or why we still haven’t found a commercial way to fly a supersonic passenger aircraft, or why so many people pit religion against science, as if they don’t both exist in the same world.

Then there’s ongoing and fascinating question of why Congress has accomplished less each session, even though the intelligence levels of individual members of Congress are largely much higher than were those of their predecessors. I also have the suspicion, but no way to prove it, that more often than not, the less intelligent candidate for President has been the winner. Is that just my perception, happenstance, or does the American electorate have a distrust of “elites,” intellectual and otherwise?

And then there’s technology and all the questions that it raises. Just last week, the Atlantic ran an article entitled, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” I don’t know about “destroyed,” but I’m not so sure that it hasn’t at least impaired part of a generation, particularly their attention span, given what I’ve seen on college campuses and elsewhere. We certainly have a generation, as well as some of those of older generations, who can’t walk or drive safely because they’re too enamored of their smartphones, and that doesn’t speak much for either their upbringing or their intelligence – but then, maybe it’s just a latest manifestation of teenagers’ [and those who haven’t ever outgrown being teenagers]unthinking belief in personal invulnerability.

As for books, we’re seeing the greatest change in publishing and reading since the introduction of the mass market paperback in the 1950s, and there’s no telling exactly where it’s going, except that, in fantasy and science fiction, that once-vaunted mass market paperback is taking a far bigger hit than in other genres. Is that because F&SF readers are technological opinion-leaders or just because we’ve all run out of shelf space at a time when the price of housing continues to rise?

For those of you who’ve followed the site for its more than ten years, and for those who joined along the way, even if today’s your first read, thank you all!

Reality doesn’t care what you believe. Or as Daniel Patrick Moynihan [and quite a few others] said, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”

Put another way, just because you believe in something with all your heart and soul doesn’t mean that it’s so. President Trump’s assertion that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever doesn’t make it so. Nor is climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. It’s not a matter of opinion that the latest iceberg that broke off the Larson C ice shelf is roughly the size of Delaware, nor is it a matter of opinion that the Arctic ice cover is diminishing radically.

No matter what conservative politicians claim, lowering taxes won’t increase higher paying jobs for the working and middle classes; lower taxes will benefit primarily the upper middle class and the upper class, particularly the top tenth of one percent, simply because they make more money. For example, the average household in the middle 20 percent of earners [the average American taxpayer] pays slightly more than $8,000 in federal taxes, on income of about $56,000. The average household in the top one percent [the rich taxpayer] pays about $430,000 in federal taxes on an income of $1,500,000. A one percent cut in the tax rate means the average family would get back less than $800, while a one percent cut for the rich taxpayer would give back more than $16,000. For an ultra-rich taxpayer, with an income of $100,000.000, a one percent tax cut would give back one million dollars.

No matter what anyone claims, U.S. manufacturing has not declined. In fact, the U.S. now manufactures twice as much as it did in 1984. The political “problem” is that it does so with five million fewer workers than it did in 2000.

The holocaust did exist; the Germans killed more than eleven million people, including six million Jews and five million others they thought “undesirable,” the second largest group of which totaled than a million gypsies. The Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks also took place from 1914 through 1918, with the deaths of between 1.5 and 1.9 million Armenians, yet the present Turkish government contends that the massacre was not genocide. Both events have been documented extensively.

Various surveys show that Americans believe that immigrants, defined as people not born in the United States, account for between thirty-two and forty percent of the population; federal statistics place the number at slightly above thirteen percent. People also believe Muslim immigrants are 16% of the U.S. population; the actual number is one percent.

We all have a choice. We can look at the facts and then form or change opinions, or we can form opinions and then invent or search for facts of dubious origin to justify them. Which do you do?

This coming week classes will begin at the local university, and with those classes come expenses, tuition, fees, room and board, and, of course, textbooks. Except, unfortunately, more and more students aren’t buying textbooks.

The dean of the university library cited a study that found as many as half the students in college classes, especially classes that required expensive textbooks, never purchased those textbooks – and unsurprisingly those who failed to purchase textbooks had lower grades and a greater chance of failure. But why don’t students purchase textbooks? The usual reason students give is cost. The cost of textbooks for the “average” student runs from $500 to $800 a year, depending on the college and the subject matter, and in some fields the costs can exceed $1,000.

But are those costs unreasonable historically? I still have a number of my college texts, and some of them actually have the prices printed on them. I ran those numbers through an inflation calculator and discovered that, in terms of current dollars, I paid far more for books in 1963 than students today pay on a book for book basis, and back then we were required to read far more books than most college students read today.

Today’s student priorities are clearly different, and for whatever reasons, a great number of them aren’t buying textbooks [cellphones and videogames, fast food, but not books]. For this reason, the local university is promoting “open texts,” i.e., textbooks written by professors or others and placed without cost on the university network for students to use. Not surprisingly, students love the idea. It costs them nothing, and they don’t even have to go to a bookstore.

The idea bothers me, more than a little. And no, I’ve never written a textbook, and despite what people claim, those professors I know who have didn’t write them to make money. They wrote them because what they wanted their students to learn wasn’t in the available existing books. The royalties and/or fees they received usually barely reimbursed them for their time and effort in creating the text. So how did textbooks get so expensive? First, they’re not that expensive, given the time and expertise it takes to create a good text – and all of the diagrams, tables, and the like are expensive to print [even in electronic books they take a lot of time and effort]. Second, because fewer and fewer students are buying the textbooks, the unit costs of producing them go up.

Maybe I’m just skeptical by nature, but so far with each year that the internet expands, the percentage of accurate information declines. With all these professors producing these “open texts,” where exactly is the quality control? Where is the scrutiny that at least produces some attempt at objectivity? When a textbook is printed, it’s there in black and white. It can’t be altered and anyone who wants to pay the price can obtain it. Just how available are these so-called open texts to outsiders? Against what standards can they be measured? Is there any true protection against plagiarism?

I have yet to see these questions being addressed. The only issue appears to be that because students think textbooks are too expensive, they aren’t buying them, and those that aren’t buying aren’t learning as well. So, the university answer is to give them something to read that doesn’t cost them anything.

Yet I can’t dismiss the textbook problem. It does exist, and part of the problem is also the typical college bookstore. They’re under pressure not to lose money. So what do they do? They only order the number of books that a course sold the previous year or semester. Even when half the students in a class can’t get books and want to pay for them, too many bookstores can’t be bothered, and students get screwed, especially the poor but diligent ones for whom every dollar counts, and who can’t afford to rush to the bookstore immediately.

On more than one occasion, my wife the music professor has had to order opera scores personally [and pay for them] and then sell them to students [since it’s rather hard to learn the music and produce an opera if the singers don’t have the music to learn] so that her performers all had the music. And, of course, doing so is totally against university policy. But then, cancelling a scheduled opera because the music isn’t available isn’t good, either, and copying the scores is not only against copyright law, but also runs up the copying budget.

But this is what happens when the “business model” of the bookstore meets the realities of publishing costs and students who are either unwilling or unable to afford textbooks.