A week or so ago, I received the worst review of a book of mine in thirty years.  Not surprisingly, it was the Publishers Weekly review of Empress of Eternity.  The only good thing I can say about the review was that it appeared almost two months after the book was released.  Now… I’ve had good reviews and not so good reviews, and questionable reviews throughout my career, but never a review that so thoroughly trashed a book, especially a book that had received numerous rave and favorable reviews elsewhere.  I’ve already been the first to admit that Empress of Eternity, like Haze, is not a book to appeal to everyone, and I certainly wouldn’t object to a review that said just that… and said why.  What bothers me about this particular review is that it exemplifies a trend in both books and movies that is both deplorable and, I believe, culturally dangerous.

By its very approach, the review essentially states that, if something isn’t immediately obvious and clear, it’s trash.  If it’s not simple and direct, then it’s worthless.  That’s like saying a one pound hamburger with American cheese is far superior to a custom-broiled filet mignon with cordon bleu béarnaise sauce.  Obviously, tastes differ, and there are times when a hamburger just hits the spot… but please don’t tell me the hamburger is superior in culinary terms.

It’s becoming so that too many reviewers and readers can’t tell the difference between a book that has no characterization to speak of and one in which the characterization is nuanced and subtle.  If the writer doesn’t effectively come out and say, “Joseph was devastated,” these readers and reviewers don’t pick up the other clues.  The same is true of foreshadowing.  The author practically has to post signposts that state “this is important,” or it goes over their heads.  This tendency isn’t new.  There have been readers with such problems since there have been books.  What is new is that, in this “new” era of “everything in your face,” there are more and more of them, and they’re infiltrating the ranks of the reviewers and critics.

The same trends have already occurred in movie-making, and it’s to the point where almost any movie trailer will tell me if it’s an “in your face” movie.  In fact, almost all the block-buster movies are these days, and it’s getting harder and harder to find movies with depth, subtlety and nuance.  Once upon a time, the banana peel humor was largely limited to the Saturday morning movie serials, and the scatological humor to pornography.  No more. Once upon a time, many movies [certainly not all, or even a majority, but enough that one didn’t have to search through a haystack of dross] actually presented brilliant dialogue and depth.  No more.

This cheapening and over-simplification of societal entertainment bleeds over into everything else, from supersizing fast foods to the Sarah Palinization of politics, where “in your face” direct simple solutions are the answer.  And because everyone has a “simple” solution, no one can understand that big simple solutions don’t work… and never have, not without an extraordinary cost to people. Unfortunately, this past weekend we’ve had what appears to be a reminder of those costs with the shooting of a moderate Congresswoman in Arizona, who, from all accounts was popular with the majority of her district, and unpopular with the extremists in both parties.

So I’ll say it again.  Big, simple, extreme solutions aren’t the answer, and never have been. After all, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was certainly a big and simple solution.  So were Hitler’s Third Reich, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Castro’s Cuban Revolution… as well as all the ethnic cleansing movements throughout the globe.  By contrast, from the beginning the American Revolution embodied compromise, a fact conveniently overlooked by the Tea Partiers. Interestingly enough, what it created lasted… so far, but will it survive the “in your face” era?

As a result of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords last week, there has been an outpouring of rhetoric and petitions along the lines that Americans need to turn away from appeals to hatred and violence.  I certainly agree with the sentiment, but this movement in a large degree begs the question.  The first question is why in recent years Americans have turned to more and more violent rhetoric and why the political climate has turned uglier and uglier.  The second question is whether “debate” is the answer.

I don’t think so, at least not given the way debate is being approached today.  It all reminds me of a woman I know, who divorced her husband when no one could understand why, since he was such a rational and logical fellow. Her answer, which almost no one accepted or understood, was that his logical and rational approach was the problem.  Whenever she disagreed with him and tried to explain her views, he was so busy thinking up arguments to undermine her position that he never listened to what she was saying or what lay behind what she was saying.  And that is the problem with political and social debate and problems today – on all sides of the political spectrum.

Everyone’s talking, and no one is listening.  The Republicans are determined to repeal the health bill.  Is anyone there listening to the more than forty million who don’t have and can’t get health care in a time when healthcare costs are spiraling out of control.  The Democrats refuse to consider limitations on legal claims and windfalls for attorneys proposed by the Republicans, which certainly add to health care costs.  The Democrats demand tax increases on the “wealthy,” but insist the wealthy include the upper middle class and small businesses that have always generated the majority of “new” jobs in the economy, while the Republicans want the uber-rich, those who make millions, to get the same tax cuts as everyone else, when the corporate fat cats are the ones who are making millions by cutting jobs. Citizens in border states face huge problems with illegal immigrants, and Congress has done nothing.  On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of young people brought to this country illegally as children who know no other homeland, and Congress isn’t listening to them, either, and yet deporting or allowing them no legal status punishes them not for what they did, but for the sins of their parents.  The Democratic Party ignores the problems illegal immigration has created, and the Republican rhetoric ignores the suffering of too many innocents.  The Republican rhetoric, if followed literally, would create an American version of the Berlin Wall, but not doing anything isn’t working, either, and not allowing a path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants who’ve lived here for years and who had no choice in the matter, isn’t exactly in keeping with the American tradition.  The list of polarized issues goes on and on… and everyone’s talking, and no one is listening… and the anger continues to build.

What we need is more listening… and some compromise… so that Americans can get a sense that something is being done.  Try splitting the difference.  Let each side get something, and I don’t mean the past political compromise of spending more money and splitting the spoils. And it might not hurt to ask another question when facing yet another “simple” solution: How will this benefit or affect everyone? 

Debate isn’t an answer.  We’ve had years of it. Without more listening, more debate will only create more hate.

In 1865, an Englishman named William Stanley Jevons published a book entitled The Coal Question, as I discovered in an article entitled “The Efficiency Dilemma,” in the December 20^th issue of The New Yorker.  What was striking about the book was its “proof” that energy efficiency leads not to less energy use, but more.  Over the years, economists have debated this proof, and others that followed, but the conclusions noted in the article seem indisputable:  Energy usage for any given application of the same task and scope tends to decline, but overall energy usage increases.  Cars become more efficient… so they become larger with more capabilities, and their overall worldwide usage increases markedly.  The same is true of refrigerators and air conditioners, computers, cell phones, etc.

And the result?  Overall energy usage continues to climb… and it will continue to grow even as energy efficiency increases as well.  In short, we can’t “efficiency” our way out of the energy problem.  Does that mean we shouldn’t continue the efforts toward greater efficiency?  No… we need all the efficiency we can squeeze out of our technology. 

The problem is economic… and political.  When goods or services are less expensive, we humans use more of them.  We also have a “good idea” [whether we do or not] of what those goods and services “should” cost.  An example of how this perception can be skewed was the furor over ebook prices in mid-2010.  Many readers insisted ebooks should be cheaper because electronic downloads and copies cost almost nothing, and blank discs are cheap.  They really didn’t consider all the other expenses going into producing a book.  In essence, they were insisting that ebooks be priced at the marginal cost of production, rather than factoring in any of the sunk costs, or the lost revenues coming from the decline in hardcover and paperbook sales.

In the case of energy, however, governments and societies face a different problem.  Energy is cheaper, in real terms, than it used to be, and people are using more.  The only way to cut back on energy usage is to make it more expensive, or to ration its usage.  And since technology is making it currently less expensive overall, and since people don’t want to pay more for “cleaner” energy such as wind and solar power, the only way to increase costs is either to mandate greater use of cleaner energy or to increase the taxes on energy.  This, needless to say, is politically unpopular, even if government made such energy taxes “progressive,” with higher tax rates on larger energy consumers.  People would create a political backlash, and others would opt for their own generators and solar panels once the taxes got too high.

Energy rationing would effectively be a non-starter in most democratic nations.

And, as a result, it appears that the energy “problem” will simply be pushed farther into the future, until true costs can no longer be denied, and prices inevitably rise, along with the costs of goods and services requiring energy inputs – and that’s almost everything.

Scientific findings in two areas seem almost in conflict, at least with regard to the question of whether there’s other intelligent life in the universe and how frequent it might be.  The first set of findings reports that life exists across a far greater spectrum of temperatures and pressures than most biologists dared to hope.  The second set of findings comes from astronomers, who are finding that, at least so far, other solar systems appear far more bizarre than ours, with planets in odd orbits, planets circling their suns in retrograde orbits, massive gas giants in tight solar orbits, all creating conditions that appear less favorable to life, or to complex cellular life, than in our solar system.

At this point, it’s clear that we are far from knowing enough to speculate knowledgeably about the frequency of life in the universe, let alone intelligent life… and yet…

Could it just be that life, of all sorts and kinds, arises under all ranges of conditions and under strange suns and stars?  Given the billions and billions of planets in the universe, and given the range of conditions under which life has evolved on earth, how could there not be life elsewhere?

But… given the immensity of the universe, and the distance between stars, will we ever know for certain?  And does it matter?

I’m afraid it does.  It matters because too many people in too many cultures have come to believe that somehow “we” – homo sapiens – are special merely because we exist, that some deity created the entire universe and put us at the center of it.

Yet… how special are we?  In almost every decade over the past century, archeologists and paleontologists have discovered yet another variety of human forebear – homo neanderthalensis, homo floresiensis, homo africanus, homo erectus, etc., and many of these were not our ancestors, but cousins.  And all of them are extinct, with the exception of the Neanderthals, who live on in the genes of much of the world’s population.

Recently, a team of archeologists discovered a big-brained dinosaur, one they believe was on the way to what we would call true intelligence – except it ran out of time when the climate changed.  Perhaps it, too, thought it was special, merely through the fact of existing.

Will it take the discovery of alien artifacts and signals to prove that we’re not that unique in the grand scheme of the universe?  Or would that discovery just trigger xenophobia and racial paranoia?

I don’t know, and I doubt anyone does, but what I do find intriguing as a science fiction writer is that the majority of novels written in the genre and dealing with such subjects tend to deal with humans trying to prove they’re special or acting as if we are.  All that, of course, raises the question of whether, if there are aliens out there, they’d even want to deal with us at present.

Certainly, there were many changes in the world, and in the United States, in 2010, but in many areas things seemed to stay the same.  Yet, which of the changes were “real,” and which of those things that seemed unchanged truly did change?

In the book field, an area obviously of concern to me, it’s fair to say that ebooks “arrived,” not that they haven’t been available to some degree for years, but 2010 marked the first year in which they accounted for a truly significant fraction of total book sales, although the analysts will likely be trying to ascertain exactly what that fraction was for months to come.  With ebooks has also come the rise of publishers who are essentially ebook only, and who rely on print-on-demand trade paperbacks, if pressed for a physical product.  Whether such publishers will become a larger part of the market or fade away is uncertain, as of the moment.

In science, one of the “biggest” announcements, although it received comparatively little media attention, was that astronomers have determined that the universe contains more than three times as many stars as previously thought because the number of so-called red dwarf stars had been grossly undercounted, largely because optical telescopes on Earth could not pick many of them up, even in stellar areas comparatively closer to Earth.  This also increases the chances for alien life because red dwarf stars have a much longer and more stable lifespan than do brighter stars.  Will this change anything here on Earth?  Hardly likely. 

In U.S. politics, of course, the balance of power in the legislative branch shifted considerably with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and the Democratic loss of a “gridlock-proof” [not that it always was] Senate.  That shift will likely result in very little being accomplished in 2011 or 2012 because the Republicans don’t want to accomplish anything but to roll back what the Democrats did, and the Democrats have enough votes – and the President – to stop such efforts, and neither side has either the initiative, intelligence, nor the will to work out compromise solutions.  So there really wasn’t much change there, either.

The war in Afghanistan continued in 2010, with escalating U.S. casualties, and is now the longest military conflict in U.S. history.  While the media continues to report, in small stories and back pages, various events, the majority of the American people remained content to pay lip service to the military, to allow private contractor profiteering, and in general only complained about it in terms of siphoning off funding for their desired social programs.  In short, no real change – except, of course, to the families and lovers of the increased numbers of dead and wounded.

2010 has been established as one of the three warmest years on record, at least in technological times, despite unseasonably cold winters in the northeast U.S. and in Europe, and that apparent paradox will continue to fuel opposition to dealing with the real issue of global warming, resulting in no real change in actions or positions.

The other real social change heralded in 2010, especially in western Europe and the United States, memorialized in part by the movie – The Social Network [because all momentous social movements need cinematic commemoration] – was the verification that the only forms of social contact that matter are those created and maintained by electronic means.  This is indeed a significant change, marked by the decline and possible demise of:  first meetings with significant others conducted with physical presence; actual conversations without overt and covert electronic interruptions and/or additions; efficient work habits and sustained mental concentration; and, of course, social niceties such as written paper thank-you notes.

In the end, did much really change?