Every so often, I come head-to-head with an unsettling fact – being a “realistic” novelist hurts my sales and sometimes even upsets my editors.  What do I mean?   Well… after nearly twenty years as an economist, analyst, administrator, and political appointee in Washington, I know that all too many of the novelistic twists and events, such as those portrayed by Dan Brown, are not only absurd, but often physically and or politically impossible.  That’s one of the reasons why I don’t write political “thrillers,” my one attempt at such proving dramatically that the vast majority of readers definitely don’t want their realism close to home.

Unfortunately, a greater number don’t want realism to get in the way, or not too much in the way, in science fiction or fantasy, and my editors are most sensitive to this.  This can lead to “discussions” in which they want more direct action, while I’m trying to find a way to make the more realistic indirect events more action-oriented without compromising totally what I have learned about human nature, institutions, and human political motivations.  For example, there are reasons why high-tech societies tend to be lower-violence societies, but the principal one is very simple.  High-tech weaponry is very destructive, and societies where it is used widely almost invariably don’t stay high-tech.  In addition, violence is expensive, and successful societies find ways to satisfy majority requirements without extensive violence [selective and targeted violence is another question].

Another factor is that people seeking power and fortune wish to be able to enjoy both after they obtain them – and you can’t enjoy either for long if you’ve destroyed the society in order to be in control. This does not apply to fanatics, no matter what such people claim, but the vast majority of fanatics don’t wish to preserve society, but to destroy – or “simplify” – it because it represents values antithetical to theirs.

Now… this sort of understanding means that there’s a lot less “action” and destruction in my books than in most other books dealing with roughly similar situations and societies, and that people actually consider factors like costs and how to pay for things.  There are also more meals and meetings – as I’m often reminded, and not always in a positive manner – but meals and meetings are where most policies and actions are decided in human society.  But, I’m reminded by my editors, they slow things down.

Yes… and no…

In my work, there’s almost always plenty of action at the end, and some have even claimed that there’s too much at the end, and not enough along the way.  But… that’s life.  World War II, in all its combat phases, lasted slightly less than six years.  The economics, politics, meetings, meals, treaties, elections, usurpations of elections, and all the factors leading up to the conflict lasted more than twenty years, and the days of actual fighting, for any given soldier, were far less than that. My flight instructors offered a simple observation on being a naval aviator:  “Flying is 99 percent boredom, and one percent sheer terror.”  Or maybe it was 98% boredom, one percent exhilaration, and one percent terror.

On a smaller and political scale, the final version of Obama’s health care bill was passed in days – after a year of ongoing politicking, meetings, non-meetings, posturing, special elections, etc.   The same is true in athletics – the amount of time spent in training, pre-season, practices, etc, dwarfs the time of the actual contest, and in football, for example, where a theoretical hour of playing time takes closer to three hours, there’s actually less than fifteen minutes of actual playing time where players are in contact or potential contact.

Obviously, fiction is to entertain, not to replicate reality directly, because few read to get what amounts to a rehash of what is now a very stressful life for many, but the question every writer faces is how close he or she hews to the underlying realities of how human beings interact with others and with their societies.  For better or worse, I like my books to present at least somewhat plausible situations facing the characters, given, of course, the underlying technical or magical assumptions.

Often my editors press for less realism, or at least a greater minimization of the presentation of that realism.  I press back.  Sometimes, it’s not pretty. So far, at least, we’re still talking to each other.

So far…

When a science fiction writer starts pondering the basics of science, especially outside the confines of a story or novel, the results can be ugly.  But…there’s this question, and a lot of them that arise from it, or cluster around it… or something.

Does light really maintain a constant speed in a vacuum and away from massive gravitational forces?

Most people, I’m afraid, would respond by asking, “Does it matter?”  or “Who cares?”

Physicists generally insist that it does, and most physics discussions deal with the issue by saying that photons behave as if they have zero mass at rest [and if I’m oversimplifying grossly, I’m certain some physicist will correct me], which allows photons to travel universally and generally invariably [again in a vacuum, etc.] at the speed of light, which is a tautology, if one thinks about it.  Of course, this is also theoretical, because so far as I can determine, no one has ever been able to observe a photon “at rest.”

BUT… here’s the rub, as far as I’m concerned.  Photons are/carry energy.  There’s no doubt about that.  The earth is warmed by the photonic flow we call sunlight.  Lasers produce coherent photonic flow strong enough to cut metal or perform delicate eye surgery.

Second, if current evidence is being interpreted correctly, black holes are massive enough to stop the flow of light.  Now… if photons have no mass, how could that happen, since the current interpretation is that the massive gravitational force stops the emission of light, suggesting that photons do have mass, if only an infinitesimal and currently unmeasurable mass.

These lead to another disturbing [at least for me] question.  Why isn’t the universe “running down”?  Don’t jump on me yet.  A great number of noted astronomers have asserted that such is indeed happening – but they’re talking about that on the macro level, that is, the entropy of energy and matter that will eventually lead to a universe where matter and energy are all at the same level everywhere, without all those nice gradients that make up comparative vacuum and stars and planets and hot and cold.  I’m thinking about winding down on the level of quarks and leptons, so to speak.

Current quantum mechanics seems to indicate that what we think of as “matter” is really a form of structured energy, and those various structures determine the physical and chemical properties of elements and more complex forms of matter.  And that leads to my problem.  Every form of energy that human beings use and operate “runs down” unless it is replenished with more energy from an outside source.

Yet the universe has been in existence for something like fifteen billion years, and current scientific theory is tacitly assuming that all these quarks and leptons – and photons – have the same innate internal energy levels today as they did fifteen billion years ago.

The scientific quest for a “theory of everything” tacitly assumes, as several noted scientists have already observed, unchanging universal scientific principles, such as an unvarying weak force on the leptonic level and a constant speed of light over time.  On a practical basis, I have to question that.  Nothing seems to stay exactly the same in the small part of the universe which I inhabit, but am I merely generalizing on the basis of my observations and anecdotal experience?

All that leads to the last question.  If those internal energies of quarks and leptons and photons are all declining at the same rate, how would we even know?  Could it be that those “incredible speeds” at which distant galaxies appear to be moving are more an artifact of changes in the speed of light?  Or in the infinitesimal decline of the very energy levels of all quarks, etc., in our universe?

Could our universe be running down from the inside out without our even knowing it?

A few weeks so ago, I watched two college teams play for the right to go to the NCAA tournament.  One team, down twenty points at halftime, rallied behind the sensational play of a single star and pulled out the victory by one point in the last seconds.  That was the way television commentators and the print media reported it.  I saw it very differently. One of the starting guards for the losing team missed seven out of twelve free throws, two of them in the last fifteen seconds.  This wasn’t a fluke, a bad day for that player – he had a year-long 40% free throw success percentage.  And just how many games in the NCAA tournament have been lost by “bad” free throw shooting?  Or won by good free throw shooting?  More than just a handful.

Good free-throw shooting is clearly important to basketball success.  Just look at the NBA.  While the free-throw shooting average for NCAA players is 69%, this year’s NBA average is 77%, and 98% of NBA starters have free throw percentages above 60%, with 75% of those starters making more than three-quarters of their free throws.

To my mind, this is a good example of what lies behind excellence – the ability to master even the most boring aspect of one’s profession. Another point associated with this is that simply knowing what a free throw is and when it is employed isn’t the same as being able to do it.  It requires practice – lots of practice. Shooting free throws day after day and improving technique is not exciting; it’s boring.  But the fact that there are very, very few poor free-throw shooters in the NBA is a good indication that mastery of the boring pays off.

The same is true in writing.  Learning grammar and even spelling [because spell-checkers don’t catch everything, by any means] is also boring and time consuming, and there are some writers who are, shall I say, slightly grammatically challenged, but most writers know their grammar.  They have to, because editors usually don’t have the time or the interest in cleaning up bad writing.  It also gets boring to proofread page after page of what you’ve written, from the original manuscript, the copy-edited manuscript, the hardcover galleys, the paperback galleys, and so on… but it’s necessary.

Learning how to fly, which most people believe is exciting, consists of a great deal of boredom, from learning to follow checklists to the absolute letter, to practicing and practicing landings, take-offs, and emergency procedures hour after hour, day after day until they’re second nature.  All that practice is tedious… and absolutely necessary.

My opera director wife is having greater difficulty with each year in getting students to memorize their lines and music – because it’s boring – but you can’t sing opera or musical theatre if you don’t know your music and lines.

I could go on and on, detailing the necessary “boring” requirements of occupation after occupation, but the point behind all this is that our media, our educational system, and all too many parents have instilled a message that learning needs to be interesting and fun, and that there’s something wrong with the learning climate if the students lose interest.  Students have always lost interest.  We’re genetically primed to react to the “new” because it was once a survival requirement.  But the problem today is that the skills required to succeed in any even moderately complex society require mastery of the basics, i.e., boring skills, or sub-skills, before one can get into the really interesting aspects of work.  Again, merely being able to look something up isn’t the same as knowing it, understanding what it means, and being able to do it, time after time without thinking about it and without having to look it up repeatedly.

And the emphasis on fun and making it interesting is obscuring the need for fundamental mastery of skills, and shortchanging all too many young people.

Last week, in my semi-masochistic reading of reviews, I came across a review of The Magic of Recluce that really jarred me.  It wasn’t that the review was bad, or even a rave.  The reviewer noted the strengths of the book and some areas she thought weak, or at least that felt rough to her.  What jarred me were the words and the references which compared it to books that had been published years afterward, as if The Magic of Recluce happened to be copying books that actually appeared after it.  Now, this may have been as much my impression as what the reviewer meant, but it struck a chord – off-key – in my mind because I’ve seen more than a few reviews, especially in recent years, that note that The Magic of Recluce was good, decent… or whatever, but not as original as [fill in the blank].

Now… I’m not about to get into comparative “quality” — not in this blog, at least, but I have to admit that the “not so original” comment, when comparing Recluce to books published later, concerns me.  At the time the book was published, almost all the quotes and reviews noted its originality.  That it seems less “original” now to newer and often younger readers is not because it is less original, but because there are far more books out with differing magic systems.  Brandon Sanderson, for example, has developed more than a few such systems, but all of them came well after my systems in Recluce, Erde, and Corus, and Brandon has publicly noted that he read my work well before he was a published author.

The word “original” derives from “origin,” i.e., the beginning, with the secondary definition that it is not a copy or a duplicate of other work.  In that sense, Tolkien’s work and mine are both original, because our systems and the sources from which we drew are substantially different.  Tolkien drew from linguistics and the greater and lesser Eddas, and, probably through his Inking connections with C.S. Lewis, slightly from Wagner.  I developed my magic system from a basis of physics.  Those are the “origins.”

The other sense of “original” is that signifying preceding that which follows, and in that sense, my work is less original than that of Tolkien, but more “original” than that of Sanderson or others who published later, for two reasons.  First, I wrote it earlier that did those who followed me, and second, I developed magic systems unlike any others [although the Spellsong Cycle magic has similarities to Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger, but a fundamentally different technical concept].

There’s also a difference between “original” and “unique.”  While it is quite possible for an original work not to be unique, a truly unique work must be original, although it can be derivative.

Inn any case, my concerns are nothing compared to those raised by the reader review I once read that said that Tolkien’s work was “sort of neat,” even if he did rip off a lot from Terry Brooks.

The other day I received an email from a faithful reader who noted that he had stopped reading The Soprano Sorceress because the song magic was “too easy.” Over the years I’ve received other comments along the lines that all she had to do was open her mouth and sing.

Right. Except that under the magic system in Erde, the song had to be perfectly on pitch and in key; the words had to specify what had to be accomplished; and the accompaniment had to match. In the opening of that book, a sorcerer destroyed a violinist whose accompaniment was imperfect — because it could have threatened his life. Comparatively few professional singers, except classically trained opera singers, can maintain such perfection in a live performance. And some of those don’t have the best diction — yet clear diction would be vital in song spell-casting. Now… try it in the middle of a battle or when your life is under immediate threat.

I bring this up because there are certain skills in any society, but particularly in our society, that almost everyone thinks they can do. Most people believe they can sing, or write, or paint almost as well as the professionals, and almost all of them think they can certainly critique such with great validity.

I’m sorry. Most people have a far higher opinion of their skills than can be objectively confirmed — and that’s likely an understatement. Even in noted music conservatories, only a minority of graduates are good enough, talented enough, and dedicated enough to sing professionally. The same is true of noted writing programs or established art programs. For that matter, comparatively few graduates of noted business schools ever make it to the top levels of business organizations or corporations.

A similar attitude pervades our view of sports. Tens of millions of American men identity with sports and criticize and second-guess athletic professionals whose skills they could never match under pressures they can only vaguely comprehend. Monday morning quarterbacking used to be a truly derogatory term, enough so that its use tended to stop someone cold. Now it’s almost jocular, and everyone’s an expert in everything.

Is all this because our media makes everything look easy? Because the media only concentrate on the handful of individuals in the arts, athletics, and professions who are skilled, dedicated, and talented enough to make it look “easy.” Or is it because our society has decided to tell students that they’re wonderful, or have “special” talents when they’re failing?

The bottom line is that doing anything well is not “easy,” no matter how effortless it looks, especially when one of the talents of the best is to make that accomplishment look effortless… and that usually means that only those who truly understand that skill really know what it took to make it look easy or effortless.