Science fiction has postulated the rise and fall of many civilizations, and the causes of those falls are many: warfare, famine, ecological disaster, energy shortages, internal collapse from overindulgence, conquest, pestilence, plague… and doubtless many others.The one cause I’ve not seen explored much is the collapse of infrastructure, and yet I suspect it’s the most likely reason for the failure and fall of a high-tech civilization. When most people talk about infrastructure, they think of highways and bridges, but infrastructure consists of far more than that.

The more people that live in an area and the greater the population concentration, the greater the infrastructure requirements, even in low-tech societies. In higher-tech societies, the physical infrastructure requirements pyramid. A clean and reliable water system, sewage and waste disposal systems, paved streets, roads, and bridges, dependable electric power and other domestic and commercial utilities are just the beginning. We also need redundant communications links, banking and financial systems, not to mention a system for maintaining law and order and adjudicating disputes.

The more infrastructure a society requires, the more each part of that structure has the potential for conflicting with the requirements of a another part, and the more of a society’s resources and effort that is required to keep all the parts of the infrastructure in good repair and operating properly. Also, the more susceptible each section is to damage and failure. For example, in the United States, the electric power grid is being stressed toward its limits, and electric power outages are already increasing. More powerful transmission lines and more power sources increase the vulnerability of the entire system to a host of problems, from solar storms to extreme weather, to simple wear and tear. Repairs or damage to one system can disable other systems, as when a backhoe used to excavate to repair a water line breaks a fiberoptic cable, or when a broken water main floods a subway tunnel, or…

The other significant problem with infrastructure is those aspects dealing with human interaction require acceptance and trust. Even the income taxation system in the United States is based largely on trust and the fact that the majority of Americans and/or their employers largely voluntarily submit their tax payments to maintain government. Likewise, most people obey the law without being forced to do so at gunpoint. Most civil and personal disputes are settled without recourse to physical force. And this is the norm in most countries. It is, however, not universal. No such trust and agreement exists in Somalia… or in other parts of Africa, nor in much of Afghanistan… and we’ve all seen the results. We’ve also seen the results in the financial sector in the United States, where greedy financiers betrayed the trust of investors on a massive scale.

We all know that physical infrastructure fails when it is not maintained, as in the case of collapsing bridges and deteriorating highways, but few politicians or other leaders consider the need to maintain the underlying trust that supports our society’s human infrastructure.

Right now… we need to shore up both aspects of infrastructure, or the science fiction that hasn’t explored infrastructure might end up being history.

In our fast-paced world, almost everyone praises technology, despite small gripes about occasional glitches. But, as I’ve noted before, technology is never an unmitigated blessing, nor is it nearly so cost-effective as its most enthusiastic supporters maintain.

The one problem that few commentators or analysts account for is the continual cost of the learning curve. Every time a computer program changes, those who employ it need to learn the changes and the additional applications, and seldom do either make the program easier or quicker. Every time a new computer application is developed and implemented, the same thing happens. Now… these are generally comparatively minor problems for the geeks and tech-types, but they’re not necessarily that minor for a large segment of the work force, even for high-level professionals, for whom technology is merely a tool and not an end-all and be-all.

I have a five year old computer. It works quite well and handles high-speed internet and the like. Already, however, I’m beginning to run into problems with other people’s information and applications, because my computer can’t take certain upgrades. If I attempt to install and use them, they freeze the computer. I’m certain that a high-level tech could fix some of these, or that if I wanted to invest a considerable number of hours in learning more about the programs and systems… so could I. Except… why exactly should I be faced with the choice of spending time or money to accommodate continual change? In practical terms, I have no choice… but it’s a cost that rapid technical change places on everyone not in the information systems field. It may place a cost on those people, too, but they’re paid for dealing with it. The rest of us aren’t.

In my professorial wife’s field, students expect more and more of the high-tech glitz in the classroom… and often refuse to study old-style recordings [in which refusal they are supported effectively by the administration’s pusillanimity and enthusiastic support of anonymous student evaluations] despite the fact that much of what the students need to study is not yet available in that high-tech forum… or is available only in formats directly incompatible with classroom technology and equipment, for which the administration does do not have funding to upgrade. So she’s spending much of her summer [totally unpaid] making conversions in order to be able to present material efficiently during the coming school year. She’s not a computer tech, and the learning curve is steep, but those who have the technical knowledge don’t have the musical knowledge, and even if she could find technical support, she’d not only have to pay them out of her own pocket, but would need to talk them through everything step by step.

In essence, the popular demand for only the latest technical offerings also imposes a cost on both business and education, a cost that’s not in the slightest paid by high-tech industry, but imposed willy-nilly on everyone else — and this doesn’t count the not-insignificant costs of applications rushed to market with flaws that cause even greater costs.

Do you suppose just a little bit more of a “slow and steady” philosophy might actually be more cost-effective?

Recently, in several other websites and blogs, there have been comments about too much science fiction being negative, as well as too many reviews being positive. There have also been suggestions, if not recently, that the boom in fantasy is partly due to the negativity and lack of “soaring imagination” of current science fiction.

One of the problems in writing science fiction, especially if one wishes to be somewhat accurate as a writer, is that science fiction is supposed to be based on science. That means that conventional faster-than-light travel is improbable, if not impossible, and certainly not possible without the expenditure of vast amounts of energy. The same is true of such devices as matter-transformers and instant travel portals.

Also, in practical terms, in the future escaping or transcending the various messes that human [or other] civilizations have made is not going to be easy, and writing about doing so will necessarily reflect a certain gritty and sometimes pedestrian reality. Currently, Americans, in particular, even with the latest financial difficulties, now live in a society whose dreams are not based on the “work hard, persevere, and you will eventually succeed Horatio Alger philosophy” of earlier generations, but more upon reality TV and lottery instant wish-fulfillment. In addition, the “mouse-click magic” of computers provides another instant escape mechanism. Given these background factors, any literature or other form of entertainment truly based on science and hard reality is going to appeal to a far smaller audience than one based on magic.

Now… there are different ways of approaching magic, as all widely-read followers of fantasy know, and some fantasy authors, as do I, take a more realistic approach to using magic. I believe that magic, if it did exist in human societies, would be used as everything else humans do — as a tool. In such societies, reality does tend to intrude, because magic usage is subject to economics and all the other nasty implications of human society. And, in general, authors who approach magic in this fashion don’t sell as well as those who are more wish-fulfillment and “isn’t this neat”-oriented do.

As for the business of too many, too favorable reviews… for the most part that’s merely sour grapes on the part of the crew that, in general don’t like anything except that narrow spectrum of books that is their special province or those who prefer nitpicking books to death rather than enjoying them. There are, I’d be the first to admit, a very few reviewers who apparently never ever read a book they didn’t like, but that’s still preferable to the even smaller number that never read one that they couldn’t find something wrong with. Most reviewers are very much aware that, in today’s information explosion, most readers are far more interested in what they might find interesting to read than in what not to read. So… if they find a book really terrible, they don’t waste space on it. I can also tell you, from personal experience, even with books that sell well and get generally favorable reviews, there’s still no lack of reviews incorporating nitpicking, nastiness, lack of understanding, and parochialism… and frankly, for the most part we don’t need them, not when only a fraction of the fiction published, even in the F&SF community, is actually reviewed.

For every J.K. Rowling or Robert Jordan, for every Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade, there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of writers and artists with skills far above those of the average educated individual who cannot make a living at their art. For every Pavarotti, there are hundreds of tenors with good, if not great, professional voices whom no one will ever hear except in small opera houses or singing restaurants — if even there. For operatic sopranos, it’s even worse, and how many struggling writers have had their hopes dashed in the past year?

I’m not talking about people who “want” to be writers, singers, composers, and artists, but about people who’ve devoted years to education and training, not to mention more years underpaid or unpaid work in their field.

Now, there’s a feeling among some in these fields that there once was a time when artists were more respected and compensated for their expertise. I’m not certain when this “golden age” happened to be, because in the early 1800s, the print run for a wildly popular book was something like a thousand copies, and most successful writers came from financially secure backgrounds that allowed them to write. Most of those that did not, such as Keats and Poe, struggled with poverty and illness their entire lives, despite a certain amount of popular acclaim. In the late 1960s, Isaac Asimov [as I recall] calculated that there were only about 50 F&SF writers who supported themselves entirely on their writing. Recent figures published by various sources suggest that the number of overall fiction writers in the U.S. who can do so today is somewhere around 900, with a range of 400-2,500 cited.

The market for composers has never been wonderful, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth century only a handful of composers and musicians made more than survival wages — and those only if they had wealthy patrons. Mozart was dogged by financial problems his entire life. Bach supported himself as a church organist, and today almost all modern classical composers are either academics or support themselves in other music-related specialties. Even in the pop music field, songwriters like Willie Nelson and Barry Manilow became singers because they made so little from songs they wrote that made the singers millions.

Van Gogh, whose works now fetch tens of millions of dollars, never sold a painting in his own lifetime, and historically, most painters supported themselves by doing portraits, a practice that dwindled dramatically with the introduction and growth of photography.

In writing, the numbers are fairly clear. Comparatively, very few writers finish and sell more than a book a year. In the F&SF field, standard royalties start at ten percent for a hardcover, but a “successful” hardcover must sell a minimum of 4,000 copies and 30,000 copies subsequently in paperback. According to publishing figures, something like two thirds of all books published are not “successful.” But let’s say the struggling author manages to be successful and sells 5,000 copies at a hardcover price of $24.95, and a year later, 35,000 copies in paperback. That’s $12,475 on the hardcover [not deducting the 10-15% to the agent] and approximately $14,000 on the paperback. If this writer can manage to keep putting out a book a year at the same level he or she might make $25,000 a year out of combined paperback and hardcover sales. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, because if the writer’s sales don’t increase above the minimally profitable level, the publisher won’t buy the second or third or fourth book. And yet… looking at the comparative numbers, it’s likely that the past thirty years through the present are possibly the best time for writers in history.

A golden age for the arts? Like many myths… it’s just that.

Most people know the Reverend Thomas Malthus as the English clergyman and economist who wrote The Principle of Population, a work that went through six editions between 1798 and 1826 and that made the case that “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” In the more than two centuries since the publication of Malthus’s first edition a raft of biological and social scientists have attempted to refute Malthus’s basic theory, pointing out as the enviro-sceptic Bjorn Lomburg did, that food production has always increased faster than population growth.

For the moment, these “skeptics” have been correct. If population growth continues, in the long run, they will all be wrong. Why? Because even if our vaunted technology gets to the point of turning all matter and/or energy into the food and support necessary for human existence, the amount of matter on the planet is indeed finite, although in practical terms, it’s far more likely that other aspects of civilization will collapse first, leading to a reduction in food supply… and population.

The larger mistake in dealing with Malthusian economics, however, lies in the failure of Malthus’s critics to understand why Malthus did not seem to be correct in his own lifetime, or even in ours. Both Darwin and Wallace read The Principle of Population, and both commented to the effect that his work applied directly to the “natural world.” What they meant was that, for example, there are always more prey than predators, because if there aren’t, predator populations crash. The same is true of herbivores. One of the problems the giant panda faces is that it’s a very picky eater and there is only so much of the bamboo it eats within its range, and that range is decreasing because the human population has been encroaching.

In overall terms, what the human species has done for roughly the last 8,000 years is to employ technology to transform the entire world ecology into anything but a “natural” world. Currently, there are between one and one and a half billion cows in the world, 15 billion chickens, 700 million pigs, over 100 million horses, mules, and donkeys, and close to half a billion domesticated turkeys and geese. None of these animal population levels are anything close to what these species could maintain without extensive human effort, and the impact of these animals is anything but insignificant, considering that, as just one example, a single cow produces 250-500 liters of methane every single day, and that methane tends to last in the atmosphere for up to 100 years. Fertilizer run-off from the Mississippi River has created algae blooms and large dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Years ago, when I was working at the EPA, research studies showed that the pesticide toxaphene, used primarily on cotton crops in the southern United States, was appearing in the tissues of northern arctic mammals — not birds who might have flown over or through the USA, and in animals who did not prey on such birds. While its use is now banned in the United States, the world-wide spread and bioaccumulation is indicative of just how much human technology has changed and modified the planet.

This human-created “ecology” is not stable, nor can it be maintained without enormous investments of energy, resources, and effort. So, while the human species has been able to “thwart” Malthusian principles for two hundred years, the real question is not how and why Malthus was wrong, but for how long we will both allow unchecked human population increases and increasingly artificial ecological manipulation… and at what cost.