Science fiction and fantasy have always dealt, at least ostensibly, with change, about how the future might be with technology, aliens, biotech, or whatever, or how our world or others might be if some form of workable magic existed. In a world where change is ongoing and seemingly accelerating, we tend to forget that for much of human history change was either slow or non-existent. And it wasn’t just a question of technology. The Ptolemaic Egyptians had a rather interesting array of technological gadgets. And they were nothing compared to what had already been developed in China. The Roman Empire implemented Greek technology, but added little, except concrete, central heating, and plumbing, despite conquering a large section of the “known” world. So why did technology lead to change and ever more change in post-Renaissance Europe and virtually none in earlier prosperous societies?

Africa is clearly the cradle of homo sapiens, and where tool-making began, yet after the Egyptians, the Nubians, and perhaps the Carthaginians, in a sense, nothing changed, and societies in Africa declined, both in cultural and technological terms. Why?

Today, after several centuries of comparatively rapid change, despite outward appearances, the pace of change is again slowing. About the only significant change in space exploration and travel over the last forty years has been the advances in communications and video areas so that we can see more of the solar system and the universe in far greater clarity. We still can’t get anywhere significantly any faster, and, in fact, we’ve really done less human traveling in space. Do better pretty pictures of space represent a real change, or just an illusion of change?

Despite Einstein and atomic power, essentially we’re still using an improved model of the first atomic power plant. That’s after fifty years of accelerators, totamaks, and other gadgets designed to discover more about the nature of matter and energy, and we don’t seem much closer to practical fusion power than a generation ago. The fastest commercial air travel is slower than it was two decades ago. We have a better understanding of medicine and better medical procedures, but much of our own population and most of the rest of the world can’t afford the costs of availing themselves of such medical improvements. Will such costs eventually choke off real change in the medical procedures available to most people?

According to some test scores, American students are smarter and improving in their knowledge of various subjects, and certainly there are more students in both absolute and percentage terms who are completing high school and college. Yet the high-level functional literacy rate of college graduates and post-graduate degree holders continues to decrease, and the absolute performance of males is declining relative to women. The United States, despite a century or more of effort to eliminate sexual discrimination, is one of the few western industrial nations that has never had a female head of state, and, unless matters shift dramatically, has never even had a major party candidate who was female. The U.S. is also the most overtly religious of the major western industrial nations. Does that religious background mitigate against significant real change in the gender power balance? And perhaps in other aspects of society?

Both Democratic Party candidates have called for “change,” but for what sort of change? I don’t see a call for re-invigorating our space program, or more more research in basic science, or for real and fundamental change in our approach to education, or anything approximating real change. What I see is an emphasis on changing who controls government and resources and who benefits from them, and that’s not the same thing… is it? Really?

Those of us who write science fiction and fantasy are often considered to be people who enable escapism through our writing. Certainly, I’d dispute that, particularly given what I write. But…even if the charge happened to be true, which it’s not, we writers would hardly be the only ones in U.S. society institutionalizing escapism.

The other day a husband and wife who are acquaintances told me how upset they were by the university commencement address given by a Nobel laureate because the scientist had laid out rather directly and bluntly some of the challenges that the next generation would have to face, in particular those involving energy supplies and global warming. They both felt that a commencement address should be inspiring and uplifting, and “not a real downer.”

On the one hand, I can see their point. Hitting bright young graduates between the eyes with the cold water of realism is not exactly encouraging, when commencement is considered “their” day.

On the other hand, times have changed. Many long years ago, when I was in high school, educators made a practice of pointing out one’s short-comings in more than graphic detail, day after day, while suggesting that major improvements in attitude, effort, and skills were the only way to avoid a life of failure and lack of accomplishment. And when one got to college, the “standard” entry address to college freshmen was: “Look to your left; look to your right. By the end of the year, one of you won’t be here.” In those days, there was a draft and a war in Vietnam, and for young men, at least, not being there meant a good chance of being somewhere else — a place distant, hot, damp and dangerous. And more than a few students didn’t make it through the curriculum. Those that did finally got to hear an excessively optimistic speech about how they would go forth to conquer the world… or at least their chosen profession.

Today, except in a comparative handful of institutions, education tends to be all about encouragement and reward for often negligible accomplishments. For all the talk about tightening standards, and the like, the functional literacy of American university graduates continues to decline, even while the grades given — and received with little gratitude — has continued to inflate. Given the recent financial crises, it’s also clear that fewer Americans seem to know enough basic mathematics to understand how to calculate the impact of a mortgage payment on their monthly budget… or even what a budget might be.

So… we’ve moved from a more realistic system of education, where the commencement addresses were always falsely encouraging, to an educational regime that tends to exude false hope and low standards, but where commencement addresses are occasionally sobering. Personally, as a curmudgeon and cautious optimist, I think the old system prepared more students for the real world… and back then false hope was limited to an occasional commencement address and not dispensed throughout an entire course of studies.

Recently, especially in dealing with subjects like near-earth-objects or global warming, I’ve come across more and more people whose reaction to these subjects is conditioned by or based on what I’d call the “vastness illusion.” I’m not talking about unintelligent individuals, either, but people who have been highly successful in business, academia, and in other fields requiring education, skills, and experience.

Put simply, the vastness illusion is the belief that the earth, and especially our solar system, is so vast that nothing we as human beings do could possibly affect it in any measurable fashion.

Like many illusory beliefs held by humans over history, there’s a grain of truth behind the vastness illusion. In fact, there’s nothing that a given individual — unaided by technology and the efforts of others — can do that will make a measurable impact on our world. For better or worse, however, there are six billion humans now living on the face of the planet, and those six billion people and their technology, both high and low, do have a significant impact on the world and, in particular, on its climate.

Those six billion people rely on 3.3 billion cattle, sheep, and goats for milk, meat, wool, and other products, and those billions of head of livestock require food, most of it derived from grazing. Presently, over half the grass and rangelands are at least moderately degraded as a result of the more than doubling of livestock production over the past century. Human activities, mainly those associated with agriculture, have increased annual methane emissions from less than 80 million tons in 1860 to over 500 million metric tons a year at present, and those emissions remain in the atmosphere for an average of 12 years, and they are a greenhouse gas that helps warm the atmosphere.

The six billion people and their activities are also adding 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere every year, and the majority of that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for close to a century. Both these greenhouse gases have feedback effects on the water vapor that is and has always been the largest greenhouse gas in terms of impact. Even a slight increase in global temperature results in more water vapor. So while the advocates of the “vastness” theory point out that CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases are “marginal” in their direct contribution to global warming, they tend to ignore their considerable feedback impact on water vapor, which is anything but marginal.

Admittedly, the earth’s atmosphere is indeed vast, but human technology and human numbers multiply our effects on the world, in a real fashion analogous to compound interest. A percentage point here and another one there, and millions have trouble making their house payments. Well… the same is true about human impacts on our planet… except that if we lose a climate conducive to maintaining our present human cultures, we lose a great deal more than a few million houses, and it’s a different kind of arrogance to insist that our activities have no impact.

The earth is over four billion years old, and yet, in the last few centuries we’ve managed to consume between a third and half the fossil fuels created over that long span… and the earth is too vast for us to have any impact? We’ve hunted scores of species out of existence, and we can make no difference? The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the highest in more than 650,000 years, and that’s been with no large or sustained unusual natural occurrences; the last eleven years have been the among the 13 warmest over the past century and a half… and possibly the longest “warm streak” in thousands of years, if not longer; the northern polar ice cap has been shrinking steadily for forty years, and now is at the smallest extent and thickness in thousands of years, if not longer.

Yet, there are those who insist that the earth is too vast for us to have any measurable impact. What sort of impact do they want before they’re convinced? All of Florida under water? Starvation of billions because of climate shifts? Or would anything matter, because they believe that we’re essentially helpless to affect matters one way or the other?

I suppose that’s comforting, in a way, because it means we can do anything we want without having to be held accountable. Just claim that earth is too vast for us to be responsible, as well as being so vast that we can’t change or affect any major challenge that nature hurls at us. And, of course, that means admitting that, as a species, we’re merely hostages to fate, unable to direct our destiny, poor lost souls, depending on chance or deities to rescue us from disaster. But then, since neither chance nor deities have had a very good record in that department, if the majority of homo sapiens cast their lot with those who claim earth is too vast for us to affect matters, they’re essentially condemning the rest of us to great privation and possibly even marginalization or extinction as a species — and sooner, rather than later.

Not only does that make for lousy government and cultural direction, it’s also a terrible plot for either science fiction or fantasy.

We of the species homo sapiens may not exactly deserve the “sapiens” label, since the terminology homo anecdotus or something similar might be more accurate. We react to what we see and what we hear, and tend to believe stories others tell, rather than facts, mathematics, or statistics.

When I was with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, there was such a furor over hazardous waste sites that, effectively, almost the entire political staff of the Agency was canned, including the Administrator, as well as the Secretary of the Interior. While I thought then, and still do, that the issue was badly bungled by the Administration, and that’s putting it mildly, they did have a certain point in believing that people were overreacting. That was because people could see the hazardous waste sites and the handful of children and others who suffered damaged health, as well as the contaminated neighborhoods.

HOWEVER… in perspective, as shown by a later series of studies, the “Superfund” hazardous waste sites were far from the most dangerous environment concerns. Yearly deaths from exposure to household radon were far more dangerous, by five to twenty times, as was asbestos exposure, which has resulted in more than 10,000 deaths annually. Cancer deaths from smoking exceed 300,000 annually, and automobile accidents account for some 45,000. Yet the Superfund political upheaval resulted in Congressional action headed toward impeaching the head of EPA and resulted in the resignations of both the Interior Secretary and the EPA Administrator, and the conviction of an assistant administrator for perjury before Congress.

Another example of this anecdotalism is exemplified by people who refuse to fly because they feel driving is safer. For them, the anecdotal example of the infrequent air crash where 300 people die has a greater impact that the fact that most people are ten thousand times more likely to die in an automobile accident than in a plane crash.

On a far larger scale, take the issue of cometary or asteroidal impacts on the earth. Based on what was seen, i.e., anecdotal evidence, scientists originally estimated that the chance of a “space rock” large enough to create a catastrophic impact on earth, such as the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs, was roughly once every million years. Then, more digging and satellite photography analysis discovered more craters, and the odds were increased to something like once every 100,000 years. Then, several years ago, several scientists made the rather obvious observation that the craters that had been discovered were all where we could see them — on land — but that the earth’s surface is something like seventy percent water. More investigation and correlation with historical and climate records revealed several more near-catastrophic water impacts over the past 10,000 years.

Then, recent astronomic discoveries have revealed that the population of near-earth objects [NEOs] big enough to wipe out cities or larger sections of the planet is approaching more than a thousand, and that their orbits aren’t nearly so stable as was originally surmised. Yet NASA, the U.S. space agency that might be considered to have a certain concern about space-related potential disasters, blithely informed Congress several years ago that any really reliable survey of NEOs would cost $1 billion, about seven percent of its annual budget — or one percent if spread over seven years — and that NASA had no intention of spending money on what is clearly a real threat, nor did it even have a draft contingency plan of what it might do if one of those objects was discovered to be on a collision course with earth, even though some respected astronomers have now estimated that the chances of a city-destroying [or worse] object hitting earth in any given century are about one in ten. In short, since we haven’t seen anything like this recently, except maybe something did explode above Siberia a century ago that we still can’t explain fully, it can’t be as real as the need to pinch pennies for other projects that don’t bear on the survival of our entire species, as well as a few thousand others.

The anecdotal mind-set may function adequately in a hunter-gatherer society, but just as we’ve given up, largely, chipped flint hammers for better tools, isn’t it time to go beyond the anecdotal mind-set, one that’s clearly limited to what we can see, and use a wider and deeper perspective?

Because, over time, if we don’t, earth will see the end of our anecdotal species.

I happened to come across a reader’s comments about the Spellsong Cycle, most of which boiled down to the fact that he liked all my books — except those, because they were “trite.” I mean, after all, writing about sexism and stereotypes is just so old and trite, and the idea of magic being wielded through song in a logical and technical basis is almost as trite, as well. Except… outside of Alan Dean Foster and Louise Marley, I haven’t seen any other decent, in depth, and logical treatments of vocal music as the basis of magic. It’s very rare, as Louise Marley herself has said upon occasion, and as both a noted novelist and a professional opera singer, she does have a bit of expertise in those fields.

That leaves the issue of novels dealing with sexism as perpetuating “trite” stereotypes and something that is so old and last-century, or even so nineteenth century. If anyone thinks that sexism is that out-of-date, then you’re living in a greater fantasy than anything I’ve ever written. A few examples follow. A highly-qualified gynecological oncologist [female] who runs the a division at a top medical school is paid less than a younger colleague [male] with far less academic and occupational qualifications, publications, or surgical expertise. Female full professors at any number of colleges and universities — with equivalent or greater time in rank and professional qualifications — are on average paid more on the level of male associate professors in the same disciplines. A similar discrepancy occurs in the ranks of business executives [when one can even find senior female executives who have managed to break through the glass ceiling]. What is interesting about all this is that these days, if you look at university graduates and post-graduates, women are winning a wide majority of the academic honors, with the exception of a few areas of science.

I’d also note the large number of political pundits who are calling for Senator Clinton to drop out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. As a long-time Republican, if of the Teddy Roosevelt stripe, I can claim a certain distance… but I would note that in my own twenty-odd years of political involvement I never saw anyone even broach that sort of suggestion to a male candidate. After all, it’s only right that a real man fights it out to the last, isn’t it?

Obviously, with six daughters and a wife all in professional fields, I have a wealth of insights and information from which I can draw, in addition to the statistics that are available to all — and which are largely ignored and minimized.

Now… one of the roles that F&SF fills in our society is to explore ideas and issues and problems, and it’s one of the few writing fields that does so consistently. I’d be the first to agree that readers certainly don’t have to read what they don’t like… and they don’t. Some readers have indicated that they stay away from my work that deals too directly with real-world issues. I can understand that. There are times when I certainly don’t want to deal with them. But issues tend to keep coming up until they are addressed.

After all, some of the Founding Fathers, among them John Adams, suggested that the slavery issue wasn’t going away — and it didn’t. Nor did the civil rights issues that followed. Nor will the issues raised by the current Administration in instigating a war and in suppressing civil liberties in the name of “security.” Nor will the problems raised in a society where almost any working woman has to do more and do it better than her male peers in order to even come close to them in terms of compensation.

Is sexism a long and enduring problem? Absolutely. Does that make it “trite?” Not in the slightest.

A reader can certainly complain about anything, and an author has to take complaints with enough grains of salt to fill all the shakers in my house. But… don’t tell me or anyone else that a real social problem is “trite.” You can tell me that the plot’s lousy, that you don’t want to read about women and their problems, or that the kind of fantasy you really want to read has to have more testosterone in it. You can claim my style’s weak, that the book’s too long or too short, or that the song lyrics should have been better. But when a reader claims that a real and unsolved social issue is trite… that’s a pretty good explanation in itself why that issue hasn’t been resolved… and why I’ll continue to raise the issue at least periodically.