Jim Baen and Eric Flint, as well as other fiction writers and editors, have both made statements to the effect that every writer and publisher is competing for a reader’s “beer and movie money.” While not always literally true, their underlying point is all too accurate. A successful fiction writer has to leave his or her readers feeling that their time and funds were well-spent.

That’s obvious enough, but is there any single great and glorious formula for success in achieving that end? Not exactly, because there are as many types of successful writers as there are types of readers willing to pay for books. As a result, we have writers who range from those who produce what can most charitably described as “mindless entertainment” to those who write books that are so involuted and complex that often a single book is all that they ever publish.

Years ago, a well-known news magazine used to publish a chart on which the bestsellers were listed, along with a red or green arrow. The red arrow pointed down and the green one up, and the arrows represented the consensus of a span of reviewers. What I found interesting was that the vast majority of bestsellers almost invariably had red arrows after the title. While I tended to agreed with the arrows, beyond that my perceptions certainly didn’t agree with those of the reviewers in all cases.

These days, for whatever reason, I tend to agree with reviewers in the F&SF field even less than I did twenty years ago, and I usually didn’t agree all that often even then. That may brand me as a curmudgeon, and someone who was one even before I was old enough to claim that title by virtue of age, but I think the reason was simple enough. It had to do with the “suspension of disbelief.” I’ve never had that much trouble suspending my disbelief about plausible future high-tech gadgetry or even about magic — if the author is logical and consistent in describing and using such gadgetry and magic, but I’ve always had real problems when authors have characters and societies which act and react in ways contrary to basic human nature — and one of the historic problems with science fiction has been its excessive emphasis on the technical in ways often at odds with how societies work. Readers will easily and often point out that Dyson rings or the like need steering jets [or whatever], but will swallow far more easily economic, social, and political systems that could never work, usually because they’re at great variance with human nature.

In an overall sense, my writing reflects my views in this area and how I approach writing. In my opinion, this is as it should be, at least for me. As for editors, that’s another question, and one I’m not about to touch here.

All that said… books sell because the stories they tell and the way in which they’re told appeal to various types of readers. Some authors appeal primarily to readers whose make-up falls within clear preference lines. Others don’t. And there’s a temptation for newer writers to “aim” their works directly at a given type of reader.

To that, I say, “Don’t.” Especially if you’re new to writing professionally and if you want to have an identity and stay around for a while. I’m not saying there aren’t writers who aren’t good at targeting markets. There are. Some of them even are quite successful, but far fewer are successful than one might imagine. Why do I say this? Because any written work of any length reveals as much about the writer as do the story and the characters. If a writer’s style, structure, and views are consistently and widely at variance with the stories he or she is telling, sooner or later, in most cases, one of two things are likely to occur. Either the writer will burn out because he or she is fighting his or her nature, or the readers will drift away because of the dichotomy between the overt actions and characters and the conflicting subtexts.

And what of those few who can write “anything,” and do? More power to them, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of them. Not for a million years… or dollars, and I suspect those who read and like my work might understand why, and for those who don’t… it doesn’t matter.

Recently, in his column about Arthur C. Clarke in the New York Times, Dave Iztkoff explored whether present and future writers would be as successful as Clarke had been in envisioning future technologies. Over the years, various writers and academics have attempted to quantify in a rough fashion just how accurate SF has been in predicting the future. In his Foundation series, written around 1940, Isaac Asimov did anticipate the pocket calculator — and even the color of the numbers — but he thought it would be thousands of years before they were developed, instead of twenty or so. Clarke himself thought we’d have expeditions to Jupiter by 2001, and he lived to see that men hadn’t gotten farther than a few missions to the moon. In his book, The Forever War, first published in 1974, Joe Haldeman envisioned interstellar travel by the twenty-first century, and we still don’t even have interplanetary travel.

At the same time, in most areas, we’ve advanced further than Verne and the visionaries of the late nineteenth century imagined, sometimes much further. So what happened? Why has that changed?

I’d submit that the failings of later SF writers to anticipate the future rest on three factors. The first is that while our world has become far smaller than anticipated by early writers, our solar system, galaxy, and universe are far larger and more complex than even most scientists truly understood. The second is that future advancement depends on an increasing share of our resources being devoted to science and technology. And the third is that most predictions, either from scientists or from SF writers, are based on extrapolating from the known, because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of what lies beyond the known, without basing it on what is known. Yet many technologies have come from what was not previously known or understood. In short, most predictions suggest more of the same, except with changes that imply the future will be better… or worse, but not all that different. Human motives and emotions aren’t likely to change; that’s true enough, but the framework within which they’re expressed is likely to change greatly.

In fact, the future is likely to be different, and most probably both better and worse. Given the great advances in micro-electronics and communications, as David Brin has suggested, future society is most likely to be the “transparent society” where almost everything can be discovered by almost anyone, and the most valuable commodity may be privacy. In some of my work, particularly in The Elysium Commission, I’ve explored this to some degree, but I don’t think I’ve more than scratched the surface in terms of how that kind of technology will change society, and I’ve seen very few books that do explore that possibility.

All too many future SF stories postulate trade between solar systems. In fact, the only trade, if there is any at all, will be knowledge or unique art or artifacts, because the energy cost of such travel would be so great that any good could be produced within any given system far more cheaply than it could possibly be transported and sold.

What about finance? We’ve just seen the world-wide impact of the failure of a U.S. financial subsystem consisting of sophisticated and highly leveraged mortgage-backed securities. What sort of new financial complexities lie down the road — and what sorts of regulations?

A recent study I ran across suggests that people who are not good readers are far more susceptible to manipulation by con men and politicians and more likely to take at face value what they see on video presentations. Add to that the fact that the rise of a video visual culture has almost halved the percentage of supposedly “educated” people in the USA [those with a baccalaureate degree] who have the reading skills to follow sophisticated written arguments and statements. In other words, less than 30% of those with a college degree can do so. What are the political implications of that? What sort of future — and stories — might come from it?

Even ten years ago, could anyone — did anyone, except the Israelis — imagine citizens of the United States lining up for security searches more reminiscent of communist Russia just to get on an airplane?

In almost any area or discipline where one might look, there are similar changes beneath the surface, and all of them will impact the future. What is certain is that, beyond the next decade or so, the future won’t be what we’re likely to think it will be. But then, even for scientists and writers, it never has been.

I tried to get deposit slips from a well-known financial institution for almost a month. I’m pleased with all the services and features, except this one thing. They wouldn’t send me more deposit slips. I finally received them two weeks after contacting a vice president. Considering that I first requested replacement slips over two months ago, it’s rather amazing that I have to send them money in care of a vice president with a cover letter because they can’t get around to sending me replacement slips. After all, shouldn’t we be able to do better in our computerized high-tech society?

Sadly not, I have to conclude. While we have progressed immensely in our ability to move information and electrons around, our infrastructure for moving much of anything else seems to be on the decline. Another example is mail. My mother lives a ten hour drive from me. I can get to her house almost entirely on interstate highways, with only a quarter mile drive from my house to the interstate and a mile from the interstate to her house. So why, exactly does it take 4-5 days on a regular basis for the U.S. Postal Service to get a letter in either direction? Since 1950, the consumer price index has increased some 760%, that is, the average of all consumer goods costs more than 7 ½ times what the same goods did in 1950. The cost of a first class postage stamp is up 1233%, or more than twelve times what a stamp cost in 1950. In 1950, the vast majority of first class mail was delivered within three days, and many cities still had twice a day deliveries — and the Post Office wasn’t running a deficit. To get a chance at three-day delivery now will cost you a minimum of $4.60.

It’s not just the U.S. Postal Service, either. Last year, we ordered a loveseat from a well-known furniture manufacturer — and this is often necessary because we live many miles from any significant furniture retailer — and it took eight weeks to get it. It arrived broken, and another five weeks passed before we received a replacement.

I just returned from ICFA [the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts], where three boxes of books sent from various publishers — with tracking numbers — had failed to arrive, and two different “overnight” shipping companies had no idea where they were. Then, there is the business of stocking supermarket shelves. Why is it that they always run out of one brand of tea, or one brand of potato chips, week after week, month after month, and never stock more of that brand? Is it incompetence? Or merely a stock and price fixing arrangement that might violate any decent antitrust legislation? Speaking of which, why can’t the techno-whizzes who create all those stock-trading algorithms come up with something that might flag more precisely insider trading or fraudulent mortgage lending?

I won’t mention — except in passing — the state of airline baggage. But I will ask why we seem to have more trouble delivering “stuff” and finding it when we have more technology than ever before at our fingertips and why so little of that technology is employed to deal with the nagging glitches in life.

According to “The Philanthropy Hormone,” an article published in the April issue of Discover, one third of all U.S. philanthropic giving in 2006 went to religious groups. The next largest category, at 14%, was education. Foundations and human service organizations each received somewhat more than 10%, while cultural/arts organizations and international affairs groups received about 4% each, with other categories receiving smaller percentages. All told, on average, Americans contributed 2.2% of their after-tax earnings to charity.

This distribution of charitable giving is intriguing, particularly because it suggests, as is also the case with morality, that charity is strongly linked to belief in a higher being of some sort. One could almost make the case that a great deal of this charity comes from religious-based fear — punishment in the afterlife — or this one — by a divine being. At the very least, one could suggest that at least some of the giving in other areas might also be inspired by “divine guidance.”

Of course, there might be another reason for the predominance of religious giving. It simply could be that religious establishments provide a critical social function in knitting communities together, and that the contributions they receive are a form of payment for that social cohesion and not “charity” at all.

All this raises another question. Why is there so little F&SF dealing with the issues in and around charity? Certainly, there are more than a few novels dealing with religion, some notable, like Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and I’ve certainly taken on belief and religion, but offhand out of the thousands of F&SF novels I’ve read, I can’t think of one notable title dealing with the issue of charity and its impact on humans and humanity in general [and as sure as I’ve written this, someone will comment and raise a title I should have remembered].

Either way… what exactly do the numbers above suggest about the human species? Are there any writers out there who want to take a crack at it?

In some ways, the first three books of the Spellsong Cycle are among the most realistic fantasies I’ve written, particularly in dealing with sexual politics and intrigue. Interestingly enough, each of the five books received starred reviews from some literary source or another, and the last book was a book of the year for one literary review. None of my other fantasy series has received anywhere close to that sort of critical acclaim, but the books of the Spellsong Cycle don’t sell as well as those in my other fantasy series.

It can’t be because there’s no sex, since none of my books — except one, published more than 20 years ago — contain anything other than indirect allusions to sex. Is it because the main character is a middle-aged woman? Is it because the source of magic is the fairly technical application of song and accompaniment? Or is it because I dared to show certain very direct components of sexual discrimination?

All of those may play a part, but I suspect that the real reason is the same reason why my science fiction novel Archform:Beauty won plaudits and awards and only sold modestly. The success/failures of characters in both books hinge on the value of experience. No young hero saves the day against impossible odds. In the Spellsong Cycle, Anna bides her time, utilizes the bitter lessons of academic politics and a failed marriage to position herself so that, when the time comes, she can act effectively. She doesn’t hate men, but she has few illusions about either their strengths and weaknesses, and she’s not any easier in assessing those of her own “fair” sex, either.

In Archform:Beauty, the experiences of the five viewpoint characters — all told from the first person — interact and combine to create the resolution, and like most such resolutions in life, the results are bittersweet and mixed… and, also like life, anything but world-shaking.

This does bring up a point that has certainly been debated for years, if not centuries, and that is whether, except in exceedingly rare cases, books that hew closer to the realities of human emotions and experiences can ever be wildly popular. Is popularity based on the defiance of experience, the dream of identifying with what we as readers know to be impossible, but would still like to believe? Does it matter?

This might seem like an “eternal question,” but in a sense, it’s anything but eternal, because in terms of human culture, the modern novel is an extremely recent innovation. While epic tales date back millennia, and one of the first examples of what we would consider a novel is the eleventh century Japanese work, The Tale of Genji, such examples were either essentially oral traditions or hand-written longer works with extremely limited circulation. The modern novel needed the printing press, and a number of scholars suggest that Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, is the first of the modern novels.

And in practical terms, until the 1950s, and the wide-spread advent of paperback books, novels tended to be restricted to those who could afford them, and not a large percentage of the population could. While book publishers were clearly interested in profitability, “popularity” didn’t become the dominant issue with book publishers until the late nineteenth century, and didn’t become an overriding imperative until the last 50-75 years.

But the interplay of popularity and content do raise further questions. What is the point of publishing a book? To sell as many copies as possible? To make a great profit? To entertain? To enlighten? To educate? To raise issues? What trade-offs do publishers make… and why?

I’ve certainly been fortunate as an author to have been backed by a publisher who has allowed me to raise issues, sometimes less than popular ones, in what I’ve hoped is an interesting and entertaining manner… and I’ve seen other publishers who do, but I have to wonder, as I watch the media conglomerates strive for market saturation and pure profitability, how long truly thought-provoking books will be widely published.