While some readers will doubtless laugh at what follows, I still have the feeling that I went, almost overnight, from “up-and-coming writer” to “he’s-been-writing-forever.” It wasn’t all that many years ago when my editor asked me to introduce myself to a young writer who had just sold his first book. I introduced myself and got a blank look, followed by the statement, “I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of you.”

That was less than eight years ago, and I’d published almost thirty books. Now, I see comments like, “The Recluce Saga is older fantasy, but still good.” A former publicist remarked that, “I can’t believe the Recluce Saga is still going.”

Times do change, and I’ll have to admit that my reaction to one of the changes probably marks me as being of the “older generation.” This change has to do with how writers tend to get started. When I first began to write seriously, my naive thought was that, if I wrote well enough and worked hard enough, I’d get published. And I did… and it happened. It also happened for other writers.

Today, I can think of more than a few would-be writers who seem to spend more time promoting themselves on the internet than writing or attempting to improve their craft. And in a way, they remind me of juvenile ravens, because they tend to collect in a gaggle [although technically and grammatically and practically, the term is an “unkindness”], where they spend an inordinate amount of bandwidth and space commenting on the writing field and promoting the new works of the younger writers, whom they wish to join. Call it the support of the “new” by those who wish also to be the newest of the new.

I don’t mind that aspect of it. A majority of the “young” have always done that. I never was in that majority, but that’s another story that won’t be told. But what concerns me is the amount of time that this represents. This is not, for the most part, time spent refining one’s craft as a writer. It is not time spent creating stories or novels. It is sheer personal promotion, often before the writer is question has much of worth to present.

Is it understandable? Absolutely! Now that only one or two F&SF of the major publishing firms accept unsolicited manuscripts, how else can a writer find a way to get either an invitation from a publisher or an agent interested?

Is it good? I don’t think so. More than a few editors have suggested to me privately that the technical quality of submissions is declining. That’s not to say that some are not good, or that all of that decline results from the shift of energy from writing to promoting, but they’re fewer and harder to find. It also is a trap, I suspect, because maintaining a high-visibility website takes a tremendous amount of time. If the site declines, so does viewership… and visibility. But in a culture that is incredibly media-driven, not “improving and advancing” is seen not as stability, but as failure. So, in order to attract “attention,” more and more effort is required for promotion, and less and less time is available for actual writing and learning the craft.

Add to that an increasing pressure to produce profits by the parent companies of larger publishers, and what happens? More and more profit is generated by a handful of books and by media knock-offs, while good books that don’t appeal widely don’t get published by the majors and/or are put out by smaller presses.

From that point of view, it seems to make sense for a newer writer to try to build a following through the internet, but the problem is that when they’re all chasing the “flavor de jour” they’re all trying to appeal to the exact same audience, and that audience is still not a majority of the book-buyers, even in F&SF, and the rest of the audience is often put off by the “flavor de jour” and purchases fewer books.

Do I have an answer? I’d suggest that more new writers take a risk, a real risk, and concentrate on writing and not promotion. Remember, neither J.K. Rowling nor Robert Jordan needed a website presence to get started. They just needed books that lots of people, and not just the internet crowd, wanted to read.

As some of my readers know, I spent time working at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency all too many years ago, and later as a consultant dealing with environmental regulations, among other matters. One of the most contentious matters then, and still, was the issue of what a human life was worth. If an environmental regulation costs industry [and consumers, because the end user eventually always pays the cost] ten billion dollars, but saves a thousand lives… is it worth it? What if it only saves ten lives?

This issue, whether we like to think about it, is everywhere. Why do we buy life insurance? That’s a form of valuing life. Why do we spend precious hours in exercise and physical fitness? It’s another way of valuing life by attempting to prolong it in better health.

But there’s one area where our laws and our attitudes are far, far behind — and that’s in the area of financial fraud and embezzlement. Just last week, the second largest bank in France announced that a rogue trader employed there had effectively lost over $7 billion by diverting over $50 billion in bank funds to personal speculative trades. This is the largest loss ever created by a single individual, but it’s not anything new. The fraud at WorldCom, Global Crossings, and Enron resulted in billions and billions of dollars of losses. The amount of mortgage fraud arising from the latest real estate bubble has yet to be tallied.

And what does this all have to do with the value of lives?

It’s simple, actually. Most people work. They invest their lives in working and in trying to save or buy a house or stay at a company long enough for their pension to vest or put aside money for an IRA. When embezzlement and fraud cause them to lose all or part of those investments, in effect, part of their life has been taken. The same thing happens when someone is scammed or phished out of funds on the internet.

In the federal regulatory system, although no one wants to talk about it openly, essentially regulations have established a range of values for human life. Depending on the situation and other factors, at one time that range was effectively from one to twenty million dollars. Doubtless, it’s higher now.

Take the current French situation — seven billion dollars. Seven billion dollars taken from people, admittedly in smaller bits than a whole life, but… if a life is worth twenty million dollars, then the embezzler or fraud artist has committed the equivalent of 350 murders.

Far-fetched, you say? Think about Enron. How many lives were shortened because of health insurance lost? Or because employees lost their retirement? How many investors lost income, either directly or through other pension funds, and what did that do to their lives? How many families’ lives were disrupted?

We’ve tended to treat this kind of white-collar crime as if it were almost victimless, but it’s not. It’s just that the embezzler and fraud artist take a little bit of life from thousands or millions of people, and we seem to think that it’s somehow not nearly so bad as single heinous murder. Yet, I’d be willing to bet that every major fraud/embezzlement case results in actual deaths or at least early deaths among the victims. Most major embezzlers and fraud artists lose what assets they have and serve a few years in jail — maybe ten at most. Some, like the head of Global Crossings, actually get to keep their ill-gotten gains and serve no time at all.

Maybe, just maybe, if the damages incurred by the victims of embezzlement and fraud were converted into the equivalent of murders… then we might have a bit more deterrence, and possibly certainly more justice.

I don’t see this happening… but it should be considered, if not adopted.

Recent sociological studies and experiments strongly suggest that human beings, indeed most if not all primates, have a genetically based “sense of fairness.” One experiment, for example, sets up a situation where one individual is given something of value, which either directly by its nature, or indirectly through trade or money, can be split. That individual then proposes sharing the item with a second. The first individual gets to propose the terms of division, and, if the second agrees, each gets to keep his or her share.

So… I’m given a hundred dollars. I can offer you anything from $1 to $99 [zero or a hundred wouldn’t allow a split]. If I offer you even $10, we’re both better off than before. But… neither people nor primates think or feel that way. In experiment after experiment, for the most part, people rejected anything less than a 30%-70% split — even though that meant neither got anything. The results, using food and other items, were similar among the primates studied.

So what are the implications of this finding?

One conclusion is that “justice” in human societies is not just a social, governmental, or even a practical requirement, but a fundamental physio-genetic one. If this were the only implication, matters wouldn’t look too bad for the future. After all, even in a totally secular society, it would appear that most people would still have a sense of fairness and justice.

A second and more worrying conclusion is that this feeling is not “rational,” not in the sense of being thought out. A “rational” individual would take any split, because in rational terms, he or she would still end up better off. And that implies that humans have great difficulty in being rational, no matter what we think.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that there’s yet another and far more disturbing possibility. First, of course, one must consider one of the basic conditions of the experiment, and that condition was that the recipient knew that neither party would get anything if “unacceptable” terms were offered and rejected.

Now… consider the world political situation today, with what appears to be an ever-growing divergence between the developed and the undeveloped world, as well as an increasing discrepancy between the wealthy and non-wealthy in the developed world. Throughout history, there have always been the haves and the have-nots, but until the age of modern and near-instant communications, those who were poor, whether the urban poor in the ghettos of developed countries or the masses of the poor in less developed lands, really had limited means of knowing how those who were so much better off lived. In a sense, they didn’t know how the resources were split, and how little they received. Now they do.

Could it just be that some, if not a large portion, of the current global unrest might just be the result of our species’ genetic need for “fairness,” a need that has not been historically as much of a factor because before modern communications the “terms” were not widely known? Interestingly enough, from what I can determine, prior to the eighteenth century and the beginning of “modern” communications, there were very few revolutions fomented by the middle class and supported by those below. Even the American Revolution was essentially an upper-class led uprising. “Popular” revolutions seem to be a comparatively recent development.

Equally important, rational and logical explanations of why these resource divisions are the way they are, such as capital investment, cost of innovation, payback for taking risk, the cost of advanced education, will not change most people’s opinions, because their response is in fact genetically programmed and results in an immediate and ongoing emotional reaction.

So… for all the rationality behind the increasing separation of the meritocratic elite and the working classes, or the distinction between the developed and developing world… with the “fairness gene,” how wide can that separation become and how long can it last?

When retail sales levels for the United States were recently announced, stock prices in the USA immediately dropped, and a number of large retailers immediately announced plans to close down “unprofitable” outlets. My initial reaction was to think that, well, if sales were down, that would be understandable. Except sales weren’t down. They were up three percent. They only increased three percent over the sales levels of the previous year, as opposed to the four percent sales increase registered in 2006. Today, the market plunged again…even after the Federal Reserve announced an interest cut of three quarters of a percent, a rather large one time cut, and the largest in more than 16 years. The market recovered somewhat but remains down at the time I write this.

Three percent is an increase. It’s an increase greater than the rate of U.S. population growth. And yet the economists, the stock market, the retailers, and the commentators are all saying that we might be entering a recession… unless government gives them the means to borrow money more cheaply and provides more “stimulus.” They may well be right.

What exactly does this say about the United States and modern economies in general? That we can’t maintain close to full employment and prosperity without an ever-increasing amount of consumption and production in a world that looks to have finite resources? That steady and sustained growth isn’t enough, that for us to be happy and prosperous, we need incredibly high growth rates that are unsustainable without government deficits and subsidies…and loans at artificially cheap rates?

This obsession with more permeates everything. In the past generation, the size of the average house has nearly doubled, and Americans in general have more cars, more televisions, more “stuff” than ever before. I’m not against improvements or new devices that make life better, but I don’t need a new computer every year or every other year, or even every third year. Nor do I need a new vehicle anywhere close to that often. Frankly, while there are those who do need frequent replacements and updates because of their occupations, most of us don’t, and many of those who do only need those replacements because the computer and other industries employ a combination of “improvements” and planned obsolescence that makes older but still functional equipment incompatible with the “new” models and software.

Yet this obsession with “more” is highly selective. We reward hedge fund managers with annual earnings in the millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, and their only contribution to society is success in high level and legal gambling, all of the rhetoric about the need for arbitrage notwithstanding. We reward high profile CEOs, and yet recent studies have shown that, in general, the lower profile and lower-paid CEOs do a better job. We pay a comparative handful of entertainers and athletes incredible amounts, but every time the economy slows a trace, all across the country, the salaries of teachers are frozen, and the increases given to those at the bottom in government and industry are minimal or non-existent.

Not only that, but market response and public reaction appear nonsensical. Oil prices are above $90 a barrel, and yet the stock prices of oil companies that made great profits when the prices were “only” $70 a barrel are down, and neither their production nor their reserves have changed significantly. Food prices are increasing, and the government subsidizes ethanol made from corn, which further boosts the cost of corn without making any significant difference in the amount of imported oil or in air pollution.

We spend billions on “measuring” various kinds of progress, from retail sales and output of goods and services to educational testing… as if the measurements were reality, and as if the resulting numbers automatically equate to immediate and significant changes in the economy, or the educational system. But, once we have the numbers… what happens?

Most of the time, there’s a demand for “better” numbers and measurements… or the results are ignored. Or… as in the current case, there’s universal dissatisfaction with a federal commitment over more than $145 billion. Of course, that’s somewhat less than the $150-200 billion U.S. companies spend annually on radio and television ads, in hopes of increasing sales and profitability, because, after all, sales were only up three percent, but what can one expect from government?

Now, if I or any other SF writer created a future world that portrayed such idiocy in this kind of graphic detail, such a novel would either be regarded as far-out satire or patently impossible.

Last week, I was talking to an editor, and he made the observation that, overall, paperback book sales of bestselling authors have been declining steadily but inexorably over the years… and the situation is even worse for other authors. Now… if this were a trend where those paperback sales were being replaced by e-books or the like, I’d chalk it up to changing technology. But it’s not. As I understand it, in science fiction and fantasy, it wasn’t uncommon to have first paperback printings of 50,000- 100,000 books for a publisher’s top writers [excluding, of course, the very small handful of runaway best sellers like J.K. Rowling and Robert Jordan]. Today, it’s more like 30,000 – 50,000.

One immediate response is along the lines of, “What do you expect when new paperbacks are eight dollars?” But I’m talking about what’s happened in the last few years… AFTER paperbacks had reached the $6-8 range. Besides, the real costs of other items have increased in the same way as those of books.

At the time when an Ace double was 35 cents, I could get a hamburger, fries, and a Coke from MacDonald’s for the same amount. Now the average paperback F&SF book is three times as long as that Ace double and costs $7.99. People are buying full meals from MacDonald’s for about the same amount, but the difference is that the market for fast food has exploded, and the market for books has not.

Certainly, one factor is the “profit motive.” All of the large F&SF publishers have been gobbled up by one of the media conglomerates, and conglomerates want to make money first, and publishing books is only a means by which this is possible. The same is also true of the booksellers. The results are anything but good for the fiction market.

No matter how many or how few books are printed and shipped, some are always returned. For example, one of the more popular best-selling F&SF authors has a “sell-through” of 70-80%. That is extremely high. The “normal” range for successful authors is more like 50-60%. One critically acclaimed author once actually achieved a dismal sell-through of 4%, i.e., 96% of the books printed and shipped were returned unsold. Now… enter the accountants of the bookstore chains. They look at the sales of even a best-selling author and note that they didn’t sell all of the books of that author’s last book… and they order fewer copies of the next book. Even if the sell-through ratio goes up considerably, say ten percent, and that is a considerable increase, the total number of books ordered and sold goes down… And for the author’s next book, the chain’s initial order will again decrease… and so on.

Then add to that the fact that reading among Americans under the age of thirty has dropped precipitously, for a number of factors, including the internet, computers, and media-created attention-deficit-disorder which makes reading boring, because it requires sustained concentration and thought. And all the technology and convenient e-book readers won’t help with those who can’t concentrate in the first place.

What does this mean for publishing?

I’d say that a certain trend is already emerging. The larger publishers are cutting loose more and more authors who were once “mid-list” because their sales numbers are falling and because the break-even point for larger publishers is a higher number of copies than in the past. Authors who have a small but loyal following are turning to the smaller presses, who are now providing higher quality products, and who can produce fewer copies “economically.” Add to that print on demand.

But… the basic problem is that the number of outlets for books is continuing to diminish, and except in the mega-stores or the minimal numbers of F&SF specialty stores, the range of choice is almost non-existent. While the mall bookstores are being replaced in some places by anchor chain bookstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, thousands of malls have no book outlets at all. While every Wal-Mart has a book department, it’s a rare Wal-Mart that stocks more than 20 F&SF titles — and that’s one percent of the number of F&SF titles published in a year, and those 20 don’t include anything from the small presses.

So the small press editions are mostly relegated to online sales, local sales, specialty F&SF stores [of which there are only a few handfuls left], and convention sales. These outlets aren’t enough to expose new readers to the true range of speculative fiction, and without such exposure, the number of new readers will remain low, and, unless matters change, as the older readers die off, the reading base will diminish.

Does this mean that in another generation, the only devoted F&SF readers will be gray-haired and restricted to a few specialty stores and one carrel in the chains?

I hope not… but it’s not looking all that promising [unless you all go out and buy more paperbacks!].