The other day, a more recent reader [new to what I write in the last five years, and also, I suspect, of a younger persuasion] of my work emailed me with a suggestion. His view was that my science fiction covers were far too “dated.” The artwork looked like “that eighties stuff” with all the sharp lines and airbrushing. He argued that my SF would sell much better if my science fiction covers looked more like the recent Corean Chronicles covers by Raymond Swanland, because “Swanland is more organic…”

The reader went on to say that my science fiction is anything but conventional or dated, but that the covers on the books proclaim that it is. I certainly like the Swanland covers, but I like a number of my other covers, by other artists, and the John Picacio cover for Ghosts of Columbia helped John win an award or two, I understand. I like that cover a great deal.

But… the point raised by my reader is intriguing. Certainly, research into reader buying habits shows that, especially for an unknown or little known author, the cover is one of the largest reasons for picking up and buying a book. One study determined that something like 27% of sales result from the impression the cover makes on would-be readers.

Yet, for an established author, how much of a difference do covers make? Or do they only make a difference in sales to new readers? The covers on the Recluce books have always been painted by Darrell Sweet, who is a superb colorist, while the Corean Chronicles covers painted by Swanland show more dynamic action. Certainly, sales of the Corean Chronicles appear to have increased somewhat with the Swanland covers, but would a switch to more edgy action covers increase the sales of my SF books… or would they end up disappointing readers who would then expect the sort of non-stop action such covers would imply? Would they turn away older readers who would think that the change in covers reflected a change in content? And while my science fiction certainly has action, it’s definitely not non-stop, because my characters are as real as I can make them, and in real life, nothing is non-stop.

Of course, as the writer, I get very little say on the cover, outside of suggestions for scenes, and what technical input I do provide is usually on the accuracy of the illustration — and yes, the art director and editor do actually consider such factors.

Still, the question remains… would organic yet edgier covers for my science fiction better reflect to readers what I write?

One of the biggest unaddressed issues in science fiction and fantasy is the fact that, whether we want to admit it or not, we as human beings are really not very rational. At best, we’re selectively rational… otherwise known as using rational arguments to support what we already decided to do or to oppose what we don’t want to do. Just as we’ve finally mastered enough technology to get to the point where we can move off the planet so that all the human eggs, so to speak, are not in the same basket, we effectively slow down and turn away from space travel. Just when we’re almost to the point of being able to prevent disastrous asteroidal impacts, we scale back on sky scans and enabling technology.

Yet… should we really be surprised at such irrationality?

If we as human beings are so smart, why do we fret and worry about our jobs, our social status, our earnings, and so many similar circumstances… and then drive while drunk or using cell phones… or while drowsy or distracted… without fastening the seat-belts?

Put another way, motor vehicle deaths every year are nine times greater than all job-related deaths, and for those of us not involved in farming, forestry, and heavy construction, automobile accidents cause fifty times more deaths than anything in our occupations. In fact, the only large-scale work field with a high death rate from the occupation is agriculture/forestry, and even in recent years, there were almost twice as many deaths in farming and forestry accidents as combat deaths in Iraq.

Another example, albeit in a different context, was revealed by two sets of statistics revealed by the state of Utah. Utah boasts the highest high school graduation rates [something like 92%], the lowest per pupil expenditure on primary and secondary education, and one of the highest rates of failure by high school graduates on national competency exams — over 25% of graduating Utah high school seniors cannot pass basic competency levels in reading, mathematics, or general skills, i.e., they can’t understand a newspaper editorial, balance a checkbook, or read and understand a map. Now, these numbers don’t seem contradictory to me. If you don’t spend much money on education, have a high rate of teacher turnover, and lenient grading standards, then exactly what should a rational person expect when the students are assessed more objectively?

Years ago, a health researcher told me [and I’m taking it on face value] that one of the reasons that early tests on the effects of tobacco smoke on rats didn’t reveal elevated rates of cancer was that the rats piled straw and anything else they could find against the smoke inlets in their cages. Even if this story is exaggerated, millions of human beings, supposedly far more rational than rats, and now with the scientific knowledge of exactly how tobacco impacts the human body, choose to smoke and continue smoking. Is this exactly rational?

The United States possesses one of the most prosperous and open economies in the world, and there are millions of jobs that U.S. citizens don’t want to do, and there aren’t even enough Americans to do them. So… we should be amazed that we have 12 million illegal immigrants? One can say, of course, that the immigrants are behaving rationally in trying to improve their lot in life, but is the other side of that equation that prosperity enables irrationality?

Maybe… just maybe, that’s why great civilizations fall… because great prosperity removes, for a time, the constraints of rationality. But then, does it make a great SF novel? Nah… After all, doesn’t great human technology in the hard SF tradition solve all the problems?

Earlier today, Mathew Cheney [whom I’ve known on and off since he was in something like fifth grade, and since he’s over 30, that might tell you that we’ve both been in this field for a while] wrote a piece in his Mumpsimus blog reacting to Jason Sanford’s article in The New York Review of Science Fiction. To stir the pot a bit more, I’m going to say that I think, in a sense, they’re both right in some fashions and totally missing the point in viewing the larger “literary” picture.

As I understand it, Jason makes the point that F&SF “don’t get no respect” from the so-called literary establishment, and not only no respect, but not even any acknowledgment. Matt makes the point that in real terms, there’s no such thing as a monolithic or even an oligopolistic literary establishment or an agreed-upon literary canon. Matt goes on to point out that, even if The New York Times attempted to impose such a canon, its reviews effectively amount to less than a thimble full of liquid in an ocean of ink.

Over the past almost fifteen years, I’ve lived in a slightly alien culture — Utah — where the prevailing faith dominates the local media, the local events, the laws, and even the scheduling of athletic events. Yet, Utah has a state constitution which prohibits strongly any religious interference in government on any level, and while the LDS Church occasionally makes pronouncements, essentially it doesn’t have to interfere, because the cultural indoctrination is more than sufficient for its purposes.

In a similar sense, since its very beginning, science fiction has had to battle a similar cultural indoctrination, one that I’ve become aware of on a very personal level as a writer. Over the years, I’ve had a number of highly intelligent people attempt to read my books… and fail. One of them was my own father, who was not only a brilliant attorney, but an accomplished pianist and sometime composer. The only book of mine he actually understood and liked was The Green Progression, which was a very near-future political/legal/regulatory thriller. For all of his intelligence, his wanting to read and enjoy what I had written, his stylistic mastery of the English language, and his wide reading of historical and contemporary fiction, he had one problem — he was so deeply grounded in the here-and-now that he could not accept worlds or futures based on anything that he did not know to be “real” and true.

In that sense, he was a member of that large group of people from which Sanford would claim the “literary establishment” arises, an establishment which Matt denies exists. The plain fact is that this group of people, many of them highly intelligent, does exist, but not as an organized group or conspiracy. No, most of them are not reviewers and literary critics, but some of them are. The problem isn’t that of a “literary” establishment, but the fact that any culture is composed almost universally of individuals whose thought processes and preconceptions are tethered to the present reality in which they live. That present reality is the basis of their preconceptions. Some can speculate slightly beyond the here and now. An even smaller number is comfortable in reading farther beyond the “now.” But… the farther one goes from the comfortable here and now, the fewer individuals there are who will make that leap, and even fewer who are comfortable with it. Even in the theoretically more open society of the United States, there are tens of millions of people who cannot conceive of, let alone accept, any sort of domestic arrangement besides a two-partner paternalistic, heterosexual union sanctioned by a religious body. There are possibly more than a hundred million who have no understanding of any theological system except those derived from European Christianity. Effectively, the vast majority of individuals from such backgrounds are self-alienated from science fiction and to a lesser degree from fantasy.

Fantasy gets around some of that barrier for many people by claiming, right from the outset, that nothing is real in fantasy and never can be… or that fantasy is based on folk-tales and the like and is merely cultural fancy. The fact that fantasy sells far more titles than does science fiction supports, I believe, my conjecture that alternative cultures, worlds, that postulate possible other realities are far too uncomfortable for most people. Even so, the current best-selling Harry Potter books, I recently read, annually total only some 10 million copies a year in English-speaking markets of some 400 million people.

There is no conspiracy or determined effort by a literary establishment to attack science fiction and/or fantasy, but individual attacks have occurred and will continue to occur. Because scholars, critics, critiquers, reviewers are all drawn from the literate population of a culture at large, the majority of whom are uncomfortable with alternatives and futures beyond the here and now, most of those scholars and reviewers will simply be unable and/or unwilling to comprehend alternatives beyond their comfort zone. Rather than admit such discomfort, they will ignore or denigrate that which they do not understand.

At times, this discomfort is so great that it blossoms into outright prejudice, where talented F&SF writers cannot teach at certain institutions or where critics blindly lambaste all fantasy and science fiction. This prejudice does not arise from a tight literary clique, as Sanford would apparently have one believe, but, contrary to what Matt has implied in his blog, from a large segment in society firmly and irrevocably socialized against science fiction and fantasy, and indeed against anything outside their “this-is-real-and-acceptable” mindset. Unfortunately, the majority of critics and reviewers tend to fall into this category, not because they are a literary clique or because they are “out to get” science fiction and fantasy, but because of a socialization they either cannot or will not transcend.

The “bad” news is that little we as writers can do will change adult minds already closed. The “good” news is that, in our society, we can still write and reach those who are open to re-socialization and an understanding that the universe is far wider and wondrous than those who will not can possibly imagine.

Over the years in SF, various writers have postulated assorted “doomsday” environmental scenarios, where the entire planet gets too hot, or water turns to the equivalent of clear jello, or the northern hemisphere becomes encased in solid ice in an improbably short period of time. Yet, in a way, these are “simple” catastrophes, and I say simple because they are of such magnitude that we poor humans can do nothing.

What about catastrophes with which we could deal… and won’t?

For example, it appeared for a time as though there were two schools of thought on greenhouse gas effects, those who believed in global warming and that it was caused or greatly exacerbated by human activity and those who denied any such warming was taking place. Recently, it appears as though the majority of what one might call “informed” opinion, i.e., those with data and some understanding of it, has changed into those who believe in global warming as created by human activities and those who believe in global warming as caused by “natural” effects.

Too many of those in the second group, at least from what I can see, don’t seem to understand that the situation is no less critical for being “natural” [if indeed it is]. But such warming, whether anthropogenic or “natural,” will still lead to ocean levels far higher than they are now. Picture a United States with much of Florida underwater, New Orleans submerged, parts of Houston, New York, San Diego, and other coastal cities under water.

Current estimates for the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina run at over $100 billion, and the majority of that centered on the city of New Orleans and the surrounding area. Something like a 30 foot rise in sea-levels would create a loss of property and equipment thousands of times that amount. How about a $10 TRILLION loss?

And that well might be conservative.

There’s been a great controversy raised by the current administration about the need to reform Social Security because of the possible cost burden required to maintain current benefit levels. Yet rising sea levels pose an even greater threat to the next generation than mere financial burdens — but the financial losses involved would be huge, as noted above. Curiously, I’ve seen no real attempts at a hard dollar assessment just of the losses of productive lands, cities, and like that would be caused by rising sea levels. While one might justify building dikes around New York City, it’s clearly neither possible nor practical to build dikes along the entire U.S. coast.

And what of the political firestorm that would be created by “writing off” real estate and investment in low-lying areas? Yet, if global warming is “natural,” it could well fall under the “acts of God” clause in most insurance and indemnity policies… and that’s certainly where casualty insurers would want it.

With such a massive loss possible, it’s no wonder that no one really wants to address it… and that politicians and policy-makers chose either to ignore the possibilities or to wait until “better data” are available. In the meantime, more and more homes, buildings, and other societal assets are being created in areas ever more vulnerable to losses through rising waters, storms, and violent weather.

But, of course, if all that warming is just a “natural” effect, we really don’t have to worry, do we? And our children and grandchildren will be just fine, won’t they?

And besides, it’s not really a world-destroying environmental danger of the kind we writers postulate, is it? Just a minor rise in temperature and sea-levels, that’s all.

The other day I was proofing a copy-edited manuscript of my forthcoming short story collection [Viewpoints Critical, Tor, March 2008], and I came across a line in the introduction that pointed out that much of what I write has unsettling implications… if the reader thinks about it. This observation followed my reading the introduction that David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer offered to my story “Ghost Mission,” which appears in their annual anthology [Year’s Best Fantasy 7, Tachyon Press] and in which they claim that I’m a romantic.

Yet… if my fantasy and science fiction have unsettling implications, why is it so seldom noticed? So much so that respected editors term me a romantic?

As a side note, I was once asked in which of the worlds I’ve created I’d like to live, and I didn’t even have to think about it. “None of them,” was my immediate answer. I’ll leave it to all of you to consider why my answer was both immediate and vehement — for a moment — but it wasn’t because any of those worlds were quiet and “boring.”

Part of the reason why I’m not considered even a borderline “horror” writer is because I seldom throw the horrifying aspects of the worlds about which I write into my readers’ faces… or figuratively rub your faces in the gore. But… if one thinks about the implications…

Would it really be comfy-cozy to live in a world where the ghost of your teen-aged son or daughter who died in an accident or a lingering illness remained for years to remind you visually and physically that, somehow, perhaps you could have done better?

Would you like the idea of living in a world, like that of Recluce, where every substantial increase in technology resulted in an increase in chaos and societal disruption… somewhere in the world? [Or do we live in a similar world already?]

What about a world such as Liedwahr where the greatest power is wielded by those who have musical abilities most of us can never hope to match? [But is that so different from intellectual capabilities in a high-tech world?]

Or a world such as Corus where abusing the environment will ensure absolutely that a few generations hence every intelligent creature will perish?

Or a future high-tech world such as depicted in Archform:Beauty or Flash, where all of the technological and political/legal protections we have enacted make it virtually impossible to be truly ethical — or to protect your family — without breaking the law?

But…of course… none of these are considered horrifying in comparison to novels that spill entrails everywhere and where evil is conveniently personified in devils or evil politicians or business types out to dominate whatever world is being described. Or where massive fleets of spacecraft [patently impossible both technologically and economically] vie to see whether the good guys and gals or the baddies control the universe.

Then…it just might be that most readers prefer simple and obvious horror and that the less obvious and more real horror hits too close to home.