No, I’m not giving awards, but commenting on the social implications of the recent Winter Olympics. Put bluntly, there’s something really wrong with the world when a national psyche, such as Canada’s, rests on the outcome of a hockey game. Did this athletic contest produce a cure for cancer, a new space drive that will allow us access to the planets, or a way to effectively deal with terrorism? For that matter, did any of the Olympic contests really determine the best athletes in any given endeavor? No, they did not. They determined who was the best on a given day. One could even claim that the U.S.was the better hockey team since the two teams split contests and overall the USA scored more goals. But Canada’s national psyche was “saved” because one game was somehow more important than another game. A game! So be it… sadly.

And, by the way, when did games and viewing them become so important? Has it ever happened before in history? Several times, as a matter of fact — in ancient Greece, before its civilization collapsed, in Rome, after the fall of the Republic, and in Central America, before the Mayan civilization became too weak to survive environmental catastrophe. There might be other examples, as well, but those spring to mind immediately.

More to the immediate point, the Winter Games — and the television hoopla surrounding them — trivialized the lives of everyday people everywhere. A skater was praised for competing and winning a bronze medal in the days following her mother’s death. Yes, she was courageous, but how many people, every day, have to go with their lives after a loved one dies unexpectedly? Several other athletes were lauded for overcoming difficulties in order to triumph in their fields, and the media played it up as if they were the only ones who had ever done so. I don’t recall any media hoopla or medals for my wife when she had to sing a full concert while her mother was dying, in order to keep her job, nor do I recall any great praise for the student who had to do a singing competition after surviving a car crash and a broken shoulder and the death of a beloved aunt. And there seemed to be a great deal of concern over whether Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series would be finished, which concern and commentary lasted far longer than the brief praises of his career at the time of his unfortunate death.

There was a note that the coverage of the Winter Olympics actually outpolled American Idol in terms of viewers. Why should this have been any surprise? They’re different sides of the same coin. Both reward a performance of the moment, not necessarily sustained excellence, and both performances, frankly, have little to do with improving the human condition, except for momentarily making those watching feel better. I’m not taking anything away from the athletes; they’ve worked long and hard to achieve excellence in their fields. But to showcase such performances and to surround them with such hype… what does that say about our society?

Now, before anyone jumps to conclusions that I’m just a geeky science fiction and fantasy writer who has no understanding and appreciation of sports, I will point out that, for better or worse, I was one of those athletes. In addition of lettering in high school sports, I was a competitive swimmer for fifteen years, all the way through college, and although I was just a touch too slow to be Olympic caliber, I do know what it takes to succeed first hand. I’m not against sports; I’m against the glorification of the spectator side of sports, against glitz overwhelming true achievement, and against the creation of an image where sports achievement is blown totally out of proportion to solid values in life.

We live in a world where American Idol far outdraws opera, yet opera is far more demanding and technically superior. Where stock car drivers make thousands of times what those other drivers — such as truckers and highway patrol officers — do. Where graphic novels sell far more than books that actually make readers think in depth. Where the glitz and financial manipulations of Wall Street quants and financiers draw rewards hundreds of thousands of times greater than the salaries of those who police our streets, fight our fires, and educate our children.

History won’t remember American Idol, nor the winners of Olympic Games. If history is even read by the coming generations, it might list Shakespeare, Edison, Washington, Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Pasteur, and Einstein, among others who made real accomplishments.

What did the Winter Olympics say about us as a society? That the winner is… those with the greatest ability to entertain and dazzle, rather than those who provide us with solid achievements?

The other day, Jo Walton, another author, posted a commentary on Tor.com about the decline in “optimistic” science fiction books, claiming that she found few SF books that showed a “positive future” and asking “Why is nobody writing books like this now?”

I won’t quote extensively from her article, but she does make the point that optimistic science fiction was written in the depths of the Great Depression, through WWII, and through the 1950s, none of which were exactly the most cheerful of times, despite a certain later gloss of nostalgia, while noting that today most SF views of the future are rather grim.

What struck me about both her commentary and the initial responses posted was that both Jo and the commenters restricted their views to a comparatively few handfuls of writers, and those writers tend to be those who have high visibility in the F&SF fan community and press. Even some writers who have fairly high visibility and who show a certain optimism about the future — such as Joe Haldeman, Michael Flynn, David Drake, or Walter Jon Williams — aren’t mentioned. While my optimism is of the somewhat cynical variety, I do often write about futures with optimistic features and places, and I-m optimistic about solutions — just not about their costs… and needless to say, I’m not mentioned either.

So, as Jo herself asks, how much of this is merely seeing what one wants to, and how much is grounded in a fundamental change in what is being written? Another relevant question is: How does one define optimistic? From the viewpoint of the tens of thousands of American mothers who lost children to so-called “childhood diseases” every year prior to about 1940, the health situation we have today would look incredibly optimistic. The same would be true of all the slaves in the south in 1850. On the other hand, the Jeffersonians of 1800 would be appalled by the centralized banking and commercially dominated economy of the twenty-first century. For all the housewives of the years before 1950, modern conveniences would likely seem the ultimate optimistic convenience, and long-distance modern transport is definitely far better and more optimistic than sailing ships and horse-drawn wagons.

I’m a great believer in the fact that life comes in all shades, particularly of gray, and the events of the past half-century, in particular, have reinforced that feeling in millions of Americans. We have comparatively few Americans, in percentage terms, in grinding poverty, particularly compared to most of the world’s population, but we also have far higher taxation rates than we ever had when grinding poverty was the norm for twenty percent of our population. Despite the tabloid headlines, civic violence is far lower than it was a century ago, but there are far more restrictions on personal acts and behavior. And so it goes. In a way, one might even call these trade-offs the “loss of societal innocence.” This makes it difficult for an intelligent writer to present an unblemished and totally optimistic view of a future where technology will solve all the major problems facing society — or even one of them.

Yet, despite my quibbles with what Jo Walton has written, and despite those of us who struggle to show optimism in depicting the future, I think she touches a vital point. It is getting harder and harder to be both realistic and highly optimistic in writing about probable futures, although I do believe, as I think my writing shows, in qualified optimism.

In the end, the question becomes: Can any realistic future high-tech society present other than qualified optimism, given higher population levels, higher and often unrealistic societal expectations, and the need to maintain basic levels of order among society itself?

Last week, a biochemist who was denied tenure shot six of her colleagues, and three died. An engineer blew up his house and piloted his private plane into an IRS office after publishing a manifesto claiming how, time and time again, tax judgments by the IRS had wiped out his savings and retirement. What wasn’t revealed by these reports is the fact that they’re the tip of an iceberg that’s been quietly growing over the past several decades.

What is this iceberg? It’s the ever-growing pressure in all areas of society to do more with less, and it’s been exacerbated by the economic meltdown and recession.

American manufacturing, as I noted earlier, is hiring as little as possible, and is either automating as much as possible or simply closing American facilities and importing goods from off-shore facilities or manufacturers in order to keep costs down. Admittedly, some facilities have retained hourly-paid employees, but have kept their hours the same or cut them hours while expecting higher production levels.

The same sorts of pressure have hit education on all levels. In most states, teachers and aides have been let go, and classroom sizes have increased. More students are going to college to try to improve their skills and qualifications, but across the entire nation, college faculties have been reduced and classes have been cut, making it harder and harder for students to graduate in a timely fashion, putting additional stress on the remaining faculty, the students, and their parents. Yet state legislatures are still demanding greater cuts in higher education because tax revenues are down, and the legislators are feeling pressure not to increase taxes. A professor who is denied tenure in this climate may never teach again, and granting tenure, no matter what anyone says, can be both arbitrary and unfair, and even if it is not, it’s highly stressful and getting more so because everything is reviewed under a microscope. Over the past decade, I’ve seen or read about a number of cases, including one shooting, and another case where a professor literally attacked campus security, kicking and screaming, when being removed from an office he refused to vacate.

The TEA Party protesters are another symptom of this pressure, complaining primarily that taxes are too high and government too intrusive.

This pressure affects everyone and shows up in different ways. For example, I’m writing more books than I was ten years ago, and according to readers and critics, the books I’m writing now are better than the ones I was writing then, but I’m making less, even though the price of books is slightly higher. Why? Because I’m selling fewer copies of each older [backlist] title on average each year. This isn’t limited to me. Once you get below the top twenty best-selling authors or so, in general book sales are lower. Certainly, it now takes fewer copies sold to make the lower rungs on The New York Times bestseller list, and this reduction in reading has hit midlist and beginning authors especially hard. Much has been made of the fact that younger readers aren’t reading as much, so much so that another factor has been ignored — one that my wife and other professionals have told me time and time again. They’re all working longer hours, and they’re too tired to read as much as they used to. Now… there are those who’ve been downsized out of higher paying jobs, and they have the time to read — but they don’t have the money to buy books, or as many books.

Why are there more and more “reality shows” on television? One reason is that they’re far cheaper to produce — another result of trying to do more with less. Another reason is likely that they offer a way for hard-pressed individuals to “succeed” outside the normal occupational channels, where too often these days harder and longer and better work is required just to keep a job, rather than mark one for advancement.

Yet, for all the commentary on the “recession,” on jobs, on politics, I have yet to see a commentary on what all of these factors add up to for those who are still employed — ever increasing pressure on working Americans, from those at the lowest level to doctors, professors, and other professionals, who are feeling more and more that they’re being backed into a wall or a corner from which they cannot escape.

Whether that iceberg becomes a powder keg — that remains to be seen.

Last week the U.S, government released statistics showing that for the first time women held more payroll jobs than did men. Not only that, but overall male unemployment was three full points [or roughly 30% higher] than that of women. Among blacks, the discrepancies were far greater, with black male unemployment rates being more than twice that of women. In addition, there’s a similar pattern occurring in education, where women are not only obtaining more collegiate level education, except in four areas of science and computers, but women are also winning a disproportionate amount of the scholastic honors, far more than in proportion to their enrollment.

That isn’t to say that some males aren’t excelling, because they are, but more and more, I’m seeing a pattern in both the statistics and in my own observations, and it’s simple. A small percentage of men are extremely high achievers, and so are a small, if somewhat larger, percentage of women. The remainder of the men tends to skate by (and at times, that’s an particularly charitable description), while a far, far larger percentage of women work extremely hard at what they do. In short, more and more, men seem to be choosing between the extremes of high achievement and effort and just “getting by.”

My wife has also noted this change among students, where a smaller and smaller percentage of male students devote themselves to their studies — even while test and ability scores indicate that the average intelligence level of these males is considerably higher than that of their predecessors twenty years ago, due in part to the fact that the university’s admission standards have tightened. On the other hand, a greater and greater percentage of the female students devote themselves to pursuing excellence. Most of the males have greater difficulty concentrating. Interestingly enough, what the males also fail to notice, or apparently don’t care about, is that the majority of the women aren’t terribly interested in non-motivated males, and they comprise the majority of the male students.

The other area of extremism is that of risk-taking. A far greater percentage of men than women take high risks, often in areas where the chance of success is not all that great… or where sooner or later, failure is inevitable, such as with the derivatives meltdown.

While it’s anecdotal, and I do tend to regard such with skepticism, I might also note that all those financial institutions which took huge risks and which continue to pay huge bonuses are dominated by males. I could not find a single large institution that failed and that was headed by a female CEO. There certainly may be one, but, even taking into account the far smaller number of large business organizations headed by women, the statistical discrepancy is noteworthy.

This difference may be biological in nature, in that women tend not to take extreme risks because doing so would jeopardize their offspring, or cultural, or both, but what I find disturbing is not that men tend to take risks, and that some take extreme risks, but when they take risks with other people’s money and capital. If a risk-taker wants to sky-dive, free rock climb, or the like, that’s his privilege and life, so long as it doesn’t endanger the lives and resources of others. But taking extreme risks with large amounts of the funds of others to bring in a higher rate of return in order to gain millions in personal bonuses, while threatening the entire financial system… that kind of risk-taking I find objectionable, self-centered, and disgusting.

Part of these masculine behaviors may simply be a reaction to civilization, and particularly to a high-tech culture. Proving that you’re the meanest, nastiest, and greatest risk-taking male in the world may have a large personal payoff in a low-tech culture, but that sort of behavior is a disaster in a world where everything is interconnected. As a result, society is creating more and pressures against such behavior. Some men just don’t respond well to such pressures, and, for better or worse, a disproportionate percentage of those types of males are represented in those who immigrated to the United States. I suspect that’s why we have so many “backlashes” against laws that restrict certain kinds of behaviors, from gun control legislation to restrictions on riding ATVs on public lands, to opposition to seat-belt laws, etc. This male reaction may also be fueling the popularity of “reality shows,” where the “rules” of civilization don’t apply.

Again, I have no problem with people watching “reality shows,” but I do have a problem with their proliferation, because when the media is over-saturated with such programs, the message the media sends is that extremism, plotting and scheming, and all manner of negative behaviors are to be applauded and rewarded. In short, extremism is a virtue under the reality show model, while hard work, dedication, and honesty are for losers.

We’re currently at war in two nations, battling extremism in its worst forms. Should we really be celebrating and espousing it here in the United States? Especially when it appears that it’s creating an even greater divide between men and women? Or is it that only “our” forms of extremism are the good ones?

For some time as a writer I’ve wondered why so many books that I and others have found good or even excellent seldom ever get discussed by the critics and reviewers within the F&SF field, and why so many of those books that get praised are demonstrably weaker than all too many of those that are never mentioned. The most obvious answer, and the one that comes up the most often, is that it’s just a matter of taste. That’s certainly a factor, and one that can’t be discounted, but I don’t think it’s the only factor and not even the dominant one.

What first got me to thinking about this was a conversation I had several months ago with several of the noted and leading reviewers of a magazine that publishes a great number of reviews every month. The magazine reviewers explained that they liked to concentrate on “newer” writers and books that readers might not have seen or heard about. That’s a reason with thought behind it, and one that has a certain validity.

Then, the other day I read a review column about the “best” works of 2009 by one of the newer “flavor-de-jour” reviewers who’s currently everyone’s darling, so to speak. Rather than explain, I’m just going to lift a few phrases from the column, each phrase about a different book: “fearless deep dive into worlds of fantasy and of sex…avant garde fantasy elements”; “wonderful ability to be utterly modern”; “strange scenes involving bizarre fish and other monstrosities”; “never blinks in its depiction of horrors of the mind and the body”; “gleefully subvert most of heroic fantasy’s tropes”; “strange creations and enchanters”; “beyond the idea of cyberpunk or the New Wave in its approach”; “kinetic energy and hard-to-define originality”; “potent sampling of the author’s Southern-tinged dual gonzo and horror impulses”; “most experimental and formally daring genre fiction of the year”; “interesting fantasy experiments”; “extraordinary credit for publishing an anthology with few marketable names.”

I understand the appeal of the new, especially to critics and reviewers. After all, who wants to write reviews, year after year, that say something like, “XXX provides another well-crafted, well-plotted, and well-written work with virtually no flaws… sure to please those who have followed…” Even writing a review that states “YYY offers yet another well-designed and enchantingly written experimental novel whose plot and characters are based on the musical motifs of…” gets old after a well-established author achieves yet another milestone or artistic triumph, particularly if he or she does so without excessive sex or rhetorical fireworks.

Coupled with the praise of newness is also, so far as I’m concerned, far too much praise for the violent violation of taboos and the equating of explicit and often vulgar sexual episodes to excellence or insight or being daring. As I think Marion Zimmer Bradley once said (and she should have known, having written pornography under pseudonyms), “Describing sex in detail is like describing plumbing.” Technical manuals and descriptions, whether about technology or sex, should definitely be limited in good fiction.

Seeing newer or unrecognized writers getting exposure and praise doesn’t bother me in the slightest (although I do admit to a bit of jealousy because I would have liked a share of that when I was new and unrecognized), but what does bother me — a lot! — is that all this gushing over newness and shock value is equated with excellence, and all too many excellent works are overlooked in the critical pursuit of “newness.” But then, I suppose I should remember that the very term “novel” comes from the Latin, through French, term for “new.”

The other day, when almost a foot of snow fell on Cedar City, I heard someone remark, “so much for global warming.” Yet even this early in the year, a great number of climate scientists are predicting that 2010 will be among the warmest years on record. With normally comparatively balmy Washington, D.C., suffering its worst blizzards in decades, and Siberia colder than in half a century… how can this possibly be?

For the same reason that people insist that e-books of new publishers’ releases can profitably be sold for $9.99 — personal experience! Forget about all those hundreds of pages of publicly available financial statements, or the percentage of books that fail. Just because individuals can copy an electronic file for next to nothing, that personal experience means that electronic books shouldn’t cost anything, either.

Human beings gather patterns to make their way through life, and those patterns are all concentrated and analyzed on a personal level. Even the stories and anecdotes have more impact on humans, far more, than do facts and statistics. The problem with this experiential and anecdotal approach is that — without “outside” information and wisdom — it’s lousy for dealing with events larger than the life and attention span [or lifespan] of an individual.

Take the problem of global warming. It’s been a cold winter in much of North America and parts of Europe and Asia — but the area above the Arctic Circle has been running as much as twenty degrees above normal. That’s because for the past several decades, in the winter, wind patterns have confined the chill to areas well above the Arctic Circle. This year the warmer air has disrupted those patterns and sent comparatively “warmer” air south — except that comparatively warmer air is a lot colder than what we’ve experienced in recent winters. Even so, the overall temperature of the northern hemisphere is predicted to be warmer than it was last year, but since none of us happens to live near the north pole, all we see is that it’s colder where we are. That’s experiential information, and it’s limited to where we are.

Recently, the Economist had an article chronicling the pattern for economic booms and busts, and the patterns date back to before the Dutch tulip boom, and they all proceed in the same fashion, whether the commodity is tulips, South Sea or Florida land, stocks, or real estate. So why doesn’t anyone learn? For two reasons. First, often those who fuel the boom didn’t live through the last one, and they have no experience, and, second, because, as human beings, each of us likes to think that we’re unique. That is a survival trait, necessary for beings who have self-awareness, because it would be too depressing for most people to carry on without that spark of uniqueness. And each of us is unique — just as each snowflake is unique. And just as the patterns and uses of snowflakes are limited by their structure, so too are human interactions limited, if to a far larger compass. But our sense of uniqueness blinds us to the fact that human patterns repeat, time and time again. We can read about past patterns, but most people dismiss them with the thought, “I’m different. It won’t happen to me.” Yet it does, and all too often.

Another part of the reason is that there’s a difference between knowledge and wisdom, and an old saying illustrates that: Knowledge is as old as the oldest cave painting or hieroglyph, but wisdom is only as old as the oldest human being.

A number of those of us who either served during the Vietnam era or lived through it had great concerns about military adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq and opposed it from the beginning. We weren’t and aren’t against our troops, and we certainly don’t like either the ideology or politics in those areas But we lived through Vietnam, and we saw how it is almost impossible to combat ideologies, especially ones fueled by fanaticism, without the total commitment of the entire nation and the expenditure of far more in lives and in resources than any administration would be allowed to make in the political conditions that exist. Yet the decision-makers vowed that the military effort would be limited and surgical and effective. Those were essentially the same terms used by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the early 1960s, and that war dragged on for almost fifteen years and killed more than 55,000 Americans. We’ve now been fighting in the Middle East and Afghanistan for close to nine years, and matters still aren’t anywhere close to resolution, not to mention the restrictions on everyday freedoms that having to combat the terrorist backlash has placed on all Americans.

But two administrations have vowed that matters would be “different.” How different? Well… one difference is that we don’t have a draft, so that national outrage over casualties is muted, even if career soldiers and National Guard troops are being deployed time and time again — like the former student of my wife who’s still in his twenties with something like five National Guard deployments. And we’re using far more high-tech gear. So we’re not losing nearly as many soldiers, but a lot more of them are surviving with high levels of physical and mental disabilities, and the resource cost is getting astronomical, at a time when our failure to learn from past experience created the second largest economic meltdown in a century — and thus drastically reduced tax revenues… and boosted the deficit and thrown millions out of jobs.

Yes, each of us is unique, and all too many of us are uniquely unable to see and learn from wider knowledge, the past experience of others, and impartial and non-experiential knowledge, because, after all, we are unique, and oh-so-different from our forebears, and we’re practical and see clearly everything around us. And that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

One thing that the Macmillan-Amazon debacle highlighted is, to me, a very disturbing aspect of American society — the idea that everyone has a right to everything cheaply, and that if a copy of something can be made inexpensively — or for almost nothing — then that’s everyone’s right. Thankfully, not everyone, and perhaps not even a majority of Americans believes that, but millions clearly do. The reaction of the ten-dollar-or-cheaper e-book demanders is merely the latest manifestation of the idea.

People who copy music, either recorded or sheet music, without paying for it, people who download illegal torrent copies of books, people who plagiarize others’ ideas — all of them are part of this movement, and they justify it with slogans such as, “Information should be free” or “The marginal costs of producing e-books are nothing” or “the music industry is gouging the listeners.” In the area of books, the e-book buyers tend to ignore the fact that authors get less than half as much from an e-book as from a hardcover, or the fact that the vast majority of authors hold down daytime jobs because writing doesn’t cover the bills. Everyone concentrates on the five percent or so of authors who actually make a living at writing. The same pattern holds true in music as well, and I have to ask if the lack of technical perfection and musical quality in so much of what is popular is the result of the “cheap at any cost” philosophy? Might that just have something to do with the fact that a smaller and smaller fraction of musicians and singers can support themselves by their music?

And then there are the banks, who are working diligently to reduce their costs, by making you print your statements out, or having you use your computer to monitor your account, and by trying to run banks with fewer and fewer employees while paying less and less interest on deposits. Or the various state legislatures who insist on not raising taxes while more and more children pour into the schools and colleges, and while teachers’ salaries are frozen and classroom sizes increase, while state universities have to hike tuition because the state legislators want to keep taxes “cheap.”

Of course, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. As a nation, we want everything as cheaply as possible, but we also believe that our incomes or wages or salaries should increase every year. Exactly why did so many manufacturers shut down U.S. facilities and outsource to Asia, Central America, or other third world countries? Or automate and reduce the number of employees? Because very few of them could compete on price while paying the wages, salaries, and working conditions demanded by U.S. workers and required under state and federal regulations. In addition, investors and lenders demand higher and higher profit levels. That combination translates into higher prices, unless costs can be reduced, and Americans generally won’t pay higher prices — except for certain luxury goods… and those often only in “good times.” The result? Fewer high paying manufacturing jobs and more lower-paying service McJobs… with even more pressure for “cheap” goods, because more people have lower incomes… or none at all.

So, “price-sensitive” manufacturing industries have automated or fled the USA, if not both, of necessity, while everyone complains — even while shopping for the lowest possible price for those goods. Along the way, we tend to turn a blind eye at the working conditions in those countries, yet rail against Chinese manufacturers of defective drywall, or toys with lead paint, or other unsafe products.

What almost everyone tends to ignore is that not only does price reflects the sum total of inputs, plus profit, but that not complying with safe working conditions and not enforcing good environmental practices also reduces costs, and much of the lower prices of many, many imported goods, including cheap CDS and other bottom-line electronics, is effectively subsidized by such practices as child labor, slave labor, terrible working conditions, and environmental degradation in third world countries. Of course, what makes it work is that, bad as those conditions may be, they’re often far better than what existed before.

But what happens when there are no more third world countries willing to accept such conditions? When we run out of places to which we can export costs, so to speak? Or will we end up destroying our own economic system in pursuit of the “cheap at any cost” and become someone else’s third world country?

As of this Friday morning, Amazon still isn’t selling any Macmillan [or Tor] books, despite a statement six days ago that they would capitulate. Now… to be fair, Amazon didn’t say when it would resume selling Macmillan products; it might be in the next hour, or it might be a year from now. [NOTE: As of Friday evening, sales of hardcovers and paperbacks resumed, but not the majority of e-books, and the issues raised below still are open questions.]

Some who know the book industry and Amazon have speculated that the promise was designed to mute the reaction from readers and authors, while the reality was to punish Macmillan for not falling into line with Amazon’s future view of how e-books and books in general should be sold. Certainly, there’s a case that can be made for this. Amazon was willing to lose tens of millions of dollars in establishing itself, and if Amazon believes that, by losing more tens of millions of dollars to “punish” Macmillan in order to shape the future of bookselling, then that’s a small price to pay for eventual success and market domination.

Another possibility is that, because Amazon has not updated its software, except on a piecemeal basis, since its founding, the abrupt “re-structuring” of the “Buy” buttons produced a cascade effect that has overwhelmed the programming capabilities of its staff and technicians.

And a third possibility is simply that Amazon was lying when it said it had to capitulate. One small fact that supports this view was the phrase in the Amazon statement of “capitulation” that declared that Macmillan had a “monopoly” over its products. Duhh… Every producer has a monopoly over its specific products. Ford can’t sell brand-new from the factory GM products. Kroger doesn’t get to sell Wal-Mart’s “Great Value” store products. Tor doesn’t get to sell Berkeley or ROC books. What the Amazon statement reveals is Jeff Bezos’ view that Amazon has the “divine right” to sell all books from all publishers on his terms. Not that this is really anything new; it’s been obvious from the beginning that such was his goal.

In addition to the fairly obvious use of strong-arm techniques and misleading and/or misinformative statements, what also disturbs me about this “vision” is the hypocrisy behind it. Amazon has positioned itself as a champion of readers, claiming that it wants to make low-cost books and e-books available to everyone at the lowest possible prices, as well as trumpeting the widest possible selection. Yet the tactics used by Amazon are designed, or will have the effect, as I suggested earlier, of reducing the diversity of books available to readers, because books which sell in smaller volumes will either have to be priced higher or subsidized by better-selling books. Yet, if Amazon is successful in forcing price levels down so that the better-selling books have far lower profits, publishers will reduce the numbers of “different” books that do not fit in whatever the “flavor de jour” of the marketplace may be at any given point, because either their prices will be comparatively too high and readers won’t buy them, or because the profits from better selling books won’t support subsidizing them. There is already tremendous pressure in the publishing marketplace to “homogenize” and “popularize” publishers’ offerings, and Amazon’s tactics, if successful, will increase that pressure, because, in order to compete, other booksellers will have to follow suit.

Readers are already a minority in the United States, and intelligent readers more so, and whether “accidental” or deliberate, Amazon’s failure to resume sales of Macmillan books does tend to suggest to me that its agendas are anything but good for the future of different, thought-provoking, and diverse books — no matter what Jeff Bezos may claim. And, if the problem is “merely” technical, then should we really be quite so trusting of Amazonian pronouncements? Should we really trust a multibillion dollar entity that can’t fix its “Buy” buttons?

I suspect by now a good many readers know that, as a result of a disagreement over the pricing of e-books, Amazon has “temporarily” removed all Macmillan titles [which includes Tor titles… and all of my books] from its online sales operation. For some time, Amazon has been listing the majority of its Kindle titles at $9.99. In addition, more recently, it has been making the Kindle titles available, at least in the case of my books, almost simultaneously with the initial hardcovers.

Amazon wanted the price to start at $9.99 and decrease from there. It’s hardly surprising that Amazon wanted a ten dollar list price because Amazon had been losing $4-$5 on all those ten dollar e-books, at least in the case of new releases, in the hopes of establishing what amounted to a market monopoly on e-books, at least until Apple’s latest news. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, justified this stand by saying that e-books should be cheaper than hardcovers because they don’t have to be physically printed. But… e-books already are cheaper.At $15.00, an e-book of one of my titles is 46% less than the list price, and more than 10% below the super-discounted hardcover price.

The reader advocates and Bezos have made the point that the incremental or marginal cost of “producing an e-book” is almost nothing. Unhappily, this argument not only misses the point, but is fallacious. Here’s why.

First, the production costs of a book go well beyond the paper and binding. The president of HarperStudio, a division of HarperCollins, noted in the Los Angeles Times that his costs for an e-book were three dollars less than for a hardcover, not the $18 less claimed by Amazon. The reason for this is that the author has to be paid, or he or she isn’t likely to keep writing books. Then there are editors, assistant editors, proofreaders, and copy-editors to be paid. They happen to be there as part of the review and quality control process, and, until you’ve read the first drafts of some authors, you have no idea how critical they are. Then there are artists and illustrators, and even e-books have covers, even if only electronically reproduced. In addition, there are the sales representatives, who have to persuade booksellers to buy books. Why are they necessary? Because the booksellers don’t have enough people and enough time to sort through every single book published each year, among other things. There are also contracts attorneys, publicists, and accountants. Like it or not, publishing is already one of the lowest profit margin industries in the U.S. Last year was so bad that virtually every single fiction publisher either laid off employees or didn’t hire as many as left through normal attrition.

The argument used by some readers and Amazon is that e-books are an “afterthought,” something that can be created electronically after all the other costs are attributed to the hardcover and mass market paperback. Yet… if the devotees of e-books are right, and they are the wave of the future and end up becoming a major fraction of the copies of most fiction titles, how can a publisher not spread the costs across all formats being sold?

Second, what’s been overlooked is the fact that a tremendous number of book titles actually lose money. Depending on the publisher and the year, that can range from as little as 30% of all titles published to more than 60%. That means that successful books not only have to cover their own production costs but the losses from unsuccessful books if the publisher is to remain in business.

Third, hardcover sales of successful books effectively subsidize paperbacks or less successful books. Ten-dollar Kindle books would have created price pressures that would either reduce the sales of hardcovers or replace them with e-books, and as more adaptable e-book reading devices become available, that would reduce overall revenues even more than would $15 e-books. This, in turn, would reduce the ability of publishers to try “new” authors and approaches, and would likely result in more “mass” entertainment and less diversity in a field that is already having trouble publishing books for limited audiences.

What about the small presses? Aren’t they supposed to fill that gap? Some are, and in the F&SF field, they’ve done well… BUT… what most small presses cannot do is offer a national exposure to a range of new authors. Doing that takes the resources of a large publisher, and they’ll do less of that in a marketplace based on the lowest possible price.

Now… is all this just a ploy to “justify” the status quo for my own benefit? No. I already have a defined “brand.” Even over the short time Amazon is boycotting Macmillan I will possibly lose some revenue, and had Amazon prevailed in its demands for ten dollar e-books, I probably would have lost more over time, wherever the e-book pricing point settled, but not enough for the publisher to stop publishing me. But that’s because I’m an established author, even if I’m not rolling in the millions as some are. Had Amazon been successful, it would have hurt beginning and mid-list authors, and it could have destroyed some careers, because what Amazon wants is to sell lots of cheap books, regardless of the effect on authors or discriminating readers.

I don’t have a problem with “cheap books.” I do have a problem with Amazon claiming lofty arguments for those “cheap books” and rationalizing their predatory scheme with fallacious arguments, supported by what amounted to blackmail, and their low cost to Amazon being subsidized by everyone else.

And from Amazon’s grudging concession to Macmillan, so did a lot of other readers.

I love my computers… mostly. But computers aren’t exactly what they seem to be for most people, and the wide-spread proliferation of computers and their omnipresence has had good effects and bad. One of the worst is that the “computer age” has generated a host of illusions that have, in general, had pervasively negative effects.

The first illusion is one I’ve mentioned before — the illusion of choice. The internet and the world-wide web — as well as satellite TV — offer an infinite array of choices, don’t they? No… not exactly. If… and it’s a big IF, often requiring considerable expense to someone, you have access to all the university libraries and research facilities through the web, there’s quite a bit to be found. The problem is that, first, most people don’t have universal access or anything close to it, and, second, even for those that do, the search systems are rudimentary, if not misleading, and often simply cannot find information that’s there. More to the point, for general users, the information resembles the “Top 40” in hundreds of different formats — the same two paragraphs of information in infinite variety of presentation. The same is equally true of the software tools available. And it’s definitely true of all the varieties of TV entertainment. Yes, there’s great choice, and most of it’s in the packaging.

The second illusion is what I’d call the illusion of completeness. Students, in particular, but a huge percentage of those under thirty have the illusion that all the knowledge and information can be had through the internet. Just as an illustration I did a search on Paul Bowles, the composer and writer, and came up with a theoretical 285,000 references, which boiled down to 480 discrete references, which further decreased to 450 after deleting the other “Paul Bowles.” Almost 20% of the references dealt with aspects of his most famous book — The Sheltering Sky. Something like 15% were different versions of the same standard biography. Three other books of his received about 10% each of the references. From what I could determine, more than ten percent of all entries were totally useless, and over 70 percent of the detailed references, which might provide unique information, were either about works for purchase or articles or studies not available online. That’s not to say that such an internet search doesn’t provide a good starting point. It can, but, unfortunately, the internet is exactly where most students and others looking for information stop.

The third is the illusion of accomplishment. Americans, in particular, feel that they’re working harder than ever, and the statistics tend to support it. But what did all that work accomplish? With all the emphasis on reports and accountability, businesses and institutions are generating more reports and data than ever before in history. With email and cellphones, the majority of North Americans and those in the industrialized world are “instantly” available. With this instant access, supervisors, customers, and governments all want answers “now,” and more and more time is spent responding rather than “doing,” and all the need to respond to all the inquiries limits the time available to “do.”

The fourth is the illusion of the “quick and perfect solution.” In the world of the mass media, entertainment, and computers, problems are resolved in an hour or by the judicious application of software [and if you can’t make the software work, that’s your problem, not the software’s]. Combine this with the niche-fragmentation of society, and each group has its own “perfect solution,” if only those “other idiots” would understand why what we’ve laid out is THE answer.

The fifth illusion is that of “reality.” Both the entertainment industry and the computer wizards are working hard to make the unreal look as real as possible and to convince everyone that everything can be handled electronically, and that there’s little difference between “electronic reality” and dirt-under-your-fingernails reality. That bothers me, more than a little, because electronics don’t convey the blood, sweat, striving, and agony that fill all too many people’s lives, and that lack of visceral appeal leads to more and more decisions based on image and profit — exactly exemplified in bankers who make million dollar bonuses while police, firefighters, and teachers have their wages cut and/or frozen whenever the economy dips.

But then, of what use is reality when illusion is so satisfying?

With a military escalation in Afghanistan estimated to cost one million dollars per soldier per year, a health care legislative package that could cost trillions, not to mention escalating costs in dozens of federal programs, both the Administration and the Congress are looking for ways to come up with more funding and/or reduce the cost of existing programs.

The easy target, of course, is to aim at the “undeserving rich,” such as Wall Street hedge fund managers and investment bankers and tax them more heavily. And between the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and various administration and Congressional initiatives, it seems unlikely that the “rich” will escape greater taxation. The problem there, of course, as I’ve noted before, is that most of the “undeserving rich” will escape the majority of the proposed taxes, while the upper middle class will pay for most of it, because, for some strange reason, the political mindset is that anyone who makes over $250,000 is rich. Yet, in practice, most tax avoidance strategies don’t work for couples who make between $250,000 and $400,000. In fact, the more money you make, the better they work. So these tax increases will hit the hardest on those couples in high cost-of-living cities, such as New York and San Francisco, particularly those where both spouses work long hours and who, facing high mortgage and schooling costs for offspring, would laugh bitterly at the idea that they’re rich. Do they really “deserve” to be the most heavily taxed segment of the population? Certainly, they’re anything but poor, but for the most part, the vast majority of their income is earned through long and hard work, and they’re not the ones with the mansions and the yachts and the fabulous vacations.

At the other end of the income spectrum are the “poor.” Like the “rich,” this catch-all definition includes all manner of people, except the poor range from third-generation welfare recipients to hard-working minimum-wage level families, from drug-addicts to disabled individuals who need support services, either to work or just to live, from the able-bodied employable unemployed to the mentally-disabled unemployable. And society has effectively said that all of them are deserving of governmental aid, in some form or another, if not in several forms.

But… exactly who is “deserving,” and of what are they deserving?

Both the Iraqi and Afghan people deserve better governments and lives, and we “deserve” not to be at the mercy of terrorists — but “deserving” or not, does spending all those resources and lives in the Middle East really make sense? On the domestic front, why should middle-class taxpayers subsidize families and single mothers who knowingly have child after child that they cannot support through their own efforts? Why should hedge fund managers who get multimillion dollar bonuses for gaming securities in such a way that it continually threatens our prosperity pay lower effective tax rates than say, primary care doctors or college professors? Why should taxpayers have to fund rehabilitation efforts for teenagers and adults who make bad choices and become addicts?

One answer, of course, that applies to the “poor” is the children. If society doesn’t maintain some living standards for the poor with children, the argument goes, then the cycle of poverty and violence is merely repeated generation after generation, and besides, the children “deserve better.” But with forty percent or more of the American population paying no income taxes at all, virtually all of them, despite the rhetoric, either working-class or poor, and something like 20% of the remainder paying 80% of the taxes, how long before the “needs” of the “deserving” — both internationally and domestically — overwhelm the American mid-middle class and upper-middle class?

Don’t they “deserve” some consideration as well?

A very recent review of Arms-Commander opined that the book was, as expected, essentially Recluce “comfort food.” I think it’s more than that, but as an author I can live with such a commentary. What really bothered me about the review was the opinion that Saryn’s opponents should have learned from others’ mistakes and adapted to her tactics.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because it’s far from the first time this criticism has been aired, both regarding my fantasy and SF, and the critics don’t seem to have learned from their mistakes, either.

There are several points that the “critics” don’t seem to understand. First, there’s a vast difference between “receiving information” and “learning.” Learning requires not only assimilating the information, but responding to it and changing one’s actions and behavior. To learn from someone else’s mistakes, you have to know about them and understand why they were mistakes. In a low-tech society word doesn’t travel fast, and sometimes it doesn’t travel at all. And when it does travel, you have to be able to trust the bearer of that news. You also have to have enough knowledge to be able to understand what went wrong. Now, in the case of Saryn, and Anna and Secca in the Spellsong Cycle, most of their opponents — and officers — who made the mistakes didn’t survive them. Even when a few did, those that did weren’t likely to be trusted, especially in Lornth, where most lord-holders don’t trust any other lord-holders.

Even if knowledge of such defeats reached others, the knowledge of how those defeats occurred didn’t. This isn’t unique to fiction. The conquests of Alexander the Great tend to follow the same pattern. He had a new way of waging war, and yet almost no one seemed to adapt. Even with more modern communications, how many generals in World War I sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths, essentially in exercises in futility, seemingly unable to understand that the infantry charges of the past didn’t work against barbed wire, machine guns, and deep trenches? Even the high-tech U.S. armed forces took almost a decade to switch from conventional war techniques to wide-spread counter-guerilla tactics in Vietnam [and some critics contend we never did].

Even if you do understand what happened, to counter it you have to change the way you operate, usually the way you’ve trained your forces and your commanders and subcommanders. Even in the best of cases, this doesn’t happen quickly. I’ve been a teacher and a swimming coach, and my wife is a singer and voice teacher, and we both know it takes years to get most people to change long-held and incorrect techniques. It’s not something that happens overnight or even in weeks or seasons. And sometimes, after a certain age, people simply can’t change their way of dealing with matters.

Finally, even if you think you want to learn, if that learning requires letting go of long-held beliefs and biases, in many, many cases, it simply won’t happen. Instead, you’ll attribute the problem to other factors or ignore it totally because you hold those beliefs so dearly.

Yet the medieval level holders and barons of Lornth, with no communications faster than horses, no understanding of what really happened, no trust in each other [which was what caused many of their problems to begin with], and no desire to change their tactics and way of life, should have understood what Saryn was doing, essentially before they even had word, and revolutionized everything they knew about warfare and fighting in less than a season?

The idea that any significant fraction of people, and particularly institutions, learn, adapt, and respond quickly is more fantastic than anything I’ve ever put in print.

A website [Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist] just posted a quote from Arms-Commander, in which a character notes that “it is better to be a just tyrant who provides freedom than a dead ruler who tried to be fair in an unfair world.” Almost immediately an anonymous commenter observed that “a tyrant, even a just one, can never provide freedom. It’s antithetical to the very nature of the word.”

I was instantly torn between the desire to laugh hysterically, to go postal, or to sigh in despair. After having spent a lifetime studying government and politics, not to mention nearly twenty years in Washington, D.C., in a number of federal positions in both the executive and legislative branch, and after two tours in the U.S. Navy, I think I have a fair understanding of how governments do and don’t work. So…

First… NO government provides “freedom” in the absolute sense. All governments restrict certain practices and behaviors in order to maintain order, because without order, people literally do not have the “freedom” to walk down the streets safely. Even with such restrictions, the order created may not be anywhere close to desirable — except when compared to the state of no effective government at all, as one can currently see in Somalia. The degree of restrictions and how much order is created varies from country to country and system to system, but restrictions on behavior for the safety of others are anything but “freedom” in the ideal sense.

Second, the original meaning of “tyrant” was a ruler who seized power outside of the previous legal system. In that sense, the founding fathers of the United States were tyrants. Now… they justified that rebellion and seizure after the fact by creating a system that was superior to what preceded it. We can call them authors of democracy, founding fathers, and the like, but a significant number were in fact rebelling aristocrats who did in fact sometimes behave like the popular conception of tyrants, and who insisted on enshrining the legality of slaveholding, certainly a local, if not a regional tyranny. Yet they provided more “freedom” than the previous system.

Likewise, “freedom” and even “liberty” have been evolving terms. In the United States, originally “liberty” was effectively limited to white males, and predominantly property owners. Slaves, women, and children had few legal rights. In practice, and in law, “freedom” is the granting of certain rights to certain classes of people, and the less restrictive the conditions circumscribing those rights are, the “freer” those people are judged to be.

Given that, by definition, in practice, there’s no difference in the moral status as a ruler between a “tyrant” and a “legitimate” government. How each attained power may have a moral connotation, but the “morality” or “ethics” of their regimes depend on the acts and laws by which they rule and the results. Franco was a dictator and a tyrant of Spain, yet Spain today is a free and democratic nation that works, as a result of his “tyranny” and reforms. On the other hand, Salazar of Portugal operated a brutal secret police and impoverished that nation.

Tyrants aren’t, by definition, any more antithetical to freedom than any other class of ruler, because all rulers, democratic or otherwise, in order to maintain a civil society, restrict freedoms. Period.

“I couldn’t do it.’ Those are my wife’s words every time I talk about reading though reader reviews of my books. Many authors won’t do it. I’m one who does, grudgingly, very grudgingly, because I’m still a reluctant optimist, but I believe that you can learn something from anything — even reader reviews.

Unfortunately, maybe those other authors are right, because I don’t much care for what I’m learning, and it doesn’t seem to be of much use, not if I want to keep trying to become a better and better writer. At first, I thought that I was imagining things, but then, because I do have a background in economics and analysis, I decided to apply some basic analysis — and I used The Magic of Recluce as the “baseline.” Why? Because it’s been in print continuously since 1991. It’s not a perfect baseline or template, because the reader reviews I used [Amazon’s] don’t begin until 1996, but it gives the longest time-time of any of my books. Over that fourteen year time period almost 35% of readers gave the book a five star rating; 25% gave it a four star rating; 18% gave it three stars; 8% gave it two stars; a little more than 15% gave it a one star rating [and yes, that adds up to 101% because of rounding]. More interesting, however, was the timing of ratings and the content of key words in those ratings.

To begin with, for the first two years or so of ratings, comprising roughly 20% of all ratings, all the ratings were either four or five stars, and not until 1999, eight years after the book was first out, did it receive a one star rating. Not just coincidentally, I suspect, that was the first review that claimed the book was “boring.” More than half the one and two star reviews have been given during the last five years, and virtually all of the one star reviews use terms such as “boring” or “slow.” From the wording of those reviews, I suspect, but cannot firmly prove, most come from comparatively younger readers.

The fact that more and more readers want “faster” books doesn’t surprise me. Given the increasing speed of our culture, the emphasis on “fast-action movies” and faster action video games, it shouldn’t surprise anyone. What does bother me is the equation of “fast” to “good” and the total intolerance that virtually all of these reviews show for anything that takes thought and consideration. The fact that more than twice as many readers find the book good as those who do not, and that a majority still do indicates that there are many readers who still appreciate depth, but the change in the composition of readers, as reflected in the reviews, confirms, at least in my mind, that a growing percentage of fantasy readers want “faster” books. Again… no surprise, but the virulence and impatience expressed is disturbing, because it manifests an incredible sense of self-centeredness, with reader reviews that basically say. “This book is terrible because it didn’t entertain me in the way I wanted.” And terms like “Yech!”, “Yuck!”, “Such Junk?”, “its [sic] horrible”, and “total waste” certainly convey far more about the reader than about the book.

As an author, I understand all too well that not all authors are for all readers, and there are authors, some of whom are quite good, who are not to my taste. But there’s an unconscious arrogance that doesn’t bode well for the future of our society when fifteen percent of readers state that a book is terrible because it doesn’t cater to the reader’s wishes — and throwing the book through a window because it doesn’t [yes, one reviewer claimed to have done so].

I’d say that they need to grow up… but I’m afraid that they already have, and that they’re fast approaching a majority, at least among the under 30 crowd. Two recent articles in other publications highlight the trend. The latest edition of The Atlantic Monthly has one explaining why newspaper articles are too long and basically gives what amounts to a variation on the USA Today format as an answer — quick juicy facts with little support or explanation. And what’s really frightening was the conclusion of an article in the “Week in Review” section of The New York Times last Sunday — that youngsters who are now 4-10 will make today’s young people seem like paragons of patience.

Newspeak, here we come.

On the Locus online site, there’s a discussion about who might be considered a worthy successor to the “grand old man” of science fiction — the late Robert A. Heinlein. A number of names are mentioned, and those contributing all give reasons for their selections. Something about this bothered me when the discussion was launched weeks ago, and, slow as I can sometimes be about the obvious, “it” — or several “its” — finally struck me.

What’s the point of the discussion? For all his accomplishments and faults, and he had both, Heinlein was unique to his time and place. Many of those involved in the discussion acknowledge this, but what isn’t brought up is that the same is true of most writers with any degree of accomplishment and originality.

Although few have noted it, Heinlein’s greatest claim to fame was that he combined originality, ideas that were usually less than jaded, and solid writing with popularity. According to one of the most senior editors in the F&SF field, the number of his individual titles that approached or exceeded million-seller status is “remarkable.” As a new biography to be published by Tor indicates, he was a complex man, with an equally complex and involved personal life.

So… why is anyone looking for his “successor”? Can’t the man be appreciated, or attacked, or analyzed, or whatever, for what he was? Has “sequel-itis” so permeated the critical F&SF community that some writer or writers must be jammed into a designed place?

Everywhere I look these days in entertainment — whether in cinema, music, books, and even games — there’s a tremendous pressure to fit. If an author or a musician does something different, there’s usually far more negative pressure and comment than positive. Much of that pressure is financial. I’ve noted on more than one occasion that any one of my “series” fantasies earns far more than one of my few critically acclaimed SF books — and this is not by any means exclusive to me.

In this light, even the discussion about successors to Heinlein nags at me, because I see it, perhaps unfairly, as another aspect of trying to come up with easy categorization in a field where such categorization is anything but easy and where labels create false expectation after false expectation. For example, it’s fair to say that a “Recluce” book should be a “Recluce” book, taking place in that world and adhering to the rules of that world, with a similar style, but is it fair for readers and marketers to insist that every book I write follow that style?

Certainly, that is the pressure. Some authors actually have a different pen name for each “style” of book they write, but what does that say about readers? Are so many so rigid in their habits and mindsets that they can’t look at anything different by the same author? Or have the marketing mavens conditioned them that way?

How about accepting/rejecting Heinlein for what he is, and doing the same for the writers that have followed him, instead of looking for quickly identified niches and tropes? When reviewers and critics who are supposedly analytical and thoughtful do this, that, frankly, bothers me even more. They should know better, but, then, maybe I’m just expecting too much.

Or does looking at each writer and book for what they are require too much thinking and depress the bottom lines of the industry?

The Economist reported that the U.S. Air Force has put in a request to procure 2,300 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles — not for personnel entertainment, but to hook together to build a supercomputer for ten percent of the cost of ordering one. This isn’t a one-time fluke, either. The USAF has already built and is operating a computer constructed from 336 PS3s. U.S. troops are using slightly modified off-the-shelf electronics for everything from calculating firing trajectories to controlling drone RPVs.

While I’m perfectly happy as a taxpayer to see cost-effective procurement, examples such as these give me a very uneasy feeling… for a number of reasons. First is the obvious fact that anything that is commercial and open can eventually be cracked, hacked, snooped, and sabotaged. Granted, for some applications that’s unlikely or doesn’t matter, but controlling drones? Second, even the example of the USAF procurement gives the “bad guys” new ideas and capabilities. And third, somehow the thought of our supposedly high-tech military having to rely on the gaming industry for the latest technology — and they are beginning to do so, thanks in part to complicated and Byzantine U.S. military procurement regulations — suggests that there’s something a bit askew in our national priorities, especially when a Nigerian national paying with cash, carrying no luggage, traveling alone, and already on the terrorist watch list can get to the point of almost detonating an incendiary device on an aircraft about to land in Detroit.

We don’t seem to be able to carry through on relatively routine security measures; we rely on gamers for high technology; we haven’t been able or willing to build a supersonic replacement for the Concorde; we’re behind the entire rest of the world in implementing high-speed ground/rail transport; and our most profitable industries are financial manipulation and litigation.

Now… it also turns out that some of these gaming devices provide essentially the guts of supercomputers… and that they have far-reaching medical implications.

For all this, I must say that I have to salute the gaming industry… but what exactly does that say about the state of American drive, initiative, and technology in every other area?

Are we so into video gaming that the rest of our high-tech industry needs to subsist on the fruits and scraps of electronic entertainment?

We live in a world that has become on a daily basis increasingly more complex because of its ever advancing technology and still rapidly increasing population. One of the most obvious effects of both is that we have come to live in a world defined by, restricted by, and described by numbers.

For example, for most people, the date today is January 1, 2010. That’s effectively an arbitrary denotation of the passage of time since the attributed date of birth of the founder of a major religious belief system. Research, however, suggests that that birth date is off by six or so years and that the time of year was later manipulated for theo-political reasons to coincide roughly with the winter solstice. Because much of the world has based its chronology — and dates and chronologies are important for many political, economic, and social reasons — societies in general have accepted the modified Gregorian calendar for practical reasons and have resisted major changes for exactly those reasons. But most people never consider the background or the implications, and those who do quickly move on to more pressing issues, and ones about which they can do something.

Unhappily, the same lack of understanding lies behind so many of the numbers we use in society today, and the numbers tend to become “reality,” with little understanding of what actually lies behind them — until something goes wrong, and the blame is assessed everywhere but where it should be — and that’s at a lack of understanding of what the numbers really mean… or, in many cases, what they do not mean or represent.

For example, everyone takes “for granted” that if someone runs a temperature over 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit consistently for several hours, that person is sick. Not necessarily. In some cases, subnormal temperatures signal severe illnesses as well. Also, the 98.6 degree number is an average across large populations. It doesn’t hold for everyone, as I well know, because my wife’s “normal” temperature is consistently a degree and a half below “normal.” What that means for her is that what would be a mild or moderate fever for someone else is a severe fever for her. Yet the failure to understand the difference between “normal” for her and for the population as a whole could make a considerable difference to her in the case of a severe infection.

I’ve made the point earlier about numbers in regard to the side-effects with regard to vaccinations. Because some parents do not understand statistics, because they fear side-effects that occur in one in a million cases, they will avoid vaccinations for “childhood” diseases, where the side effects of the disease are often hundreds of times more prevalent than the side-effects of vaccination.

Failure to understand what the economic numbers meant in the several years before the last financial meltdown contributed mightily to the disaster. No matter what any “guru” preaches, you cannot have massive societal and even world-wide price run-ups in securities and real estate prices on a wide-scale basis when real overall economic growth is slow or moderate — not without generating a “bubble” and a subsequent collapse.

Nor can every company realistically aim at 10-40% annual profit targets, and when large numbers of companies are posting such profits at a time when nominal inflation is low… something is wrong, either the way those profits are calculated, or the way inflation is measured… or the reporting of other data… or the business practices of the companies involved.

Likewise, when more than forty percent of the grades given at universities in the United States are “As,” anyone with a modicum of understanding should realize the implications behind those numbers. In three generations, human beings don’t change from 10-15% of the collegiate population being brilliant to 40% plus being brilliant, especially when far larger numbers of less advantaged students are attending college. What it does mean, among other things, is that pursuit of “the almighty grade” has become as rampant as the pursuit of “the almighty dollar,” and that excellence in both academia and business has become secondary to numerical targets of dubious worth in assessing performance.

When “reader reviews” flood Amazon.com, what do they mean? Do they really judge excellence? While some may be accurate in that regard, in practice what those numbers reflect is popularity, not quality. There’s nothing wrong with that… so long as people understand that, but unfortunately, many don’t. More than a few readers have contacted me in surprise after reading one of my “less popular” SF novels to say that they thought a book was far better than the reader reviews. That shouldn’t really be surprising. Often excellent books do not make a quick and easy read, and for some readers, who seek ease of escape and entertainment, an excellent book may not be a good read. That doesn’t mean the book is “bad,” only that it’s not suited to them, but handing out “stars” for popularity doesn’t reflect quality. In fact, one reader made the point that he looks for “bad” ratings among authors he knows are good writers to find the excellent books.

The same problem exists with the travesty of “student evaluations.” I’m sorry, but 18-20 year old students do not know what they need to learn. Studies have shown that high student evaluations correlate directly to high grades given by the professor. There are always exceptions, but across thousands of professors that observation holds true. Thus, the numbers reflected in student evaluations do not reflect the quality of teaching, but the degree of grade inflation. Yet university administrations routinely use these evaluations as a proxy for good teaching. What their use reflects is not excellence, but the need for “popular” teachers to fill classrooms, regardless of excellence.

I could go on and on, but my opening thought for another numbered year is that, with more and more numbers flooding us, day after day… try, please try, to understand what they really mean and not what everyone else tells you they mean.

For more than a decade, at least some of the more “realistic” or “mundane” among the science fiction crowd — including various proportions of readers, writers, and critics — have been suggesting that the idea of interstellar travel is somewhere between unlikely and totally impossible in a practical sense. So I happened to be very pleased when I read in the November 26^th edition of New Scientist that two new approaches to interstellar travel had been trotted out — one of which essentially revisits the idea of the Bussard interstellar ramjet… except the propellant would be dark matter, which is far more plentiful in interstellar space than the comparatively few atoms of hydrogen that made the original Bussard concept unlikely to be successful in significantly reducing travel time to even nearby stars. The other involves the creation of an artificial black hole that radiates Hawking radiation for propulsion.

Coming up with a theoretical model for either approach is, of course, a far cry from even an engineering design, let alone a prototype, especially when the composition of dark matter has not even been determined and when we don’t yet have the engineering know-how to create anything close to a black hole, but these theoretical approaches do bring some hope to the idea that we humans may yet escape the confines of a single solar system in some fashion other than massive asteroid-sized generation ships that no government or corporate entity will ever commit the resources to build.

One of the aspects of interstellar travel that fascinates me, and more than a few others, is the hope that it might at least give a jolt to the political and cultural emphasis on limitations and upon the glorification of the small — from ever-smaller and ever more necessary electronic gadgets that tie people into self-selected and socially and culturally limited peer groups to a lack of understanding about just how immense, wide, wonderful — and awful — the universe is… and how unlikely what lies out there can be conveniently catalogued into neat and small packages designed just for human use and understanding.

Will we ever understand it all?

Who knows? But we certainly won’t if we don’t keep looking outward and striving for more than a way to use science and new knowledge for a quick buck in the next fiscal year… or quarter.

I’d certainly rather have either a black hole starship or a dark-matter-ramjet than the new and improved pocket iPhone and its sure-to-be innumerable successors.

In the last few days, several stories have popped up in various newspapers about the Barnes & Noble decision to close its B. Dalton outlet in Laredo, Texas, leaving the small city [population 220,000] with no bookstore at all, neither a chain store, nor an independent. That will make Laredo the largest town or city in the United States without a full-service bookstore, an absolutely “wonderful” Christmas present for the book-lovers of Laredo.

In past blogs I’ve pointed out the rather numerous short-comings of Borders. Now it’s the turn of Barnes & Noble. The B&N decision comes as part of its strategy to close all the remaining B. Dalton outlets in 2010, a decision from on corporate high to close high-cost, low-profit small mall outlet stores. Frankly, in the case of B&N, it makes far more sense than it did for Borders to downsize the number of Waldenbooks outlets, since from my industry sources, the word has always been that Waldenbooks was profitable until Borders started fiddling with their operations, while the Dalton outlets were, as a whole, marginal.

Even so, the B&N decision in the case of Laredo, and perhaps in other individual cases as well, is stupid. They have a local monopoly that is in the black, if not necessarily highly profitable, and B&N has been quoted as saying that Laredo will support a small but full-sized B&N — but that B&N won’t be able to open such a store for at least 18 months. Generally speaking, a city with a population of over 100,000 is profitable for the chain bookstores, and even with Laredo’s high level of Spanish-speakers, a store there should be profitable, especially with no competition.

Let’s get this straight. For bookkeeping and corporate decision-making reasons, B&N will close a profitable local outlet well before a successor B&N can be opened. In other words, they’ll destroy or at least erode their customer base…and then have to rebuild it, if they can, a year later.

All right, they have to close all the B. Daltons for whatever reasons. Then why not simply re-label the Dalton store in Laredo as a B&N Express or some such with signs saying that there will be a full-sized B&N coming before long, and add the Laredo store to the B&N supply system. Surely, it can’t be that hard. Then B&N can still claim it’s closed down all the Daltons in order to keep the stockholders or creditors or whoever happy and not anger an entire reading community.

Unfortunately, this is just another example of where pre-determined decisions are trading short-term profit considerations for longer-term profitability — and undermining the future customer base by literally chasing away readers. Exactly how much sense does this make in terms of future operations? Not to mention that it makes little sense at all from a societal point of view when reading levels among younger Americans are dropping.

We’ve all met them, the seemingly well-intentioned people who raise questions about this and that in the workplace. “Why is George doing it that way?” “Why do you think Suzanne changed the production schedule without telling accounting… or advertising?”

And if you’ve noticed, or watched carefully, you’ll have discovered that each of these seemingly innocent questions is asked in a public forum from which George or Suzanne is absent. Further, if you just happen to ask the questioner why they raised the question, the answer is almost invariably a variant of “I was just thinking of the good of… [fill in the blank with the appropriate word, such as “the staff,” “the customers,” “the students”].

Just as Lenin and Stalin, Hitler. Mussolini, and all-too-many tyrants in modern times have justified their actions on the basis of being for “the good of the people,” so too are these work-place questioners not at all interested in the good of whomever they cite. They seldom bring up their questions in any situation where the “accused” has a chance to explain; they almost never go to the accused and ask for an explanation. And the bottom line is that they’re not really interesting in solving the “problem.” They’re interested in causing trouble for another individual, preferably without leaving too obvious a set of fingerprints and without ever confronting the individual in question, always looking innocent and professing their altruism in raising such questions.

So… when you hear one of these kinds of questions, and especially if you get an explanation that the questioner is “only looking out for everyone’s good,” start asking exactly what the questioner really has in mind. Does he or she want to discredit the subject of the questions, or covet their job, or get back at the other person?

History and experience suggest that people who are interested in doing good do just that. They do; they accomplish; they work at make things better. Trouble-makers ask questions that stir everyone up without ever pointing toward a solution. There’s a very fine line between an honest question and one designed to incite trouble, but asking who benefits personally from a question and who is harmed is a good start to sorting out one from the other.

Even so… be on your guard when anyone cites “for the good of…”