The mortgage securitization debacle and the housing market meltdown illustrate a fundamental aspect of modern technological civilization: the loss of direct personal accountability that accompanies increasingly complex social, technical, and industrially-based cultures.

In a low-tech culture, if I purchase a hammer from the local smith, I know who forged it. If something goes wrong with the tool, there are essentially only two people who are accountable. Either the smith forged an inferior tool, or I used an adequate tool improperly. In such a setting, most of the time, it’s a fairly straight-forward process to determine responsibility and accountability. The same is true when cattle are grown and slaughtered in the same local village.

But… once these and almost all others processes become “industrialized,” who’s responsible when things go wrong… and how can any individual hold anyone accountable? The answer is that, without some sort of societal rules and regulations, with penalties, the individual can’t. The incredible abuses of the food processing industry in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century have been studied and documented in detail, and those abuses led to a range of government regulations and agencies… and many experts still feel that the oversight of the industry leaves much to be desired. The same problem led to environmental abuses and cities where the rivers literally caught fire… and even recently to children’s toys coated in lead paint.

Like it or not, human nature being what it is, all too many people who would not dare to shortchange their families or their neighbors face-to-face seem to have no compunctions about doing so in an industrial or technological society where they’re only a part of the process and where they are never personally held directly accountable.

In the mortgage mess, I doubt seriously that many, if any, mortgage lenders would have recommended that their institutions should keep the vast majority of the sub-prime loans that were bundled together and then sold to investors, especially not if their paychecks depended on the performance of those loans. Instead, all too many of the low-level originators were pressed, either directly or indirectly, to make as many loans as possible, because the originators had no sense of accountability, only the pressure to obtain high yields and fees.

For any society to continue to prosper, there has to be a high degree of accountability, and that accountability can either come from a societal tradition of honesty and responsibility, or from regulatory structures that force some accountability, or from a combination of both. In the end, however, regulation alone will fail, because unchecked human ingenuity and duplicity will force more and more regulations, to the point that the entire society becomes bound so tightly in bureaucracy that change and innovation become virtually impossible. On the other hand, with minimal or no regulation, and no cultural insistence on honesty and responsibility, human vices will destroy the trust and cooperation necessary to maintain a viable high-tech society.

So… any time you start complaining about those endless government regulations that seem to invade everything…you might consider why and how they developed.

I have been known to stand and lecture from soapboxes. I have even been known to pile soapbox upon soapbox and reinforce those soapboxes with yet other soapboxes… and I’m certainly going to reinforce that impression with what follows.

Point number one: There are no new plots. Heinlein said this almost forty years ago, and all too many readers, and even some writers, don’t understand this. There are twists on basic plots; there is window-dressing of all sorts; but the basic plots are still limited. They are: (1) the love story [all kinds of love stories]; (2) the man/woman/AI/alien who learned something; (3) the little shot who becomes a big shot [and the reverse is the classical tragedy]; and (4) the mindless adventure story [otherwise known as the video/board game or James Bond plot, although some would claim it isn’t a plot at all]. The first three plots can be combined; the fourth plot cannot be combined with anything except box office or other receipts.

Point number two: Books without plots have a strong tendency not to sell.

Point number three: The majority of readers prefer books with recognizable plots and characters that appeal to their individual tastes. Because individuals do differ in tastes, there are a number of genres, subgenres, and the like in fiction, and different authors often have differing reader bases.

Point number four: The vast majority of readers want to be entertained, and that entertainment is usually based on plot, characters, events, and structure that meet their needs. Some readers prefer their entertainment to be thought-provoking, but usually it’s only thought-provoking if they happen to agree with the author.

Point number five: Entertaining readers is not a crime; it’s not even a sin. Not entertaining them is occupational suicide, because successful writers must appeal to a certain minimum number of readers, or publishers will no longer publish and distribute their books.

There are scores of good and competent authors who are no longer published because their books did not sell. There are even authors who, editors claim, are exceptional and who do not sell commercially. But, exceptional or not, to survive, an author needs an audience.

Behind all these points is a simple overriding one. Taken in terms of a world-wide perspective [or a galactic one], there are not that many different approaches in basic structure in the books written in any given language, nor in plot. The differences lie in the skill of the writer in presenting the story… and in the receptivity of the readers.

So… when a reader or reviewer claims an author used a hackneyed plot, that’s a cop-out. All plots are hackneyed. What they’re trying to say is that they didn’t like the way the writer presented the plot, or perhaps more accurately, that the writer wasn’t successful in creating the illusion of newness or difference, at least for them… or that they really don’t know why they didn’t like the book, and opted for a convenient excuse for a reason.

There is also a certain faction among readers and reviewers that decries the “endless series” and/or “doorstopper” fantasies, yet I certainly don’t see that criticism in the cases of endless sitcoms, endless TV series, or forever dragged-out miniseries… or in other genre fiction. The only real differences are that there’s a lot more money [and special effects] in the television series… and that generally the science or the fantasy in the endless books is better. As for the criticism that “endlessness” shouldn’t apply to F&SF books… why not?

Along this line, there’s essentially no difference between an author who writes an “endless” series and one who writes the same characters, structure, and plot time after time with different character and place names and different settings. In fact, sometimes the “series” author might be the more honest one, because he or she isn’t trying to give an illusion of difference that doesn’t exist.

And… finally… readers and reviewers who complain that books whose plots and characters they have just dissected in detail are “unreadable” are either lying or don’t understand the meaning of “unreadable,” which, in turn, suggests strongly that their comments should not just be taken with a grain of salt, but that they and their comments should be interred in the salt mine.

And now… it’s time to put away the soapboxes… for at least a while.

Depending on whom you consult, the United States is either barely slogging along economically or already in a recession. Joblessness is way up, and housing prices in some areas have fallen more in percentage terms than they did during the great depression. And how did this all come about?

In general terms, it occurred because mortgage lenders and the largest lending and brokerage institutions in the United States, in order to maximize their own short-term profits, colluded in developing various mechanisms to take marginal or even less credit-worthy home loans, bundle them together, and then sell the securitized and combined mortgages to various institutions under the fraudulent presumption that combining lots of risky loans made them somehow less risky.

As a result, ten or the world’s largest financial institutions have lost over $275 billion, just to date, and those losses don’t include the total dismantling/acquisition of Bear-Sterns, or the billions in losses at smaller institutions. But what happened to those in charge? To date, five of those institutions, including Merrill Lynch and Citicorp, have sacked their top executives.

While the departed CEOs were presiding over this debacle, they collectively earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and when they departed, they left with millions more in severance and retirement benefits. In short, they were highly rewarded for misjudgment and incompetence. The other five CEOs also lost billions and yet they still remain in their positions.

The major U.S. automakers have continued to make and sell enormous cars, and not a one really made a significant investment in developing more efficient smaller cars and SUVs. In addition, over the last twenty years, they have paid for and mounted a continuing lobbying effort to keep Congress and EPA from requiring better mileage standards for vehicles sold in the United States. As a result, when gasoline prices soared, sales of enormous vehicles dropped, and the U.S. automakers all lost billions in the last quarter, and will lose more billions of dollars in the next. But their CEO were paid multimillion dollar salaries to preside over this fiasco. In effect, they were rewarded for failure to anticipate and react to the obvious, and worse, to pay lobbyists to mislead Congress.

This is nothing new. The same sorts of excesses and CEO “rewards” occurred during and the bursting of the “dot.com” bubble, or with Enron, or with… [fill in the blank].

I once lost a job because I listened to the people who used a product and reported to my superiors that the new product would flop miserably. Six months after I departed, the new product did indeed flop miserably, and the marketing vice-president who created the disaster retired with a very decent golden parachute. For me, the failure pushed me in the direction of writing, for which I am belatedly grateful, but for those who stayed with the company, it was the beginning of a long downhill slide from market leadership to buy-out after buy-out, until the company was less than an also-ran.

The question that strikes me about all of this is: Why do we continue to reward such mismanagement?

And my answer is that we pay CEOs and others far too much in terms of “present” profits and success and don’t build in compensation — or lack thereof — for future success or failure. Just how much of these failures would have occurred if the CEOs’ salaries were capped at a few measly million and their “rewards” were based on the company’s value and profitability five or ten years after they left or were booted? Certainly, a lot of workers’ futures are tied to the companies they work for. Why not the financial future of those who direct them?

Because I am a writer, not only my present but my future is determined by how well I write… how I do my job. But then, from what I’ve seen, all too much executive compensation, even senior administrator compensation in government and academia, is based on immediate profits, likeability, image, and charisma — and not on long-term competence. Add to that the share-holder, media, and marketplace pressure for quick and unrealistically high profits — or unrealistic “cost-effectiveness” — and you get what we’re now receiving.

Interestingly enough, in most of the futuristic SF I read, seldom do writers target this human obsession with excessive profit. It’s usually always about power and the abuse of power in controlling people, while the greatest abuse of power — seeking what the marketplace and the economy cannot support — seems to be consistently overlooked. But then, institutionalized greed just isn’t sexy enough to sell books… it just sinks economies and destroys futures, even while societies continue to reward and idealize those who practice it.

Two weeks ago, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver. While I was there, I became aware of a debate, instigated, it appeared, by younger writers and readers, who, if I understand the issues, were concerned about the fact that very little recognition and not many F&SF awards were going to “younger writers,” i.e., those under forty.

Human accomplishments tend to be age-related, and how great they are at what age depends on the field, although there are certainly individual exceptions. Reputedly, very few mathematicians make their greatest mark after age 35, although recognition may lag for years. Certainly, very few athletes are world class past around age forty, Dara Torres excepted, particularly gymnasts. Opera singers tend to peak in their forties, but pop singers usually burn out their voices earlier. Finance analysts seldom remain at the top of that game past forty.

On the other hand, writers usually do not do their best work young — unless it is a single book that they never surpass, and I can only think of a handful of writers who were successful young and continued writing good work into middle age, or older. I suspect this is particularly true in F&SF because great success in the genre not only requires technical skill in writing, but the ability to create and evoke whole worlds and cultures, and usually with a mythos/rationale behind such cultures. These abilities usually require practice and a range of knowledge that spans a number of disciplines. Add to that the fact that English is a highly irregular and complex language, with the largest vocabulary of any language yet developed, and you have a profession where early mastery of skills is going to be comparatively rare.

In terms of awards in F&SF, there are essentially two kinds — those awarded through popularity, such as the Hugo and Locus awards, and those which are judged in some fashion or another, such as the World Fantasy Awards. Because popularity-based awards require that those voting know the author in some fashion, it’s rather unlikely that newer and presumably younger authors will even be nominated for such awards immediately because readers have to be aware of an author before they can vote for them, and building awareness can take years.

Juried awards, of course, are designed to reflect the judgment and experience of those selecting the awards, and they usually do. [Disclosure — I was once a judge for the World Fantasy Awards.] The judges do tend to be widely read, and they don’t tend to reward popularity, but skill in writing, which as noted above, normally does take some time to develop.

Thus, it’s neither discriminatory nor surprising that newer/younger writers are “under-represented” in terms of awards.

On a side note, I was unaware, until I read The Economist last week, that Barrack Obama had written two autobiographies. When I mentioned that to a group of people, one immediately replied, “What has any politician, especially one in his forties, done that merits even one autobiography?”

While the comment was somewhat flippant, it also bears a certain truth, and that truth is, alas, at variance with both perception and human desire. In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, one of the protagonists is a woman vice-president of a railroad. Years ago, my father noted, acerbically, “No railroad has ever had a 32 year old vice president, let alone a woman.” So far as I’ve been able to ascertain, he was right, both for practical and cultural reasons.

Because of the underlying requirements for accomplishment in the creative, economic, and political worlds, while there will always be a handful of youthful standouts, the majority of solid and lasting achievements will, in fact, be based on experience and expertise developed over time, a fact that those who are young have always chafed against, and, I suspect, always will.

In one of the latest editions of New Scientist, there are something like seven articles which purport to give rationales as to why people don’t like “reason.” While I firmly believe that both “reason” and “logic,” particularly as applied in our society today, are severely flawed, what I found interesting about the New Scientist commentaries was how shallow most of them were.

Over sixty years ago, A.E. VanVogt wrote The World of Null-A, in which he postulated an alternative means of thinking, called “Null-A,” which rejected Aristotelian logic. Van Vogt’s premise was essentially that straight-line Aristotelian logic was inadequate for a complex technological society. Insofar as the book goes, describing his system is largely avoided, except in describing it as something like, as I recall, “multi-valued logic,” which is employed by the protagonist with the equivalent of two brains.

Weak as his written support for his concept may have been, Van Vogt was on to something.

The overriding problem with the use of logic and reason in a modern technological society is that, simply put, they often don’t work. Oh, lawyers, business theoreticians, and all of the practitioners of “applied” logic and reason can prove quite logically why their theories and approaches work. But while that may justify the theories to their developers and implementers, that doesn’t make the “business model” and all the other theories any more accurate.

The problem lies in human beings. We’re complex creatures who take in a vast range of sensory, physical, and intellectual inputs. But not all of those inputs can be quantified in mathematical or logical terms or outputs. That’s why so-called intuition — perhaps better described as conscious/subconscious integration of multiple inputs — often beats the models cold… IF that intuition is from someone who actually has enough data and experience. I suspect this was what Van Vogt was trying to explain or show through his novelizations.

But… even when someone who doesn’t have such a background comes across “cold logic” models, they often reject the conclusions because they don’t feel right.

To my mind, this is the “problem with reason” — that the verbal and mathematical terms used restrict the discussion or argument to those facts or processes which can in fact be reduced to quantification in a meaningful way… and all too often they can’t be.

Yet, surprisingly, not a single one of the distinguished authors seemed to want to touch this aspect of “reason” … although a science fiction author raised the issue sixty-three years ago.

Prosperity in modern industrial society is absolutely and economically linked to “more,” more production of goods, more use of services, higher levels of profits, and so forth. And when “more” is not forthcoming, the problems begin. For example, due to the higher prices of gasoline, Americans have cut back on driving by more than 40 billion miles over the past year, and by almost 4% last May. That meant they bought less gasoline, and lower gasoline sales meant fewer tax revenues, and for the first time ever, tax revenues that go to the Highway Trust Fund will be more than $5 billion less than projected federal spending on construction, maintenance and repairs in the coming year, resulting in either cutbacks in maintenance [already well-behind replacement requirements] or an addition to the already burgeoning federal debt. Consumers are cutting back on purchases, resulting in layoffs in all manner of industrial areas. Even nail salons are seeing less business. Housing sales have dropped to something like a quarter of what they were last year at this time, and it appears likely that more than a million construction workers are no longer working in that area. It’s very likely that these cuts in employment and earnings will also create more of a drain on Social Security revenues.

All the various policy remedies being suggested are variations on getting more funds into the hands of consumers and creating a climate of opinion that will encourage them to spend those funds in order to maintain a demand that will support the production of “more.”

In short, if economic prosperity depends on producing “more,” what happens when we either can’t physically produce more, or when we can’t afford to buy more in order to pay for producing more? Is there any way to maintain economic prosperity without always having to produce more? Or do we as humans instinctively define prosperity in terms of “more?”

Certainly, there’s a general sense of rejection of life as a zero-sum game, where, for everyone who succeeds or exceeds the societal average in terms of income, accumulation of resources, or prestige and power, there are others who fail and fall below the “average.” That rejection, however, is based on the experience of the post-Renaissance era, where, in the industrialized world, at least, the ability to produce goods and services on a scale always exceeding past years created the impression that a continual supply of “more” was not only possible, but a societal right.

But is production of “more” possible on a global and sustained basis? Even if it is, for a time, is it a “right?”

And… since science fiction is supposed to explore the future, why haven’t more novelists taken on this challenge? Or taken it on without falling back on a government-controlled or tradition-bound solution [as in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed]. Is there a practical and politically acceptable economic and technical approach to maintaining prosperity? Or are humans hard-wired into “more” as the definition of prosperity?

What are the implications if one society insists on “more” and another insists on “balance?” Is that the resource equivalent of Heinlein’s observation in Starship Troopers that peace achieved through pacificism is impossible because any culture that practices it will soon be wiped out by those who don’t?

For what seemed the millionth time, I opened a bill and was confronted with the invitation to “go paperless.” Instead of tracking down the idiots and fraudsters who generated the idea and assassinating them, which would prove an endless chore, given how many institutions have bought into this sham, I decided to write this blog. Going “paperless” is NOT cost-saving, space-spacing, or time-saving for most of us; it is cost-saving, space-saving, and time-saving for all of the institutions who promulgate the idea.

Of course, they don’t want to print out monthly statements for hundreds or thousands of customers. Nor do they want to pay to mail them out. Instead, they want to maintain an electronic database that they already have, and they want you and me and all the other customers to spend our time and electricity to access the data and print out what we need. In practice, this is known as “cost-shifting.” “Going paperless” shifts costs and time from them to me and you.

Because writing is my business, I need receipts and documents, both to compile my taxes and to retain as “evidence” should I ever be audited. So when my bank cheerfully informs me that no longer can I get back canceled checks, but only miniature photocopies, which take a microscope to read, this is anything but time-saving or efficient for me, and because they’re printed on both sides of the paper, I end up having to make copies just to be able to sort things into the right folders. Of course, I could purchase some electronic bookkeeping system. But I once had one of those systems and, guess what, it took more time and effort to use and maintain it than to simply keep a set of file folders… and I still need the documentary evidence anyway.

Just the other day my wife received a frantic email from the editor of a scholastic publication to whom she had submitted a report. The editor’s computer had crashed, wiping out everything, and for some reason, so had the back-up. This is far from the first time these sorts of events have occurred, but the frequency is far greater in the electronic age than it ever was in the typewriter age. And that puts a greater burden on the author… in this case, my wife.

In the past three years, I’ve had three credit cards canceled and re-issued by financial institutions, not because I lost a card or had one stolen, but because someone had hacked into or compromised the institution’s systems or databases. Of course, this probability, backed by experience, means we carry more credit cards than we need, which increases our costs and potential exposure.

And as for the vaunted savings and efficiency provided by the electronic age… they’re vastly overstated, and the costs are vastly understated. The internet is highly useful for people and professions who need one discrete piece of information at a time and sometimes for those who belong to corporations and institutions who can afford and pay for access to all the various data-bases extent. But, for the rest of us, trying to find detailed, in depth information on the net without paying a fortune is an exercise in frustration and exasperation. Also, if you have to compare, charts, statistics, and the like, you end up having to print them out because you can’t [not on any system I know] call all of them up and put them side by side on the screen.

For most names, I can find out general information more quickly and with less exasperation by picking up my handy Wordsworth Dictionary of Biography [$2.50 at Half-Price Books] than Googling it. The same is true in a number of other areas… which is why I have a short shelf of quick reference books close to the computer.

But it’s not just in information. Take gasoline stations. When I was very young, and even when I started driving, they were known as service stations. You drove in, and an attendant pumped the gas, washed the windows, even checked the oil. Now… we do it all, and it certainly doesn’t seem to have reduced the costs.

Today the majority of “restaurants” are fast-food based, and the customers wait in line, carry their food to their table, gather their own straws, napkins, and necessary utensils, and presumably dispose of their waste, thereby transferring costs from the provider to the customer. The same principle applies to “big-box” stores as well.

Another example is telephone information. It used to be free. Now, most local service providers charge the customer to find telephone numbers that aren’t listed or are in distant cities. Think about it. We pay for the service, and then we pay again to find the number we’re going to call, for which we’ll be charged a third time.

These changes haven’t come overnight. They’ve crept into society, bit by bit, but they all have one thing in common, they shift time and costs from those providing goods and services to those paying for and receiving them… and Americans wonder why they have less time than ever before?

That’s because, and in the name of so-called convenience, we’ve allowed ourselves to become the unpaid employees of others… and while each little bit of service we do isn’t much, the sum total is anything but insignificant.

Many long years ago, a political science professor educated me to the law he termed the “revolution of rising aspirations.” By that, he meant that once people learned what was possible, they always wanted more. Once they had a bicycle, so to speak, they wanted a motor scooter, and then a car, and then two. The downside of rising aspirations is that, being aspirations, they’re insatiable. No matter how much most people have, they always aspire to more.

This tends to create problems in a modern industrial society, especially when combined with a mass-production society and “economies of scale,” where the more of a good is produced, the lower the unit cost [up to the limit of the equipment], and the more profit per unit [again, up to the limit of the equipment and assuming you can sell that many]. This structure leads to decisions that are often uneconomic for society as a whole as well as inappropriate.

Take hamburgers. A fast food restaurant must pay for the building, the equipment, the insurance, and the staff before it sells a single hamburger. And there’s very little difference in staff time and effort between creating a single patty hamburger and a triple colossal cheeseburger deluxe. Likewise the difference in the costs of ingredients is not nearly so great as the difference in the prices that the restaurant can charge. So… in terms of profits and pricing, the restaurant has every incentive possible to maximize the sale of its most expensive — and most caloric — burgers. Is this to the advantage of the health of the consumer? Is it the best use of resources overall for society? I’d say not, but it does maximize profits, and that’s the bottom line.

Now… apply that same model to automobiles. For years, everyone associated with the automotive field has known that “big” cars and SUVs had sometimes twice the profit of smaller and more efficient automobiles. Americans could get “more car for each dollar” spent on a large vehicle, and so long as fuel prices stayed low, the operational costs didn’t dissuade them, and the automakers made higher profits. As a practical matter, not everyone needs a three-ton SUV to commute one person to work, but the short-term profit motive, low gasoline prices, and production economies of scale resulted in American manufacturers concentrating on “big” cars. Then when the 1970s gasoline crunch and high prices came along, they were anything but prepared… and they lost market share, most of which they never regained even when big cars became popular again. Now, with the latest gas crunch, the gas-guzzlers are sitting on the dealer lots, and Ford has posted a quarterly loss of close to nine billion dollars, and Toyota looks poised to become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world.

Because people aspire to more, they want bigger hamburgers, bigger or more luxurious vehicles, and since bigger is easier and more profitable in an “industrial” economy than truly better or what is appropriate, more and more resources get wasted, because “economies of scale” don’t allow for great diversification. Yes, you can get a car in a range of colors, and trims, and limited and set accessories. Try getting a four-door, four-wheel drive, fuel-efficient, moderate-sized SUV with a stick shift. You can’t, not in the good old USA. That’s because economies of scale aren’t all that economical in meeting anything more than cosmetic ranges of choice. They’re a form of one-size-fits-all with cosmetic cover, and that’s not suitable for the future.

Why? Because over time, one size does not fit all needs and requirements — except maximizing profits. It’s also wasteful and inefficient in terms of resources, and those who espouse the approach are ignoring the growing problems facing the world today created by the unrecognized conflict between “economies of scale,” the revolution of rising aspirations, and the law of appropriateness.

For years, my wife has been irritated with various educational bureaucrats and politicians who mandate broad and sweeping policies and laws that are highly inappropriate to what she does. I’ve seen the same thing occur time and time again in environmental and economic regulations and in corporate planning. And most of it arises from trying to fit everything into the same mold, or as my wife puts it, failing to understand that “one size does not fit all.”

When an educational bureaucrat decrees that all classes taught in a university must have the same cost/credit hour efficiency, he demonstrates that fallacy of assuming one size fits all. Science classes need more equipment, and that’s more costly per credit hour than lecture classes in literature or economics or political science… or business. Many music classes require one-on-one instruction. They can’t be taught effectively any other way, and that’s “inefficient” because it doesn’t fit the old industrial/business model of economies of scale.

In nature, evolution has demonstrated over millions of years that there is an “appropriate” size for every ecological niche. If a predator gets too big for its prey, it becomes extinct. Prey that’s too large or too slow does as well. In nature, one size does not fit all, nor do aspirations that exceed one’s abilities.

Those are lessons that an intelligent species should learn, but will we?

While I may not be the only writer to do so, I’m certainly one of the very few to present the taxation problem from the viewpoint of a ruler in a fantasy novel. For those interested, the character is Creslin, in The Towers of the Sunset. The entire issue of taxation, both in fantasy worlds and in real worlds, seems to be stereotyped in terms of “taxes are bad for the poor and too low for the rich.”

The problem with this viewpoint is that it tends to ignore the entire reason for taxes, which is to raise revenue in order to provide services for the society as a whole that it would be uneconomic or impossible for the majority of individuals to provide for themselves. National defense is often cited as one of those services, perhaps because it’s fairly obvious that very few of us could afford to build or buy even one aircraft or tank or ship. Other obvious “communal” services are road-building, water and sewers, ports, harbors, and canals. And some services, once regarded as best provided privately, are now considered public in most industrialized nations, such as education, old-age income security, banking regulation, food and medical oversight and regulation.

The underlying problem with taxation is that people have differing levels of income, but many of the services provided are the same, regardless of income. Each individual generally gets the “same” amount of national defense, roads built, availability to water and sewer or education as any other. And given socio-economic trends, often certain services are used disproportionately by those who have little or no income and pay little or no taxes. Thus, even with a “flat” percentage tax, in essence a certain amount of redistribution of social assets takes place. With a “so-called” progressive income tax system, where those with greater income pay a higher share of taxes, even more income and asset redistribution takes place. And when one adds in programs to aid the poor and disadvantaged, or direct subsidies to businesses, an even greater amount of redistribution occurs.

Now… even in fantasy novels, when taxes or tariffs are discussed, usually they’re imposed by the evil ruler, and they’re far too high. What’s overlooked in fantasy and reality is that taxes are in essence fees for services provided, and the social question becomes who pays how much for what, and who receives what in return for what.

The United States is running a massive deficit, financed these days primarily by the Chinese, simply because we have voted for more services than we are willing to pay for, including funding an unpopular war and income redistribution through Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various welfare programs, not to mention farm and other “corporate” subsidies [not to be confused with tax concessions, which are NOT income redistribution, whether they are justifiable or not]. Oh, every American will say, “I don’t mind my taxes going for ‘X,’ but I don’t think we should be spending on ‘Y’ or ‘Z.'”

In The Towers of the Sunset, Creslin is faced with the unenviable problem of needing to raise revenue to build and pay for enough of an armed forces and navy to defend his people against outside attacks. If he taxes too highly, he will destroy his young nation’s economy, and if he taxes too little, he won’t have a nation left. But, at least, as the head of a ruling council, he didn’t have to deal with trying to explain to every citizen why he or she all couldn’t have more in services than they wanted to pay for.

There’s a very personal side to the Red Queen’s Race, and that’s what happens to individuals. For example, to people like my wife. As a professor of music and an opera director, she’s theoretically on a nine month contract — except theory is far different from practice. Admittedly, instead of working the 60-80 hour weeks, and weekends, she works during the school year, she’s only working 40 plus hours pretty much every week of her “vacation,” just to handle all the aspects of her job that don’t fit into the year, as well as: (1) counsel incoming freshmen during the three one-week sessions the university has scheduled in order to compete for students; (2) develop three new courses to help implement the new degrees offered by the University and the Music Department; (3) write the two scholarly papers due before school starts again in August; (4) track and assign incoming students; (5) develop the ground plans, staging, and rehearsal schedules for the coming year’s opera productions… and about ten other things, all during her theoretical vacation. She’s far from the only one at the university. In fact, dozens of them all laugh, and not cheerfully, at what they call “the myth of the nine month contract,” because it really amounts to the equivalent of a 25% pay cut, or 25% more in work for no more pay.

But they’re certainly not the only ones with this kind of problem. There’s a doctor I know well, who’s a surgeon and a researcher, as well as a department head, at a major medical center and who spent the last year carrying not only her job, but that of her non-existent assistant [also a doctor’s position], because budgetary constraints meant holding off filling the position for a year. The director of human resources at a major chemical company has told me that the company is always juggling these issues, because of cost and resource constraints.

Certainly, the effect has also hit the fiction publishing field. Writers whose work has won critical plaudits have been forced to move to small presses… or not have their work published at all because of the ever-increasing pressure for efficiency and profitability. Other writers are told that certain kinds of books can’t be accepted because they’re unlikely to meet expected financial and sales goals.

All across the United States, those in management and professional positions are finding themselves handling both their jobs and those once held by subordinates. Middle management positions have been trimmed everywhere, in the name of efficiency. But the work load hasn’t been cut anywhere close to commensurately. On a other economic levels, everyone has heard about all the renegotiated salaries across industry after industry, from pay cuts for pilots and flight attendants, to bankruptcy-forced pay cuts, to the replacement of full-time employees with part-timers without benefits. In fact, the only area where this hasn’t hit is CEO compensation, which for the moment seems to remain above the effect of the Red Queen’s race.

And the bottom line still remains… run faster, because running as hard as you can only leaves you in the same place.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, which is, incidentally, a classic tour-de-force, the Red Queen tells Alice that running as fast as she can will not take her anywhere. To get anywhere, she must run even faster. The concept of “the Red Queen’s race” crops up occasionally, and Isaac Asimov even wrote a story with that title.

Today, unfortunately, I see western society developing along lines that make a Red Queen’s race all too likely. What do I mean?

A few examples might help. It’s widely known and often cited that working Americans take much less vacation time than people in any other industrialized nation, and the amount of vacation time taken continues to decrease. Yet, the real earnings of average Americans, after adjustment for inflation [and that adjustment, as I’ve noted earlier, does not take into account the full amount of inflation] have actually decreased in recent years. Now, the easy answer, and the one that the demagogues of the left quickly invoke, is that’s because all the “excess” goes to the “rich.” Some of it does, but one could confiscate the amount of “excess” and redistribute it across the population, and it wouldn’t change the overall picture much, and not for long. Spread across the population, those hundreds of billions of assets of the “truly rich” might increase family income by a few thousand dollars — for all of one year, because you can bet that sort of confiscatory taxation would drive those individuals right out of the country. On the other hand, the demagogues of the right claim that the problem is that the government taxation steals money from the productive and gives it to the unproductive. And while it is indubitably true that the U.S. tax system redistributes income, the United States is far less redistributive than most European countries, and the recipients of that redistributed income generally spend every last cent on buying goods and services from others, often creating more income than is “taken” for society as whole.

Yet “real” wages are tending to decline. Why?

First, we’re in a global economy, and now that technology and education are more wide-spread, other countries can produce many goods more cheaply. How are Americans compensating? They’re working longer and harder, rather than reduce their standard of living. Now that cheap credit is vanishing, and the piggy-bank of home equity has been deflated, they’re dipping more into savings and retirement.

Second, energy costs are rising, and that will squeeze U.S. businesses — and employee compensation — even more.

Even so, the Red Queen problem doesn’t lie mainly in income, but in resources and outlays, and it’s exacerbated by our vaunted technology. For example, two hundred years ago, if you got cancer, there wasn’t anything to be done, and you died. If you had congestive heart failure, not all the doctors in the world could do anything, no matter what your wealth might have been. Today, an “average,” run-of-the-mill cancer treatment can easily exceed $200,000 a year. Already, annual Medicare expenditures alone exceed $200 billion, and health care costs are increasing more than twice the rate of other services, and that doesn’t factor in private health care costs or the ever more expensive drugs and treatments.

Likewise, in the past travel and transport were limited, as were goods. The result of the industrial revolution, technology, and globalization is that more and more of the world has the ability to buy more and more goods and services… but the total of those goods and services is limited. Call it, if you will, Malthusian economics, postponed, delayed, and modified, but Malthusian nonetheless.

The real Red Queen’s race is the one that has been around since the beginning of civilization — and one whose effects have been largely mitigated or delayed in the industrialized west for the past century or so. Simply put, we have now reached the point in the development of our civilization where it will shortly become obvious to all levels of all societies that, technology and ingenuity notwithstanding, we cannot physically provide the very best in health care, commodity goods, services, housing, and food to every individual, or even to a sizable fraction of our populations.

Yes, we will be able to provide health care for most problems for most people, but not the range of life-extending and cancer-controlling and other extensive procedures for everyone — just for a comparative few. Yes, we will be able to provide fuel for transportation, but not fuel for four billion personal vehicles [a rate roughly half the U.S. average applied to the entire world, and if you think I’m being unreasonable, just look at the rate of growth of motor vehicles in China]. Yes, we will be able to provide housing, but not the 2,400 average square footage per house for U.S. new housing. And since the United States will be competing in a world market for energy, food, goods, and services, we won’t be able to isolate ourselves from these effects the way we have in the past.

Welcome back to the Red Queen’s race.

Readers of science fiction and, in particular, fantasy often read about the evils of zealotry in fictional worlds, and how it destroys people. Likewise, we in the “enlightened” and industrialized world, particularly the western world, tend to look down on the Islamic “zealots,” and to ignore anything they say which doesn’t agree with our view of the world. Now… don’t get me wrong. I am not an apologist for the excesses of Islam, nor do I have any desire to live in a culture dominated by any version of Sharia, but we tend to forget that western industrialized culture also has its zealots. In particular I’m referring to the far right-wing, the business-model-is-best, policy wonks, politicians, and bureaucrats.

Earlier, I mentioned how the failures of airline deregulation could be traced to the fact that those structuring the deregulation failed to understand or even consider that the industry doesn’t fit into a free market because there are far too many geographic, economic, and structural barriers to free and open competition. But those facts were brushed aside, and now travelers face the possibility of transportation purgatory every time they enter an airport.

Just the other day I read that some economists were re-thinking the “free-trade” ideal, and the idea that free trade was always a blessing. In fact, this group concluded free trade might not necessarily be good for some developing nations, good as it might be for the rest of the world. Then, there are the educational bureaucrats who have been attempting to restructure education on a “business basis,” which results in institutions competing for students on the basis of popularity, the increasing easiness of courses and majors, and in the watering-down of curricula and the continued pressure to increase class sizes to gain economies of scale. Whole departments have been abolished in institution after institution because enrollments were not economic, all with little consideration about the educational role of a university — supposedly its purpose.

We face a tremendous oil crisis today in the United States because the “free-market” policies of our government continually discouraged investment in alternative fuels and in more efficient automotive transport, and it’s likely that at least one of the Big Three automakers will go under financially because a tacit reliance on the economic assumption that cheap oil would always be available, which encouraged U.S. automakers to concentrate on more profitable gas-guzzling huge SUVs and trucks. Yes, that was economics — short-term economics, because in consumer goods, the marketplace reflects the “now,” not the future. That’s just one of the problems with unfettered “free-marketing.” The readjustments when the economics change can be catastrophic, something the advocates of the “business model” fail to point out.

The problem is really fairly simple to describe: Not all aspects of any society fit the “free-market” mold, because while truly free markets are certainly efficient, first, not all societal actions fit into a free market, and, second, sometimes that vaunted free-market efficiency is brutally inhumane and uncivilized. Yet, anyone who raises those issues seriously and suggests that at times regulation and control of activities on a non-economic basis might just be necessary and justifiable risks an ire and scorn from the high priests of the market not all that much different in tone than non-believers in an Islamic nation risk from their high priests — except that in the United States, the market high priests only want the power to sever people from their jobs and benefits when either is “un-economic,” as opposed to severing people from their heads, which is highly possible in the more theocratic Islamic regimes.

In either case, however, just as in too many fantasy novels, the high priests are far more interested in the purity of their beliefs than in the practical welfare of their people, and in that sense, there’s not all that much difference between in the approach of the free-market zealots and the Islamic zealots.

On Sunday, July 6th, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer played an incredible tennis match at Wimbledon, but what I found most interesting was that no U.S. men reached even the semi-finals, nor did they at the French Open. I also watched the televised celebration of the fourth of July at the U.S. Capitol and was far less than impressed with the performance of “American Idol” Tyler Hicks. On what might seem an unrelated note, the performance of American stock analysts was woefully inadequate in ferreting out and making public the all-too-obvious weaknesses in the mortgage securitization field, and the greed of all too many institutional investors in seeking “quick and unrealistic profits” was a major factor in creating the circumstances that led to the mortgage meltdown and the current recession. And, in the field of F&SF writing, where are the new “great” young American males? I see women with promise; I see comparatively young British writers like Charles Stross. I see a “great” book here and there, but see comparatively little continued production of consistently good books by more than just a few American male writers under 40, while the shelves are exploding with books by American women.

Admittedly, these are semi-anecdotal examples, but from what I’ve seen, they’re definitely representative. In all these cases, American men don’t seem terribly interested in perfecting the full range of talents necessary to excel. Current “top-level” American male tennis players don’t want to put in the hours and effort to perfect back-court ground strokes and work to obtain the conditioning necessary to scrap for every point in the way John McEnroe and Andre Agassi once did. One noted U.S. tennis coach closed his camp with the statement that young Americans didn’t want to work, because it interfered with their social life. Tyler Hicks is good looking, well-dressed, energetic, and enthusiastic, with good dance moves. Unfortunately, he’s supposed to be a singer, and his singing is definitely second-class, if that. So why are Americans focusing so much on appearance and failing to see that his vocal production is lacking? The failure of U.S. financial analysts to consider the full range of factors behind the credit and mortgage boom… and subsequent bust… reflects the same kind of failure — a focus on what is immediate and easy and profitable, rather than on the core requirements for long-term excellence and financial stability — and the results were just as predictable.

All of this applies to writing as well. In its simplest sense, fiction consists of two components — technical skill in putting words on the page and story-telling. Writers who have great technical skill and write beautifully crafted prose with either limited story-telling or none to speak of [such as in the Ghormenghast Trilogy] aren’t complete writers, and won’t sell much, if anything. Writers who are technically deficient but who tell great stories are like the top American tennis players — they’ll make money, but they’ll never be great.

In any field, to excel requires a mastery of the full range of skills, not just what’s easy, or popular, or what brings in the cash, and right now, it seems to me, the interest in popularity and cash is destroying the desire for greatness in all too many fields in the United States, especially those that take great and sustained effort, and particularly among American men.

The necktie manufacturing trade association has closed its doors, because there are no longer enough necktie manufacturers to support it. While I doubt the demise of the association has caused much mourning outside the fashion industry… it does concern me, and not because I always wear a tie. I don’t, except to conventions and other appropriate business and social occasions. But it does concern me because of what it represents. The decline of the necktie might well be likened to the canary expiring in the social coal mine, so to speak.

Fashion is not just the presentation of one’s self through attire. It’s also a form of acknowledgment that there are duties to society which include appropriate clothing. Or put another way, wearing a tee-shirt to church or to a wedding or a tank-top to a restaurant, even McDonalds, is a form of disrespect to those in either place. It’s an attitude best described as “in your face, I’ll wear what I want.”

Interestingly enough, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he forced a crackdown on minor offenses, which initially was met with ridicule. But… the results of this type of policing in New York and elsewhere, not surprisingly to me, have shown that it also decreases other types of crime. That may well be because it reinforces societal expectations on behavior.

My late father-in-law was a trucker at a time when truckers were expected to wear uniforms of the company for which they drove [imagine that!], and frankly, in those days, truckers were a great deal more polite, both in person and in the way in which they handled their rigs. I can’t prove it, but I believe those uniforms reinforced their image and their sense of responsibility.

Dressing in an inappropriately sloppy fashion and just for one’s self when going out in public is another form of self-indulgence, the visual equivalent of bad manners. Bad manners lead to bad behavior. Bad behavior tends to undermine societies and social structures, because all successful and enduring societies are based on a degree of mutual respect between individuals within a society, and bad manners are a form of direct and personal disrespect.

Throughout human history, there have been periods where manners and standards of attire declined. Almost invariably, thereafter so did the society. So, if as a writer, you want to portray a collapsing society, just show one where personal sloppiness and bad manners are abundant, and you won’t be far wrong.

And that’s why I worry about the demise of the necktie and the necktie manufacturing trade association.

Last week, like many other travelers, my wife went on a business trip. Also, like many other travelers, she experienced the trip from hell. After three hours en route, her first flight was put in a holding pattern over west of Charlotte, N.C., for another two hours, because of thunderstorms, then landed at Greensboro, where it sat on the tarmac for an hour until a gate that could refuel the plane was available — except the gate where the plane was parked didn’t have that capability, and the plane had to wait for yet another gate. Some four hours later, she finally arrived in Charlotte at 2 a.m, for a connecting flight that had left four hours earlier. The next available flight left at 7:15. She was there, two hours early for security, only to be told that, because the same crew that had flown them in late was the crew to take them to Nashville, the flight would be delayed three hours to meet federal turn-around-time standards. And, oh yes, even though she’d called the hotel and asked them to hold her room — and that she’d pay for it, the hotel canceled her reservation, and she had to commute to the conference from another hotel. The return after her conference in Nashville wasn’t much better. First, because she had picked up some scholarly materials at the academic conference, her suitcase was ten pounds overweight — an additional $50 fee. Then, without the excuse of weather, her flight to Dulles, for a connection to Las Vegas [which is a 3 1/2 hour drive from our house] was an hour and a half late, causing her to miss her connecting flight. She was rebooked through Los Angeles, some 200 plus miles west of Las Vegas, and arrived in Las Vegas five hours late — and her luggage didn’t make it, even though it made it to L.A. and there was a two hour layover in L.A. So it had to be sent to our house arriving another day later. She finally arrived home some 24 hours after she first left for the airport after being up all night, twice in a week.

Now… first of all, her experiences are far from unique. They’re not even rare. At least half a dozen other academics at the conference who arrived on different flights had similar tales, and certainly the several hundred other passengers on these flights were also greatly inconvenienced. And it’s easy to blame the airlines, most of which are either slightly badly mismanaged or horribly mismanaged, but the reason for this mismanagement lies deeply imbedded in our society, and it’s very simple. Simple, but profound.

While there are exceptions, in the vast majority of cases, as a society, we seek the cheapest prices for everything, no matter what the long-term costs may be. We reward short-term greed and refuse to consider the long term societal and personal costs of such short-term thinking. The airline mess is a perfect example of what can happen.

Now, it’s not exactly a secret that oil supplies are tight, nor has it been unexpected that oil prices would rise over the long-term. Some few airlines, such as Southwest, locked in lower fuel prices through hedging and long-term contracts. Most did not, because they didn’t want to pay the short-term associated costs of such hedging. So… now they’re slapping fees on everything because fuel costs are up, and the prices they charged for tickets bought months ago don’t cover operating costs.

When weather conditions are bad, congestion gets far worse than it would have to be because the United States has a terribly antiquated air-traffic control system, again because no one wants to pay the price for a modern system, not the airlines, and not the federal government. So delays and messes such as those experienced by my wife become even greater and cost small businesses and individuals millions. Larger businesses charter jets, and that increases congestion and costs in a different way.

Then, there are the other costs. Although Southwest flies only one type of aircraft [the 737], most airlines not only fly differing aircraft, but differing models from different manufacturers. This has the effect of increasing maintenance costs, and that’s exacerbated by the fact that even different model aircraft from the same manufacturer aren’t always exactly engineered for parts and maintenance compatibility. Seeking the “best deal” every time one upgrades one’s fleet may reduce procurement costs, but it also increases maintenance costs and may actually require purchasing more aircraft because maintenance delays result in aircraft being out of service.

In the interests of short-term profitability, the major airlines, again except for Southwest, developed the hub and spoke system where their flights and feeder regional aircraft congregate at regional hubs. This not only increases regional air congestion, but also ensures that any time there is a major weather problem, entire sections of the country suffer loss or significant reduction in air travel capacity. In addition, the combination of deregulation and the hub-and-spoke routing encourages “specialty” lower-cost carriers to “cherry-pick” the more highly traveled routes, forcing prices down on those routes and redistributing higher costs to routes where there’s less competition. This is out-and-out geographic discrimination, and it’s largely not based on the costs of providing service, but the degree of competition, which is limited by the fact that commercial air travel can never be a free market.

Airline deregulation was adopted in the ostensible interests of reducing airfares, but those pushing and supporting it seemed unable or unwilling to accept that so-called free market competition has extremely high indirect costs to everyone when the market isn’t truly free. In the case of the airlines, the available routes are limited and controlled by the government. The major airports located near population centers are also limited, both in numbers and in their ability to handle more than a certain number of aircraft. The barriers to entering the industry are extremely high, because passenger aircraft each cost hundreds of millions, and trained pilots and crew are not inexpensive, not to mention the costs of leasing or buying terminals, reservation systems, etc., and, of course, fuel. This is not a classical free market in any sense of the word, but everyone jumped on board because deregulation promised cheaper fares “now.”

It’s also not a traditional free market because there’s often a tremendous lag time between when the service is purchased and when the cost of supplying it is incurred. If costs increase, such as has happened in the case of rapidly rising fuel costs, the supplier can’t pass on the costs to the consumer, and, in fact, will probably never totally recover them, which is why virtually all the major airlines who cannot or will not hedge their fuel costs risk bankruptcy… because fuel costs will continue to rise.

In a nutshell, the airline mess is exactly what we as a high-tech society can expect with ever-increasing frequency and with ever-increasing costs and frustrations so long as we continue to focus on the “cheapest price,” this quarter’s balance sheet, and the idea that “free competition” solves everything. Total regulation doesn’t, either, but that’s another story for another time.

All too often, sometimes more often than not, those who make the innovations or who create something new aren’t the ones recognized for it. Robert Fulton, for example, didn’t build the first steamboat; Robert Fitch did, but he went bankrupt, while Fulton made money. Galileo certainly wasn’t the first scientist to propose the heliocentric solar system, nor was Guttenberg the first one to come up with the idea of moveable type and the printing press. The listing of those recognized as “firsts” who weren’t is long, and, given human nature, that’s probably not surprising, because, for someone to be recognized as a “first achiever,” it’s necessary that the knowledge of that achievement be disseminated, both about the action, and with some supporting information explaining why the act or achievement is worthy of recognition. Sometimes, explanation isn’t all that necessary, but knowledge of the act is vital for societal recognition.

In addition, sometimes a figure well-known for popular achievements never receives his or her true due for other substantial accomplishments. Benjamin Franklin certainly falls into this category. With all the notice about his political successes, his scientific career is reduced to the story of the key, the Leiden jar, and the kite. Yet Franklin also invented bifocals, the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, a flexible urinary catheter, not to mention the armonica [glass harmonica], and, with his cousin, was the first to name and to chart the Gulf Stream. He was the first to document and write up many of the basics of electrical behavior, and the first to document the principles of evaporative cooling.

These examples suggest that often what we “know” about innovation or about people happens all too often to be incomplete, or sometimes close to a complete lie.

In the field of fantasy and science fiction, this is also true. Popular recognition of “innovation” often has not coincided with reality. As I wrote almost a year ago, Fred Saberhagen was a very innovative writer, but one who never truly received his due for all the innovation and uniqueness in his work, perhaps because he accomplished it without bells and whistles, without overwhelming self-promotion and rhetorical excesses.

Although “alternative history” dates back to the Roman writer and historian Livy, H. Beam Piper was one of the first twentieth century SF writers to create more than one or two works of alternate history, beginning with “He Walked Around the Horses” in 1948, but comparatively few readers today would recognize his name, and most of those would likely do so because of the tributes of current writers to his legacy.

Even with popular and well-known writers, at times, works of a high caliber are overlooked or lost behind the clamor about popular works. Examples of this include, in my opinion, Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness, Michael Moorcock’s The War Hound and the World’s Pain, David Drake’s The Forlorn Hope, George R.R. Martin’s The Dying of the Light, and Gordon R. Dickson’s The Way of the Pilgrim. Of course, in accord with the trend noted in a recent blog, these are all stand-alone works unrelated to the more popular series of these writers.

So… on a day of remembrance, some remembrance for works and achievement forgotten or not remembered as they should be, including all those I haven’t cited.

Science fiction in particular has tended to mix a combination of elements — a sense of transition from where we’ve been as a society, a commentary on the present, and an extrapolation depicting one of any number of possible futures. Given the current popularity and market place domination of the F&SF genres by fantasy, it’s often hard, especially for new readers, to realize that for almost a century, science fiction was certainly far more prevalent and dominant than fantasy.

How did it come to be that in a comparatively short period of time, fantasy has literally swamped science fiction?

First, let’s take a look at Jane Austen. Over the past few years, there’s been a resurgence in the popularity of Jane Austen, manifested especially in endless cinematic and video remakes of her books, as well as the continued popularity of more than a few romance take-offs on her “world.”

I can certainly understand the Austen period fascination. The clothes were fashionable and elegant, and people didn’t board their carriages in tank tops and flip-flops. The conversation was well-mannered, even when vicious. The dances were truly dances and not frenzied athletic competitions or public pseudo-orgies. Dinners were a time for dining and not gulping fast food after a rushed trip through a drive-in service window. Even revenge was thoughtfully and carefully planned in a way that makes most current “pay-backs” seem crude and boorish. The music had melodies, and young men and women were pleased to master difficult instruments, and not just bang out repetitive chords on an electrically amplified, yet simplified guitar.

By comparison, we live in a world of cheap pleasures and cheaper thrills, gulped down like fast food, time after time, because, somehow, they never satisfy. Americans in particular have more “toys” than ever before, and yet surveys show that they’re not any happier, and in fact may be less so.

And what does all this have to do with science fiction and fantasy?

Among the chief attractions of the genre are inspiration and, frankly escapism, and it’s clear that a growing number of readers want to escape the ugliness of the present, but, from what I’ve seen and read, comparatively little science fiction offers hopeful escapism. Most of it’s pretty grim. Twenty years ago, there were more well-written SF books like Walter Jon Williams’s House of Shards, which deftly mixed SF with manners. I still write books in which the future still has culture, and so do a handful of others, such as Lois McMaster Bujold, but, in general, those tend to be the exception, whereas fantasy tends to offer, if not exclusively, more hopeful endings, or at least endings where there is a glimmer of light. In passing, I would also note that even Devention, the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in early August, is featuring a “Summerfair Reception in Barrayar” and a Dowager Duchess of Denver’s Regency Dance.. and both are based on “mannered” societies, if fictional ones.

And we could all use more manners, more culture, and more inspiration toward excellence and beauty… especially in our fiction.

A number of years ago, a singer named Rick Nelson had a hit song entitled “Garden Party.” A portion of the lyrics follows:

When I got to the garden party, they all knew my name.

No one recognized me, I didn’t look the same…

Played them all the old songs, thought that’s why they came.

No one heard the music, we didn’t look the same…

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck

But if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck…

…it’s all right now, learned my lesson well

You see, ya can’t please everyone, you got to please yourself.

Nelson wrote the song after appearing in a “rock revival” concert at Madison Square Garden, where he was booed when he played and sang songs that weren’t his “golden oldies,” because, apparently, that was all they wanted to hear. Some days, I feel like I really understand what Nelson was driving at.

Now…while singers — or writers — clearly can’t please everyone, it is fairly clear from the bestseller trends and sales figures that the closer a writer, and a singer, I suppose, sticks to a single type of fiction, or song, the higher the sales numbers. Robert Jordan’s other books don’t sell a fraction of what those in the Wheel of Time series do, and I doubt that anything J.K. Rowling writes besides Harry Potter will approach the Potter books in popularity, either. The same is true of popular authors in other fields. Writers who produce series, or “type” books, outsell those who don’t. In my own work, the individual books in a fantasy series outsell the stand-alones by better than three to one. Doubtless, there are some exceptions to the success of literary “type-casting,” but given the overall trends and numbers, there aren’t many. That’s why it’s extremely hard for an author to produce and get published a body of work that’s diverse, let alone do so and be commercially successful.

At the same time, Nelson’s line about not pleasing everyone also rings true. Going through reader comments and critical reviews on my books last week, I came across such comments as “writes fantasy for Republicans”… “libertarian bias”… “left wing tripe”… “ecological leftist”… “solid Republican, as to be expected from a former Reagan appointee”… “always tells the same story, young man going out into the world”… “wish he’d stay away from the arthouse fiction”… Obviously, each one of those comments and many others I haven’t quoted reflect more about the reader than my work, because, after all, I couldn’t always tell the same story, for example, and have so many readers complain in so many different ways.

Although Nelson toured widely for another 12 years after “Garden Party” was released before he was killed in a plane crash, “Garden Party” was his last hit record. I wonder why.

I dislike rap. That, if anything, is an understatement. It’s not because I’m biased against the culture from which it comes, and it’s not because I’m an old curmudgeon — which I may well be — or because it’s “modern,” and I’m not up with the times. It’s because I do indeed understand both rap’s source, its structure, and its implications… and none of them represent the best in human culture.

First, rap does indeed represent modern society — the worst of it. Words are jammed into an insistent forced beat against a set of background sounds so close to monotone that they can scarcely be termed music. Any beauty the words might have is destroyed by the framework in which they are embedded. What rap does best is, in fact, the shock value, the ugly, the “in-your-face” confrontation. In a sense, it’s the musical equivalent of the worst excesses of Fox News on the right and CNN on the left, with a soundtrack having the artistic sense of a jackhammer during rush hour.

One of the key elements of music is something called a melody line, and it’s essential — except to rap and the atonal so-called modernist composers, whose work I dislike possibly even more than that of the rappers, because the modernists had a real education in music and should know better.

Some have called rap merely modern poetry, or the modern urban equivalent to bardic minstrels. I’m sorry; it’s not. In poetry, in comparison to rap, the use and choice of words determines the rhythm… or the metre requires the poet to choose particular words, but, in either approach, they’re fitted together, not forced into a structure with the jack-hammer of an electric bass and the sonic wire mesh of a full drum ensemble.

The fact that the recent Tony awards gave the “best new musical award” to what amounted to a “rap music showcase” in which there was little music, and where much of what were intended as lyrics were unintelligible, suggests that the artistic world has come to point where no one dares to suggest that “the emperor has no clothes,” but then, I doubt that many who voted for the award would even understand that allusion, much less what lies behind it.

As Kipling suggested in “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” nearly a century ago, worshipping the “Gods of the Marketplace” and the current fad, whatever it may be, instead of striving for excellence based on experience, inevitably leads to disaster, as when “the lights had gone out in Rome.”

But who am I to stand against the thunderous applause for “music” that has no grace and no melody? Or to suggest that art should inspire men and women to strive for excellence, rather than graphically describe degradation in all its sordid forms?

With each passing day of the on-going and seemingly endless presidential election campaign, I get more and more distressed by the way in which the candidates and the media deal with the issue of “wealth.” In thinking about this, I also realized that all too many writers have similar problems, but that the writers are more adept at avoiding the issue and concealing either their ignorance or their biases… if not both.

Those on the left tend to claim that any family that earns more than somewhere in the $200,000-$250,000 range is wealthy. Now, I’d be the first to admit that such families are not poor… but to claim that they’re wealthy?

Somehow, I don’t think most doctors, lawyers, engineers, dentists and other professionals in that income range, many of whom make that income only by dint of hard work by two parents, think of themselves as “wealthy,” particularly when compared to those who truly are, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, or like the millionaire athletic figures such as Tiger Woods, Shaquille O’Neal, or Peyton Manning.

Then, too, when you use a flat number for defining who is wealthy, that number doesn’t reflect the cost-of-living. A family income of $100,000 in New York City, which has a cost-of-living more than twice the national average of all U.S. cities, has the same purchasing power as $30,000 in Laredo or McAllen, Texas, or other small towns across the United States. So… an income of $100,000 is less than mid-middle-class in New York, but signifies being well-off in, say, small towns in the mid-west or mountain states [provided they’re not resort towns inhabited by the truly wealthy]. Some 20 years ago, the Washingtonian magazine published an article entitled “How to Go Bankrupt on $100,000 A Year.” The article detailed how difficult it was for a family to make ends meet in our nation’s capital on that income, merely by attempting to hold to what one might have called a middle-class lifestyle. Given inflation and devaluation of the dollar, the income cited in that article would probably have to be well over $200,000 today. Families that earn $250,000 in New York, San Francisco, Honolulu, and the like aren’t poor by any means, but claiming that they’re “wealthy” is absurd.

Again… I am not claiming families who make such incomes are poor; I am claiming that anyone who thinks they’re rich is either deluded or a demagogue. Why are such claims being made? Because the politicians know that there aren’t enough “truly rich” to pay for the debts already incurred and the programs they think their constituents want, and by defining the upper end of the middle class as wealthy, they can claim that they’re not taxing the middle-class, but the “undeserving” wealthy, rather than hard-working professionals, with mortgages and children in college and the like

Just as the politicians and the media don’t seem to know what wealth is, or want to discuss it factually, so do more than a few SF writers have problems understanding and in dealing with wealth. Over the years, we’ve seen “millionaire” heroes with their own spacecraft, their own extensive private laboratories, and the like. Currently, a single high-tech atmospheric fighter seating just two pilots for a few hours of flight time costs over $200 million, and the industrial complex required to build it represents a number of entities representing more than $100 billion in assets. All that for a craft that flies at speeds a fraction of those required for interplanetary travel and without all the other additional systems necessary. Currently, according to Forbes, there are roughly 500 billionaires in the entire world, and most of them are worth less than $15 billion, with the wealthiest worth considerably less than $100 billion.

I’ve read very few books that even suggest the records and expertise necessary to handle vast wealth, or the limitations that such wealth imposes. Steven King, for heaven’s sake, hardly in the wealth class of Bill Gates, had to give up attending events such as World Fantasy Convention, and these days most companies spend millions of dollars in various ways to protect their CEOs.

So why do we have this strange dichotomy in our culture and our fiction where people who are merely affluent are considered rich, and where no one seems to understand how few really are truly rich and how isolated those comparative few are?